8 ways to use FUN and improve learningresults

How comes we had so many difficulties to learn history, math, geography, ... at school, while we learned all the lyrics of our favorite groups by hart in no time ? Because it was FUN to learn these lyrics.

Too often seminars are an endless bundle of dry data we forget the minute we hear it. Those trainings are a waste of time and hence cost too much.

Spice up a training. Make people laugh (which stimulates the brrain activity), give people a reason to remember what you said (people are more likely to remember good things that happened than bad things; remember when we were young...).

My advise to add FUN to trainings :

1. Don't mix up Fun and Funny : you are not a stand up comedian. People have to learn and you are a learning facilitator. 
2. Know your audience : what is their age, background, interests, history, ... The more you know them the more you can adapt your training. 
3. Use visualization : use appealing images, perhaps cartoons. Definitely don't use endless slides with only data and graphs nobody can read. 
4. Challenge and reward : challenge people to get involved, to answer, to ask, ... Sometimes I take a bag of chocotoffs to my trainings and give away when people get involved. 
5. Use the right speed : go too slow and people fall asleep, go too fast and people are lost. 
6. Tell anecdotes : anecdotes are a good way to make to give people a feeling it really happened to them as well. 
7. Encourage them when they make mistakes : learning is about failing 100 times and the 101th time, you succeed. When you punish people because they fail(or threaten to punish them), they are less likely to try it a second time.
8. Make them dream of a better future : participants in trainings don't like status quo (otherwise they wouldn't go to training). By dreaming of better future, they move forward