Novelty Attracts Attention
People are stimulated by novelty. Studies demonstrate that people seek out new experiences and behaviors. Entertainers have known this for years. The most successful acts are those who offer something different from the norm. They have the greatest chance of being noticed.
Training programs that are perceived as boring and mediocre will also have difficulty maintaining participant attention. However, if the same training program is filled with novel, engaging learning connected stimuli, it will capture and maintain the participants’ attention.
People Expect to Be Entertained
We have become a service rather than an industrial society. A focus on individual needs and emotions has supplanted the assembly-line style orderliness of past generations. People today expect to be catered to and will spend more to patronize organizations that provide an enjoyable experience. In response, many organizations have entertainmentized their products.
The result is a culture where the lines between entertainment and non-entertainment are evaporating. Entertainment is becoming the norm. Shakespeare was right: The world IS a stage, and trainers are not immune.
Entertainment Engages More of the Brain
Great entertainment routinely establishes one perspective and then, once the audience has fully embraced it, reveals that perspective to be false. The surprises of comedy, magic, and drama are all achieved in this manner. Using these entertainment techniques, learners explore the multiple perspectives of any subject.
Trainers already have facts and figures at their disposal for the logical, analytical portions of the brain. Learnertainment®, entertainment-infused learning, appeals to the emotive portions of the brain. When both the logical and emotive regions of the brain are simultaneously activated, more neurons fire, more brainpower works, and the facilitator creates a more engaged learning environment that fosters deeper understanding and retention. Rather than a one-dimensional view of the subject, the learners experience multi-layered insights.
Entertainment Overpowers Negative Emotion
Negative emotion rarely sleeps, especially in the classroom. Learners are uncomfortable in a classroom – fearful of their own learning disabilities or suspicious of the facilitator’s motives that they can become so wrapped up in emotion and block learning. Given that emotion cannot be stopped, smart trainers find ways to harmonize with and harness that emotional energy.
Studies have demonstrated that the right hemisphere tends to process the negative aspects of emotion that block learning, while the left hemisphere processes the positive aspects of emotion that open a trainee up to learning. Learnertainment® relaxes the fears that the limbic system urgently relays to the right hemisphere. In effect, entertainment style activities babysit the right hemisphere, keeping it busy with things it likes: cartoons, music, games, activities, visuals. Once the right hemisphere is playfully engaged, learning can commence without the blocking that negative emotions bring forth.
The Learnertainment® methodology consists of eight principles and their associated action steps as listed below:
- Principle One: Emotion Creates Memory and its associated action step, “Evoke Emotion”
- Principle Two: Perspectives Deepen Meaning, Layer Learning
- Principle Three: Suggestions Guide Outcomes, PREspond to Problems
- Principle Four: Visuals Aid Retention, Present in Pictures
- Principle Five: The Environment Talks, Stage the Environment
- Principle Six: Professionalism Produces Results, Perfect your Performance
- Principle Seven: Sound Trumps Sight, Mix in Music
- Principle Eight: Laughter Produces Positivity, Harness Humor
Learnertain™ ‘Em
This methodology is not a substitute for solid instruction. It is only a vehicle for presenting your message in an imaginative, original and fresh fashion. Learnertain™ them, and you will be more interesting; your trainees will listen to you; they will grasp what you are saying; they will believe you, and what you say will become their truth.
