When I was attending college for elementary teacher training, we were taught to be cautious of teaching predominantly in the style that we preferred to learn.  It’s important to be aware of the variety of ways students learn and teach to all of those modalities in order to be an effective teacher.  There are visual learners, auditory learners and those who are kinesthetic learners.

I am a visual learner, and I would much rather learn by reading.  Have you ever taken a course that was mostly lecture?  I have taken a few coaching programs over the years that were mostly delivered via live calls or recorded calls.  Not to mention live conferences are usually in speaker format.

If you have ever taken one of my classes or programs, you will notice that there is almost always a study guide, outline, and sometimes the written script as well, depending on the topic.  I definitely am guilty of teaching in the way I learn best.  This is a great thing for my visual learners, but I may be missing the boat with other learning styles.

It’s important to keep this mind when it comes to working with clients.  Ask them how they learn best and how can you best accomodate their learning style.   Consider offering the option of recorded sessions, or transcription options.   This type of service could be an excellent way to differentiate yourself from your competition, or boost profits with an expanded service list.

Podcasts are excellent as website products, whereas coaching programs are going to be more successful with an established list of subscribers who know, like and trust you.  Keep this in mind when trying to decide to offer a training as a class or a program.

Teaching as we learn can also have a negative effect on profits.  Personally, I would rather have all the information at once, rather than having it doled out and spread out over time.  This is often the way I teach.  My coaching programs are usually more visual than listening, and there is more information over shorter time periods.

Many of my clients have appreciated this type of approach, but I recognize that there are those who can only digest a little information at a time, and like to have more resources, such as live training calls as well.  For example, I’ve waffled about the delivery of the class I am offering this week on PR.  I am teaching via a 90 minute recorded call, with a study guide, and tons of resources.

I could have split the content up over at least a couple of months, and added more hands-on attention for those who need it.  I could have charged more for this as a program, but I opted to offer a high value training for a reasonable price to round out my product funnel.   Polling clients is a great way to find out what they would be most interested in.  This is something I can do in the future.  In the end, I decided that this training will do well as a podcast on my website so I chose to make this a one-time training.

In the future I may shift to a more common program paradigm, and offer a better balance of teaching to the variety of learning styles.  By offering a well rounded program that appeals to a wider variety of learning styles, it will resonate with far more people, and will probably attract more program registrants.  The true test will be if I change my teaching style to see what types of programs are best received.

How do you learn best and how has that shown up in your practice?  Tell me how you roll with clients and your programs.  . . . .