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I have been a volunteer firefighter for nearly ten years now. In my tenure, I have had to endure a lot of training. We are trained to do everything from driving and pumping the fire trucks, to breaking into locked structures, to cutting the roof of cars off for extricating victims. There are lots of things that make a training good or bad, interesting, or mind numbingly boring.

The initial training we have to go through as firefighters is to obtain the title of firefighter 1. As a firefighter 1 we can go to motor vehicle accidents, help on medical calls, and work structure fires. There is a massive amount of training in order to become firefighter 1, some of the worst training of my life. Don’t get me wrong, it was very important, however, painstakingly boring in some parts. Death by PowerPoint is saying it lightly. We had an instructor that had a monotone that droned on in a small warm poorly lit room. Coffee was not enough to keep you awake while trying to pay attention to the content being displayed.

I have had a lot of good training in the fire service as well. The best training I have been a part of was for our instructor 1 class. All of the students were asked to do the reading ahead of time and were asked to pick a topic to teach the class. None of the other students knew what the other were teaching which made it interesting. The second presenter took the topic that I was supposed to be presenting. This was an issue for me as we were supposed to come up with unique topic ideas. This threw me into a mild panic as I had my entire speech planned already. Coming up with a topic on the fly, I was nervous and choppy in front of the audience, the “after action review” reflected this. At the end, I explained what had happened and was met with an unexpected retort to said explanation.

When getting in front of people to talk or teach, expect for things to go wrong. Whether it is the subject or the technology, something could go wrong and you have to be able to get past it to deliver the message. A good instructor can make a teaching moment out of the worst situation. This was the most valid and reliable training that I have been a part of because it taught me something that sticks with me in most of the things that I do. No matter what you are trying to do, something might go wrong. You just have to adjust your thinking or delivery to get the result you wanted. There is always a way to get it done.