Creating Engaging Learning Experiences: Lessons from Live Training
The effectiveness of online educational content for small business owners isn’t just about the logistics of good delivery but the psychology of engagement and authenticity. We recently had a chat with Breanne Dyck, co-founder of the Visionary CEO Academy, and she talked about why she prefers live sessions over prerecorded videos for her events and how embracing the imperfection of being live trumps the glossy exterior of pre-scripted recordings.
It's all part of a deliberate strategy rooted in her blend of coaching and consulting, aptly coined "coach-sulting”, where the human touch is most important. By embracing imperfection, she’s disarming intimidation and fostering genuine connections and uses it to shape a community where vulnerability is celebrated, not shunned.
In the midst of this authenticity, Breanne doesn't lose sight of the endgame: outcomes! Drawing from her background in education, she emphasizes the importance of outcome-driven learning experiences, where every interaction is a tool for guiding people to make new and different choices.
As she aptly puts it, "Teaching isn't about what you can tell someone, it's about what they understand." And understanding, at its core, is a deeply human experience.
Read our full interview with Breanne Dyck below and you can find out more about the Visionary CEO Academy here.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Let's start by discussing your choice of live training sessions over alternative formats like videos, blog posts, or downloadable webinars. What motivated this preference and how do you perceive the value it brings to your business?
The short answer is if I'm going to go live, I'll actually record the video. I mean that's the honest and true answer. If you put me in front of a camera and I have my talking points and a script, it'll take me 30 minutes to record a five-minute video because I will stop and start and restart. If you put me on a live training or a live video and it's one shot, it gets done. It gets done and I can just show up. I don't have to feel like I'm overpreparing. I can be more real.
So it is completely selfish at the end of the day because when I can record a live video, I get the energy of a live video but I can still use it as a recorded video. So I've got these training videos that I might have recorded a year ago live, but I can always bring them back and use them. We edit them and we use them as client materials.
Often our training videos come from a need to explain a concept or idea to a client. Rather than going and creating something just for that client or just for a few people that'll see it, I put my energy into what I'm creating live and then repurposing after that.
Your business combines coaching and consulting, you call it "coach-sulting." How does this approach benefit your business? How do the live training sessions play into this approach?
One of the biggest things for us has always been, how do we show people what it's like to work with us. Because, apparently, when I write I come across as intimidating. I don't understand this. I don't think I'm scary, but apparently, I can come across as very intimidating. And so when I'm thinking about how I want to connect to people. A lot of it is, how can I disarm that? How can I show that I'm a human? How can I give the experience?
If they think that I'm intimidating and if they feel like I'm this sage on the stage, that's not going to inspire them to want to connect in a way that serves our business. As you said, it's coach-sulting. It's not a bunch of modules that you go through and never hear from the person that you're working with. It's very much one-on-one, very much intentional. Let's work on this stuff together, let's collaborate, and if you think that every time you're going to be coming into a call it's going to be like getting called into the principal's office, you're not going to be inclined to want to come to those conversations, and so that is number one.
It's how I show up in a way that's easy for me, but it also softens some of the rough edges and makes me more human. That's the other thing I enjoy about doing it live, it's not polished. I don't take out all of the places where I stumble or misspeak. In a live video when I'm connecting with people I can show them I'm not perfect with this stuff, I mess it up, and this is an important value to me. And if this value speaks to you in the same way that it speaks to me then we can create a better connection.
How do you approach your training sessions with a focus on outcomes rather than just delivering content? How much of an outcome-driven mindset do you apply in real time to adapt to the audience's needs and ensure they achieve a deeper understanding of the material?
I think I've been fully indoctrinated into outcomes. One of the first jobs I had before starting this business was working in post-secondary and we were specifically working on helping people learn and creating a better educational environment. One of the things I remember from that is it doesn't matter what you want to teach. It matters what you want them to learn at the end of it. That is what I'm always thinking about. When I'm giving a training, what's the outcome of this?
I always think of it as one person. I could be in a room of 300 people or talking on Facebook Live to no one, it's just me thinking about the person that's going to be listening to this and what I want them to get out of it. What do I want them to learn? What action do I want them to take at the end of it? Coming from an education background, I perceive those as the same thing, because my favorite definition of learning is we know that someone has learned when they have the opportunity to choose a different action than they would have before.
I could be in a room of 300 people or talking on Facebook Live to no one, it's just me thinking about the person that's going to be listening to this and what I want them to get out of it. What do I want them to learn? What action do I want them to take at the end of it?
If I'm going to be leading a training, what I'm looking for is the action I want someone to take at the end. If that's a training with a sales outcome, then the action I want them to take is to learn why this is a solution that's going to solve this problem for them. If it's training that I'm doing for more general marketing, then it might be more about how I want them to learn what is going on beneath these symptoms. If it's a training that I'm doing for clients, what behavior do I want to incentivize and change within the clients that we've got? So I'm always thinking about it through this perspective of the action and the outcome that's going to come at the end of it, and that feeds naturally through the way that I'm trying to present things.
Building on that, how do you integrate a human-first approach into your work, given your commitment to fostering meaningful interactions and better learning experiences?
There's a bit of a joke that goes on within our team, but also with some of the people who know me best, which is that I am not naturally good at human-ing. This is not a natural gift that I have. Whether it's undiagnosed autism or something else, human-ing is challenging for me and has been for as long as I can remember.
I think that's part of why, when it comes to the business or these events or these trainings, I'm always thinking about the human on the other side, because it doesn't come naturally to me. We hear about these mastermind dinners that happen, you'll get 10 business owners in a room and everyone will have a great time and at the end of the night millions of dollars of business will have been done. But I know that whenever I've been in one of those rooms I've had great conversations and a great meal and I walk away with no business because I have no idea what's going on around me. So this is something that I've had to learn.
Another story: when I would go along to a coffee shop with my partner Jill and I'd get my hot chocolate or whatever it was going to be, I would rehearse what I was going to say before I would get up to the counter to make my order because it was such an unfamiliar situation for me. And so I was always thinking, how is this conversation going to go? How is this person going to respond? What do I say if they say this? What do I say if they say that and that?
When it comes to the business, it has forced me to always say, what is the other person going to be responding to? What am I creating in terms of opportunities for the other person to respond? And again, because it's not natural for me I have to think about it being one person. My brain can't process the impact that I'm going to have on multiple people, but I know I can predict or kind of play the conversation out in my head. So even if I'm speaking on a stage and there is no actual back and forth, I'm still in the back of my head thinking about the conversation that I'm having.
When you pair that with our company's purpose, which is that we believe that every person is a person first, last, and always, that gives me that focusing lens. It also gives the entire team something to go back to. That's our highest value. If you are ever not sure about what to do in our company the question is, what's the best outcome for the people involved? And looking at it through that, human impact is the foundation of how we make decisions and how we choose to interact with the people that we serve.
How does your embrace of imperfection impact the way clients and audiences approach their work? How do you think it influences your clients' engagement and the community you're building?
I'll tell you a story here that I think illustrates this. Once upon a time, I used to work in higher education, and so when I started this business, I didn't know what I was gonna do. Through several false starts and trial and error, I found myself developing course materials. I was helping people build courses and I had the most imperfect version. I had just like a Google doc and no instructions other than the bare bones. Not pretty, not the fancy PDFs, none of that. There was none of that and we had almost a hundred percent completion rate.
People got ridiculous results, it was really solid and so I ran the program a few times. I was honing it in, I was iterating. Every time I did it, I was improving it. So then I decided to make the pretty version and have videos where I teach this stuff and have it all on this membership site and completion rates dropped.
And more concerning for me was that people stopped asking questions. And I thought, I know you should be struggling with the material at this point. There are certain points you can't prevent them from struggling at. They still are gonna have a point where it's something they've never done before and it's gonna be either technically hard or mindset hard, but they're gonna struggle at some point and it doesn't matter how great you make material, they're still gonna struggle. So I was like, okay this part of this program you should be struggling with right now, which means you should be asking me questions.
I am here to answer questions because I know the only way you are gonna solve this question is by actually working it out. Talking it out whether it's with me personally or in a group, the only way you're gonna solve this is if you ask me questions. Why are you not asking me questions?
And it turned out, that the reason they weren't asking questions is because the materials seemed too perfect. In the first version, where the materials were imperfect and I was presenting them as imperfect, the clients assumed this material wasn't polished, it's not finished. I can ask questions because it's probably a problem with the material, not with me. But when I had this perfect version and it was all shiny and polished when the clients encountered a problem, they started to say, the problem must be with me. I'm not getting this, I must be doing something wrong, and it almost brought a level of shame in and that, for me, was instructive.
It's not to say you can't have shiny materials, that you can't have things polished, but you still need to show some of that imperfection to be able to even get feedback, to be able to get people to engage, to get them to ask questions.
I’m a jiu-jitsu practitioner, and our instructor always says if you don't understand something, that's my fault, not yours. You're not supposed to be good at this stuff yet, and I think that's the biggest lesson that this energy of imperfection can bring. You're not supposed to be an expert in this. That's why you're here, and so if you're not understanding something, that's my fault, not yours.
Can you highlight a couple of other instances over the years that have influenced your teaching style? And how have these experiences shaped your focus on engaging with students and maintaining an outcome-first mindset?
I was fortunate that I worked in higher education and it wasn't in the university, so I was working in essentially a trade school. How do you teach electricians to be electricians through distance learning? How do you teach a plumber to do plumbing or a welder to do welding if you don't have them physically beside you the whole time? And that experience taught me number one, it's not about what you want to teach, it's about what you want them to learn. And by what we want them to learn we mean, what do we want them to be able to do differently than they could before? So that question has always been in the back of my head.
Going back to that example I gave of the course where it was rough the first time and really polished the second time, in addition to polishing the materials in the new version, I did a bunch of videos. It was all the rage about ten years ago. I spent a lot of time creating these videos and explaining things and here's the thing, I knew as I was recording those videos that I didn't need them.
The completion rate was down, people weren't asking questions at the places they should have been asking questions, and nobody watched the videos. Stop thinking about teaching as something that you do and start thinking about teaching as giving your audience, your students, your clients, your whomever, time to do work.
Every time I have worked with someone to help them the number one thing that I always say is ‘You're talking too much’. Teaching isn't about what you can tell someone, it's about what they understand. The way we come to understand things is not by hearing it, it's by experiencing it.
Teaching isn't about what you can tell someone, it's about what they understand. The way we come to understand things is not by hearing it, it's by experiencing it.
This dramatically informed the way that we run our larger events. The question, as we were creating the outline, creating the scripts, and creating the run of the show, was, how little can we teach them and how much time can we give them to do the work? Putting on my research nerd hat for a moment, there is actually a lot of research out there in a whole bunch of different fields that says people will learn better if you get them to do the activity first, without any explanation. Just give them instructions and tell them what to do. Don't tell them why it's important. Don't tell them what they're doing. Just get them to do the thing and then after explain what it was that you had them do and why it worked. It makes people uncomfortable, which is good if you're in an event setting and you need to wake people up. Maybe you're the last speaker before lunch and you need something to shake people out of their comfort zone.
One of the best ways to do that is to make them just slightly uncomfortable by getting them to do something without telling them why. Then, afterward, tell them why. And because of how we learn, we learn experientially. Then we can add on and this is why this happened. This is why this worked. This is what you did.
When you do this, you can solidify the learning in a much more powerful way. If you have a 30-minute training block, you can spend 15, to 20 minutes of that doing nothing other than asking them questions and getting them to reflect. If it's on Zoom, ask them to share, ask them to do work. It's not that you just go silent for 20 minutes, but it's 20 minutes of them putting in the effort, them doing the work, and then you can tie it back together and say, what did you notice? Because they'll come up with amazing reflections and learnings on their own. And then here's what I noticed as the expert. Here's what this tells us.
Let's dive into the virtual events, specifically your annual strategic planning retreats. In your program, clients go through regular quarterly planning, but the annual planning is a bit different. When you pitched the idea, what sparked the change, and what outcomes did you hope your clients would get from it?
Well, I didn't want it to be a boring event where we were just gonna sit on Zoom. This was after the pandemic had started and we were all plenty tired of Zoom by that point. Beyond that, one of the things that was important to us is, that my style is very direct and to the point, and when I'm teaching you're gonna be working a lot. By the end of a half day of planning, people's brains were kind of done. So we wanted to do something bigger. We wanted to do something to look at a year, not just at three months, and we knew that it couldn't just be Jill and I designing how this event was gonna be because if people were brain fried after three hours, there's gonna be no hope for any of us at the end of three days.
And so the hint for us was ultimately in the name. It wasn't just annual strategic planning, it was the annual strategic planning retreat. So how can we take it from what we do anyway and put it into a different mental container for the participants?
Not only because we knew we needed more time, but also because when you are a business owner, especially when you have a very small business you are still doing a lot of the work yourself. You are still in the day-to-day of the business a lot. That means you spend your time and energy in a particular mindset. You are in the day-to-day, you are thinking about how things happen and what needs to happen. Strategy doesn't operate at that level.
Strategy has to inhabit a different brain space. It has to have an energy of expansion, it has to have an energy of spaciousness. You can't rush these ideas, so we needed to have a different container so that we could create space for these people to move and transition out of their day-to-day, and inhabit a more visionary strategic place. And then we also had to take care to bring them back to the day-to-day, kind of like when you go on a vacation. I remember going camping one year, and it always would take me two or three days before I could relax and be okay. So, when I think about creating a sense of space and place, that was what was important for me. I wanted our clients to feel like they were going on retreat, but we couldn't go on retreat. So, how do we create that in a virtual setting, with all that goes with it, including the transition in the experience while you're there and the transition back to reality?
During our brainstorming and strategy sessions with you and Jill, we decided to elevate the virtual event by creating a tangible, physical component. The goal was for everyone to share a unique moment, so we put together this cool kit – notebooks, colored pencils, and a bunch of other things. How did you weave this into the program and curriculum development?
We talked about before how we don't learn by just having information coming to us. We learn through experience and so, even just from that perspective, being able to look at the experience we wanted to create and then apply that to the actual sensory experience that would go along with it. That was something that in a live in-person event, we often think about, like the lighting, the music, and the seating, is the seating comfortable? It's a sensory question.
I was looking on Facebook and someone asked, If you could change one thing about most in-person events that you go to, what would it be? And the number one answer was more breaks. The number two answer was better snacks. I thought, huh, that's interesting and it reminds me this is why we put chocolate in the boxes, this is why we put tea in the boxes, not just because we wanted to give something away, but because we knew at two o'clock in the afternoon people were going to need to pick me up and a square of chocolate would do that. And we tapped into all of the senses. So through taste, we did this. Through touch the first year we had a scarf and we used the scarf as a metaphor for leadership and we had a great facilitator who took us through some movement so that we were engaging with something physical and moving our body because that's so important when you're sitting in front of Zoom for hours on end.
We used smell. There were candles with different scents. We obviously had the visual, but not just the visual of being on Zoom. We had the visual of crayons, being able to have some time to draw, to be able to express ideas in different ways, and sound. We had a meditation bell that we would use so that we could create a different space, so we had our quieter reflective spaces. Then we would have certain sessions that were teaching-focused.
We would have sessions that were breakouts, where people were connecting and communicating and each of those had their different feeling and their different purpose and that experience would mean they would learn something different. And so it all ties back into this idea of, if you want people to learn, you need to give them an experience that supports that learning.
If you want people to learn, you need to give them an experience that supports that learning.
Let's wrap up by diving into community building, specifically your experience in nurturing the client community over the years. Share some recent tactical successes in building inclusive, holistic, human-centered communities. Or, the cautionary tale route – what are some common mistakes you've noticed that people should steer clear of?
I think the answer to both of those is going to be the same. I think it's really easy for us to focus on the community as a mass and as an entity and to lose sight of the individuals that make it up. Ultimately, when someone experiences community, they experience it first as an individual. I do not go into a community and experience everyone else's experience. I only have my own experience, and so when we are curating, cultivating, and building community, it is experienced individually.
I think that's important because we can focus on the mass of people, the 300 people in your membership site or the 10 people at this event, but at the end of the day, what is my personal experience going to dictate? What do I feel concerning the other people in this community?
Simple things like being a facilitator and saying, hey, you told me about this and I heard someone else talking about it the other day, you two should connect. Now I've created a situation where I'm not talking to these people separately, but now they're talking to each other, and maybe I'm creating a situation where there's three or four people that should all be coming together. And so, yes, a community can happen on scales large and small, but even within those large experiences, large communities are made up of sub-communities. Subcommunities are made up of individuals, and if you're not attending to the needs of the individual, they will not be able to participate in the community. You have to do both, you can't just do one or the other.