Training Design: Helping Others Grow

Transmitting is not limited to passing information from one head to another: it means supporting a transformation, and a transformation is as much engineered as it is improvised. What are the great keys to helping others express their potential, grow, and succeed in their project, in their life?

A great deal happens through both experimentation and mimicry. Mimicry means reproducing what people we recognize, respect, and admire do, because we want to imitate them, since they inspire us. Hence the importance of the Yama and the Niyama, which allow groups, students among themselves, to inspire one another, to reveal and align themselves with shared ethical rules, and so, collectively, to give one another the inspiration of their potential, both in terms of ethics and of behavior.

This happens through a great deal of collective work, but also through experimentation: it is by playing that children learn, and it is by working on projects that people find themselves faced with situations where they are, in a sense, compelled to learn, because learning for the sake of learning does not really make sense on its own.

If the project we are working on has meaning, for ourselves, for the collective, for the planet, if it allows us to exercise what we are passionate about, what animates us, then, when faced with difficulties, we will look within ourselves for the creative resources, the agility, both to solve problems and to seize the opportunities that arise. Doing all of this, both individually and collectively, allows each person to nourish their self-esteem, because they are working on projects in the service of noble and just causes, ambitious projects. People then reveal the best in themselves. They are aligned with ethical rules that reflect their values, which requires, in a sense, discipline of them. As they move forward on these projects, solving problems, building concrete things, self-confidence feeds itself.

It is by working on all of these dimensions together, self-confidence, self-esteem, agility, a taste for action, passion, motivation, a culture of success, that we best help those we are supporting to learn, to move forward, and to succeed in their project. Concretely, this changes the posture of the person supporting them: asking a question rather than supplying a ready-made answer, valuing mistakes as a legitimate step rather than as a failure to correct as quickly as possible, and trusting time, repetition, that sustained practice yogis call Abhyasa, without the tense expectation of an immediate result.