Every time we go to a seminar we get all jacked up.

We do the written exercises, the role playing, participate in the discussions and watch the training videos.

We write down our goals and we write down what it is that we want to get out of the seminar, or training, or workshop.

Lots of companies send their people to these things and lots of employers search for seminars that will make the team better. When we go to these events, we come away excited about what we have learned and what we are going to do with it.

But then something happens.

All the stuff we did, all the stuff we wrote, all the videos we watched—somehow none of it makes its way to our desks on Monday when we return to work. Gravity just sucks the seminar out of our mind and we fall back into the reality of doing the job at work.

Part of the problem can stem from the setting at work. Maybe things are too restrictive for you to really be able to implement all these creative things you’ve learned. Maybe you’ll look kinda square if you are too new and fresh wearing your new seminar look.  Maybe, since you’ve been gone for two days attending the seminar, there’s too much crap piled up on your desk for you to do anything but manage the disaster. Whatever the reason here is a fact—the great majority of what you learn at a seminar stays there.  You may find a few new tricks of the trade that make it back to work but most of the stuff stays at the Holiday Inn.

Seminars are great.  Seminars are interactive.  Seminars sometimes allow you to discourse with people you work with and don’t know, or have argued with, or thought was a jerk, or that thought you were a jerk and you got a chance to get warm and fuzzy with them.

If you learn something at a seminar you should take it to work.  All of it, or at least most of it.  Not just one or two things.  Michael Hyatt or Tony Robbins are not going to follow you to work.  YOU have to do it.

My name is Paul Karem. If you bug around on my website, or take one of my workshops, I’ll show you how to take it with you when you leave.