The Minimalist Educator Podcast
The Minimalist Educator Podcast
Episode 044: Effective Messaging with Chris Fenning
Unlock the secrets to effective communication and ensure your training sessions leave a lasting impact! Join us as we chat with Chris Fenning, the acclaimed business author and communication expert trusted by giants like Google and NATO. Discover how Chris turned his frustration with inefficient meetings into a fascinating journey of mastering communication. We dive into strategies from his seminal works, "The First Minute" and "39 Ways to Make Training Stick," revealing practical tips on reinforcing learning through repetition, feedback, and simplification. This episode is packed with actionable insights that relate to both corporate environments and educational settings, making it a must-listen for anyone looking to transform their communication skills.
In a compelling discussion, we also explore the art of empathetic communication, especially during challenging conversations. Learn why understanding and self-awareness are crucial when delivering difficult news and how to engage in constructive dialogues by focusing on facts over emotions. Chris shares his wisdom on the "build it once, use many times" approach, offering smart ways to repurpose educational content for maximum efficiency. Tune in as Tammy, Christine, and Chris exchange invaluable tips on minimalist education, providing forward-thinking methods and professional learning services that support educators in creating impactful and streamlined teaching practices. Don't miss this episode if you're serious about transforming your communication and educational techniques!
Website: https://chrisfenning.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-fenning/
Freebie: The First Minute Workbook - A practical tutorial with self-assessment and activities to help you improve the clarity of your communication at work. Based on the multi-award-winning book, The First Minute (https://chrisfenning.com/get-the-first-minute-workbook-free/)
Book links:
- The First Minute: https://www.amazon.com/First-Minute-Start-Conversations-Results/dp/183824400X
- Effective Emails: https://www.amazon.com/Effective-Emails-Straightforward-Communication-Business/dp/1838244069
- 39 Ways to Make Training Stick: https://www.amazon.com/Ways-Make-Training-Stick-Development/dp/1916818013
This episode is sponsored by Plan Z Professional Learning Services: forward-thinking educator support.
Buy The Minimalist Teacher book on Amazon.
Follow on Instagram @PlanZPLS and @minimalist_ed_podcast
The Minimalist Educator Podcast is a Plan Z Professional Learning Services adventure.
Welcome to the Minimalist Educator Podcast, a podcast about paring down to refocus on the purpose and priorities in our roles with co-hosts and co-authors of the Minimalist Teacher Book, Tammy Musialski-Borneman and Christine Arnold.
Speaker 2:In this episode, we speak with Chris Fenning business author, trainer and speaker. We focus our conversation on how we can improve communication, as well as how we can make training stick. Chris Fenning makes it easier for us to communicate at work. He helps experts talk to non-experts, teams talk to executives and much more. Chris's practical methods are used in organisations like Google and NATO and have appeared in the Harvard Business Review. He is also the author of multiple award-winning books on communication and training that have been translated into 16 languages. Find out how Chris can help you at wwwchrisfenningcom.
Speaker 3:Welcome to today's episode of the Minimalist Educator Podcast. Today, christine and I are excited to talk to Chris Fenning, who is an author and apparently lives just down the road from Christine, so that was a fun fact we just found out. We won't be talking about all of the things that are in common already with us, but we're excited to have you today with us, chris. Thanks for being here.
Speaker 4:Tommy, thank you very much for having me on the show. It's a real pleasure.
Speaker 3:Thank you. So you have written a few books and I had mentioned to you that I had listened to one of your books a while back about. It's called the First Minute. So you talk a lot about effective communications, whether it's emails or conversations. Strategies to make training stick that's your latest book, 39 Ways to Make Training Stick. But I always like to know where did you get this interest from on how to effectively communicate with people? Where did that come from?
Speaker 4:how to effectively communicate with people. Where did that come from? Where did the interest come from? I think it was mostly born of a frustration of myself and other people not getting to the point, or sitting in a meeting and listening to the same thing, go round and round and round, and, oh my gosh, can we please stop talking about the history of a problem and just start solving the problem? And so, oh, I really felt that coming out there. So that's really where my interest in it came from.
Speaker 4:I had a lot of experience over 20 years in real employed jobs where I was exposed to a lot of different communication styles. I had some fantastic teachers and I also had some pretty bad communication training. I was on a number of development programs sort of a graduate development program, a managerial, an executive development program and the communication training was always a little vague, a little weak, and I was the guy sat in the class saying, all right, you've told me what to do, but you haven't told me how to do it. So can you give me the how? And all of that led to me wanting to know how to do some of these things, how to be clear and concise, how to get people's attention at the beginning of a message, and that interest led to, among other things, writing the first minute.
Speaker 2:I've just had a look through and finished reading your 39 ways to make training stick today. Actually, chris um really enjoyed looking through all the different strategies and tips and everything you've got in there and I definitely felt like there was a lot of crossover with the things that we do in education like giving feedback and focus on collaboration and self-pacing, giving people choice and all of that sort of stuff. But maybe you can talk a little bit about why it's so important for us to keep revisiting skills and information. Why can't we just do this training or this new information once and that be enough?
Speaker 4:Yes. Well, first of all, you mentioned, in education you do these things. You have the best make it stick method. It's homework.
Speaker 4:Now, kids might not think it's the best, but it's a very effective way to get repetition, to get reinforcement. Now, why, why do we need this? Well, there's something and I'll try not to geek out too much on this but there's something called the ebbing house curve, or the forgetting curve, which says that within half a day or a day of leaving a training session, we forget 50% of what we were told, and by the end of the week it's between 70 and 90% of what we've been taught. And so, from a corporate perspective, why should a company pay 100% of a training fee if their staff are only going to remember 30% of what they were taught? That's not a great return on investment.
Speaker 4:So, as trainers and educators, it's our responsibility to make sure that the people we teach have the very best chance of remembering. And so, if I come back to the Ebbinghaus curve, the forgetting curve, once we sort of leave the room and everything starts falling out of our ears and we forget, it doesn't take much to help overcome that forgetting, and it can be three or four reinforcement points over a period of days or weeks, depending on the topic and how it's applied, but three or four revisits, whether that's a reinforcement, self-paced, whether that's a live top-up training, whether it's some kind of feedback during the application of what people have been taught. Whatever it is, if we do those reinforcements we retain so much more of what we learn.
Speaker 3:It's such an important point to make, right, because a lot of times, as teachers too and I've been guilty of this it's like, well, I taught you this yesterday and the day before and whatever.
Speaker 3:So why don't you know it? But it does take that several repetitions and the skill practice for people to learn things and we forget that. But, and I think we also get caught in the trap of making things too complicated, and so I think your ideas about like keeping communication like simplified and getting to your point is really effective for making your teaching stick right. So, obviously, if you're not getting it in, you know, the first few times I have to repeat myself several times, like I think of how many times do we repeat ourselves as teachers? Or, you know, just even working with adults, like I told you, why don't you remember? So what, what are some like specific tips or strategies that you have, whether it's in an email or a conversation, or like specific things that you say to like make sure that you get to your point? Is there like a formula that you have?
Speaker 4:Ah, for getting to the point. Yes, there's definitely a formula or a couple of formulas for that, and very quickly. The thing to do when you start a particular work conversation with someone is you need to get their attention, keep their focus and get your message across and get your point across. And we can do that in less than 20 seconds if we name the topic, tell the other person what they need to do with the information and then give a clear headline and those three things the formula is called framing and it's context, intent and key message. And if we do those things, we overcome three unfortunate questions that most of us have experienced.
Speaker 4:So if you think about a bad conversation you've had recently that never really seemed to get to the point, you may have thought one or more of these questions what are you talking about? Why are you telling me this and what's your point? And if you've experienced any of those three things, any of those three questions, it's because the other person didn't tell you what the topic was. What are you talking about? They didn't tell you what to do with the information. That's the intent. Why are you telling me this? And they didn't give a headline for you to be able to then understand everything else that was going to be said. So if you want to get to the point, context, intent and key message in the first 20 seconds, and people will pay attention, have focus and know what you're about to talk about.
Speaker 2:Very cool. And while we're talking about those conversations that might not always feel quite as smooth or hitting those objectives that we want, do you have any tips for conversations where we might be feeling a little bit more emotional? Or if you're talking to someone that might feel a little bit defensive, or something like that? When we're working with different colleagues, we might have some more challenging conversations. Do you have some tips for encountering those ones?
Speaker 4:Wow, we could talk for a very long time about very situation-specific methods, about very situation specific methods. So, to give general advice if you feel that you have the emotion inside so if you're feeling very emotional, or if you're going to have a conversation and the topic is emotive letting people go talking about failures in their work, those sorts of things very high intensity, high emotion conversations Slow down, breathe and think about how the other person is going to be feeling. Imagine that your roles were reversed and someone was giving you this news. How would you like to get it? Even if it's bad news, we don't want to get it.
Speaker 4:Assuming you have to receive the news, what is a way that would be empathetic? What is a way that you would understand? What is a way that would be empathetic? What is a way that you would understand? What is a way that you would recognize that you're having a valuable conversation and it's not just you suck, you failed this bad thing. And if you can do those things, you'll be in a better mindset to have those conversations when you get into them. There's a bunch of frameworks and techniques and things that you can use, but they tend to be situation specific, so there isn't one perfect way to approach difficult or challenging conversations Really just have empathy. And if you're not sure what that is, go and go and have a look at it. Go and look it up and get some. There's some great books on how to become more self-aware and empathetic towards others. That's really going to help.
Speaker 3:Yeah, when I think about having those hard conversations, I do think about you. Know how can I put myself in this person's shoes? But also to your point before, like being that's when I want to be very clear about what the conversation is, and it's usually it's not a personal thing, right? It's you try to keep it objective and kind of focus on the content. Um, so yeah, because then your communication is just much more clear. I feel like, without getting so muddled in the emotion, that we can get caught in Um yes, it's hard to strip them out, though we're.
Speaker 4:We're human, or at least most of us are, I think, that human element. We can't ignore it, but the first step to not letting it overwhelm us or become the core of our message is to be aware of it and the slowing down and sticking to facts rather than opinions. That's another good thing that we should attempt to do as best as possible. Stick to the facts, leave the opinions out, because opinions are emotionally charged.
Speaker 2:So I really love that the book with all the strategies I'm talking about 39 ways again here, but you describe it as a toolkit that we can have. 39 ways again here, but you describe it as a toolkit that we can have. And I love that you say right up the front of the book build it once, use many times. And, of course, because we love minimalism here on this podcast, I'd love you to tell us a little bit more about that idea of build it once, use many times.
Speaker 4:Oh, yes, this is one of my favorite things to do. So, just like everyone else on the planet, I have a limited number of hours in the week that I can work, and when we create things from scratch, it takes time, effort, lots of thought. If we can find a way to reuse something we create, we've saved time. And so in the book, 39 Ways to Make Training Stick, every method can be used in multiple different ways. So, for example, if you create some content, let's say you were creating a reminder video. So you delivered a training course, or you delivered a lesson or a lecture and you wanted to send out a couple of videos to the students or the learners in a week or two after the training event, and they could be two or three minute long videos with a reminder of a key point from the training, a prompt for how they can apply it and a little activity. Something very simple, but it's that reinforcement and reminder. If you do a short video, even if you do it on your phone, and then you send it out, here's how you can reuse it, because if you just send it, it's one and done and then you have to do another one next time. But if you keep it, you can use it for every time you deliver that training. And here's where you can really get value from it. If you take the transcript from that video, that becomes the basis for an email reminder or a newsletter.
Speaker 4:It's also, if you create your video in a certain way, it can become a page in a book. So, for example, on my training, I tend to give out tips afterwards and I'll give out a few tips on key elements from the training, but I always do one-minute tip videos in the following format Name the tip, describe it in two lines, say what happens if you don't do it. That's why it's important. How do you do it? And I give an example, and in one minute I get 150 words. That's a page of a book. And so when I've done 50 tip videos, I've had 50 pages in a book. That then becomes a resource that can go in learning calendars, it can be emailed out, it could become a lead magnet if I wanted to attract new clients, all sorts of things. It's a digital resource all from that one video. And those are just a few examples of how you can reuse content.
Speaker 3:That's really valuable to think about how educators have a lot of content to cover with their students. But we were talking earlier about making the content stick, obviously, and so when we provide those multiple means of reminders whether it's in like a little note card or a little video for them to watch, I think that really that reusage of content and then building onto it is so valuable because it does keep it simple but it can increase in complexity, right? So you start with some of your content and then you build it out, and I think that's just something that we forget that we can do as educators and, as you know, people with businesses, and we're sharing content with people and because we have so much content to share and we forget how much is there sometimes. So it's such a great reminder to just to remember how much content there is and then chunking it out too.
Speaker 4:Oh, yes, and you've hit on something really important. We have the content Making. Training stick is not about creating a whole new program or a whole new course. It's about taking the headline from 10 slides in your, in your program. If you use slides, if your slides are created in a way where they deliver a key message or a particular bullet point that someone needs to remember, that's copy and paste. And then you have a text message, tip series or reminder series. You have examples, and good educators have activities that they use within their training. Well, those activities can just be reset, reformatted and sent as a quiz series. They go in newsletters. You can do it as a voice note and explain to people what they can do.
Speaker 4:Reusing stuff you already have is so, so easy if you look at your content as already existing. And there's one more benefit to reusing content in multiple ways is not every make it stick method will work for every student. And so if I like email tips because they're easy to set up and I work in a corporate environment in which there's been emails a fairly common channel but when I work with younger audiences, it just doesn't work, so I have to use something else. So there's WhatsApp groups. There are text messages. Sometimes, depending on the audience and the topic, I use all of them and it's fine to use all of them because some of them will stick with some people and others will stick with other people. So providing that variety without going crazy. Don't do all 39. Don't do all 39 on one training topic. But having a few means you're more likely to give somebody something in a format that will really resonate with them and that's the win You're helping that person really make the most of the time they've invested in the training.
Speaker 2:I loved that a lot of the strategies you have require your trainees to take action, so they're not just passively receiving more information about the training itself, but they're actually having to take action, which you know teach somebody else or do something with the knowledge that they've got there, but do you ever get any pushback about the time that it could take? So if you sent out a quiz or a challenge or anything like that, do you ever get people going? Oh, I don't have time to engage with that, or follow up or answer the questions?
Speaker 2:Does that ever come up at all?
Speaker 4:I can't think of a time when it hasn't. It always comes up because you've taught me. I want to know this now. I want to put in no effort, I want to be good at this thing straight away, and that is what my one hour of training that I've spent with you should deliver. It's just, society's expectations in some countries are way, way out of alignment with actual reality, and I'll give an example from my communication training.
Speaker 4:I'll deliver communication training on a very simple method that helps people get to the point and they expect to be able to leave and use it straight away. Now they can use it straight away, but they have to build that habit, they have to practice, they have to apply it, and it's just like learning a language. You can't read a French textbook and then suddenly you speak French. It takes application, it takes practice, it takes the grind of using it and feeling awkward and it feeling clunky and building that muscle memory. So does it happen? Absolutely, christine, it happens all the time.
Speaker 4:Everybody wants instant learning for zero effort. So what I do about it is, again, provide variety. So they have things that are self-paced. They don't have to do them on my schedule, they can do them on their own. But I also work with the organizations that are bringing me in to find somebody internally to help champion what comes next? Because I can't be there to help them all the time. I mean I'd love to if people want to bring me in and pay me for that, brilliant I will. But having a champion within the organization to do the follow-ups, to check in, to find out whether the accountability buddies which is one of the methods in the book whether the accountability buddies are actually meeting and holding each other accountable, so that's trying to overcome that human nature of I just don't want to put any effort and I want to know it all straight away.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that definitely makes sense. I do think that the accountability partners are. They're really life changing and I feel like I've accomplished a lot because I have people that I go to and it's one of those things where you just you need to build it into your habits where it's like you're checking in with people and people are checking in with you to make sure you're following up on the things that you're saying that you're going to do.
Speaker 4:Yes, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3:We're nearing the end of our episode with you, chris, and we always ask our guests for a pare down pointer, so that can be a tip that you've talked about in this episode, or it can be something that you use in your personal life, but what pare down pointer would you like to share with our listeners?
Speaker 4:If you work. So here's one for anyone who is in learning, training and development you can't afford to ignore what happens after trainees leave the room. So even if you do one small thing, make sure you do one small thing. Accountability buddies is a really easy example. So to pare it down, do one thing in your training to help make it stick afterwards, and pick something simple for you and simple for the trainees.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much, chris. This has been a great episode, lots of tips that you've shared. Thank you for being with us today.
Speaker 4:Well, thank you Tammy. Thank you Christine, it's been wonderful.
Speaker 2:Today's episode was brought to you by Plan Z Professional Learning Services forward-thinking educator support. Find out more at planzplservicescom.
Speaker 1:Be sure to join Tammy and Christine and guests for more episodes of the Minimalist Educator Podcast. They would love to hear about your journey with minimalism. Connect with them at PlanZPLS on Twitter or Instagram. The music for the podcast has been written and performed by Gaia Moretti. Thank you.
