This week Tobi is getting real with some stories from her early days of volunteer training and some of the things she wishes she’d known back then. From the days of forgetting an extra lightbulb for the overhead projector to now, Tobi’s sharing her nine biggest early mistakes so you don’t have to make them, too.   Is Training Volunteers Always the Solution?  It’s so easy to see a problem and immediately jump into superhero trainer mode.  Executive leadership may be expecting a training seminar to quickly resolve an issue, or volunteers may not be meeting the expectations of your coworkers. Tobi reminds us to slow down and really assess the issue at hand before jumping into our next training session.   Is volunteer training the correct solution to the problem? Determining the answer to that question should come before anything else.  Training Volunteers Should Focus On...The Volunteers? So often, trainers get into the regular routine of a presentation and focus on covering the information. However, effective training is more than just checking the boxes and hitting the marks. It’s about helping your volunteers actually learn the skills needed to do the job.   We’ve all endured a boring, generic presentation and probably couldn’t recite any information covered in those meetings. There’s an definite art to creating an engaging training presentation, and some much-needed skill in reading the room to accurately assess the unique needs of each audience.   Tobi shares some of the ways she got those things wrong in the early days, and what she’s learned along the way in how to build an extraordinary, entertaining, and effective training curriculum.  Always Keep Learning Mistakes happen, and sometimes your volunteer training isn’t everything you wanted it to be. You wonder if people were interested, or if they got anything of value out of your stumbling words.   Find encouragement in this podcast! If you keep learning, you will continue to improve your knowledge and training skills, and you keep getting better.   Like Tobi, you’ll look back at your own Hall of Shame of early mistakes and share them (with a cringe and some laughter) to help others along the way.