Counting Down My Top 10 Favorite Learning Experiences and Sharing Advice for New L&D Professionals
- Aug 6
- 3 min read
#1: Building Your Personal Resilience
Recently I wrapped up an article series focusing on the four essential elements of impactful learning experiences. When facilitators execute these elements successfully, learners leave their training sessions feeling informed, engaged, entertained, and inspired.
I was eager to author another series but was drawing a blank on a topic. As I began reflecting upon my early years in the postsecondary classroom and more recent years in corporate training spaces, several learning experiences stood out to me.
While a late night talk show host gig is probably not in my future, I decided to compile a list of my top 10 favorite learning experiences.
I hope that by sharing my work, I spark your imagination, inspire you to experiment with new approaches, and encourage you to pitch audacious ideas for your learning projects. At the end of each article, I‘ll offer a few suggestions for you to consider.
#1: Building Your Personal Resilience
I designed, developed, and began facilitating this session in the spring of 2021. Everyone was grappling with the uncertainty and fear surrounding Covid. It was also a particularly challenging time when employees at my organization, who were accustomed to interacting with their colleagues in a physical office, were struggling to adjust to the work-from-home mandate. After a successful pilot within my department, I partnered with the Benefits team to offer the session to a broader enterprise audience as part of their ongoing wellness programming.
The goals of this 90-minute virtual session were: (1) explore participants' views on resilience and explore why it really mattered; (2) dispel several common myths about resilience; (3) discuss 10 practical strategies to strengthen participants' resilience muscles; (4) review numerous resources provided by the organization to support participants' resilience; and (5) help participants develop an action plan to set and achieve their 30-day resilience goal.
Why This Experience Makes My Top 10
Reason #1: The session spoke to the realities of the moment we all found ourselves in.
The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta confirmed the first case of the coronavirus on January 21, 2020. The United States declared a public healthy emergency on February 3. President Donald Trump declared coronavirus a national emergency on March 13.
Naturally, people were frightened because we didn’t know what this disease was. We were getting conflicting, and often speculative, information about its origins, the severity of the risks it posed, and how it could be transmitted. We were worried about our health and the health of our loved ones, particularly our elderly family members, friends, and neighbors.
Schools were closing down and non-essential employees were ordered to work from home. Parents were balancing working remotely for perhaps the first time with the added stress of helping their children adjust to participating in classes online. There were widespread business closures across the country. The personal services, food services, hospitality, and arts and entertainment industries were hit the hardest. Everyone was forced to dramatically shift from the way of living we had always taken for granted to something completely foreign.
Controversy brewed over state-issued stay-at-home orders and local government mask mandates. Shutdowns and social distancing became entrenched in our everyday vernacular. News reports of the sharp spike in fatalities were troubling. There were shocking images of bodies piled up in vacant rooms of hospitals due to lack of space in the morgues. Many people expressed their mistrust of vaccines. Still others called science into question.
In the midst of these increasingly unsettling circumstances, our employees were expected to satisfy their work obligations. Often in a makeshift home office using their kitchen tables or even ironing boards for desks. All while laboring under a cloud of uncertainty about how long this virus and this new working arrangement would last.
This session provided a psychologically safe space for participants to express their feelings of isolation, loneliness, and helplessness and also receive support from their colleagues who shared similar concerns.
Read the remainder of this article for free on Medium here.
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