Clearly he did have a point. The point of ongoing education is to develop our capabilities and skills. Essentially we work to “become” better. For example we do not train to be better leaders, we develop our strengths to carry us to the next level.
After another day of thought, that legendary trainer’s remark seemed that training is designed to elicit natural habitual reactions, such as training dogs to sit on command. At first glance this seemed to be more of a negative aspect, yet upon further contemplation I changed my views.
If you can train a dog to follow or carry out commands upon natural reaction to a stimulus, maybe there is a positive aspect to that. Maybe that is a reason we do invest in training ourselves. Take sales training for example, we practice and rehearse our presentations so that it seems natural to us. Likewise we study and role-play objections so that we don’t even have to think about how to handle the situation, we just do. Well these objections are the stimuli and training gives us the natural reaction needed to respond automatically to the situation.
In the end, Training is a good thing as is development. We want to develop and further build on our strengths and also train ourselves to ensure top-notch performance and professionalism in our day-to-day functions. Its not a matter of one over the other, instead it is a matter of ensuring we have continue to participate in both training and development.
