Where challenging behaviour comes from
The day's last block was the one every new trainer secretly wants first: what to do when the room misbehaves. Martin's frame drained the drama out of it immediately — challenging behaviour is a signal, not a personal attack, and its motivation traces to one of three sources. Reasons related to the participant: some people are argumentative by nature, and they arrived that way. Reasons related to the content: material pitched too easy or too hard — which is sometimes your course description's fault and sometimes means they simply booked the wrong course, "and sometimes you cannot do anything about that." And reasons related to the facilitator: your competence, your delivery style, or simple chemistry. That third category came with the week's best dose of professional realism. "Not everybody will like you. Believe me — not every participant likes me either. What to do? You just get a thicker skin." Training providers who advertise a 5.0-star rating are, in his blunt assessment, fake — "it's impossible" — because no trainer clears every room. His own proof story: a rating of one-one-one-one that once sent a training manager into crisis, until they phoned the participant and discovered she had read the scale backwards — she thought one was the best. And the career arc he offered as calibration: his own scores started around 4.0 when he was new and sit at 4.5 to 4.8 after years of practice. The number that matters is not the score; it is the critical comments underneath it, "what we can do better." A trainer's rating is a trend to work, not a verdict to fear.
The cast, in order of difficulty
Then the field guide, six characters, each with a face from Martin's career attached. Movie stars like attention — his friend Harry "needs to be a little bit in the spotlight, that's why he asks a lot of questions." The response is generosity: give them a little room, as long as your nerves survive, because the need is real and mostly harmless — they just want to be seen. Side-conversationalists get escalating tools: first the polite "can I have your attention please" — and then the sound every culture apparently shares, the teacher's tsss, which he demonstrated and which landed on the room like a spell. "Who did this to you? Your teacher. Your mom." People go quiet for the sound their childhood trained them on. Deserters — reluctant to speak, pulled out, disengaged — get his most compassionate reading: "they might have personal or company problems. Someone died in the family, a brother in hospital. These are the common cases." The silent note-taker is not a deserter; yesterday's rule stands — if they're writing, relax. The genuinely withdrawn get re-energising, simple direct questions, real-life examples — and if the withdrawal extends to isolation outside the session, a private, human check-in. Comedians he defends outright: "we always need some good comedians in the class — they make the class joyful." Boundaries only when the jokes start costing other people's learning. Blockers, attackers and dominators are the hard three. Attackers toss barbs at the trainer, the content, or other participants — the response is a calm, factual surface in public, and a side conversation in private, "because it's getting into your nerves." Dominators consume the room's time — his friend Terry again, beloved and unstoppable — and the technique is gratitude with a redirect: "thank you very much for your question — can we let some other people also talk?" Delivered warmly, it works on anyone with normal social sense.
How blockers are manufactured
Blockers — negative, cynical, certain nothing will work — got the block's most valuable insight, because Martin traced where they come from: sometimes, the trainer manufactures them. The scenario: an in-house training with a manager, an assistant manager and an engineer at the same table. You direct a question at the manager. The manager cannot answer — in front of their own subordinates. "What do they lose? Face. And this person automatically becomes your blocker." Nothing wrong with the person; a perfectly human response to a public loss of position, and entirely the trainer's own doing. The prevention is a design rule for in-house audiences: keep the hierarchy gap in one room to two levels at most — C-suite and their direct reports, or managers and their assistants, but never manager-assistant-engineer in one class, because three levels means someone senior can be exposed in front of someone junior. It is a course-design decision, made before anyone misbehaves, which is what makes it my favourite kind of insight: the best behaviour management happens at the audience-composition stage, weeks before the training room exists. Day 2's understanding-participants post asked who is in the room; today added why the org-chart distance between them is a safety parameter.
Case Study
casting my own classroom
I ran the field guide over the DJC AI course and recognised everyone. My movie star is the participant who has already used ChatGPT extensively and wants the room to know it — I have been treating his interjections as interruptions, when the manual says give him a role: he becomes the designated live-demo volunteer, spotlight granted, energy converted. My comedians I have always enjoyed, so that page was already right. My deserters are the mid-career staff sent by their bosses, phones out by mid-morning — and today's diagnosis fits: the content feels either beneath them or beyond them, which is a reasons-related-to-content problem, fixed by the challenging-but-attainable ladder from the engagement slide, not by resenting the participants. My blockers, though — today rewrote their origin story. The corporate classes always contain one: arms folded, "AI will never work with our data," negativity radiating to the whole table. I had filed them as personalities. But my corporate bookings routinely put a department head, their managers and their executives in one room — three levels, sometimes four — and then I open with a round of questions, distributed generously, straight at people who may not know the answers in front of their own staff. I have been manufacturing blockers with the exact mechanism Martin described. Two changes, effective immediately: the pre-course call now asks for the hierarchy span, with two levels as the recommendation — and where the client insists on mixing, my opening questions go to volunteers only, with the senior people given advance warning of anything I will ask them directly. Losing face is a risk parameter I can design out, and the response to the blockers I still get follows the poster: listen, validate, facts — and involve them in problem-solving, because "AI will never work with our data" is, taken literally, a genuinely useful data-governance question wearing a scowl. And the thicker-skin doctrine goes up on my own wall. My course feedback runs one embarrassing rating per cohort, and I have brooded over every single one. Today's calibration: a spread is normal, a perfect score is fake, and the useful part of the form was never the number — it is the critical comment underneath, which is free consulting from the one participant annoyed enough to write it down.
Reflections
Day 3 ended "a bit late already, sorry for that" — on the sentence every service business eventually earns: not everyone will like you, and the job is to be excellent anyway. Guests leave unfair reviews; participants rate a good session one-one-one because they read the scale backwards; someone in every room is having the worst week of their year and it will look like disengagement. The six characters are not enemies of the session. They are the session, arriving as people. What ties the whole day together — presentation, facilitation, questions, memory, behaviour — is that every block replaced a fear with a procedure. Nerves got a scripted opening. Silence got a second signal to read. Hard questions got LACAV and a parking lot. Forgetting got five levers. And the difficult participant got a field guide and a design rule. Tomorrow is the last day of content before Friday's assessment, and the fifteen minutes I was dreading on Monday now looks like the most thoroughly proceduralised quarter-hour of my year. Which, I suspect, was the desire-to-learn ladder working on me all along.