Seminars - Do They Really Help?

We are living in an information age and as such you can find a seminar on just about anything that you want to learn, but do these seminars really work? Statistics show us that one person can have a life changing experience from a seminar yet the person sitting beside them will gain nothing. Let's have a look at why that is.

I am one of the people who experienced massive, positive life changes from going to seminars. For example I changed my income from being around the average national income to being five times the average in a period of around 18 months. I did this by directly applying material that I had learned in seminars.

I personally know other people who attended the same seminars that I attended and some of those also made huge improvements in their life, while others made no change at all.

A couple of years after starting to go to seminars I joined a business seminar club. This club ran six major seminars a year with internationally respected speakers. They also held monthly club nights where we would have a 1 hour presentation from up and coming speakers on the circuit and then we would socialize and network with each other.

These club nights provided me with the ideal opportunity to see who was improving their life and who was not. We were all attending the same seminars because they were included as part of the annual club fee. I became fascinated by the differences in results and subtly conducted my own research while socializing and networking.

I discovered two major differences between those who gained major improvement after attending the seminars and those who didn't.
Difference #1. Expectation. The people who gained substantial benefits from attending the seminars had the prior expectation that the seminar was going to provide them with information that they could take action on in order to improve their outcomes. The important point here was that they were fully accepting the responsibility for taking action to change their outcome.
The people who didn't make big improvement after attending the seminar fell into three groups. Firstly there were those whose expectation was that somehow their life would change after attending the seminar. These people were positive but seemed to completely miss the point that they would have to be responsible for the change. They didn't seem to appreciate that all the seminar was going to do was provide them with the tools that they needed.
The members of the second group were approaching the seminar as a social event. They were expecting to have a lot of fun there and to meet other interesting people. They were all enthusiastic and after attending the seminar they would regularly meet with their friends, old and new, who had also attended the seminar and they would talk about how great it had been. These people seemed to be fooling themselves into thinking that being enthusiastic and talking about the seminar was somehow going to change their life.
Then there was an interesting third group who appeared to be attending to reinforce their idea that nothing could improve their life. They would make comments like "I've heard all that stuff before" or "that's interesting but I doubt if it really works" or "these guys never tell you what they are really doing". They seemed to completely miss all the great tips that the speaker had given and as I result they didn't apply any of them.
Difference #2. Action. The people who successfully improved their outcomes were the people who took action on what was taught. They also accepted the teachings on faith and applied them exactly as they had been told too.
Those who didn't achieve the great results from the seminars fell into two groups. Firstly there were those who took action but they decided only to apply some of the teachings and to ignore the rest or they decided that there was an even better way to use the teachings and so they changed them around and came up with their own variation.
It always intrigues me when a person will pay money to get advice from an expert, who is far more successful and experienced, and then they will change that advice around before applying it. Let's face it, if you really knew more about how that advice should be used then you would probably already be a successful expert yourself.
The members of the final group were the people who didn't actually take action at all. This is by far the largest group and also the most vocal in saying that seminars don't really work. Well guess what. A seminar is not a magic wand. They teach you what you need to do and how you need to do it but then it is up to you to actually put it into action. If you don't actually do what you are taught then of course it won't work.

In Summary. The people who gain huge benefits from attending seminars are the people who approach the seminar as a source of valuable information but they still accept full responsibility for applying that information. They also apply the information exactly as presented and don't argue with it, reinterpret it, or try and reinvent the wheel. They just do it!