I just spent 3 days doing some leadership/coaching training, this wasn’t new or advanced training, this was a repetition of some great training I had done previously.
Why would I do that, why would I relearn something that I had already learnt?
There are a couple of answers to that, one of them is to refresh my skills and look to bring back, to front of mind, some of the things which although I had learnt them previously, I may have forgotten or have just stopped using.
The main reason though is that because I see leadership as a journey not a destination, and by doing a training a second time, or even a third time, I might pick up some different perspectives, my thought processes or thinking might be different now, such that I see the training differently, or its sparks a different thought process or a different deeper understanding than I had previously.
It’s like taking the same journey through a forest over and over again, the first time we go through we are focused on getting to our goal, ensuring that we don’t get lost, maybe our focuses is just on the path ahead and our eyes never leave that.
Whereas the second, third and fourth times we take that journey, we can now focus on our surroundings more, as we know where we are going, so now we can take more in and focus on the journey because the destination is assured.
When we do that, we see so many different things, things weren’t aware of previously, and we are open to experience more things because our focus had changed, we are no longer head down marching towards our target.
I would say I got as much, if not more, out of the training the second time, because it allowed me to reflect on how I had used some of the techniques, and I was able to question what had worked and what hadn’t and of course why. This helped me get a much better understanding of what I needed to do to be able to be more successful with some of the techniques I would use again in the future.
Not only was the training the same, but it was with the same trainer, which meant that I got great feedback and he could see where my understanding had increased, or where I still needed a little bit more support and guidance.
We shouldn’t just look to learn something once, we should look to be in a continual training mode, and I would recommend that everyone looks to either retake some training, especially if they felt they got a lot out of it, or to go back through the course and course notes again, in order to see what else we can learn from that training.
Training, like a forest, doest give up all it’s secrets the first time we journey through it, sometime we need to repeat that journey again and again, in order to reveal all of its secrets.
So my recommendation to you is, if you haves some training you enjoyed why not go back through it again and see whether you can get something extra out of it, you never know you might just deepen your understanding or see something in a different perspective giving you some different or deeper insights.
Gordon Tredgold
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