My Life as a Lifespring Trainer (Part II)

Over the course of the next twelve months I led something like thirty-two trainings in all, twenty-five Basics and a few other graduate weekend courses. Other than the first one, two other trainings stand out for me from that first year. One was in Los Angeles and the other was in New York City.

LA and New York were considered the toughest markets for a trainer to handle. The audiences tended to be quite savvy and ready to be high maintenance. The LA training was mid-year sometime and it was a blockbuster.

To this day I’m not able to exactly put my finger on what makes or breaks a training. There’s some kind of intangible alchemy that occurs between trainer and participants, along with the volunteer staff, that’s indefinable. I know it has a lot to do with the participants’ level of personal commitment to change as they walk in the door. When the graduates who enroll their friends and family take the time to have them get committed to some personal breakthroughs, the trainer’s job becomes a lot easier. Beyond that, with the trainings that really shine, the trainer and participants establish a strong mutual affection and regard.

This particular Los Angeles training worked spectacularly from beginning to end. Students were extremely open to my input; they worked hard in the experiential exercises; and they simply insisted on having a good time.

One memorable moment occurred on Saturday afternoon of the training. Usually at some point on Saturday we pumped some dance music for a few minutes and most everyone joined in and started dancing. Except the trainer, usually.

I was over by the music system doing my typical swaying when a gigantic group with big smiles on their faces came my way. Before I knew it they picked me up and carried me horizontally lying on my back out to the dance floor and plopped me down. What could I do at that point? It was boogie time.

On Sunday one of the big players from the class was sharing on the microphone when he picked up a two foot ceramic Greek style pillar. He proceeded to share that this item somehow represented who I was for him. He gave it to me as a gift. Later the whole class signed a giant three by three foot card with little personal messages of thanks. Again, first and only time something like that has ever happened. That will always go down as my finest training.

My first New York experience is right up there, too, in my pantheon of memorable trainings. My manager, Jim Cook, wouldn’t let me even sniff New York for most of the year. Finally in the fall, I was on. The thing that struck me so hard that week was how vocal New Yorkers can be. I had heard about what it would be like. As usual, hearing about it and experiencing it turned out to be two totally different things. There was this one guy, a real prototypical New Yorker, who must have asked for the microphone at least a couple times every session. Sure enough, every single point he wanted to make was something that contradicted or at least questioned some phase of the training. I made a point of being patient with him and just trying to reason with him. Finally by the end I had won him over and we had a good laugh together.

The other thing I remember about that training was learning some new slang. Thursday night we were discussing something, probably the concept of responsibility, and someone directed a comment to me in jest. I couldn’t hear what they said so I asked for clarification. It was all lighthearted, lots of laughter. Someone shouted out that they were “dissing” me. Huh? I had never heard that term before. They kindly explained it. I’ve been getting dissed and dissing others ever since! All in all it was a great training. As I said before, the key is mutual affection. By Sunday the New Yorkers and I were in a joyous groove together.

I had a very good year as far as the company was concerned. Trainers were judged on two critical criteria. Of lesser importance was the number of guests attending the post training event. As a Basic trainer, I led the Wednesday, Thursday, Friday night sessions as well as Saturday and Sunday. Eight or so days later, the group was scheduled to reconvene for a three-hour Post Training Guest Event. This event was half Basic Training completion and half introductory enrollment evening for the guests. My job as a trainer was to do what I could to ensure a decent number of guests came to the event by inviting the training participants to invite their friends and family.

Why was this the trainer’s job? Well, the idea was that if the training was effective enough, students would be enthusiastic about sharing the training with others. This seems pretty straightforward to me. It’s basically word of mouth advertising. It’s very similar to what sells a movie. With a big enough name on the movie trailer, a movie can get a huge opening weekend. To propel it into major blockbuster status, however, it better be a good enough movie to generate sufficient buzz on the street. In our case we looked at it like however many participants graduated the training, we ought to be able to have a guest event with close to that same number of guests. We called it having “one per” guest attendance.

While guests were an important criteria, our biggest task was to produce a decent upgrade statistic into the Advanced Course. The participants agreed to attend a ninety-minute personal interview session on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday of the week following the initial five days. The trainer was expected to give a thirty minute marketing lecture at some point during Sunday of the training, encouraging people to sign up for the Advanced. A forty percent upgrade into the next available Advanced Course was considered a decent upgrade stat for a Basic trainer. Usually we varied between thirty and fifty percent. By the end of the year, I was ranked in the upper two or three Basic trainers with a forty percent average.

Upgrade to the next course was a very important indicator for how the training worked. I didn’t have any misgivings about that aspect of the business. It was: here’s the standard; where are you in relationship to the standard? I think it’s one of the things that made the organization go for as long as it did.

We took some heat from our own people on how forceful we were with the phraseology “based on results.” But we felt, hey, what you’re doing is either working or it’s not. There’s no gray area. It was consistent with what we were teaching. I’m not saying I walked the talk every day because I didn’t, but I did all right. We were all about asking people to make promises in the training and live up to the promises and honor themselves as their word. If we asked the students to do that and it worked for them, well, why not ask ourselves to do that?

We had an interior competition where we tried to do better than we did last year and last month. I don’t think there was any downside, because that was part of the training. The trainer actually showed the students how to be transformative while in the process of sharing the next step. The students learned from the trainer how to open up a possibility where there is none and handle people’s objections. In order to get any venture off the ground, you must get people’s agreement, get people enrolled, get their objections handled, and so forth.

After my first year, I was happy. My manager was happy. Everybody was happy. I received a little bump in salary from thirty-five to forty thousand dollars. What could be better? One thing that was of some concern to me was how tired I was. I was exhausted. All the travel and all the energy expended in front of the room really took it out of me.

As you get older you learn more about yourself in terms of personality. One thing I now understand is that I’m not a super expressive guy. I’m not super quiet either. I’m somewhere in the middle. I do enjoy my quiet time though. Many a training I have so looked forward to taking off my suit on a Sunday night, crawling into my bed and watching ESPN. Ahhh, now that’s happiness. By contrast I know other trainers who thrive on the action. When Sunday hits they’re looking for the party. The next morning when I’m dead to the world, they’re rocking and rolling. I usually need three or four days of down time after a training before I even think about getting up front again.

I don’t know if the workload caught up to me or if I just lost the plot somewhere along the line. Whatever it was, my second year was not nearly as good. By the end of the year I was at or near the bottom in measured statistics. While I could still make it work well on occasion, I could also go four or five trainings in a row not making it work in terms of the statistics.

I’m sure people still created value in the courses, but too few of them were turned on enough to jump into the next step. I ended up struggling, with occasional winning streaks for the better part of the next few years.

A turning point finally came when I accompanied Terry Nelson at a training he led in Atlanta. Although he was an experienced Advanced trainer, center manager, and business manager for the company, he was relatively new to Basic. In fact I had helped train him only a year or two earlier. He turned out to be a valuable mentor and friend for me.

By that time I believe we had transitioned to the three-day Basic Training model. Sometime in the afternoon of the first day, Terry sat with me at the back table on a break. We got to talking about how the class was going. I mentioned that he didn’t seem to be working very hard and that the room seemed fairly flat.

He smiled and assured me things were going great. “I don’t need them to change. It’s fine with me if they do. I will even encourage them from time to time, but I don’t need it.” We talked about how I sometimes operated as if I needed people to change. My method had the opposite effect I desired. Sometimes you get what you resist. Some students experienced that I didn’t accept where they were. They resisted my resistance. I’m not saying people didn’t get value from the training. There was a certain percentage of the class, though, that I wasn’t able to reach with this approach.

I’ve never really looked back since that coaching from Terry. I started doing better. By the last couple of years I was close to the top. Part of it also was pure ego. I was sick and tired of being bested by others in the department. I knew I could do better. By the end of my tenure, I can safely say I was one of the more respected trainers. I often played a big role in our monthly trainer meetings and people generally looked to me for advice and coaching.

To be continued...