Trainer Tools

In this podcast John talks to Sunita Sehmi about how Learning and Development professionals can approach inclusion in our work, and how we can move from talking about words like "diversity" and "inclusion" to thinking about "belonging"

Sunita Sehmi is a Certified Executive Coach, Consultant, Speaker and Trainer. She is of Indian origin and was born in London before moving to Geneva in 1992. She has a Psychology degree, specializing in Occupational and Developmental Psychology and a Post Graduate certification in the Development and Training of Adults from the UK. She also has a Masters in Human Resources, Coaching and Career Management from HEC University of Geneva. Where she wrote her Master Thesis “How does proficiency in English affect French-native professionals at work?” A qualitative research conducted in the French-speaking part of Switzerland.

She is the founder of Walk The Talk, which provides tailor-made professional coaching consultancy and training.

Her business background includes working with International companies in banking, finance, media, pharmaceuticals, and FMCG industries. Sunita’s coaching style advances the skills and approaches needed to develop performance. Her forte is the fact that she has studied and worked in several different countries and thus her understanding and knowledge of language communication and culture is compact and solid.

During her twenty-five years of international experience, Sunita’s objective has always been to support people to uncover and utilise their potential and to help individuals and organizations to perform at their very best.

Sunita is an accomplished speaker and business writer furthermore she has had several articles published articles in the press.

She has written two books:

The Power of Belonging

How to Get Out of Your Own Way

In this episode John Tomlinson talks to Lydia Hooper of Venngage about how to make great visuals for use in education and training, or more generally to communicate complex information in an engaging and effective way.

Examples used during the discussion:

• Visuals about diversity, equity, and inclusion: https://venngage.com/blog/designing-for-diversity/

Other articles by Lydia on Venngage: https://venngage.com/blog/author/lydia-hooper

Lydia Hooper is the information design expert at Venngage, the simple and powerful design solution for making infographics for business. She has designed and facilitated workshops for dozens of organizations including the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Association for Talent Development and the American Institute of Graphic Arts-Colorado. Her writing has been published by numerous publications including Training Journal and SAGE Publishing’s MethodSpace, and she is the co-author and editor of the forthcoming Authoritative Guide to Designing Infographics. You can follow Lydia on LinkedIn.

In this episode John Tomlinson talks to Matt Somers about his five dos and five don'ts when training managers on using a coaching style of management.

Matt Somers is a coach, trainer and author. He helps managers get good at coaching and with the areas people most want coaching on: Sales, Leadership and Communication.

He has been in the training and development business for most of his career, focusing on the idea of the Leader as a Coach since 1995. His training programmes, books, articles and seminars have helped hundreds of leaders achieve outstanding results through their people and teams.

He has an MSc in Human Resource Development and is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).

Working internationally, he has helped multiple high-performance organisations, including HSBC, Citigroup, Scottish & Southern Energy and Sage PLC.

To get in touch or find out more, please drop an email to [email protected] or connect on LinkedIn.

Most leaders are not succeeding in their roles as leaders, sometimes because they're in the wrong job, and sometimes because they're not self-aware enough and so cannot manage their behaviours to improve their effectiveness.

In this episode, John talks to Nancy Parsons about the work she does in coaching leaders and running leadership development programmes, and how her company has developed a suite a tools to really dig deep on self-awareness.

Nancy E. Parsons is the President and CEO of CDR Companies.

She is one of today’s foremost experts in combining the science of assessments with the art of developing people. As CEO and President of CDR Companies, LLC, she and her team shed new light on personality strengths, inherent risks and motivation and change performance, careers and lives. Esteemed author of two research based books including the Amazon best-seller, Women Are Creating the Glass Ceiling and Have the Power to End It, Nancy is the 2019 MEECO International Thought Leader of Distinction in Executive Coaching and continues to break barriers in her field. 

In 1998, Nancy and Kimberly R. Leveridge, Ph.D, authored the break-through CDR 3-Dimensional Assessment Suite®, an ideal coaching tool for global clients. The CDR 3-D Suite measures character traits, inherent risk factors for derailment, and drivers and reward needs. Combining this scientifically-validated assessment suite with cutting-edge technology, Nancy and her team launched CDR-U Coach in July of 2020. This product is the first of its kind that provides a scalable, personalized, online coaching feedback solution based on the results of the most in-depth assessments available on the market today. Because of the rich data source, predictive results, and complex algorithms, CDR-U Coach provides an A/I type experience for users with no two users having the same feedback.

Nancy works with global leaders to accelerate success by helping them identify and develop their true talent at the launching point of a coaching engagement. She provides executive coaching services for the C-Suite and leaders across all sectors, facilitates strategic executive team development sessions, and instructs custom “Authentic Leadership” and “Women in Leadership” workshops. Additionally, she instructs and leads CDR Executive Coaches’ Certification Workshops and teaches advanced coaches’ programs. She has authored countless articles and blog posts on topics ranging from diversity and inclusion in the workplace to employee retention and has presented at international, national, and regional industry conferences.

In 2016, Nancy developed the architecture of “Vets Coaching Vets,” which is a philanthropic initiative helping to accelerate veterans’ success in the job market. CDR Companies has worked with more than 5 veterans’ organizations and has provided assessments, individual coaching, and training workshops for over 50 veterans. CDR Companies, LLC is certified as a Women’s Business Enterprise by the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC), the nation’s largest third-party certifier of businesses owned and operated by women.

Instagram: @cdrugroup

In this episode of the Trainer Tools podcast, John Tomlinson talks to Nikie Forster about how we can use LEGO in Learning and Development.

Nikie Forster was convinced she was going to be a Radio One presenter from an early age, so took a less than conventional route into the world of Learning & Development. This has given her a wide range of experiences that enables her to see learning in every interaction.  Two decades later, having backed up these experiences with a plethora of professional qualifications, she is now Director and Founder of Curious Lighthouse Learning Consultancy, where she specialises in enabling Curious, Creative, and Credible training solutions for Managers, Trainers, and Entrepreneurs to enhance their performance, whether they are at the very start of their journey or experienced professionals. She often uses LEGO in her learning solutions and has created several online courses to help others do the same.  

​​​​​​​​​​Curious Lighthouse is based in Hampshire and mainly serves the south coast and worldwide virtually.

Link to the main page for Nikie's Lego courses, including a freebie: ‘Introducing your Learners To LEGO’ 14-page free guide

Link to the open-source Lego Serious Play guide (PDF download)

Universities and colleges like MIT are fantastic at the theory, and great at technical training, but they have traditionally been less strong on teaching their students the practical skills needed to succeed in the workplace. Mark Herschberg works with MIT as a mentor-instructor, his role is to work with students to plug this gap, teaching them essential professional skills and lessons in management and leadership. He has captured 20 years of his learning into his book, The Career Toolkit (see link below).

In this podcast he talks to John about the methods they use at MIT for leadership development and other practical workplace skills, and, as a special bonus, we add the terms "firm skills" and "Schrödinger's opinion" to our vocabulary!

Mark Herschberg is the author of The Career Toolkit, Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You. From tracking criminals and terrorists on the dark web to creating marketplaces and new authentication systems, Mark has spent his career launching and developing new ventures at startups and Fortune 500s and in academia. He helped to start the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program, dubbed MIT’s “career success accelerator,” where he teaches annually.

At MIT, he received a B.S. in Physics, a B.S. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, and a M.Eng. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, focusing on cryptography.

At Harvard Business School, Mark helped create a platform used to teach finance at prominent business schools. He also works with many non-profits, including Techie Youth and Plant A Million Corals.

So often L&D is about righting wrongs and filling gaps in our knowledge or skills, and OK ... yes, this has a place for specific learning needs, but when thinking more deeply about personal development, positive psychology gives us an engaging way to focus on the good stuff and build on strengths and opportunities, and not just fixing the crap stuff.

In this episode, John talks to Alex Bailey about how we can use positive psychology in L&D, and especially for social learning where the focus is on learning and sharing, and not on knowledge-transfer by a know-all trainer.

Alex Bailey is CEO and founder of Bailey & French, a purpose led global consulting company that is focused on humanising the World of Work.

Alex is pioneering a new paradigm in psychology strengthening what’s already uniquely brilliant about individuals and teams in all types of organisations.

Her work over the past 20+ years is focused on large scale cultural evolution that combines the latest evidence based research with innovative approaches to help people, teams and organisations grow. 

Over the past seven years Alex has led her company to successfully expand reach and scope across the world in all industries, sectors and markets bringing her ambitious vision to life.

See here for Bailey and French on Twitter, and here for Alex's profile on LinkedIn.

John Tomlinson talks to Shirley Gaston about how we can make our online learning sessions more experiential and engaging - feels like an important intervention given the amount of PowerPointy crap there is out there!

Some links mentioned in the podcast: article on online games can be downloaded free at https://www.azesta.co.uk/resources

Shirley Gaston is the founder of  the experiential learning company Azesta which has been developing people for 21 years. As such, she is one of the driving forces within the company.

She values openness and this quality is intrinsic to her award-winning learning programmes. It is important to her to be really approachable and, although professional, her overt friendliness is part of her style.

Shirley’s passion for learning through experience has led to her working in learning and development for her entire career and also representing experiential tool maker Metalog and virtual exercise creator Gaminar in the UK.

She has a first class degree in Education, a Post Graduate Certificate and Diploma in Professional Training and Development, she is a qualified coach and holds numerous psychometric qualifications.

She is an absolute CPD addict and attends facilitator development programmes on an almost weekly basis as well as running the non-profit Yorkshire Trainers Development Network. Working directly with her own clients, she specialises in leadership and management, engagement, team development and coaching skills. Working with trainers, she shares her passion for programmes that fully involve the learner and incorporate active and creative review and the most possible variety. She has had several articles published particularly in the field of experiential learning and outdoor management development and is currently working on her first book on the subject.

Shirley lives in Yorkshire with her partner, four children, a dog and three cats. She enjoys a range of outdoor activities, theatre, book groups and is also a Humanist wedding celebrant. 

In this episode John talks to stand-up comedian Sam Carrington about how organisations can use stand-up comedy for staff wellbeing, leadership development and running fun and engaging away days - we talk mainly in the context of remote working where issues of wellbeing, mental health and motivation are especially pertinent.

Sam Carrington is a working stand-up comedian who has done over a thousand gigs, including three stints at the world famous Edinburgh Festival. He also runs Smirk Experience, a company that runs corporate training events about how to use the skills and techniques of comedy to improve your confidence, communication and leadership ... in their words, they "harness the power of comedy to transform people and businesses"

John Tomlinson speaks to Jeff Wald about the future of work, what knowledge and skills workers will need in the future, and why he put up $10 million dollars for a prize!

Jeff Wald is the Founder of Work Market, an enterprise software platform that enables

Jeff began his career in finance, serving as Managing Director at activist hedge fund Barington Capital Group, a Vice President at venture capital firm GlenRock and various roles in the M&A Group at JP Morgan.

Jeff is an active angel investor and startup advisor, as well as serving on numerous public and private Boards of Directors. He also formerly served as an officer in the Auxiliary Unit of the New York Police Department.

Jeff is the author of The Birthday Rules and The End of Jobs: The Rise of On-Demand Workers and Agile Corporations.

Jeff frequently speaks at conferences and in media on startups and labor issues.

Jeff holds an MBA from Harvard University and an MS and BS from Cornell University.