Make An Impact With Mission Drive And A Positive Mindset

Commit to making a positive impact by helping people learn, grow, develop, stretch, and win. This gives you the resilience to leverage technology to create the highest level of virtual learning experience. This is what separates average trainers from true professionals.

Excerpted from Jeb Blount’s newest book: Virtual Training. You can get your copy here. 

Never Lose Sight of The Mission

In this reality, it is easy to feel unappreciated, jaded, and cynical. It’s easy to lose your passion and joy for teaching, and forget why you chose this profession in the first place —to help people reach their potential. This is exactly why you must never lose sight of the mission.

Our mission as trainers is to make a positive impact by helping people learn, grow, develop, stretch, and win. This mission fuels the passion, enthusiasm, energy, and joy we feel when delivering training. 

Focusing on the mission helps you block out the noise, overcome obstacles, and breeze past adversity. Mission drive pushes you to improve, learn new skills and methodologies, and adapt to new technology so that you can make an even bigger impact on your learners. 

For many trainers, the aversion to virtual training comes from fear. I’ve looked on as otherwise-competent trainers are pushed to emotional extremes when forced to deliver virtual training.

They become totally overwhelmed by the software and production equipment. They’re petrified of the camera and feel like a fish out of water. Sometimes, they shut down and become paralyzed.

Virtual Training Is Not About You, It’s About Your Learners

These aversions to virtual training do not have anything to do with the mission. They have nothing to do with your learners and everything to do with you. To get over your emotional hangups, you have to change your mindset.

Instead of thinking about what you want, think about what your learners need. Instead of focusing on what you’re most comfortable with, focus on how you can grow.

The strongest negative feelings about virtual training are rooted in our own insecurities. That’s what happens when we make it all about ourselves instead of focusing on our learners.

But here’s the brutal truth: You have a choice. You can learn to control your fear, anxiety, and insecurity, and master virtual training.

Or, you can become irrelevant. If you lose sight of the mission and don’t change your mindset, you will fail to make an impact. 

Rewiring Your Brain to Shift Your Mindset

The key to rewiring your brain for the virtual classroom is a commitment to getting past insecurity and doing it—again and again.

The more you teach in a virtual environment, the less daunting it feels and the more comfortable and intuitive it becomes.

Although technology is what makes virtual training possible, it is still a uniquely human endeavor.

Training and learning are woven into the imperfect fabric of human emotions. That’s why it’s so important to shift your mindset. 

Virtual Training Matters

Before you get comfortable with the technology and overcome your tendency to be camera shy, you need to commit to making a positive impact by helping people learn, grow, develop, stretch, and win.

This gives you the resilience to leverage technology to create the highest level of virtual learning experience. And this is what separates average trainers from true professionals.

No matter what you teach, for you and your learners, emotions play a crucial role in the outcomes of your virtual learning experiences.

Your mindset drives your emotions. Your commitment to the mission matters. Relationships matter. Interpersonal connections matter. That is why virtual training, through the lens of human emotion, matters.

Jeb Blount’s new book, Virtual Training gives you the tools to master the art of conducting powerful virtual training that engages learners and makes knowledge stick. Keep reading here.