Make Your Information Come Alive

When it comes to learning new information or skills, one of the things that any learner benefits from is knowing that people like them have already been there and done that.

Your learners need to connect with your expertise during any learning event. One of the easiest ways of doing this is to use names and personalities to create mini stories that help illustrate how other people (like your learners) have used your expertise in your own life.

In order to protect the innocent, I would recommend having a composite character who you name and talk about.

If your audience tends to be mainly female, then use a girl or woman's name, such as Agnes, or Amelia or Annie.
If your audience tends to be mainly male, then use a boy or man's name, such as Arthur, or Adam or
Alex.

After you have decided on a suitable name, then flesh that character out - with an age, a business, a lifestyle that relates to your ideal learners.

If you tend to talk to retired people about financial planning, then use a 65-75 year old character called Agnes or Ethel who is worried about how she will manage if her arthritis gets any worse.

If you talk to young people about career choices, then use a hip-hop boy called Dizzle who would like to emulate his hero (say 50 cent) and go into the music bizness.

Then use this character throughout your seminar or workshop. You can use them to introduce each new section - at the start the character has a similar problem to the group you are teaching. As you tackle and resolve each issue, then your character moves on and is curious about what comes next. At the end, you can finish the story with what happens next. To make that ending really powerful, if you can then show a photograph of the real Dizzle or real Ethel and give a little more information on how successful their lives have been, that would be fantastic.


There are two main reasons to use a named character:
1) It is far more personable - your learners will feel like they can relate to someone with a name, a background, with the same problems or issues as their own. By showing how that character has benefited, they can see how your topic will transform their own lives.

2) A character can be used to introduce subtle humour into your event. For instance, if your event is around business finances and you wish to illustrate a calculation of your hourly rate, you may introduce a character named Ms P Hilton, who wants to earn one million pounds/ dollars a year, but only wants to work 20 hours a month, 10 months of the year. How much does she need to charge to do so?

So think about your area of expertise.
What sort of character will be most similiar to your ideal learners, those who attend your training events?
What name would they have? How old would they be? Where would they live? What problems might they be facing? What story might they follow from where they are now to where they want to be?

If you have some real case studies, then feel free to borrow from these, whilst protecting the personal information of your clients or customers.

So bring your topic or expertise come to life using real characters, real people, real stories to really connect with the people listening to your information. Capture the journey in a simple story and you have a powerful tool to help people remember and help inspire them to use your information to transform their own lives.