We're all familiar with the problem of nine points that have to be joined by four straight lines without lifting the pencil from the paper. It's impossible to do this "without leaving the square". The problem is that you construct the nine points in your mind as a square, rather than as three triplets of three equidistant points.
In the same way, if we look at other people's worlds from the same point of view as we do our own, at some point we discover that our familiar landmarks no longer serve us. We need to get out of the comfortable squares or boxes we've built around ourselves in our imagination.
So what formative experiences in my professional life have helped me to break out of my particular square?
I'm going to talk about some of my missteps, rather than my so-called successes, because it's often the "blunders" and uncertainties that offer us the best opportunity to learn and deepen our knowledge of the world around us.
When I became an adult educator, it wasn't something I planned or even thought about. I dare say it was more a vocation that was recognized by someone who saw the potential in me. I had left teaching for a career in cosmetics sales for a multinational company. It was a radical change in my career path, dictated by economic reasons: I needed to earn more money to support my family. We were going through a very difficult stage in our lives, and my teacher's salary was no longer enough. So I seized another opportunity and threw myself into it. This time I had a specific goal: to acquire new skills and earn more money to pay for my parents' medical treatment. After an initial experience as a sales representative, I set up my own team, which quickly grew. After a year, I was promoted to regional manager, and a year later the national manager offered me a promotion to trainer. I couldn't believe it! Why me among all the other 40 regional managers? For my dynamism - I was told - for my ability to motivate others and... for my pedagogical training.
And so I came full circle, returning to my "first love", training. But this time I was dealing with adults, and building professional skills became the real issue. I had to learn that an adult trainer is not a teacher of adults. They don't just turn the pages of the text of knowledge at breakneck speed, they create situations where you learn " to do by doing, what you don't know how to do ", to analyze your practice and the professional problems you encounter. This is how I learned to be a trainer in the "active school", linked to North American pragmatism and "learning by doing", which makes the student the actor in his or her training.
In the first courses I ran, I came up against belief systems that persisted long after the end of the Communist era. Historically, it was a very formally hierarchical relationship, which influenced the way a trainer's position was viewed. Especially if he came from abroad, the trainer was easily invested with a wisdom he didn't necessarily deserve. As for me, I didn't come from abroad, but I had climbed the ladder very quickly, so I was going to suffer the "drama of the best". While I was eager to exercise my role as trainer and coach, the people in front of me reacted like students waiting for me to teach them a lesson. This was the teacher they expected me to be.
I had to reposition myself and explain my role to them: developing skills is at the heart of the trainer's profession, which takes on the role ofa coach rather than a "transmitter" of knowledge or models. It was a fundamental realization for me.
There's another, more recent experience that has shaken me up more than any previous experience. This was my debut as a trainer in Switzerland. In addition to the culture shock I had underestimated, there was the specific nature of the audience. Whereas in Romania I was training motivated people whose aim was to advance in their careers, here my audience was made up of the unemployed, people with other obstacles to overcome, especially of a psychological nature.
On entering "refresher" training, many are ill at ease, insecure, lacking in self-confidence, withdrawn, lonely, afraid of communicating and being misunderstood. They feel ashamed and inferior, believe themselves to be poorly regarded by others, and often feel too old to learn new skills. In this context, it is obviously difficult to motivate these people to start training, as they are afraid of the trainer, of failure, of being laughed at.
So how can we make people feel better about themselves? And how can we draw on their experience to give meaning to "formalized" knowledge? Naturally, I applied the know-how I'd acquired from my previous experiences. I had a bag full of motivational techniques, team games, in fact the whole "arsenal" of techniques I'd learned and verified during my previous training courses.
But then came the shock! My dynamism was almost frightening them, my confidence-building techniques coming up against an invisible wall, as if I'd invaded their privacy. Nothing was working the way I'd expected. I was unsettled. So I sought the answer from other training colleagues. Thanks to their relevant feedback, rooted in the regional culture, I understood what I'd done wrong.
I wanted to apply a model that worked well in my home context, but which risked insulting my participants, despite the fact that I knew I wouldn't have made such a faux pas at home, with people from the same culture. As soon as you're abroad, you run the risk of sticking more firmly to your habits as if they were a "safety barrier". On the contrary, I've come to understand that you have to strip off your cultural clothes if you want to avoid becoming inaccessible, or worse still, offending the learners you're working with.
I've come to realize that this is just one stage in my integration and, above all, in my adaptation to this new audience. To be a trainer is to enable others to acquire their own style. The learners I train today have their own vision of the world. As a trainer, I also have to ask myself whether I can help them clarify their own vision of the world.
Because you can't learn something new, however desirable, if you refuse to change.