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Why you need to slow down and match the pace of who you are teaching

Posted by Carole Mahoney on 1/7/20 7:45 AM

Matt Miller Match the Pace

We've all been there. We've listened in to a presentation or lecture and thought, "Wow, I wish they would slow down!" Or worse... "Man, I wish they would pick up the pace!"

To some, their "normal" pace is fast, while other people's "normal" is slower. The key is to be self aware and realize that our "normal" pace isn't always the pace that we should be going.

Learn more in this clip featuring teacher, blogger, and presenter, Matt Miller.

 

 

Carole Mahoney: Pointing out how many managers that I talk to that say, I've given them every answer to every question, we've gone through the book, we've gone through all of these things. And at the end of it, they go through a training in two or three days, or a week, and they still can't sell. My students still don't know Spanish. So, this is something, I think, that we see happening, not just in teaching, but in sales and marketing... In a lot of industries, this disruption of attention is happening.

Matt Miller: Oh yeah, absolutely. I've got to think that for sales managers working with their salespeople and for salespeople working with their clients, a lot of times you think, I told them, I told them in very clear specific words what it is that they needed to know. But of course, if we're experts at it and it comes so easily in our brains, when you've got to introduce something like that to somebody else, in my case it was high school freshmen learning how to conjugate verbs in Spanish. But for a sales person, it might be educating them about a new product. And there's all of these million things going on in their brain while they're trying to take it in. Salespeople learning from their managers or clients learning from their salespeople.

And not only are they trying to gather information, they're also trying to fit it into their paradigm of what their business looks like. And they're also having their BS meter go off in the background, and they're going, "Is this too good to be true?" And with all of that noise in your brain, it's like, hey, I need to slow down. And I found that so much in the classroom too. I could conjugate a verb as well as anybody, I could speak fluent Spanish. But my students couldn't, and I realized that I needed to slow the pace down and I needed to try to put myself on their level instead of going at a level that I was comfortable with.

Carole Mahoney: And I love what you just said there, because it's so important. As managers, a lot of times they risen through the rank, they've become top salespeople, then they become the lead of the team. And sometimes they forget what it was like when you first started out, so the things that now seem so easy to you, it's hard for you to understand why it's not easy for someone else. It's like the other side of the Dunning Kruger effect that not a lot of people talk about. They talk about inexperience leads to overconfidence, but they don't talk about the reverse of that, where it's the more experience you have, the harder it is to sometimes teach because you can't understand why they don't get it.

Matt Miller: Yes, yes. That's so true. That's why whenever I get done with a training or whenever I've gotten done working with teachers or doing whatever, if I can get that feedback from people and I could say, "Hey, what do you actually remember from what I just said?" Like with the keynote speech, "What do you actually remember?" And it kind of puts them on the spot and they feel bad when they say, "Well, I don't know." And if you prod them a little bit, maybe you'll get something. But that's the true indication that you have actually taught something, that someone has actually learned something from you. And it's hard if you don't remember where they are and you don't put yourself in their place.

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Topics: What Sales Can Learn From Series