ShivWorks Instructorship Hack Number One:
Establishing Connection.
Part of being a successful teacher is establishing connection with not only the class, but every single person in it. This can be difficult, and one tends to be on a constant bungee cord from the entire group at 10,000 feet, to the individual at ground zero.
Years ago I started playing what I think of as the “Name Game”.
I begin every class by asking each person to introduce themselves to me and the group, tell me a bit about their training pedigree, and then I ask what they want from the weekend. After they do that, I thank them for investing in me and the coursework for the weekend and I tell them that I will do my best to make sure their time and money will be well spent. This is when I start working on names. I begin recording names with faces. Sometimes the names are unusual and easy to remember. Other times the names are common and the person is average featured so it takes a while. In an ECQC class this begins on Friday night, and I have until the class ends on Sunday evening to have on average, twenty names. The reason for this is that I end every class by again going to each person, now calling them by their name, and asking them what they thought of the weekend.
Usually this practice is mentioned by someone in their de-brief and they are stunned that I can remember twenty names and faces accurately.
No one taught me how to do this. I didn’t learn it in an instructor development class. I figured it out.
I do it for two reasons.
First, it forces engagement from me even when I want to disconnect. Travelling 40 weeks a year, and teaching the same content weekly gets tedious. I get tired of saying the same things so frequently. As long as I’ve been doing this, and as frequently as I do this, it would be very easy for me to disengage, go on auto-pilot, and let the words that are so practiced and rehearsed just roll out of my mouth, while my mind goes somewhere else.
The Name Game keeps me from doing that. I can’t disengage when I have twenty names to get in such a short period of time. Throughout the weekend I sit above the group and start working through pairs of people, as they drill in things like pummeling for under-hooks. My internal monologue is usually something like this: “Dan…Bill…Jeremy…Mark...fuck what’s that guy’s name?” I descend from my perch on a bungee and drop to ground zero with my unknown. There’s usually some correction that needs to be made. “Hey buddy what’s your name one more time”? “Darren”. “Ah that’s right, Darren. Hey man drive your under-hook a little higher and get more on the shoulder and not around his waist okay?” “Ah okay, gotcha”. I then pop the bungee, go back to my perch at 10,000 feet, survey the group as a whole and start going around the training area again. “Dan…Bill…Jeremy…Mark…Darren…and so on.
The Name Game is my personal exercise in attention, mindfulness, and engagement. It’s a huge part of my instructorship.
The second reason I do it is because it forces an individual connection with every person. Think of any time, in any group where someone just kind of gets unnoticed. This happens in firearms classes all the time. Some people just fade out and are hard to see. The Name Game prevents that from happening because it FORCES connection with every SINGLE person in the group, not just the group at large. You have to connect with the GROUP….and every PERSON in it. It’s certainly fatiguing and not easy to do. I make myself do it and now after years of practice I want to do it. I know in my soul when I haven’t connected with someone in a class.
So that’s your ShivWorks Instructorship Hack for the day. Try and develop your own techniques for creating connection.