If you lead the room, learn to own the room.

I hate being held hostage in learning sessions - I imagine you do too.

One of the worst parts of training sessions for me is going to ones where the person leading the room does not in fact, have the skills to lead the room.

They are a subject matter expert, or a trainer who is relying too much on content knowledge rather than the actual skills needed to command, engage, and lead a room.

The result is that those of us in attendance are held hostage, wasting time. At this point, everyone is just looking at the clock.

A parallel from the field of product development is having a product with world-class engineering, but no user experience. Training is the same.

I see it over the course of my career in the evaluations people provide:

- "The trainer was boring."

- "Different trainer please."

- "The trainer mostly talked about themselves."

And those were the polite ones.

So, to develop your ability to lead the room, develop the skills. Here is what I recommend:

- Take improv courses

- Take public speaking courses

- Train as much as possible and do a post-session reflection of yourself

- Check your evaluations

- Study Crowd work comedy

- Attend other trainers' training sessions to learn from the good and bad