Episode Details

What causes clients to keep coming back?

Is it information? Or could it be entertainment?

For too long we've treated teaching and learning as an activity that needs endless slides, pages and work. But what if clients get better results having fun? And what if you had a ton of fun as well?

Let's find out how to speed up client learning with some pretty minor tweaks in your e-books, courses, presentations and webinars.

Click here to read the transcript on the website: #166: How To Speed Up Client-Learning With The Incredible Power of Infotainment

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When my mother-in-law, Preta, was in her twenties, she was teaching at Sunday school.

Like most Sunday schools, the kids were there to learn about the Bible. However, my mother-in-law decided to teach the girls how to sew tiny dresses for their dolls.

Within weeks of her starting up, all the girls wanted to be part of her class. Ironically, this made the other Sunday school teachers jealous. They complained to the "higher authorities", and Preta was called in to explain herself.

"We've heard you're not teaching them about the Bible, and instead only involving them in play", said the person in charge. "You can come in and test the knowledge of the kids," retorted my mother-in-law, "and you'll find they know they're well-versed in their Bible studies".

You can clearly see the wisdom of play in this story, can't you?

You can also see how people in charge resist it a lot, even though it's apparent that we all have a maddening streak of playfulness we can't seem to shake. That when learning something, we want the trainer to bring a sense of joy into our learning. Instead, most education is soulless, incredibly dull and it's not surprising that clients drop out. The problem is that we're pretty sure we're guilty of this callous training and teaching as well.

But what if we were to make fun the core of our system?

What if we postponed designing the information-based section and thought about the fun elements, instead? What if fun wasn't an afterthought but part of the entire structure of learning? How would we do things differently, if this were the case?

In this series, let's look at: In this series, let's look at:

1) How to create Infotainment 2) Why we need to understand the goal 3) How to place the fun elements in your training

1) How to create Infotainment

If you were in charge of getting a kid to write, would you start with "slimy, oozy eyeballs?"

Here is a story of Jen Jackson from Seattle. She'd started a small English tutoring business aimed at kids that were being homeschooled. One of her students was Michael, Michael clearly despised writing, despite being able to read well. His mother tried "everything", but her methods weren't working, so she called Jen to help Michael write.

Except for the fact, that Jen didn't make Michael write at all.

The two of them read joke books, challenged each other to tongue twisters and did everything but write. The second meeting involved fun drawing games and drawing a monster. Still, no writing was included. It was only the third session where a Monster Cafe was created, apparently to accommodate Michael's monster.

That's when Michael wrote out a short menu that included slimy, oozy eyeballs. In the sessions to follow, Michael went on to create many menus for different monsters. Today, Michael is not exactly prolific, but he willingly writes short paragraphs and is eager to keep improving.

When we read this story, we can see how entertainment has led to information success, can't we?

Yet, as an educator it somehow feels scary. Even if you embrace the power of entertainment as the doorway to learning, how are you supposed to implement it? If you did what Jen did, wouldn't Mic