Now What? Post Conf Application

3 days. Keynotes, sessions, and the expo are packed with stories, examples, emotions, and images. Conferences can be mind-numbing experiences that leave you struggling post-conference on what you can apply to your own work. In reviewing my notes from Training 2023 in Orlando, the thread to pull through for me was communication. My first pulling on the thread will be from four sessions.

Raul Sanchez and Dan Bullock provided 6 practices to frame persuasive writing. Writing content related to safety training definitely could include time relevancy, data showing the impact, an emotional pull, and connection to our employee's proximity both in geography and their beliefs. I am going to dig deeper by reading their book, How to Communicate Effectively with Anyone Anywhere. We work with so much content writing that I think their work goes well with our learning from Patti Shank.

"We make stuff up all the time," said Kim Lindsey in Write for ID, to nodding heads around the room. I appreciated her emphasis on studying before the writing begins so you start to know your audience's world before meeting with your SME. Tools she uses that I am going to try are Reverse Dictionary and Visual Thesaurus.

Matthew Luhn talked to us about storytelling while telling us his story at Pixar. Just because we have heard how impactful for memory stories are does not mean we are using them in training as we should. Being a Finding Nemo fan, I liked the example of Marlin as the hero, whose goal was to find Nemo and had to travel a distance full of obstacles, and changed his behavior to be a less protective father. Our business has loads of stories we could weave through our training, his talk gave me ideas on how to do that better. The first thing I shared with my team though was how he used examples to illustrate his points.

The Dali image above was one shared in Art Thinking by Kim Macuare from The Dali Museum. The people in the room saw it one way and those of us in the back could not understand why those people could not see President Lincoln. What do our learners see due to their own perspective? The filters we see through mean we see as WE are. I have used art museum trips to get my ID team thinking creatively but liked her ideas to use it in virtual or in-person classes to talk about ambiguity, to ask "what more can you see" in an effort to dig deeper, or to discuss different viewpoints of our employees. I am putting The Dali Museum on my bucket list for my own personal growth thanks to Kim. Meet you all in St. Petersburg, Florida?