You’ve seen it happen: participants nodding off, checking their phones, or leaving a training session and forgetting everything they learned as soon as they left the room.

There’s no worse feeling as a trainer. You feel defeated, start second guessing your expertise, and feel like you just wasted your time and theirs. 

Before you blame short attention spans and just accept your fate as a trainer, here’s what I’ve learned from 20+ years of experience: 

Most trainers were never taught how to design and deliver sessions that actually stick. Instead, we rely on what’s comfortable: boring, lecture-style “information dumps.”

The result?
→ Trainings that fail to engage and make an impact
→ Organizations wasting time, money, and energy on repeated trainings
→ Participants who don’t retain what they learn
→ Leadership development that stalls

For over two decades, I’ve worked with professionals across higher education, nonprofits, local government, athletics, and corporate settings to transform how trainings are designed and delivered.

You deserve to learn the skills to perform unforgettable trainings where participants leave excited, inspired, and ready to take action. 

I founded Leadership Trainer to equip educators, facilitators, and leaders with the tools, tactics, and frameworks to consistently deliver trainings that are high-impact, high-engagement, and yes, actually enjoyable.

Through our Master Trainer Certification Program, we provide our signature Training Story methodology, a proven, plug-and-play framework that helps trainers:

🎯 Confidently design and lead trainings that people actually want to attend
🎯 Keep participants engaged and actually enjoying the learning experience
🎯 Assist participants in directly and immediately applying learning to practice
🎯 Strengthen organizational culture by building leaders (not just running meetings)
🎯 Earn recognition and career advancement through Certified Master Trainer credentials

My approach is rooted in practical application, equity, and transformational learning, so trainers leave confident, capable, and ready to make a real difference. 

At Leadership Trainer, we don’t just train trainers. We empower educators, facilitators, and leaders to create transformational learning experiences that ripple out into organizations, communities, and beyond.

If you’re ready to turn forgettable trainings into experiences that excite, challenge, and empower your participants, it’s time to take the next step. 

Let’s connect and start transforming your trainings today.

🌐 leadershiptrainer.org

Are you seeking a nonprofit Board opportunity? Consider Leadership Trainer!

Leadership Trainer is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that envisions a world where every trainer consistently designs and facilitates high-impact training experiences. Our proven approach to trainer preparation results in strengthened capacity-building, the direct and immediate application of learning to practice, and increased impact.

We are seeking new Board Directors who are passionate about equipping the next generation of trainers and facilitators with the knowledge, skills, and dynamism to effectively develop the skills and capacities of others. Specifically, we are recruiting people who have a depth of experience in:
 ⭐ Corporate Learning & Development
 ⭐ Executive-Level Organizational Leadership
 ⭐ Fundraising & Development
 ⭐ Business Development

New Leadership Trainer Board Directors will serve a three-year term beginning in April 2026. Our Board Directors are expected to contribute 4 - 6 hours per month through committee work, Board Huddles (bi-monthly meetings), and projects that align your interests with our strategic priorities. This is an exciting time for Leadership Trainer as we are embarking on a new Strategic Plan.

If you believe you would be an exceptional Board Director and can contribute to our growth, please DM me to receive our Board Director expectations document and to schedule an informational interview and conversation.

Jonathan Kroll

I am an entrepreneurial and accomplished leadership educator, award-winning author of Preparing Leadership Educators, and internationally-recognized master trainer. I'm dedicated to transforming the leadership landscape by preparing the next generations of trainers to effectively facilitate high-impact, high-engagement, and high-enjoyment trainings, consistently. I envision a world without boring, lecture-style, yawn-filled slide deck trainings.

Leadership Trainer

Certified Master Trainer 🎯 20+ Years of Helping Trainers Transform Forgettable Sessions into High-Engagement, High-Impact Learning Experiences | Award-Winning Author ‘Preparing Leadership Educators’

Earlier this month, I found myself back in the kind of room that reminds me why I do this work.

I was facilitating a workshop with SUEÑOS, and for two hours we focused on something deceptively simple: healthy communication for stronger teamwork.

Not theory.
Not talking about communication.
Actually experiencing it.

We used hands-on activities to surface communication habits and patterns that show up under pressure, what gets avoided, and what quietly breaks down over time. 

Then we paused to discuss what those patterns mean for how people work together and how they serve their communities.

What stood out wasn’t just the engagement in the room.

It was the care.
Care for one another.
Care for the children and families they serve.
Care for getting this right, because the stakes are real.

Moments like this take me back to the early years of my work, long before Leadership Trainer existed, when I was facilitating trainings in community-based settings and seeing firsthand how the quality of a training experience directly shapes the quality of what happens next.

That’s where my “why” comes from.

I’ve seen what happens when trainers are prepared to design experiences that are relevant, immersive, and grounded in application. And I’ve seen what happens when they’re not.

This workshop was a reminder that training is never just about skills.

It’s about people.

And when people are supported to reflect, practice, and learn together, the impact ripples far beyond the room.

This is the work I’ll always come back to.

If you want to design trainings that move beyond content and actually change how people work together, this is exactly what we teach in The Master Trainer Certification Program. DM me to learn more.

Come JAM with me!

Starting this week, I'm facilitating JAM SESSIONS: 1-hour free virtual engagements designed to explore relevant tactics, tools, and strategies that can be directly and immediately applied to enhance our training practice.

Theme: Holding Space for Quiet & Stillness...Becoming Comfortable with Silence

Wednesday, January 7th: 2pm, eastern | 11am, pacific

Register: https://lnkd.in/er_nUeuY

Most trainers design sessions around what they want to say.
High-impact trainers design for what participants need to do.

When sessions are built around what you want to say, you'll probably see:

➔ Participants checking their phones or staring at the slide deck without taking notes.
➔ You ask a question and get blank stares or eyes suddenly fixed on notebooks.
➔ By the end, people say “that was helpful,” but nothing actually changes afterward.

This doesn’t happen because participants don’t care.

It happens because most trainers were taught to organize content, not design learning experiences.

When sessions are built around information delivery, participants are asked to listen longer than they’re invited to engage.

Reflection feels rushed. Practice feels optional. And application gets left to chance.

What participants actually need are opportunities to do the work in the training environment.

They need reflective dialogue where ideas bounce between people and the energy is palpable.

They need to see how what their learning connects directly to their role, their challenges, and their next steps.

When trainers design for what participants need to do, the shift is noticeable:

➔ You can physically FEEL the energy in the room.
➔ People are leaning in and taking notes, instead of doodling and nodding off.
➔ Conversations build on each other.
➔ Participants leave knowing exactly how they’ll use what they learned.

This is exactly what we prepare trainers to do inside the Master Trainer Certification Program.

If you want to design sessions that consistently create this kind of engagement and application, DM me the word “DESIGN” to learn more about our January cohort.

Have you ever asked yourself why attention drops during your trainings, even though you know your content is solid?

If you’re like me, I used to think it was about attention spans.
Phones. Fatigue. “This generation.”

But that explanation never really held up.

What I’ve learned through years of training and preparing other trainers is that attention drops when the experience stops asking participants to do anything meaningful.

You can see it when it happens.
Eyes drift to the slides.
Heads go down when you ask a question.
Energy fades halfway through something that actually matters.

Attention drops when sessions are built around information instead of experience.

When participants listen longer than they engage.
When reflection is rushed or unclear.
When application is implied but never intentionally designed.

Most trainers were taught what to teach, not how to design learning experiences that hold attention from start to finish.

The shift happens when the question changes from “How do I keep them focused?” to “What do participants need to experience right now for this to stick?”

When trainings are designed around relevance, immersive experience, reflective dialogue, and application to practice, attention isn’t something you have to manage.

It’s something you earn.

This is exactly what we teach inside The Master Trainer Certification Program, a repeatable way for trainers to design sessions that keep people present, engaged, and ready to apply what they’ve learned.

If attention dropping during your trainings feels familiar, it’s not a personal failure.
It’s a design gap and one that can be closed.

If you want to learn how to design trainings that hold attention for the right reasons, DM me to learn more about The Master Trainer Certification Program.

Trainers who say, “I don’t have time to re-create my training,” this is for you.⤵️

Because the truth is, you already are spending the time.

Most trainers are already spending significant time designing training, trying to keep participants engaged, and troubleshooting when sessions don’t go as planned.

I hear this hesitation all the time:
“I want to do this, but I don’t have the time right now.”

So here’s the real question:
What if instead of telling yourself you don’t have time to learn a new approach, you pushed that belief aside and learned how to design trainings that actually work?

You have a limited window to decide whether you’re going to take action, learn the skill, get the support, and change how your trainings land, or continue revising the same sessions and hoping they feel different next time.

📌 The Online Master Trainer Certification Program begins January 20th and is designed specifically for trainers who are already in the process of planning and leading sessions.

This program doesn’t ask you to step away from your role.
It gives you a repeatable framework so the time you’re already spending leads to clearer engagement, stronger participation, and real application to practice.

And because Leadership Trainer is a nonprofit, scholarships are available to help make participation accessible.

If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to make a change, this is the moment when timing actually matters.

👉 DM me to learn more about the January 20th Online Master Trainer Certification Program and scholarship options.

I remember standing at the front of the room, mid-training session, watching it happen...
A few droopy eyes.
Someone jolting awake.
Yawns spreading.
Phones quietly coming out.

And the familiar internal dialogue kicked in:
Do I push through? 
Speed up? 
Add another example?
Is this on me?

Over time, and especially through preparing other trainers, I learned something important: those moments aren’t about attention spans or motivation.

They’re signals.
They show up when a session is designed around what I want to say instead of what participants need to do.

When content stays abstract.
When reflection gets rushed because we’re “behind.”
When application is implied, but never intentionally designed.

Most trainers were never taught how to design sessions that prevent this in the first place. We were taught the content, not the craft of training.

The shift came when I stopped asking, “What do I need to cover?”

And started asking, “What do participants need to experience so this actually sticks?”

That’s when everything changed.
Eyes came up.
Energy shifted.
Conversations started building on each other.
Participants left knowing exactly how they would apply what they learned.

That change wasn’t accidental.

It came from using a repeatable method for designing trainings one built around relevance, immersive experience, reflective dialogue, and clear application to practice.

A method that helps trainers design sessions that keep people engaged every single time, not just when things go well.

This is exactly what we teach inside The Master Trainer Certification Program.

It’s a comprehensive trainer-preparation experience where trainers learn how to:

✔️Design sessions using a proven Training Story framework
✔️Facilitate hands-on, experiential learning instead of lectures
✔️Lead reflective dialogue that actually creates meaning
✔️Build clear pathways for application so learning shows up in practice

If the opening scene of this post feels familiar, it’s not a personal failure.

It’s a design gap and one that can be closed.

If you want to learn how to design trainings where people stay awake, engaged, and ready to apply what they’ve learned, DM me to learn more about The Master Trainer Certification Program.

You're passionate about what you do, you want highly engaged trainings, and your participants to leave excited to apply what they have learned but deep down you know something is just off...

The trainers who join The Master Trainer Certification Program aren't beginners, they are seasoned trainers just like you.

They come in experienced, thoughtful, and committed to creating meaningful learning experiences.

What they’re usually missing isn’t passion.

It’s a proven structure, intentional feedback, and a clearer way to design trainings that consistently land.

Here’s what trainers typically walk away with after completing the program:

✔️A repeatable method for designing immersive, engaging, application-focused trainings

✔️Stronger confidence in how and why their sessions work

✔️Practical tools they can immediately apply to the trainings they’re already leading

✔️Clearer language for facilitation choices they were previously making instinctively

✔️A deeper understanding of how identity, leadership, and facilitation intersect

✔️A renewed sense of creativity and momentum in their work as trainers

This video captures what that shift looks like in real life from a trainer who already had experience, and still left with more clarity, more tools, and a stronger foundation.

If you’re ready for that kind of growth and support, DM me to learn more about The Master Trainer Certification Program.

A new year is a chance to rethink how we design learning. 

Not by adding more content, but by strengthening the conditions that make learning meaningful and transferable.

What will you be focusing on in 2026 and why? Vote below and share your direction for the year ahead.

Most training programs give you tips. The Master Trainer Certification Program transforms how you design, facilitate, and shepherd learning experiences.

This experience isn’t just about facilitation skills (though you’ll master those). It’s about who you become as a trainer and a leader - one who understands how identity, purpose, and intentional design shape engagement and outcomes.

Here’s what people consistently tell us they gain:

✔️ A proven plug-and-play framework that makes training design confident, consistent, and reliable

✔️ The ability to create learning environments where people truly show up

✔️ A deeper sense of self as a trainer, not just someone who delivers content

✔️ A supportive community that continues long after the program ends

If your goal is to move from good training to transformational learning experiences that participants remember, enjoy, and apply, this program was built for exactly that.

DM me to learn more about The Master Trainer Certification Program and how it supports trainers across sectors.

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