Guy Malone writes an enjoyable blog on his experiences as a waiter.

Last month he described an amusing encounter he’d had with two customers who were settling in for a night of heavy drinking:

Pointing at their nearly-empties, I ask these these two gentlemen, “A couple more beers guys?”

“Yes” was the quick response.

“And by the way,” he adds “…if we ever do say no, it’s just because we didn’t understand the question.”

Experience shows that getting people to say “no” is often a challenge but it could be crucial in helping you to sell more of your products. Let me explain…….

Your learners can only learn new skills if they consume your learning materials – and then implement what they’ve learnt.

Yet I’m sure you’ve found that many customers get distracted and end up buying other products before they’ve had a chance to get any results from yours.

Because they’re not implementing anything, they make little or no progress on their goals. That means that they’re not in a position to give you any testimonials…  with the result that you have less of a track record to show future customers…  which, in turn, is going to lead to fewer sales.

Get them to say “no”

That’s why it’s so important to persuade your learners to say no to other products until they have worked through yours. Here are a few ways you can do this:

• at the beginning, get across in the strongest possible terms that they’re not going to achieve their goals if they flit from product to product
• convince them that your product has everything they need to succeed and they don’t need to stray anywhere else
• keep levels of motivation high by making sure they feel a sense of progress and that they begin seeing at least some results as early as possible.

What she calls action mapping can also be called goal mapping. But she does make a very important point….

The whole purpose of learning is not to accumulate knowledge but help people take action that will get the desired results.

So instead of starting off with the information you think people need, you start with the goal to be achieved and then work back to the information that they actually need.

This is the process:

1. Identify the goal that needs to be achieved.
2. Identify the actions/behavior that will accomplish that goal.
3. Devise suitable skill-development activities that will give learners the ability to perform the necessary actions successfully.
4. Work out what information and other resources learners need for their skill-development activities.

Using this process will keep you focused on working out how to get the best results for your learners.

According to him, it takes 10 years for long-term memories to become permanent – and even then knowledge needs active repetition for this to happen.

He tells the story of Boeing asking him how they can improve the memory of  college graduates who join them because they’ve already forgotten alot of what they’ve learnt at college. And Medina said to them: “Everyone forgets alot.”

So what are the implications of this for educators? The key is to remember that it’s inevitable that all your learners will forget a great deal.

So the first thing you need to work out is what you need them to remember compared with the information they can easily go back and refer to in materials.

And I would suggest it is the core principles and processes of your learning model that you want people to remember whereas the detail of any action plans can be easily looked up.

So you need to make clear to your learners what is essential for them to remember and then, from time to time, you can give them what Medina calls “booster shots” so important knowledge is repeated regularly.

You can also give your learners A4 or poster-size diagrams or descriptions of important principles, processes or strategies and suggest they are reviewed regularly.

This will help to embed important information into their minds. And, doing this with a clear information structure will make the process more potent.

Knowing how the brain works and then implementing that knowledge is crucial for educators – so I’ll be returning to this area in future posts.

However, the actual structure of content is usually much more sophisticated – as Fig 2 below gives some idea of – with topics, sub-topics and sub-sub-topics.

In order to fully understand all the information being conveyed, listeners to a presentation have to construct Fig 2 for themselves from the information presented in Fig 1- and doing this at the same time as taking in all the content being given to them.

And that’s a tall order for almost everyone.

The end result of this is serious. People who can’t or don’t extract the real structure for themselves end up feeling more confused and pick up less information.

Lessons for You

Firstly, it’s important to be clear about the structure of the information you provide whatever format you use. Hopefully you’re clear about the structure of your material; but you also need to convey your understanding to everyone else.

You do this by clearly describing the structure of your information and how all the different topics relate to each other.

Whether you’re writing a book, an ebook or a manual or  giving a presentation, you can start with a diagram showing the structure in graphic format and then explain from time to time where you are in the structure so you give everyone their bearings.

Another way to do this is to explain the structure using a mind map.

Your ability to help people get results is dependent on people being able to understand your ideas quickly and easily. The more confused you make them, the less successful they are going to be.