Motivating Learners

A good article from thiagi.com - to continue reading please log on to www.thiagi.com How Learners Are Motivated By Matthew S. Richter My Passion I am a trainer. I have been a trainer for just about all of my career. I started in the early 90s and was inundated with all sorts of training games that used rubber balls, funny sounds emanating from trainers to participants, and EST-like connections to humanistic approaches in business. Frankly, this stuff drove me crazy and I was somewhat embarrassed to admit I was a trainer. It was at this time that I met a guy named Thiagi. Thiagi was renowned as the game guy. All of my colleagues used his games and half the games I infused into my delivery came from him and I didn’t even know it. I should say, however, that my friends and I were all misapplying his activities. And we all had the misinterpretation that training games should be fun first. When I met him, Thiagi explained that fun was not what he and his activities were about. In fact, his goal was to facilitate engagement toward a performance objective. Now today, this all makes sense—but remember 15 years ago, it was all about funny sounds and hopping around like a chicken. Thiagi talked about relevance to performance, and how every activity needed to be congruent with every performance goal. And every performance goal should have a link back to a business objective. Essentially, Thiagi was talking about getting participants to truly connect to the value of what they were learning. And he used activities to facilitate higher levels of competence and used engagement as a way of offering opportunities for participants to freely engage and find their own value. Thiagi was teaching trainers to create motivating environments that had significance. I was hooked. I had transitioned from a naïve practitioner to someone who could do the moves properly. I had technique but no reason why Thiagi’s way of doing things worked. I probably should have just asked him. Then, I was introduced to a model that explained why we do what we do. A mentor of mine handed me a book called just that, WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO, by Edward L. Deci. It explained how and why people were motivated, intrinsically and extrinsically, to perform. The more fluent I became in applying Deci’s model to what Thiagi had taught me, the more convinced I became that life had meaning.

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