Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.
When Forrest Gump’s momma shares this pearl of wisdom with her son, she’s using one of our six keys to making virtual training memorable!
Here they are…
Forrest’s momma takes a familiar and memorable concept (a box of chocolates)... and compares it to the concept she’s teaching (in life, you never know what you're gonna get). This simple analogy helps her son grasp and remember the concept!
Use a prop or other visual aid as an illustration for a concept you’re teaching. Something like… oh, I don’t know… a box of chocolates?
When we teach our one-hour webinar about how to make virtual training memorable, we show a clip from the movie Men in Black, where Tommy Lee Jones uses his “neuralyzer” device to erase people’s memories. Then we ask you to think of various “neuralyzers” that might be erasing your learners’ memories… such as distracting work emails.
During that same webinar, we illustrate the importance of creating a sense of responsibility in your learners. We do that by re-telling the story of a scene from the movie E.T.
The little boy, Elliott, wants to get E.T. to come inside his house and hide in his bedroom. So he creates a trail of Reese's Pieces to lure E.T. into his room, and that motivates E.T. to choose to take himself exactly where Elliott wants to take him. But it’s E.T.'s responsibility to take himself there.
We then explain that, as trainers, we have our own "Reese's Pieces" that we can use to motivate our learners to take themselves where we want to take them... in terms of the knowledge they’ll gain, the habits they’ll form, and the results they’ll get. We teach those in the form of five ways to create a sense of responsibility in your learners.
Speaking of E.T., can you guess what was E.T.’s favorite candy in the original movie script?
Keep reading, and we’ll reveal the correct answer by the end of this blog!
Want to know how to R.I.V.E.T. your learners… so they stay engaged in your training and remember your content? Use these strategies below!
How can you express your content visually and help reinforce your content, so your learners will remember it?
One way to do that is through windowpanes. Maybe you have a process that you teach. Rather than just teaching it with words or bullets, you could find a unique image or icon that represents each step in the process... and make each step its own pane in a window, like what you see below.
Windowpanes are easiest to remember if they have between five and nine panes.
You can also think visually by designing each slide like it's a billboard. Billboards need to be understood by people driving fast on a highway. Use a big image and a small amount of copy. The image should reinforce the copy so learners remember it!
A great tool to help you with this is Canva. You’ll find lots of cool slide templates, stock imagery, icons, fonts, etc.
In this blog, we didn’t just tell you that analogies, object lessons, stories, acronyms, and visuals are helpful ways to make virtual training memorable. We gave examples. Because concrete examples are far more memorable than theories.
So which of those six strategies are you most excited to improve on? How will you incorporate one into your next training?
PS… E.T.’s favorite candy in the original movie script was…
M&M’s!
