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Justine Ickes coach trainer facilitator

Three Tips for Engaging Learners

What makes for a great learning experience?

The short answer = A laser-like focus on the learner. 

As we all pivot to new ways of connecting, business owners, coaches, creatives, and folks like you are looking for the best ways to deliver powerful learning experiences.

Whether it’s a live webinar, pre-recorded course, virtual instructor-led training or a combination of all three, there’s one key rule to follow.

Put your audience front and center with these three simple rules.

  1. Show, don’t tell.

Make your content real! Remember those amazing Apple product launches? Like the legendary iPhone reveal? Or the iPad presentation? Steve Jobs didn’t just talk about these products; he actually showed what they could do in real-time.

I’m pretty sure the former Apple CEO knew there’d be a learning curve. That people would need time to figure out all the cool things they could do with the new devices.

But did Steve get bogged down in wordy step-by-step instructions for all those features? 

Nah. He knew people would be so excited and motivated that they’d experiment and learn on their own. 

The same goes for your own courses. Instead of boring your clients and customers with all the details, structure your courses so people can jump right in and teach themselves.

  1. Make your content real!

Candy Crush is fine when you need a mental pick-me-up. But when a chocolate craving strikes, wouldn’t you rather have the real thing?

Real live adults — like the ones enrolling in your webinars and courses — prefer content they can relate to. 

So, instead of imaginary scenarios and stock photos look for ways to boost the real life quotient in your courses.

How?

Here’s one idea: Instead of spending money on stilted, professional voice-overs, or robotic find someone in your network who has a great voice and have that person do the narration. 

Think about it. You know your niche inside and out, right? And your employees (if you have any) should too. (And, if they don’t, why are they working for you?)

Do-it-yourself audio lets you tap into your in-house expertise and emphasize your brand’s unique personality.

So, talk about your products and services in real-world language your prospects and clients can understand.

  1. Watch your language.

Social media sites like Twitter, TikTok and Instagram have made tongue-in-cheek quips and commentary all the rage. To be sure, a smart and sassy title can bring traffic and maybe even boost sales.

But, when it comes to effective e-learning, it’s best to steer clear of this style of communication. Because what’s great for marketing can be downright annoying to a learner.

Remember, people come to your course to learn, not to be wowed — or worse, confused or irritated — by clever titles.

The next time you’re tempted to serve up some snazzy, punny text, ask yourself: Is this really necessary? Is this the best, clearest, most helpful way of educating my customers?

Follow these three rules and you’ll be well on your way to creating meaningful webinars and educational courses that your clients and customers will love.

Want some support getting your signature learning program up and running? I’ve spent decades designing courses for clients large and small and I’ve got a proven system to get you in the learning game. Check out The Launch Pad, my hybrid coaching + consulting program. Or contact me for a consult to find out how I can help.

fern

Three tips for nurturing your self

Want to dig in and plant the seeds of the next phase in your life journey? Then take a cue from Mother Nature with these three tips for building and nurturing a life you love.

  1. Prepare Your Foundation

Ask any seasoned gardener and they’ll tell you it’s all about the soil. Rich, healthy earth makes for happy, thriving plants and an abundant harvest. The same holds true for people seeking personal growth and transformation. 

What do you need to have in place at the start of your coaching journey?

  • Deep commitment to doing the work that leads to self-awareness 
  • Tools to help you explore what matters to you – your core values and motivators
  • A personal life purpose statement to steer you along
  1. Be Selective!

Whether you’re carving out an urban plot or staking a homestead, you first need to decide what to plant. Along the way, you have to assess and make some hard choices. Have you got enough space for all those heirloom tomatoes? Can you live without another jalapeño?

You need to be just as choosy when you design your own life.

So spend the time upfront to get clear on your core values, take stock of where your life is at right now, and make sure you have the support you need to make any necessary changes to move you forward. 

  1. Diversify, diversify, diversify!

Monoculture isn’t good for our planet and it’s not good for humans, either. A well-crafted life blends people, purpose and passions that feed your mind, body, and spirit. 

How do you strike that healthy balance and nurture all facets of your life? You can start by doing a personal audit. Where and how are you spending your time and energy? What people and passions will help you thrive where you’re planted?

Interested in exploring how coaching can help you grow and thrive? Not sure where to start? Then my “North Star” coaching package may be right for you. Schedule your complimentary session and let’s talk.

Justine Ickes coach trainer instructional designer

Breaking and entering

This essay by Justine Ickes was first published in July 2014 by Aperiodical LLC. The Magazine’s online ISSN: 2334-4970.

Every Sunday during the early 1960s my family would tour Long Island’s construction sites. Dad — an English teacher and armchair architect — led his bride and me around developments with names like “Pine Barrens” and “Birchwood at Blue Ridge.” Looking, after all, was free.

Often the half-built houses were unlocked, so we’d walk right in and amble around. Brushing away the sawdust with his flip-flops, Dad would decipher the markings on the subfloors and the joists, and indulge his design dreams. Our piano could go here, his reading chair there, that nook should be mom’s sewing room.

We prowled the subdivisions, oblivious to laws and safety codes, like hermit crabs in search of the perfect shell. It took decades, in fact, and the birth of my own two sons, for me to wonder, “What kind of person not only teaches their toddler to trespass, but doesn’t even acknowledge the transgression?”

Occasionally, our illegal incursions would hit a snag. Once my dad boosted me through a window — smack into a bathroom sink. Unperturbed, he guided me from outside until I sprang open the front door. “I’m right here,” he coaxed. “Just follow my voice.”

Outside the realms of real estate, I didn’t always play the willing accomplice to my father’s capers, though. I remember one ill-fated Easter hunt. “Sweetheart, go find some eggs!” he urged while I scowled in silence, jabbing a clod of turf with my patent leather shoes.

“The egg affair,” as Dad dubbed it, came to encapsulate our dutiful daughter–fearless father dynamic. For while I never imagined our escapades as anything but ordinary, I often found my father’s boundary-pushing terrifying, and his insistence on bravery maddening. So at age seven I drew the line: I would enter other people’s future homes with others, but I balked at sallying forth alone.

The world is my oyster

By college, however, I had embraced solo forays. A semester in London stretched into two decades of wandering of my own. English teaching in Madrid. A stint training Peace Corps volunteers in Eritrea. A summer trekking around Anatolia with my Turkish fiancé.

Back home on Long Island, my dad continued to indulge his architectural fantasies. At Christmas I’d flit home and find him poring over This Old House magazine or stacks of house-plan books. Dad had always been an avid reader, thanks to a childhood bout of rheumatic fever that kept him bedridden for a year. “Listen to this,” he’d say, scanning the real estate listings in the Sunday New York Times. “‘Mint pre-war apartment with formal dining room and wood-burning fireplace.’ Wouldn’t it be lovely to live there?”

Eventually, health issues left our breaking-and-entering empire in ruins. When my father developed diabetes, the ensuing circulation problems made walking difficult and painful. So we did drive-by reconnaissance; we would motor the long route home from the library, the grocery store, or — with increasing frequency — the doctor’s office. Along the way we’d marvel at a renovated Cape, groan over the new vinyl siding on a Dutch Colonial, or stare in dismay at the latest McMansion.

When my fella (now husband) and I bought our first home — a fixer-upper brick townhouse — I emailed Dad hand-drawn floor plans, careful to add the architectural hieroglyphics he’d taught me years before: dashes for a window, the staircase a block of lines, a square with four circles for the stove.

Later, we decamped to an old mill town in Connecticut. Through the casement windows, Dad would watch his grandsons clambering over the fieldstone walls that lined our property. “I could sit here forever,” he sighed. “It’s such a lovely view.”

Once, while tooling around the neighborhood, we spied a weather-worn folly, its gray-green cupola overgrown with wild roses. Ever the dreamer — and architectural pirate — Dad suggested we cart the gazebo off. “Just picture it near the lilac,” he said. “You could pretend to be Charlotte Brontë.”

In 2010, William Henry Ickes died, not long after I had moved to New England. Flipping through his old sketchbook, I realized that he had spent a lifetime crafting palaces in his mind, but he’d hardly built any in reality. Apart from plywood for homemade valances and miles of crown molding, he had lavished his paycheck and affections on his five kids. But had he, I wondered, ever made peace with the layout of his life?

A month after his death, I stumbled across a child’s chalk drawing on the sidewalk. Next to a lopsided house I saw the words “bathroom” and an arrow pointing to a small rectangle labeled “door.” The blurred, foot-worn sketch could have been teleported straight from my early childhood, when I drew with architectural authority if not precision.

That night in bed I thought about our long-ago residential ramblings and their imprint on my life. From the sidelines, Dad had showed me his plumb-lines for living. Boundaries often fence us in. And fear can demolish dreams. But love will always shore you up. 

And I remembered, too, one of our last conversations. A few days before my father’s bypass surgery, I was taking makeshift measurements of our kitchen, pacing the floor heel-to-toe as we had always done. While Dad plotted the dimensions on his trusty graph paper, I asked if he was afraid of dying. “Actually,” he replied, “I’m looking forward to the rest of the adventure.”

What’s been your most eye-opening travel experience? I’d love to hear.

Justine Ickes online training trainer coach facilitator

Are you ready to create an online course?

Prospective clients often ask me, “Do I have what it takes to create an awesome online course?” 

My answer?

Of course you do!

With today’s user-friendly e-learning platforms, you can have a course up and running fairly quickly.

But don’t take my word for it. Read on to see if you’re ready to create your own online course.

You’re Able to Commit.

Let’s be honest. Developing an online course takes a large investment of energy, time and resources. 

From crafting your course outline to writing learning objectives and from sourcing images to editing videos, you’ll need to juggle a variety of tasks before your course goes live. 

Add all that to what you’re already doing to run your business and you might find your head spinning before you’ve even started on your course. 

Does that mean you should put off your course until the time is right?

No. But you’ll be much more effective if you’ve got realistic expectations and have a plan in place to keep your business running while you dive down the course creation rabbit hole.

You’ve Got Friends and You Know How to Use Them. 

Ringo Starr got it right when he sang about the importance of friends. In e-learning, too, things are easier when you’ve got support. 

Plus, as far as we know, no one’s figured out how to extend the day beyond 24 hours. That’s why it’s important to figure out your strengths and then seek help for everything else.

Are you great at writing copy but easily frustrated with technology?

While you don’t need to be a tech guru to create a successful online program you do need to have some basic technical skills and be comfortable navigating online. 

So if words like “jpeg”, “metatags” and “bandwidth” send you scurrying, consider hiring someone to help you with the tech-side of your course.

Do you have an eye for layout but stumble over spelling and grammar? Then delegate the copy-editing to your company’s resident grammar geek.

You Know Your Learners.

No doubt about it, online learning is an ever-changing environment. What’s popular today might not exist a year from now, or even a month from now. 

The good news is you don’t need to be up on the latest app or have the skinny on the newest technology coming down the pike.

When it comes to great e-courses what matters is that you know your target audience. What e-learning tools do they like to use? How do they prefer to learn? Will they be happy to follow along with a slideshow? Or do they love on-line chats and discussion boards?

How do you find out? Ask them! 

So, how’d you do? If you can answer yes to the three criteria I’ve outlined above, you’ve got a good foundation for creating a course that your clients will love.

Want some support to get your signature learning program up and running? Check out The Launch Pad, my hybrid coaching + consulting program here. Or contact me for a consult to find out how I can help.

 

What’s it like over there in Turkey?

What’s it like over there in Turkey?

People ask me that question a lot.

They ask when they find out that my husband is Turkish. Or when I talk about spending the summer with our kids in Turkey. Or when I mention that I’m going there for work.

Or when some Hollywood starlet says something like, “Oh, I thought Istanbul was a town.” (Yeah, I know, I winced too.)

And, you know what? I still don’t have a good answer.

Because, summing up Turkey, or any other country or culture, for that matter, is basically impossible.

It’s like asking a mom what labor’s like. (Okay, it’s not that extreme.)

Still, when you’re talking about a country as big, as diverse, and as old as Turkey, there aren’t any simple, succinct answers.

But that doesn’t stop people from having questions.

The Top 3 Questions I Get Asked about Turkey

Over the years I’ve field a lot of questions about traveling in Turkey. Here’s just a sample:

Do you wear a headscarf when you’re there?  

Nope. Sure, if I’m visiting a mosque, I’ll put on one out of respect. But, in my normal goings-about, I’ve never worn, or felt pressured, to don a headscarf. 

Is it safe?  

There’s something about Turkey that makes some people very nervous. And it’s not just Americans who get the willies. Back when I lived in Madrid and was heading out for my first trip to Turkey, a well-meaning Spanish friend tried to talk me out of going. “What if you’re kidnapped? Or tossed into a Turkish prison like that guy in that movie Midnight Express?”  Considering that I wasn’t a) a top model or b) a drug dealer, I wasn’t too worried. Twenty-years and two kids later, I’m even less so.  

Is it true you have to walk several paces behind your husband?

Heck, no! And I don’t see my Turkish female relatives plodding along behind their spouses either.

Curious about Turkey and want to learn more? Then consider joining me on a “Wander & Wonder Day Trip”. Contact me to learn about the custom walkabouts I offer in Istanbul and other locations in the U.S. and abroad. 

aquarium

The # 1 Reason that Cultural Fluency Matters

Ever been to an aquarium?

It’s such a cool experience, watching the aquatic parade. 

The sharks glide by.

The sea anemones do their funky slow-mo dance.

Even the guy in the wetsuit fits right in — Okay, maybe not him.

But you know what I mean. The whole aquarium thing just, you know, works. 

What do fish have to do with culture?

Culture is like the water in an aquarium. And we humans are the fish.

As we paddle along, culture keeps us afloat. It’s the shared values and beliefs we live by, the rituals and traditions that say “this is how we do things here”, the taboos that tell us what behaviors are out of bounds.

For people born and raised in the U.S., culture is things like:

Just Do It © or “Been There, Done That” (values)

Always singing the “Star-spangled banner” before a ball game.  (traditions)

It’s rude to ask someone how much money they make. (etiquette and taboos)

For someone from Japan, culture might be expressed this way:

You always accept a business card with both hands and study it carefully. 

When you’re a guest in someone’s home, it’s rude not to eat all the food your host offers. 

Is either one of these cultures better than the other?

Nope. They’re just different ways of being in the world.

Are these differences ever cause for confusion?

You bet.

That’s because, like the fish in an aquarium, we’re all immersed in our own culture and that can make it hard to see, let alone, understand how the world might look to other fish, er, people who are from another culture. 

But, as long as you’re safe in your own cultural waters, life usually goes swimmingly.

Something Smells Fishy Around Here

But let’s say you have a change in life circumstances.

You decide to study abroad or you’re assigned to a global team at work.

Or maybe, like me, you fall in love with someone from another culture.

Now you’re in unfamiliar, maybe even murky, waters.

Out of the Fish Bowl and Into the Fire

Getting dumped out of your cultural fish bowl, whether by force or by choice, is shocking, to say the least.    

After all, you’ve got a whole new set of cultural behaviors and norms to sort out.

Which leads to lots of questions and maybe even some frustration.

Why can’t I get a straight answer from my Korean colleague? 

My Spanish girlfriend is never on time! 

This meeting with our Brazilian clients is really dragging on. What’s with all the chit-chat?! I mean, let’s get to the sales pitch, already! 

Ever felt this way? No worries, confusion, frustration and exhaustion are part of developing cultural awareness.

But, if you want to stay afloat — be happy in your new home overseas, get along with your colleagues or make your cross-cultural romance work —  you’re going to have to learn some new strokes. 

Three Tips for Staying Afloat in Cross-cultural Seas

  1. Resist the urge to succumb to stereotypes. Sure, it would be easier to just label the other culture as “lazy”, “crafty”, “just not like us” or any number of unflattering adjectives. But does that really make it easier to get along?
  2. Educate yourself about basic cultural differences. Read books. Ask questions. That way, you can anticipate where misunderstandings might arise and you can build on cultural traits that you and your new friend, colleague or soul mate might share.
  3. Remember to take off your own goggles. Pretend you’re an anthropologist and try seeing your own culture as someone from another culture might. 

Need support navigating your cross-cultural relationship? Could your team use some training in effectively communicating across cultures? I offer coaching and training for individual and groups. Schedule a consult with me and let’s explore how I can help.

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