Moving the Energy Around During Your Training
Nancy Tellett-Royce
Senior Consultant and Regional Trainer
When you attend a formal lecture, the energy generally stays at the front of the room. Unless the presenter is masterful, you may be acutely aware of time passing and find it difficult to remember many details from the lecture once you leave.
When you are conducting a training, there are several strategies you can use to move the energy around the room. This helps participants stay engaged and anchor their learning more deeply.
1. Use Past-Present-Future to Move the Energy Internally
When you invite participants to think back to when they were younger and remember someone who built assets with them, or something they did to build an asset in themselves, you are moving their energy through time. Use any question that moves them back into their own past to connect with their younger selves. This makes the concepts more concrete; and if you invite folks to share what they remembered, it gives participants a chance to share something unique about themselves.
Use the present to help your attendees focus on what they are doing or what is happening right now that is building assets, or to identify a young person that they want to reach.
Move their energy into the future by inviting them to identify ways they can use what they are learning after leaving the session. Encourage them to make a commitment to one thing they can do in the very near future. Invite them to imagine a school, neighborhood, or community that is intentional in supporting young people. What would it look like, sound like, feel like? What can they do to help bring about the future they have imagined?
2. Use large group, small group, and individual activities to vary the energy
As you structure your training, identify where you can boost or vary the energy by encouraging participants to talk with each other in pairs, clusters, or large groups. Depending on the space you are in, you can add variation by moving the activities and groups around the room, such as having participants place themselves on a continuum along a wall in response to questions from you, or using an icebreaker that encourages movement and mingling such as Asset Bingo or Asset Pandemonium (see References below).
3. Managing the intensity of the energy
Operating at high energy levels for an entire training is draining for you and for your attendees. Think of high-energy activities as accents. Build in an occasional quiet activity to give both you and your group a pause (writing down a response to a question, reviewing key points, considering future actions, and other such activities).
4. Reflect
Finally, when you are done with your training, take a few minutes to jot down which strategies worked for you, and which ones you want to change the next time. Reflect on when energy shifts seemed to work well, and when they seemed too abrupt. Before long you will develop a sense of when your group needs an energy boost or a chance to slow down and reflect in order to consolidate what they are learning.
Related References
Two great resources to help you move the energy around are:
Great Group Games (group activities to add energy to your trainings)
Conversations on the Go (use to help pairs or trios get to know each other in a non-threatening way)
