Training is what is shared with the learner. Learning is when they choose to do something with it.

Learning happens when you force your mind to start asking such questions to ourselves. A process that awakens our innate and unique endowment as human beings – the ability to think!

There are always three components to a training process – the why, what and how. While the ‘what’ remains relatively obvious around specific models, process, theories etc., it is in the why and how that see most of the action.

Training managers have been faced with the challenge of getting learners into the classroom and then making them stay there. All sorts of approaches have been tried including keeping the venue at exotic locations, taking the classroom outdoors, making it more experiential, adding more elements that satisfy auditory, kinesthetic, feeling, thinking and observing needs of participants. Then came in the digital wave – making training personalized, available on demand, on one’s device, adding gamification and multimedia, creating learning communities and discussion forums. It is another thing that learning is for their own benefit and hence that is a reason enough for one to be engaged, hooked or participating.

Given that all of us as human beings are at different stages of the evolutionary process with differing motivations and pace for learning, can you really teach a person anything even with all the effort that goes into making learning fun and engaging today? It is always said that someone who really wants to learn will learn come what may, given that the why is so strong for that person. Learning is something that one does to one’s mind, and hence primarily an inside out process rather than outside in.

So, how does all the noise that is created today around making learning fun, engaging and worthwhile make sense in light of the above?

Here’s an example portrayed by a senior trainer from the industry. Being from the Indian IT hub of Bangalore, he frequently trains and consults with clients in the city whose offices are located in numerous IT parks spread across the city. During lunch hours, he is in the habit of sitting and observing the multitude of software engineers and young professionals of today who keep moving across such facilities. How do these people look? His answer is equally interesting, albeit funny. They look like a wet potato wafer! Yes, more than 90 percent of the people look like a wet potato wafer. Why? Because they are moving around aimlessly, without a clear purpose and motive. They are living their lives earning their livelihoods by doing work that doesn’t bring much meaning to their lives. If such is the state of mind of these young people, how motivated would they be to put in extra effort? And hence, how motivated would they be to put in the effort to learn and also be pushed by this external effort to answer the why for them?

Unless you understand what brings meaning to your life by looking deep within and then connecting what is outside with what’s inside, just by heaping things on people from outside may not achieve anything for anyone.

How do you do it? When the student is ready, the master appears. The master in this statement is not a person or being but the learning itself. One can perhaps only create an environment hoping for that awakening to happen inside of a person. When exactly and how it will happen depends entirely on the individual and these may differ immensely from one person to the next.

So, what should trainers, training managers and even leaders do? Provide enough opportunities and create the right environments for the experiences to happen. We may make the learner walk over the fire, but did they learn from that experience? Let’s leave the learning to the learner! Else, we may end up burning our feet once too often by expecting and forcing things to happen when it’s not their time.

Rahul Agarwal is the senior consultant of learning strategy at G-Cube.