Imagine for a moment that you need to improve your Business English communication skills, perhaps for a new job, an interview, presentation or simply to improve your general business performance. You look around online at various options, ask friends and colleagues for recommendations and decide to book a crash course in Business English. The name of the course is actually very appropriate because very often that is exactly what you will get - a course followed by a crash.
All Fired Up
Having made the decision and taken the action of booking the course your motivation will be running quite high, even if you are not entirely sure what you are going to do. You are all fired up and ready to learn. You spend a few days working on improving your skills - maybe in the form of group classes or more personalised one-to-one training and then it is time to go home, back to work and put it all into practice. But what about your learning? Will you continue to work on that at home? Was that even part of the training? If you do continue developing your skills how long will you maintain your motivation? In my experience with my Business English Coaching clients there seems to be a general trend. A week or two after the training I send out an email asking how it is going and if any support is needed. The reply comes back telling of high motivation, many tasks completed and new successes at work. About a month later I send a similar email and get a similar response but, somewhere between two and three months after the training something happens and there is often a change. The reply to my next email may be less positive and sometimes does not come for some time. When it does arrive there is a different tone, of guilty feelings, regrets, opportunities missed, motivation lost and even unnecessary apologies to me for not continuing with the plan.
Why Does it Happen?
It is a little bit like deciding to get fit at the start of the year. The good intentions and motivations are there and we start exercising regularly but after a while we find that instead of lifting a few weights after work we are lifting a few beers. We are only human after all. The pressures of life, demands on our time and other distractions cause us to lose focus and all of the good work we did before is forgotten. Crash!
It’s Time To Talk
At this point it is really important to have a meeting, a Skype call, phone call, etc. We need to dig out your personal plan and go back to see what worked well and not so well. Review, revise, re-motivate, reactivate. Otherwise all of the value of the initial training and the work that followed will be lost. The difference that this makes in the learning process is enormous; it is literally the difference between moving forwards with positive results and going back to the beginning again. Training is not about learning something and then forgetting it shortly afterwards. It is about developing new abilities and continuing to work on them to always improve and maintain them.
