Reflective writing – Matching Consumer Psychology with Effective Communication Styles

On 03/11/15 I instructed two people in the training of “matching consumer psychology with effective communication styles”. The intention of the plan was that my training had a strong structure using the “KISS” technique (Keep It Simple Stupid) and had a solid start, solid middle and a solid end. By doing this I felt it identified the need for my subject matter in the current commercial environment. The way I conveyed the information was by preparing a slide show that would especially appeal to visual learners; I then provided handouts so the visual learners had another way to follow along. For the predominately auditory learners in my group I made sure that I repeated every word that was on the presentation slides, I also encouraged the group to ask questions so they could learn from the answers I gave. I tried to use the newsreaders approach by explaining what our objectives are at the beginning and what we will learn, then to explain what we have learned so far in the middle of the session and what we have learned on the whole at the end of the session. I was effective with explaining this at the start and middle but towards the end of the training I was conscious on time and unfortunately missed the summary part out. For the Kinetic learners in my group I made sure we had an interactive and simple case study at the end which I also used as my barometer on what the whole group have learned. By using this and asking everyone to complete a personality test half-way through, helped me to emphasise my messages to the kinaesthetic learners.
The structure of my presentation was to start with the four main personality types moving onto a more detailed description of these and then finally how to communicate with them, this assisted the learning as everyone could see a clear path of identifying customers psychology and knowing the best way to communicate with them. I felt the structure was correct but I could have maybe made the descriptions a bit more creative by using TV clips such as the Ricky Gervais character David Brent or John Cleese’s character in Fawlty Towers, I think this may have made it a little bit more memorable and fun.
Some of the individual factors I managed was to provide everyone with hand-outs so they could learn at their own pace as well as making the test at the end into more of a brainstorm, I did this along with managing my environmental factors of everyone sitting close together and letting my pitch be a bit more relaxed to make the training feel more like a group chat instead of a class room atmosphere, I feel this helped create a positive learning environment.
The feedback I received from the participants was very positive however my questions on the form were rather closed and I feel next time they need to be more open so I can see where I can improve.