A midday palate cleanser

Next week I will be travelling abroad again for a training delivery, which means this week is supposed to be my time to do the prep work involved. The general rule of thumb is that every hour of delivery takes an hour of preparation, but this depends on experience. The training I am delivering next week is new for me, so it takes longer to prepare and a fair amount of study work to understand the customer solution. Luckily there is a fair amount of overlap, so it is a question of discovering the differences.

I even blocked away time in my calendar - to no avail.

I have been recalled into a previous client integration as they have found that they need additional training services and as a result of the planning involved, my prep time has been halved. This means that it is eaither make it up on the weekend, while travelling or, each night after delivery. I think I am going to have to do a bit of all three.

So - I went to the gym instead.

Sometimes it is good to get a little space and refresh the mental palate during the day after sitting in front of screens, Teams, meetings, PowerPoints and software backends. At the office, there is a little gym with pretty decent equipment to use and since I am trying to get active again, I have been going down and spending a few minutes there when I can to lift something, stretch something or push something. It has been good, but I feel how poor my stamina is and how bad my lungs are due to my asthma.

Regardless of the physical frailties, it does wonders for my mental state as spending ten minutes there doing something gets the blood flowing enough that when I return to my desk, I am keen to gget back into the work again. It works much better than the coffee - well, I am going to drink the coffee anyway.

The other thing it is good for is socializing, as while it was empty today, normally I will head down there with a colleague or two and we end up talking across work and personal points. I believe that this helps all of us get to know each other from a wider perspective and become more familiar with how each of us thinks and operates. Our "gym time" has facilitated our in office collaboration and general team health too.

Part of the struggle of communication in organizations is that a lot of it is framed in a more formal setting which stifles much of the discussion that creates relationships. Change the environment, and the conversations take on different dynamics.

On sunny days, when I was a business language trainer I would take my clients outside and hold sessions in the park or on a terrace with a coffee, sometimes a beer, and observe how their language changed. Once in a setting and away from a more traditional classroom type environment, the language flowed much more freely, but more importantly, the conversation had a great deal less distance from the person speaking. This meant that topics that wouldn't normally get discussed came quite naturally and without as many reservations. Through these sessions, I got to know people and build relationships that would have been difficult in the engineered classroom environment.

I do the same kinds of things with my clients now and generally have a chance to go out to dinner, share a meal, have a coffee and talk about all kinds of things that would be inappropriate in a normal client setting on premisise. After these types of nights, the next training day runs more smoothly and naturally and the follow up communication is that of friends who trust each other as there is a history behind the relationship. In many respects, the evening meal serves as a palate cleanser for the training, a reset that shifts the frame going into the next session.

What this essentially does is remove a few expectations and replaces them with positions that are more open and willing to interact, to ask questions, to joke around and to learn. Having some personal stories from each other's experiences and then a few shared stories over a meal makes a big difference to how they are going to absorb the information.

It makes me wonder sometimes about how I myself go into communication and whether I am in the right frame of reference in order to be open to the information and to learn myself. I think this depends quite heavily on the source of the information of course, as if one doesn't trust or have a good relationship with the source, the likelihood of charitable listening goes way, way down, as does the patience.

For some people, I have no time for at all which is fine for me, because I have a great deal of time spent with a very wide range of people and perspectives, so excluding time wasters is not much of an issue.

Anyway, back to it.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]