Not all training is created equal. When I hear that "I've tried training my co-workers, but nothing seems to help!" My first question is, "Can I see what your training looks like?"

A quick look at a slide deck, and it's easy to see why training isn't going so well. Most slide decks include information meant for awareness, not training. After spending four hours in a classroom, your co-workers are aware they use Salesforce. They are aware of Global Search and objects. And they are aware that they are supposed to use Salesforce to do their job.

But your co-workers leave training without a clear idea of what their job is, where to do their job, or how to do their job. 

Some of you are naturals in front of a crowd - you know how to roll with surprises and modify how you communicate depending on the audience. But for those of us who aren't as experienced, the tiniest bit of friction or confusion makes us feel like we're failing, and we immediately begin to panic. 

But we don't need to panic. What usually causes us to second-guess ourselves is actually a natural part of teaching and learning. Here are four common moments that are scary and awkward when you're the prestenter, but shouldn't be.

Everyone wants to be a "training superstar," but too often trainers look out and see blank stares, confused looks and twisted eyebrows. This can be really demoralizing especially when you have worked so hard to prepare a great event.

Whenever we have a live training event we want to evaluate how well we did. I have been to a lot of trainings and have seen many ways that people try to evaluate.

I admit it - I have run my fair share of terrible, boring, ineffective training sessions that made my co-workers cringe.

When I was fresh out of college, one of my responsibilities at my new job was to get new-hires up to speed when they began working on my project. I typically followed these 10 guidelines:

Whether or not you are a Queen fan you are probably familiar with at least several of their songs. I'm going to talk about two of them:

• Bohemian Rhapsody
• We Are The Champions

You are probably familiar with these songs because you have heard them hundreds of times. You
may be able to sing them word for word. But the songs are very different.

The change to Lighting in Salesforce is exciting but it is going to require many organizations to provide new training to their Salesforce users. Salesforce has released a PowerPoint deck that you can use to help prepare your own internal training.

Update: You can also get the Enabledment Pack from Salesforce here (http://sforce.co/1EpM1ex) which will give you a different slide deck aimed at giving your team an overview of what is new in Lightning and how those changes will impact your company's use of Salesforce.

In this post, I am going to give you some tips on how to modify this deck to meet your internal needs.

Congrats! Your live training went really well. Everybody was laughing, users were engaged, and your feedback was great - "Best live training I've been to in a long time!"

So... now what?

We've talked before about how our brains struggle to remember more than three to five things - we just aren't very good at remembering more than that. But our brains are very good at chunking information.

Chunking information is the process where we break up large amounts of information into manageable chunks. It's almost like putting things into folders.

Let's look at how this works with phone numbers in the United States. I live in Northern Virginia just outside of Washington DC. There are basically three area codes that I usually run into: 703, 571 (which are both in Northern Virginia), and 202 which is Washington, DC.

While discussing best-practices for end-user training with Mike Gerholdt, Salesforce Admin Evangelist, he brought up a great point.

If you only focus on the technology, users will feel disconnected from the process. 

The business process informs the technology and the technology supports the process.

Sometimes, we focus too much on "teaching the technology" and not enough time explaining the process so that the technology -- and the inputs needed -- feel natural.

We couldn’t agree more; however, this brings up a new kind of challenge - what is the best way to teach a business process to end-users? A process map will scare most away, and paragraphs in PowerPoint put everybody to sleep.