The Art of Training

Beyond delivering training — learning to work with what actually happens.

What do you do when a group doesn’t respond?

When the silence lasts longer than you expected? When an activity doesn’t work? When someone challenges you? When the people in front of you seem to be somewhere quite different from where you expected them to be?

Do you explain more? Try harder? Return to your notes? Change the activity? Or do you become curious about what is actually happening?

And how do you know?

These are some of the questions at the heart of my Core Trainer Training Programme.

I have been training trainers for many years, and one of the things I continue to discover is that the most powerful learning often comes from what wasn’t planned.

Of course, trainers need to know how to design a programme, structure an experience, communicate effectively and work with groups. But these skills alone don’t make someone an outstanding trainer.

What makes the difference is what happens when the plan meets reality.

In this programme we will explore how to:

• Recognise where you are in the learning cycle, especially when you are uncomfortable, uncertain or surprised.
• Discover where best to put your attention — on yourself, the group, an individual, the process or something you haven’t yet noticed.
• Recognise what is happening when a group doesn’t respond, and discover how to respond rather than simply doing more of the same.
• Test your assumptions, your interventions and your understanding — and know when and how to test.
• Use feedback as information rather than something to defend against or explain away.
• Recognise when your own need to get it right is getting in the way of learning.
• Use the truth of where you are, including your uncertainty, as a resource for yourself and the group.
• Develop the sensitivity to recognise when to persist, when to change direction and when to abandon what you had planned.
• Create the conditions in which participants take ownership of their learning rather than becoming dependent on the trainer.
• Build genuine connection with a group while remaining open to being influenced by them.

One of the principles that underpins everything I do is that the trainer must be learning at least as much as the participants.

That means being willing to discover what you don’t know. To recognise your own patterns. To notice when your attention has narrowed. To question what you are doing, even when it is something you have done successfully many times before.

It means being willing to be affected by the people you are working with.

And sometimes the most powerful thing you can offer a group is not your expertise, your preparation or your explanation, but your willingness to acknowledge the truth of what is happening right now.

Good training design matters enormously. And paradoxically, the better the structure, the more freedom you have to respond to the unexpected.

We will work with the design and delivery of experiential learning, the use of language, the art of questioning, the management of attention, the quality of feedback and the modelling of excellence.

But we won’t just talk about these things.

We will discover them in the experience of training itself.

You will have opportunities to design, deliver, observe, experiment, receive feedback, change what you are doing and discover the difference that makes.

And you will learn to recognise your own patterns as a trainer — especially the ones that appear when things don’t go according to plan.

This is not a programme about learning to perform as a trainer.

It is about developing the awareness, flexibility, curiosity, connection and courage to facilitate learning in whatever circumstances arise.

Because ultimately, your most valuable resource as a trainer is not what you know.

It is what you are able to notice, learn and do with what is happening right in front of you.

Core Trainer Training Programme — November 2026

For people who want to go beyond delivering content and discover what it really means to facilitate learning.