Professionalism and Poise

Making a good first impression is vital to your success as a trainer. Before you say the first word, many trainees will have already developed a perception of you based on the way you present yourself.

Appropriate Attire (What to Wear)

The way you dress should help build credibility and rapport with your learners. While what you wear is dependent on a lot of factors including your audience, your industry, the company culture, and the subject matter, just to name a few, there are some principals that you should consistently follow.

Here are some tips to help you when determining what to wear during your training sessions:

Dress Conservatively

Even in casual training sessions, your attire should help to create a professional experience. Don’t choose anything too revealing such as a plunging neckline or a short dress.

Comfortable Fitting

Your clothing shouldn’t be too tight or too loose as it may distract participants. Since you may be moving around a lot during the session, wear comfortable shoes that are easy to walk in.

Dress Relative to Your Audience

Your goal should be to dress nicer than the audience but not so formal that they’re uncomfortable. For example, if you’re training a group of construction workers, your attire wouldn’t need to be as formal as if you were training healthcare or sales professionals.

You want to have an easy time connecting with your audience and for them to see you as well-informed and mature.

Try the Outfit First

When you’re at home, check out how the outfit looks before wearing it to the training session. Slacks and shirts should be ironed to keep your appearance professional. If something no longer fits or may have distracting elements, switch it for something that won’t draw attention from trainees.

Body Language

The words that we use are a fraction of how we communicate.

There are actually quite a few theories that break down our means of communication into percentages.

For example, some of these theories indicate that only about 7 percent of our communication is the words that we use.

And 55 percent of our communication is our body language, and about 30 percent is the tonality of our voice.

When you think about it, it makes perfect sense.

Think about a time when someone was telling you something, but their body language and tone of their voice didn’t match the words that were coming out of their mouth

Sarcasm is a simple way that we can demonstrate that this is actually true.

As a trainer, you need to continuously be aware of your body language and ensure that it matches the message that you’re trying to communicate.

It would be incredibly hard for your participants to learn from you if you look as though you’d rather be somewhere else or are generally uninterested in the subject matter that you’re trying to convey.

They want you to be interesting, interested in what you’re teaching, enthusiastic, and full of life. All of these things are not communicated through your words but through your body language and the tone of your voice.

Eye Contact

Maintaining eye contact with your participants has several benefits. It helps to establish a positive relationship with them and It also conveys your confidence in your abilities as a trainer and the content that you’re presenting.

It also will help to prevent you from looking over people’s heads or staring at the ground, which can both create a weird vibe.

Going one step further and smiling while maintaining eye contact can actually help to relax participants.

Of course, don’t be creepy about this – you don’t wanna look like a potential stalker or crazy person. Maintaining eye contact for too long can be uncomfortable for some people and can be interpreted in many different negative ways.

Be natural about it, be genuinely interested in people, and you’ll find the perfect balance.

Voice and Tonality

Even if you’re an expert in the subject matter that you’re teaching, if you can’t clearly and confidently communicate your knowledge, your participants will get little to nothing from your sessions. In fact, if you come off as insecure, speak too quietly, and have an uninteresting monotonous pace, you might even bore them to smithereens.

Here are some key things to consider:

Speak Clearly at an Appropriate Pace

Often when we’re speaking, we do so quickly and possibly don’t enunciate our words as much as we should. We have the advantage of having the words in our minds as thoughts, meaning, we know what we’re trying to say, whereas those who we are speaking to, may not.

When speaking to your participants, your voice should be loud enough for everyone in the training space to hear. Make sure that you enunciate your words clearly so that everyone understands them.

Try to speak a bit slower than you typically would and make sure to leave short pauses between sentence so that your participants have enough time to absorb the information.

It’s really easy to lose track of the pace your speaking and start speaking very quickly without even realizing it.

I like to do regular “speed checks” throughout my training sessions where I quickly evaluate the speed at which I’m speaking. In many cases, especially when I’m teaching a topic that I’m passionate about, I’ll notice that I start talking more quickly and need to dial it back.

Not only does speaking too quickly make it difficult for your participants to absorb the content, but it also makes you seem like you’re trying to just get through the training as quickly as possible. This is a really bad message to send and can be detrimental to your training objectives.

Modulate Your Voice

Using inflection and changing the pitch of your voice is an easy way to convey enthusiasm, improve learner interest, and emphasize certain points throughout your training session.

Now image if you said the exact same sentence in a monotonous voice vs an enthusiastic voice.

Using inflection and changing the pitch of your voice is an easy way to convey enthusiasm improve learner interest, and emphasize certain points throughout your training session.

The words will be exactly the same, but the message will quite different.

Of course, you don’t wanna get carried away with this to the point where it sounds unnatural.

You’ll find your sweet spot as you gain experience.

Eliminate Filler Words

You know, this is um, super important stuff, right?

It’s very likely that at some point, you’ve picked up the habit of using filler words or sounds in your communications. While a bit of this might be ok in casual talk, it’s a big fat no no when you’re teaching people or really trying to build and maintain any kind of authority.

Using fillers like, um, uhhh, right, ok, see what I’m saying, has several negative effects.

One or two umms isn’t the end of the world, but more than that can be considered excessive, distracting, and contribute to being seen as less of an authority on your subject matter.

It’s easy to get into this trap, but if you’re slow enough and pause in between sentences as I discussed earlier, you can actually fix this relatively quickly.

Here are two examples using a paragraph from earlier in the lesson:

Example 1 – Using Filler Word

Um, often when we’re speaking, uh, we do so quickly and possibly don’t um enunciate our words as much as we should, right? Uh. we have the advantage of having the words in our minds as thoughts, right, meaning, we know um what we’re trying to say, ok, whereas those who we are speaking to, uh, may not. See what I’m saying.

Now, a lot of the times we do this because we need an extra second to process what we’re going to say or even search our brains for a bit of extra info. We can still buy ourselves this time, but instead of using filler words, we can use pauses and even questions to engage participants.

Example 2 – Using Pauses and questions

Often when we’re speaking, PAUSE we do so quickly and possibly don’t enunciate our words as much as we should. Let me see a show of hands from those that can relate? We have the advantage of having the words in our minds as thoughts, meaning, we know what we’re trying to say, whereas those who we are speaking to may not.

This is something that may take some practice in the beginning.

Build a system to constantly self-evaluate yourself and make corrections throughout your sessions.

Again, after you gain more experience, you’ll get much better at this. The awesome thing is that it won’t only improve your training, but your general communication skills that carry throughout many areas of your life.