GRENADE
COACHING
GRENADE
COACHING

Catégorie : company

  • Why hire a coach? 40 situations where coaching can help

    Why hire a coach? 40 situations where coaching can help

    We sometimes imagine that people hire a coach only when they have “a problem”.

    That is rather reductive.

    You can also seek coaching because you are going round in circles, because a situation keeps repeating itself, because you have a decision to make, because a relationship has become difficult, because you want to improve the way you manage… or simply because you know where you want to go but cannot work out how to get there.

    There is therefore no single doorway into coaching.

    After years of supporting people, I have seen individuals, couples and professionals arrive with extremely different requests. Some were in the middle of a crisis. Others were doing reasonably well but wanted something to change. Others simply needed an outside perspective to understand what was happening.

    So rather than explaining abstractly “why you should get coaching”, here is a much more interesting question:

    In what situations can coaching actually be useful?

    Why choose individual coaching?

    You do not need to wait until you have hit rock bottom before asking for support. Fortunately.

    How can I rebuild my self-confidence?

    When you systematically doubt your abilities, constantly seek external validation or no longer dare to do things you actually want to do, the work rarely consists of repeating in front of a mirror that you are wonderful.

    It is more about understanding what undermines that confidence, what maintains the problem and how to regain a more accurate perception of your abilities.

    How can I stop sabotaging myself?

    You know what you should do. Sometimes you have even started.

    And yet, mysteriously, you procrastinate, give up, repeatedly choose the wrong person, turn down an opportunity you wanted or find an excellent reason not to change anything.

    The famous “self-sabotage” generally deserves better than a kick up the backside and three inspirational Instagram quotes.

    We need to understand what the behaviour is protecting.

    What can I do when I feel stuck?

    You have thought about the problem from every possible angle. Then from the other direction. Then once again, just in case the problem had politely changed overnight.

    Sometimes thinking more with exactly the same premises simply produces… more of the same thinking.

    An outside perspective can reveal blind spots, contradictions, alternatives or resources you can no longer see.

    And also…

    • How can I learn to set boundaries?
    • How can I make a difficult decision?
    • How can I break a recurring pattern?
    • How can I manage my emotions better?
    • How can I stop procrastinating?
    • How can I communicate better?
    • How can I say no without feeling guilty?
    • How can I find my place?
    • How can I get through a period of change?
    • How can I understand my needs better?
    • How can I leave a relationship or situation that no longer suits me?
    • How can I turn a desire for change into concrete action?

    The common denominator is not necessarily suffering.

    It is often the gap between the situation you are living and the one you would like to build.

    Why choose couples coaching?

    No, couples coaching is not reserved for couples deciding between booking a session and throwing plates at each other.

    You can come because the relationship is in crisis, of course. But also precisely to avoid getting there.

    How can I discuss a difficult subject with my partner?

    Money, sex, children, family, division of labour, life plans, jealousy, commitment…

    Some subjects become so emotionally loaded that eventually you are no longer discussing the problem, but every previous argument about the problem.

    Coaching can recreate a framework in which each person can speak and hear what the other is actually trying to say.

    How can I set boundaries in my relationship?

    Loving someone does not mean accepting everything.

    But setting a boundary without turning it into a threat, ultimatum or punishment can require genuine relational learning.

    How can we deal with family problems affecting our relationship?

    In-laws, children, ex-partners, blended families, differences in parenting…

    A couple does not exist in a vacuum. Some difficulties arise precisely at the boundaries between the couple and the people around them.

    And also…

    • How can we start talking again?
    • How can we stop having the same arguments?
    • How can I express my needs without attacking my partner?
    • How can we rediscover closeness?
    • How can we manage an important difference between us?
    • How can we make a decision together?
    • How can we rebuild trust?
    • How can we divide responsibilities more fairly?
    • How can we live with our differences?
    • How do we know whether we still want to build something together?

    Sometimes the goal is not to “save the relationship at all costs”. It may also be to understand what is happening and help two people make a more conscious decision about what comes next.

    Why hire a coach in a business?

    Because putting eight human beings in an open-plan office with a task list, a dashboard, KPIs and someone called a “manager” has, strangely enough, never been sufficient to create a functioning team.

    A company is an extraordinary relationship laboratory: objectives, power, responsibilities, personalities, constraints, clients, money and sometimes urgency. Everything is there to produce the best… and occasionally a magnificent mess.

    How do I manage a difficult employee?

    First useful question: what exactly is difficult?

    Their behaviour? Their results? Your communication? A conflict of values? Resistance to change? Poorly defined responsibility?

    Defining the problem correctly already prevents you from looking for the solution in the wrong place.

    How do I manage a crisis?

    In a crisis, the temptation is often to react faster at the very moment when we need to think more clearly.

    Coaching can help a leader or manager distinguish genuine urgency from noise, prioritise decisions, anticipate consequences and work on communication.

    How do I deal with a difficult client?

    Setting boundaries while preserving a commercial relationship is a particular skill. Sometimes you need to learn to negotiate, reformulate, clarify what is possible and what is not, and stop confusing customer service with unlimited submission.

    How do I motivate my team?

    Motivation is not a button located somewhere behind an employee’s left ear.

    It can depend on autonomy, recognition, meaning, workload, clarity of objectives, quality of management, working relationships and the feeling of progressing.

    And also…

    • How can I give difficult feedback?
    • How can I handle disagreement within my team?
    • How can I delegate without micromanaging?
    • How can I assert my authority without becoming authoritarian?
    • How can I manage interpersonal tension?
    • How can I improve communication?
    • How can I support change?
    • How can I develop cooperation?
    • How can I manage competing priorities?
    • How can I reconcile performance with healthy working relationships?

    The aim is not to manufacture smiling managers capable of reciting three communication methods.

    It is to develop the ability to understand human situations and intervene with greater discernment.

    So how do I know whether I need coaching?

    A simple rule can help.

    You do not necessarily need a coach because something is wrong.

    Support can become useful when:

    you want something to change, but your usual methods are no longer enough to produce that change.

    You may know exactly what you want. Or not yet know.

    You may have a very concrete problem. Or simply that irritating feeling that something is wrong without being able to put your finger on it.

    That is precisely where the work begins.

    And why tell me all this?

    Because throughout my experience as a coach, I have worked with very different individual, relational, couple and professional issues.

    My job is not to tell you how to live your life.

    Still less to hand out prefabricated solutions in the style of “the five habits of successful people before 6:12 a.m.”

    It is to understand with you what is happening in your situation, bring to light what you cannot yet see and build solutions that are usable in your reality.

    Of course, I could tell you here that I am absolutely wonderful.

    That would be slightly suspicious.

    So the simplest thing is to let the people I have already coached speak for themselves:

    → Read my clients’ testimonials

    And if one of the questions in this article looks suspiciously like the one you are asking yourself, perhaps that is already a good place to start.

  • Bespoke professional training: learn, experiment… and even have fun

    Bespoke professional training: learn, experiment… and even have fun

    Delivering training is one of my greatest pleasures. I was already talking about it four years ago…

    As an Aquarius who loooves pouring the waters of knowledge over the world, I still have a blast designing bespoke training programmes, but also delivering them to people who are hungry to understand, experiment and discover new ways of doing things.

    And because I mainly work with adults, often in a professional context, I quickly discovered something:

    wearing a badge around your neck and having a meeting at 2 p.m. does not suddenly make you lose all desire to play.

    Quite the opposite.

    It has even become one of my specialities: creating professional training courses and playful workshops that make it possible to learn differently, encourage encounters, create connection, step outside your comfort zone and, above all, actually experiment with what we are talking about.

    Because there can be one hell of a gap between understanding something intellectually and being able to use it at work on Monday morning.

    Adult training should not look like six hours of PowerPoint

    We have all been through that training session.

    You are sitting down.

    Someone is talking.

    A PowerPoint containing approximately 847 slides scrolls past your eyes.

    At some point, a pyramid appears.

    Nobody really knows why.

    By 3:17 p.m., your soul has left your body, but you continue nodding politely.

    I do not want to do that.

    Professional training can obviously transmit knowledge. But if the aim is for participants to then change something in their practice, knowledge alone is not always enough.

    You need to be able to try.

    Question.

    Get things wrong.

    Try again.

    Observe what happens.

    Compare your experience with other people’s.

    And sometimes laugh wholeheartedly at what has just happened.

    That is why, whenever possible, I favour active and experiential learning.

    I do not only want participants to leave knowing something more.

    I want them to have done something with that knowledge.

    Bespoke professional training

    I am not a great believer in training courses pulled straight out of the freezer.

    A management team struggling with communication, a company wanting to strengthen team cohesion and a group wishing to reflect on their relationship with work do not have the same needs, culture or constraints.

    So why offer them exactly the same training?

    When I design bespoke training for a company or organisation, I therefore begin by understanding what is actually happening.

    What is the need?

    What is already working?

    Where is it getting stuck?

    What would you like to see change after the training?

    And above all: what should participants be able to do differently when they leave?

    That is the basis on which I build the content, exercises and facilitation methods.

    Training then becomes a means, not an end.

    My speciality: learning through experimentation

    I particularly enjoy creating playful, participatory workshops.

    Not “playful” in the sense that I am going to force Gérard from Accounts to mime something in front of his colleagues at 8:32 a.m. or be accused of resisting change.

    I promise, Gérard.

    You can breathe.

    Games and experimentation are interesting when they have a pedagogical purpose.

    They can very quickly reveal a group dynamic, a communication reflex, a relational difficulty or a different way of solving a problem.

    Above all, they make visible mechanisms we could spend hours talking about without ever actually observing.

    That is when the experience becomes interesting.

    We are no longer merely talking about what we do. We can look at what we have just actually done.

    Learning, experimenting… and even having fun

    I like people to think during training.

    I like questions.

    I like disagreement.

    I like the moment when someone says:

    “Wait, I don’t agree.”

    Excellent.

    Now we have something to work with.

    A good training course should call on participants’ judgement, critical thinking and capacity for reflection.

    It should not infantilise them.

    Adults arrive with experience, knowledge, habits, doubts, resistance and sometimes excellent reasons to question what they are being told.

    That is material.

    So rather than asking people to absorb a ready-made answer, I prefer to create situations in which they can test, compare, debate and draw conclusions.

    And yes, sometimes laugh.

    You can work seriously without constantly taking yourself seriously.

    Training is not content consumption

    This has become even more obvious with online training.

    Watching a video is not necessarily learning.

    Reading a PDF is not necessarily learning.

    Clicking “next” seventeen times in an e-learning module is definitely not necessarily learning.

    Consuming content is not learning.

    Learning requires something to happen with the information.

    Connecting it to existing knowledge.

    Retrieving it.

    Using it.

    Testing it.

    Making a mistake.

    Correcting it.

    Explaining it.

    Applying it in another context.

    That is why, when I work on online training or e-learning, I am interested in what the learner is actually going to do between two pieces of content.

    An exercise.

    A decision.

    A case study.

    A question.

    A situation to analyse.

    A real-life experiment.

    Something that turns passive exposure into active engagement.

    Designing pedagogical experiences for existing training programmes

    I do not necessarily need to create the entire training course.

    Sometimes you already have the expertise.

    You already have the content.

    You know exactly what you want to teach.

    But the training lacks interaction, experimentation or a way of turning knowledge into something participants can actually use.

    That interests me too.

    I can design pedagogical workshops, role-plays, games, case studies, icebreakers and practical exercises that fit into an existing programme.

    The objective is not to add entertainment for entertainment’s sake.

    It is to ask:

    “What experience would help participants understand this idea rather than merely hear it?”

    Training programmes adapted to your people, your context and your objectives

    Over the years, I have had the opportunity to work with very different organisations and audiences:

    ALEP, SOAT, the En Embuscade micro-nursery, Astro Bitch, Cuisinella, L’Or du Commun, Contact + and Marschall SAS…

    Different organisations, different audiences, different needs.

    And that is exactly what I enjoy.

    I do not want to endlessly repeat the same training course in front of different people.

    I prefer to understand what you need and build something that makes sense for you.

    Are you looking for bespoke training for your company?

    You may already have a very precise idea.

    Or simply a problem:

    “My team is no longer communicating properly.”

    “Our managers could use some support.”

    “We would like to work on cohesion.”

    “Something is happening in this team, but we are struggling to put our finger on it.”

    That works for me too.

    We can start with the problem rather than the solution.

    I design professional training courses, participatory workshops and bespoke interventions, particularly around human relationships, communication, management and cooperation.

    And what do I like most about my job?

    Being asked to do it again.

    So, will the next training session be for you?

    Contact me. I would be delighted to discuss it with you.

  • Fear of failure, change and judgement: do we really need to “overcome our fears”?

    Fear of failure, change and judgement: do we really need to “overcome our fears”?

    Ah, Madame Fear.

    Always on duty.

    You have an idea? Her little weasel face pops up.

    Thinking about changing jobs? She pulls up a chair and joins the table.

    Want to say something important to someone? She orders a coffee, takes off her coat and clearly, she intends to stay.

    And she has a few classics in her repertoire:

    “Maybe this isn’t the right time.”

    “What if you screw it up?”

    “What will they think of you?”

    “Maybe you should think about it a little longer.”

    That last one is particularly sneaky because it sounds like healthy caution. Except that sometimes you’ve been “thinking about it a little longer” for three years.

    But unlike what you regularly read in personal development, I am not going to tell you that fear is an illusion you simply need to conquer.

    Fear exists. And courage, after all, is not the absence of fear.

    Fear therefore has very good reasons to exist.

    The more interesting question is:

    Is this fear still protecting me… or has it started making decisions for me? Or even… shitting in my boots?

    Fear is not your enemy

    Let’s give Madame Fear her due.

    Fear is an extraordinarily useful mechanism.

    When faced with a threat, our body mobilises responses that can help us flee, fight or freeze. Our attention changes. Our body prepares itself. Our perception of risk shifts.

    In short, fear did not take up residence in our brain solely to stop us asking for a pay rise.

    Its main role is… survival.

    And contrary to the slightly caricatural mammoth metaphor I used in the past, our brain does not react only to dangers capable of eating us.

    Human beings are social creatures.

    Rejection, humiliation, loss of status, uncertainty and failure can therefore represent particularly powerful threats.

    Your boss may not look like a sabre-toothed tiger (well, I hope not; otherwise change companies quickly!), but the idea of standing up to them can still trigger a very real fear response.

    So why do some fears stop us in our tracks?

    Because fear does not need to correspond to an immediate danger in order to affect us.

    Take someone who wants to change careers.

    Their fear may say:

    “You’ll lose your financial security.”

    That is useful information.

    We can work with it.

    Run the numbers.

    Plan a transition.

    Build a safety net.

    But it may also say:

    “What if you discover you’re not capable?”

    Then:

    “What if everyone thinks this decision is ridiculous?”

    Then:

    “Maybe you should wait until you’re absolutely certain.”

    And here we arrive at one of my favourite little marvels:

    waiting to feel reassured before taking action.

    On paper, it is ideal, seductive and so much more reassuring. Except that in real life, sometimes it is impossible.

    Because some information only exists after you act.

    You cannot know exactly how you will feel in a new profession before you have experienced it enough.

    You cannot know how someone will react before you have the conversation (or before working with an experienced coach who can role-play the scene with you and help you prepare).

    You cannot know whether your project will work before confronting it, at least partly, with reality.

    At some point, more thinking no longer produces more information.

    It simply produces more thinking.

    The real trap: avoidance works brilliantly well and feeds inertia

    And this is where it gets properly vicious.

    Imagine you are afraid to speak during a meeting.

    The meeting begins.

    Your heart speeds up.

    You had something to say.

    Probably something very interesting too. And…

    In the end, you say nothing.

    And immediately…

    relief.

    Congratulations: your brain has just learned something.

    “Not speaking = discomfort disappears.” Yay, what a crap lesson.

    So the next time the situation occurs, avoidance becomes extremely tempting.

    That is one reason some fears can gradually shrink our field of action.

    Not because we are weak.

    But because avoidance is bloody effective in the short term.

    The problem arrives with the long-term bill.

    “Get out of your comfort zone”: yes, but not any old way!

    Here again, personal development has managed to turn an interesting idea into something printable on a mug.

    GET OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE.

    Very good, Gérard. But how far, exactly?

    Because between comfort and absolute panic, there are a few interesting nuances.

    The goal is not to throw yourself deliberately into the situation that terrifies you most and hope for a spiritual revelation in the middle of a panic attack.

    A much smarter objective might be:

    gradually increase your ability to act despite a certain level of discomfort.

    And for that, we can experiment.

    This is where coaching can become particularly concrete

    Suppose your difficulty is asserting yourself.

    We could spend an entire hour talking about your fear of conflict.

    That might be useful.

    But we can also do something else.

    We can manufacture the conflict.

    Not with boxing gloves, I do run a respectable practice after all, but I can play the insistent colleague, the unhappy client, the toxic manager who asks:

    “Yes, but just this once, surely you could still…”

    And you can try, stumble over your words, get it wrong in a sandbox.

    Your first response may be far too aggressive (and that’s okay, that’s the game, my poor Lucette).

    The second may sound like an apology.

    The third will start sounding like you.

    And suddenly, we are no longer discussing your ability to set boundaries in the abstract.

    You are learning how to set one! (And I’ll be bouncing with joy watching you succeed!)

    Fear of failure also deserves a little failure

    Here is another thing I love working on.

    Someone who is deeply afraid of failure can spend an enormous amount of energy avoiding every situation in which they might fail.

    The problem is obvious:

    that also eliminates an impressive number of situations in which they might succeed.

    So sometimes we can turn the problem around.

    Not:

    “How can I be certain I’ll succeed?”

    But:

    “How can I try without needing this attempt to succeed?”

    Small test.

    Prototype.

    Exploratory conversation.

    Application.

    Request.

    Experiment.

    An action small enough that failure would not be catastrophic, but real enough to produce information.

    Because one tiny failure in the real world can sometimes teach you more than three weeks spent imagining a gigantic failure in your head, or worse, living only in the safety of NEVER making a mistake.

    What if your fear is right?

    Yep.

    That happens too.

    Afraid of losing money by launching your project?

    Possible.

    Afraid someone will react badly when you set a boundary?

    Possible.

    Afraid a major change will be difficult?

    Obviously.

    The purpose of coaching is not to turn every fear into a negative thought to be exterminated with inspirational quotes.

    Sometimes fear contains relevant information.

    So we can ask it:

    “What are you trying to protect me from?”

    Then examine the answer.

    If the risk is real: how can we reduce it?

    If it is acceptable: are we willing to take it?

    If it is disproportionate: how can we test it?

    And if fear prevents us from living normally, becomes overwhelming or is part of an anxiety disorder: coaching may simply not be the right tool, and a mental-health professional will be more appropriate.

    So the right question is not always:

    “How do I conquer my fear?”

    But:

    “What do I want to do with the information it is giving me?”

    Courage is not the absence of fear

    Ultimately, I find it much more interesting to stop treating fear as an adversary.

    Because if you wait until you are no longer afraid before acting, Madame Fear has one particularly effective argument:

    “Not today.”

    So perhaps the goal is not to make her disappear.

    Perhaps the goal is to be able to answer:

    “Yes, I heard you. Now move over a little; I’ve got something to try.”

    And go anyway.

    So remember, Madame Fear. She’s got potential, the bitch, but she does not get to stop you living on the pretext of stopping you dying. 😏

  • Bespoke professional training: learn, experiment… and even have fun

    Bespoke professional training: learn, experiment… and even have fun

    I have probably never felt quite as at home as I do in a training room.

    Give me a small group, a table I can sit on while talking with participants, a few markers, a whiteboard, some Post-it notes and a topic, with enough freedom to build a learning experience… and there is a very good chance I will turn it into something fascinating because…

    Training is where I feel at home.

    Because what I love about professional training is not so much passing on information.

    Information is everywhere.

    What I love is seeing the moment when it becomes understanding.

    That little:

    “Aaaaah… yes, of course!”

    The moment when someone understands something about themselves, about other people, about their work or about a situation they have been dealing with for years.

    When someone leaves with a better understanding of what surrounds them and, above all, able to use what they have just learned, I get that delicious feeling of:

    “job done.”

    Training should not be about swallowing information

    I am probably going to make a few “friends” in the industry with this one.

    You know that training course.

    9:03 a.m.

    PowerPoint.

    Slide no. 1.

    The trainer reads the slide.

    Slide no. 2.

    The trainer reads that one too.

    By 10:17 a.m., your soul has left your body, but your physical presence remains compulsory until 5 p.m.

    I have been there too.

    Even when I was younger, I had very little patience for being asked simply to absorb information and then reproduce it.

    Because learning is not just memorising. It is understanding. Questioning. Connecting new information to what we already know. Experiencing it. Testing it. Sometimes even challenging it.

    Good training should call on participants’ judgement, critical thinking and ability to reflect.

    Otherwise, you might as well send the PDF. Attending will be about as productive as skimming it.

    Active learning: making learners active participants in their training

    That is why I particularly enjoy active learning approaches and participatory training.

    I can introduce a concept, of course. Explain it. Put it into context. Provide the knowledge needed to understand it. But then I want us to do something with it. An exercise. An experiment. A game. A discussion, perhaps even a debate. A case study. A problem to solve. A role-play. Small-group work.

    A deliberately exaggerated situation in which people can test a behaviour without facing the consequences it might have in real life.

    Because there is an enormous difference between:

    “I know intellectually how to manage a conflict.”

    and:

    “I have just tried to manage a conflict.” (and it went well…)

    It is in that space between knowledge and experience that training becomes truly interesting.

    Role-play: experimenting without risking breaking the machine

    Take conflict management in the workplace, for example. (One of the training topics I often work on with clients. I wonder why.)

    We could quite easily spend two hours explaining the mechanics of conflict, perception biases, possible reactions and communication techniques.

    All of that can be useful.

    But it is still theory. So I like to introduce role-play and practical scenarios.

    Sometimes deliberately extreme ones. Or spaces where people can practise making mistakes.

    By exaggerating a behaviour, playing a role or deliberately pushing a situation towards the absurd, we can experiment. Try. Fail. Start again. Observe what happens. Try something more daring or more personal. And laugh. Laughter does not prevent learning. Quite the opposite.

    Laughter can create a space in which we dare to try more, make mistakes and step outside our usual patterns.

    We can work seriously without taking ourselves seriously all the time.

    Learning workshops that also create connection

    That is another thing I love about training.

    A training room is not simply a collection of individuals who have come to acquire a skill.

    For a while, it is also a group.

    And that group can become a learning resource for its members.

    A well-designed icebreaker is not just a way of making fifteen people say their name and favourite animal.

    It can immediately create a dynamic.

    Reveal differences.

    Allow participants to discover their colleagues in a different way.

    Encourage cooperation.

    Create enough psychological safety for someone to dare to say:

    “I didn’t understand.”

    or:

    “I disagree.”

    From a learning perspective, those two sentences are worth their weight in gold.

    Because a training session where nobody ever questions anything is not necessarily a training session everyone has perfectly understood. It may simply be a room that is far too polite.

    Designing bespoke training instead of applying a ready-made formula

    I also design bespoke training programmes and learning workshops.

    And “bespoke” does not mean changing the logo on the first slide.

    It means starting by understanding:

    Who are the participants?

    What do they already know?

    What do they actually need to learn?

    In what situations will they need to use this knowledge?

    What are the learning objectives?

    What difficulties are they encountering?

    What skills do we want to develop?

    How much time is available?

    What is likely to bore them?

    What, on the contrary, might put them in difficulty?

    How will we know, at the end, whether something has actually been learned?

    This is instructional design at a very practical level: starting with the need and building the learning experience around it, rather than starting with a nice set of slides and hoping very hard that something happens.

    Already have a training programme? Perfect. We can strengthen it too.

    And this is a part of my work that I particularly enjoy.

    You may already have what you believe is an excellent training programme.

    The content is relevant. The expertise is there. But…

    it is a little flat. Lots of slides. Lots of theory. Lots of time spent listening. And after an hour and a half, you notice that very particular look on the participants’ faces. The one that tells you their bodies are still in the room, but their brains have gone out to buy bread.

    That is precisely where I can step in.

    Not necessarily to rebuild your entire training programme, don’t worry.

    But to design learning activities that strengthen existing content.

    Turn twenty minutes of theory into an inspiring workshop. Create a practical scenario. Imagine a game that lets people experience a concept. Build a case study. Add an individual reflection exercise. Get participants working together. Create a sequence that checks what has actually been understood.

    In short:

    put some movement into the content.

    What about online training?

    Same problem.

    Changing the medium does not magically transform a lecture into a learning experience.

    Online training can be excellent, but it still demands motivation to listen and participate. And those little practical exercises people are asked to complete can sometimes feel more paralysing than encouraging.

    It can also become:

    video 1, video 2, questionnaire, video 3, quiz, congratulations, you have finished.

    And three weeks later:

    “What was that about again?”

    For e-learning, I can therefore also design intermediate exercises intended to maintain engagement and consolidate learning.

    Reflection questions. Practical cases. Application exercises. Challenges between two modules. Activities that require learners to use a concept in a real situation.

    Tools for assessing learning outcomes. Sequences that revisit previous knowledge.

    Because finishing a video does not necessarily mean you have learned something.

    Consuming content is not the same as learning it.

    Consolidating learning rather than simply “completing the course”

    There is a distinction that seems fundamental to me between:

    having attended a training course

    and

    having acquired a skill.

    A ticked box on an LMS platform tells us that someone reached the end of a module.

    It does not necessarily tell us what they will know how to do on Monday morning.

    So I like working on learning consolidation.

    Bring a concept back.

    Present it from another angle.

    Ask people to use it.

    Introduce a new difficulty.

    Check whether someone can transfer what they have just learned to a different situation.

    And, above all, allow people to make mistakes.

    Because mistakes in training are wonderful.

    They allow us to discover precisely what has not yet been understood before the mistake actually costs something.

    Training in human relationships: an especially rich field

    My favourite field remains, of course, human relationships.

    Communication.

    • Conflict management.
    • Management.
    • Workplace relationships.
    • Professional stance.
    • Understanding individual ways of functioning.
    • Cooperation.
    • Relational intelligence.

    I have also designed and facilitated training around Human Design, including relational workshops that allow participants not only to discover their profile but also to experience what these differences can produce in their interactions.

    And this is where my different activities come together.

    Coaching has taught me how to ask questions.

    Training forces me to structure and communicate.

    My work on relationships allows me to observe what happens between participants, not only what is written in my training programme.

    The best training may be the one where the trainer talks less

    That may sound paradoxical when you sell training.

    But I have no desire to be the person showing off for seven hours.

    My role is also to create the conditions that allow participants to think for themselves.

    I can bring expertise.

    I can create the framework.

    I can challenge an answer.

    Add information.

    Put two ideas into conflict.

    Point out something that has just happened within the group.

    But participants also arrive with their own experiences, skills, disagreements and questions.

    Why waste all that richness by simply asking them to shut up and listen to me?

    Training is not about filling heads. It is about creating the conditions for something to be built inside them.

    And sometimes between them.

    Why do I train people?

    Ultimately, for that moment.

    The one when someone stops.

    Thinks.

    And says:

    “Wait… I’ve just understood something.”

    I love that moment.

    Because a piece of information has just changed status.

    It is no longer simply something I said.

    It now belongs to the person who has understood it.

    And when a workshop has also allowed several people to laugh together, understand each other better, test something they would never have dared to try in their professional environment and leave with a skill they can genuinely use…

    Yes.

    That is when I feel I have done my job.

    Looking for professional training or a bespoke workshop?

    I can work with you in several ways:

    • design and deliver bespoke professional training;
    • create a learning or participatory workshop around a specific issue;
    • contribute to an existing seminar or training programme;
    • design an icebreaker with a genuine purpose rather than simply an entertainment effect;
    • create games, case studies and professional role-play scenarios;
    • enrich an existing training programme with active learning activities;
    • design exercises for online training or e-learning to support attendance, engagement and consolidation of learning;
    • work on communication, management, cooperation, human relationships or conflict management in the workplace.

    Already have the content but it lacks the learning experience? I am interested in that too. Without adding another 50 slides, don’t worry: together, we can absolutely make sure that something happens in the room.