Last Sunday night was a new webinar session of the « MKMMA Certified Guides » training, for the September coming MKMMA six month course.

It was about how to handle, as a Guide, the input material of the members from their first week, so that they receive outstanding and above expectation support.

I was a member of the MKMMA training two years ago, and I was a certified guide last year.

When I discovered the topic of this Sunday night training session, my first thought was « ok, I know that. »

Now, everybody knows that this thought « ok, I know that » is a learning trap, literally a sentence of death for his/her own progress, because it automatically closes the mind to listen to anything which follows, even if « life critical» information are dispatched !

So as my subconscious mind had already switched on the red light and the warning horn since several minutes, shaking me like a plum tree to get my attention back on the screen and speakers of my PC, I discovered that Dayna, the MKMMA staff Chief Organizer, was asking us to make a « real time » exercise by sending her a simulated member information from a specific software tool.

Actually, the goal was to check that we, as guides, had a correct knowledge of that tool.

During the last MKMMA session, which ended last March, I had repeated more than 100 times the same 10 seconds operation that Dayna was asking us to execute here.

When I heard Dayna giving us 5 minutes to do the job, I thought « easy-peasy, let’s do it quickly then enjoy my favorite drink on the terrass… (temperature was better there than in my office) »

But you will not know for this time what my favorite drink is, because I needed the full five minutes to (1) correctly remember what I was supposed to do, (2) get the software tool ready to use on my PC, (3) make the operation required…

And at this last step, I was stunned to realize that I could not remember the sequence of actions that I had repeated so many times during nearly 6 months until last March !

Finally, my lesson from this training session was double : (1) preparation before action is mandatory for best performance, and (2) 100 repetitions of a basic action are not enough to remember it after several months of inaction…

Repeating over and over again the essential things that we « already know » (the « fundamentals ») is vital to avoid the learning trap and to create the right habits.

That’s what MKMMA is all about.