How many times have you participated in a group event only to find yourself bored, struggling to find relevance, or all too quickly forgetting what you’ve just ‘learned’?

The fact is that we all crave a deeper experience when participating in a group event, whether a presentation, workshop, meeting, class or other experience.   It’s obvious that we’d want our time to be valuable and meaningful, and yet why do we so often feel the opposite?  Read on to find out what you can do to bust the ‘event boredom blues.’

Why is it so hard to sustain engagement?
You love feeling you’ve made an impact and hearing people express that their time with you was highly valuable. Sometimes people connect, feel inspired and are even transformed by your work and that feels great. Other times, it’s hard to simply gain and keep their attention: instead it’s vacant stares, ‘butts in seats’, or worse, empty seats. Perhaps you manage to engage them initially, but eventually find that deeper engagement with your material, or with each other, is mostly resisted. These lost opportunities lead to results coming slowly, superficially or not at all.  And then, even if real change does begin, how is it sustained?  Sadly, all too often, the fire you started fizzles.

There’s more than one way to ‘wow‘
Being a motivated professional with a vision, you’ve no doubt tried or experienced various ways to keep a group engaged, to ‘wow’ them. Some methods worked, others…well, not so much.  Along the way you’ve learned a few helpful skills and tricks -capturing eyeballs with technology’s special effects, entertaining crowds with dancing bears, channeling Tony Robbins’ presence, dazzling your audience with a high profile venue, impressing folks with “Expert Big Words”, visualizing success while squeezing a blue crystal under your armpit or simply hoping that “It’ll all just work out” -but none of these methods seem to get to the essential dynamics of sustained, authentic engagement.

Not all that glitters is gold
‘Techniques’ like the above are “top-down” solutions that tend to address people as merely information-consuming & processing machines. They gain eyeballs & left-brains, but don’t win trusting hearts.  Technology can do some things well –like capturing initial attention or conveying complex ideas more simply –but its impersonal & digital nature fails at engaging the whole person, connecting people to each other meaningfully and enabling participants to fully digest & interact with the material.  Adding entertainment can be good and fun, but usually keeps the energy & action “up front” and the learning superficial.  As for trying to be ‘The Expert’ or imitating someone else (like Tony Robbins), that’s never a good idea because it hinders the authentic, amazing YOU from shining out and connecting with your group.  And besides, most people are excellent at detecting ‘imitators’.  In the end, approaches like these don’t foster authentic connection & trust -and trust is the foundation of all lasting engagement.

Fully Engaged
There’s a genuine, deeper ‘WOW!’ that everybody craves, an experience that goes beyond words & ideas, and that leads to authentic engagement & trust. In order to foster that kind of sustained engagement, you’re going to need to learn at least five essential skills:

1. Prime the pump in order to spark curiosity & give your group opportunities to connect before your experience.
2. Come into full integrity with yourself so that your group senses you’re serving confidently out of sincere care & purposeful passion.
3. Create enough safety for your participants to stretch their trust muscles by engaging you, your material & each other.
4. Prepare adaptive content & interactivities that engage the *whole* person and connect them to each other.
5. Offer follow-up opportunities & social technologies for staying connected to you and your material after your experience together.

To the degree that you gain proficiency in these skills, your participants will enjoy, benefit from & remember their experiences with you, and will stay connected in a way that sustains & spreads the fire.

In order to keep this article length short, I won’t expand the above five points here. However, look for future articles in which we’ll explore each of the above topics in more depth.

Thanks for giving me and this article your time and trust, and I look forward to seeing you at a future event…hopefully one in which we feel fully engaged!