Managing your

own energy as a
trainer in a
virtual space

- tips and tricks -

by Trainers Toolbox
 “Managing own energy as a trainer in virtual” ebook by Trainers Toolbox

Managing your own energy as a trainer in

a virtual space
- tips and tricks -
___________________________________________

This ebook is exploring how as a trainer or facilitator you can (better) manage
your own energy levels in a virtual training room.
The objective is to provide you with new ideas and tips and tricks to keep your
physical, mental and emotional energy high and sustainable.

Of course, there are no “right” answers or “o cial” solutions - it is more about

exploring and discovering our own personal needs, preferences, tendencies,
learning what tips and tools work best for our personal style.

Hopefully, this ebook will help you with doing that.

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 “Managing own energy as a trainer in virtual” ebook by Trainers Toolbox

INDEX
Challenges of managing energy in virtual space 3
Managing your own energy 5
Multitasking 5
Physical energy and how to maintain it 7
Breathing and body 7
Eyes 8
Breaks 8
Headphones or not? 8
Manage your energy consciously during the day, not just once the call
starts 9
Impact of emotion on energy 10
Managing your own emotion 11
Variety as a tool for guiding attention and energy 13
Snowball e ect of energy management: avoid the danger and use the
potential 14
Potential danger: your energy in relation to participants energy 15
Summary of Managing your own energy 16
Where to go next? 17
Looking to learn more? Join us for Trainers Toolbox courses 17

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 “Managing own energy as a trainer in virtual” ebook by Trainers Toolbox

Challenges of managing energy in virtual space

When it comes to virtual trainings and managing energy, there are many challenges
that arise:

• Need for multitasking is asking for too much of our attention - in virtual training
room, trainer is required to do more multitasking than in “real life” classroom: we need
to manage chat and “raising hands”, we watch participants video at the same time as
our slides, we need to deal with any technical issues in the background, and launch
di erent tools such as Breakouts or Polls while still in live communication with
participants… This form of multitasking and dispersed attention is highly demanding
for our brain and mental energy.
• Lack of physical movement and not enough oxygen - lack of movement (especially
if we are sitting) is taxing for our circulation, makes our muscles and joints sti and
our breathing shallow and irregular. Our body literally gets sleepy from lack of
movement, disruptions to circulation and not enough oxygen.
• Emotional impact of technology - feeling stressed, anxious, uncertain, or any other
negative emotion is costing us energy. And in virtual training, there are many reasons
to feel so: delays in communication, and sometimes technical issues, stress around
“anticipation” of technology going wrong, worry around using a new platform we are
not as used to using, less positive emotions as communication feels less deep and
personal…. Another factor is that we cannot “read the room” as e ciently, so we have
less visual feedback from the participants and that makes us feel less secure about
our ability to manage our participants, therefore, more anxious.
• Looking at the screen for too long - prolonged staring into backlit screens that are
fairly close to our eyes, without much movement or change of focus gets tiring for our
eyes.
• Distractions out of the calls - in virtual training, when the training room is “contained”
within our screen, there are many things around that screen and around us that keep
on demanding our attention. Ignoring those distractions is challenging for our brain
and requires a signi cant amount of mental energy.
• Human factor - human brain is wired to read faces… and in virtual, they show
di erently! We keep on looking for eye contact, read non-verbals and subtle face
expressions of others, yet we can read those much less on screen than in real life. In
virtual calls, suddenly all the cues are more di cult to notice, so we try to compensate
and spend more energy and attention to read each individual face - and we feel
anxious for not being able to. At the same time, there are too many faces in our focus
simultaneously, while in real life we could never have an equal number of faces in our
focus as in “gallery” of videos in a virtual call. This taxes our energy in two ways: rst,
because we spend much more focus and attention trying to read faces that are too
small or blurry. Second, because this inability to read faces makes us feel stressed or
even anxious.
• Technology brings di culties into communication - while in real communication
moments of silence are the moment in which we rest and recharge, in virtual

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communication they suddenly become a moment of stress, as we are not sure if

silence is good or it’s a technology issue. It happens with silence in voice as well as with
faces: while we try to read faces so hard, whenever a face gets still, we get confused
(and potentially stressed) trying to understand if the video got frozen or that person is
just re ecting. All these delays and changes in communication make us spend much
more attention and mental energy to gure out what di erent cues mean.

Moment to re ect:
Which of these challenges do you nd most energy-taxing for yourself?
Which of them would you like to learn to handle better?
Are there any other aspects of virtual learning that you are noticing are draining your
energy?

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 “Managing own energy as a trainer in virtual” ebook by Trainers Toolbox

Managing your own energy

Our mental energy rests on 2 big pillars: physical energy and emotion. Working with
these two - maintaining our physical energy by good posture, enough oxygen,
hydration etc, as well as managing our own emotion are the basics of managing our
energy in a virtual training.
These are the two topics we will be exploring most in this article.

The most important aspect to develop for managing our own energy levels is
awareness and deep understanding of our own needs, preferences, tendencies -
only then can we look for the right tools to support us with our “gaps” and our biggest
challenges.

TIP: OBSERVE/MONITOR: when in the call does your energy drop?

The best way to gure out your own “energy drainers” is to observe them in “real
time” and nd the connections between events on the call - eg. long discussions, not
breathing enough, stressful moments, type of activities, duration of the call etc. -
and your peaks and lows in energy.

Apart from monitoring many di erent aspects of the workshop and how they impact
your energy, one aspect that can have a signi cant impact on our energy is
multitasking. Here are some ideas how to deal with it better.

Multitasking

Multitasking is probably one of the biggest “drainers” of energy in any call, and
especially so for a trainer who has no choice but to use multiple tools at the same time.

Here are some tips on how to deal with multitasking:

● Monitor yourself- observe and notice multitasking. When your attention moves
to di erent places at the same time, go back to focusing on one thing at a time
instead of looking at all of them at the same time (eg: slides, video, chat…). Check
each one of the tools often; but every time you check each of the tools, make it
full focus on that one tool on that short moment.
● Clarify what is going on - if a lot starts happening in chat, or there is a tech issue
to deal with, don’t hesitate to share with participants what you are focusing on -
for example, saying something like “oh, we have a lot going on in chat! Let me
read it out loud….” and read it for everyone instead of trying to read it for
yourself and continue normally with the workshop. Or perhaps saying “oh, I see
we have a lot going on in chat… let me nish with this slide/model and I will check
what is happening there right after that“. It will help you and your participants’
focus.

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● Minimise - choose consciously what tools you use, and try not to use more than 3
tools during one call (eg. raising hand, chat, breakouts, or Miro, or poll, or
Mentimeter, and not all of these in the same call). Make it clear to pax that these
are the tools we will be using and all other tools are something we can all
“ignore”.
● Co-delivery - for long sessions, share the load with another trainer and plan co-
delivery. It is good for your energy management, it takes pressure of
multitasking away from you, and it bene ts the participants’ energy levels and
interest as being exposed to variation of styles of energy and keeping them
more engaged.
● Prepare - prepare in advance all that you can (have questions in poll already
typed and ready etc.) to avoid having a lot to do at the same time. Also prepare
by learning the tools and testing them out in advance, so you would need less
focus to be able to use them well during the call.

Have in mind that another huge drain of energy can be attempting to over-control the
session. So be prepared for the session, have a great plan, but once the session has
started focus on 1.session goals and 2. participants needs and experience that they are
having on this call, and not on over-managing the agenda, details and over-controling
each of the speci c activities.

Moment to re ect:
Which of these tips for managing multitasking can you leverage more in managing
your own energy?

www.trainers-toolbox.com

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Physical energy and how to maintain it

If you as a trainer would like your focus to be sharp, and your energy to leave a
positive impression on participants, the rst step is in keeping an eye on your physical
energy level.
There are many aspects we can take into account here - nutrition, sleep, having a
regular way to rest and recharge, hydration, your general level of physical energy
and tness, and much more.
While you probably want to look into all of these and how they impact your energy,
here we will look into several aspects that are speci c for their impact that they have
on our energy in the context of virtual interactions and workshops.

Breathing and body

Getting enough oxygen for our brain is perhaps the most important thing to maintain
our physical energy throughout the call.

Our brain starts to get signi cantly less oxygen already after 20 minutes of sitting
(especially if we sit in a slouched way) so ideally we want to create an opportunity to
move every 20 minutes. As that is quite challenging, the next best alternative is to
pay attention to breath deeply and often, to sit up straight (or stand during the
call), and to ll up our room with enough oxygen before the call and after the call.

To maintain a body position bene cial for good breathing, a standing desk is a great
idea (or shifting between standing and sitting desk for parts of the call, not to have too
much standing either). You can try it by stacking a pile of books on your regular desk
and place the laptop on top of it to make a standing call before deciding to invest in a
standing desk. If you do calls sitting down, make sure to sit up straight, and not to lean
forward too much - it is common to want to see participants better or to lean while we
speak, but it also disrupts our breathing.
Last but not least, manage carefully the position of your screen (the top of your screen
should be straight in front of your eyes when you sit up straight).

Three main fuels for our body are oxygen, water and food - that is why it is important
to keep on breathing deeply (moment to pay attention to is when you are speaking, or
listening to participants in a very focused mode, especially if the connection is not
great), stock with some water for the call, and to be mindful about food we eat before
and after the call or in breaks. Sugar will spike our energy, but in a non-sustainable
way, which means sugary snacks (or ca eine) can be good last-mile support for the
last half an hour or hour of a call, but would be a bad idea to get high on sugar before
a longer call.

Moment to re ect:

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Which of these tips for managing physical energy can you leverage more in managing
your own energy?
What other ideas do you have to maintain better hydration, oxygen level and nutrition
during the calls?

Eyes

Calls (especially with video) and screens can be very tiring for our eyes.

Try this tips to give them a little break:

● look in the distance for twenty seconds - nd the most distant corner of the
room, and focus your gaze on it for 20 seconds
● close your eyes for a little bit - when you catch a chance, even if just during
break or at the start of Breakout rooms, close your eyes for 10-20 seconds -
even better, close them very rmly initially just for the rst couple for seconds,
and then relax them while still keeping them closed for few seconds
● if your eyes are sensitive, try to adjust the brightness of your screen or use
dark mode or look into getting computer screen glasses

Breaks

Make sure to create some breaks for your eyes and the body:
● don’t use video the whole day
● even if you are online most of the day, make sure to have a break just before
the call!
● truly take a break during breaks that you give to participants (and for couple
of minutes while they are in Breakouts) - make sure to get up from laptop, move,
walk, stretch, drink, rest your eyes and body
● consciously design modules with energy in mind - make modules shorter
whenever possible, design in several modules instead of one session, o oad
parts of the content to video, email or articles as a prework and postwork

During the breaks, most important think is to move your body a little bit, and to rest
your eyes from the screen. Other things you can add to recharge is couple of deep
breaths, water, healthy snack, or couple of stretches.

Headphones or not?

While the decision to use headphones or not is primarily a decision based on the
quality of the sounds that it gives you for the call, it is also a decision for which we can
take impact on energy into account.

The best way to choose to use headphones or not and what kind of headphones (big
or earbuds, noise cancellation or not) is by testing how they impact your energy - so

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 “Managing own energy as a trainer in virtual” ebook by Trainers Toolbox

jump on a call with a friend or colleague and explore the quality of di erent settings -
but also observe how it impacts your energy.

Manage your energy consciously during the day, not just once the call
starts

Try to become more aware of your energy levels throughout the day. Notice what
recharges you, and what steals away from your energy.
Pay attention to activities, thoughts, emotions, interactions, as well as physical needs
such as food, sleep and time of the day.
Get in a habit of doing self-check-ins, where you ask yourself often throughout the
day: How am I doing right now? How is my body, emotion, and my energy? What
do I need right now, to recharge and feel better?

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 “Managing own energy as a trainer in virtual” ebook by Trainers Toolbox

Impact of emotion on energy

Emotion impact our level of energy in to aspects: it makes energy level high or low,
and it makes a positive or negative e ect in terms of quality of our experience or
energy.

High level we can also call activating emotions, and positive aspect of emotion we can
also call pleasant type of emotion or energy.

For example, anger makes us energetic (making energy level high), but it also gives
negative “ avour” to our energy - so while we experience peak in the quantity of
energy, it is not type of energy that feels positive for us or for others, and it is more of
“focused” and “closed” type of energy than open, friendly, communicative, which is not
great for training room. Also, as anger often peaks our energy fairly high, it can make
us tired after that peak, which is not very sustainable.

On the opposite side, serenity or feeling content makes our energy level low and calm,
yet positive and pleasant. It can make virtual calls cozy, or at other times it can make
everyone feel too low on energy and perhaps sleepy and “slow thinkers” - depending
on the moment of the call, and on the general energy level of the group.
Serenity can be a great emotion for a trainer to have during a call, but it also might
have a negative impact on the group focus and attention if it is present for too big part
of the call, or if it happens in the “wrong” part of the workshop.

Here is the view of how di erent emotions related to amount and quality of energy:

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Positive (positive in this context simply meaning pleasant) emotions make us more
open, creative, receptive. When we are in a positive emotion, we think broader and
build our resources such as knowledge, optimism and social connections.

Emotions are also highly contagious, which means that any emotion that the trainer
feels can also impact the emotions of participants. Have in mind that as this
contagiousness is a consequence of expressiveness (both in body language and voice),
which means that on virtual calls its impact is less strong than in physical
conversations, but it still exists.

Any emotional extremes and intense emotions - pleasant or unpleasant - are not
sustainable in terms of energy. They will lead to an energetic spike, but can often drain
energy and leave you exhausted after that spike. After too intense high peak, body will
usually search of equilibrium by “crashing” into a low energy.

For this reason, but also because of impact that emotion has on participants’ attention,
in training we aim to build ow of positive emotions of moderate intensity. As a trainer,
we aim to build diversity of emotions that participants’ experience, and avoid too
intense “peaks”, as they are not bene cial for long-term group energy nor for learning
process.

If you would like to learn more about managing participants energy and emotions in
training, and discover many ways and tools to do that (even) better, at Trainers
Toolbox we are o ering an amazing online course on Managing energy and emotion in
training: https://www.trainers-toolbox.com/managing-energy-and-emotion/

Managing your own emotion

As emotion is contagious, and has a big impact on energy levels, it is absolutely crucial
for a trainer to be skillful at managing their own emotions.

Moment to re ect:
How do you manage your emotions during the (virtual) training?
What helps you with that, and what are still your biggest challenge?
Which emotions would you like to experience more often during a workshop, and in
which parts of the workshop?
Which emotions do happen often during the workshop that drain your energy level?
How could you manage those?

Here are some quick tips on how to get better at managing own emotions:
• self-check-in - get in a habit of doing self-check-in often, where several times
throughout the day you take a moment, take a deep break, and ask yourself: How
am I doing right now? How is my body, emotion, and my energy? What do I need
right now, to recharge and feel better?

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• get to know your own tendencies - after each workshop, take a moment to re ect
and notice: Which emotions are your prone to experiencing on a call, and how are
speci c emotions impact your energy? Which emotions would you like to control
better, or experience more often? What are your best tools and tips for those speci c
emotions?
• be intentional (and aware) - re ect about the emotion that you wish to have for
some part of the training/workshop,
• build your toolbox - explore your own tools and ways of how we are creating that
emotion - one of the best ways to develop that toolbox is doing self-check-in’s often
and learning from yourself what helps you, as well as having a conversations often
with your fellow trainers about what works best for them
• connect between emotion and energy - keep on observing and developing
awareness about how is a certain emotion impacting our energy level, both while you
are experiencing that emotion and after experiencing it (not very useful to have great
energy cause we feel enthusiastic if that leads us to crash of energy later in the call,
once the enthusiasm goes down, right?)
• use your body and movement to impact your emotions - most of our emotional
states can be positively in uenced by movement, shifting in physical space, breathing
exercise or a good stretch
• work on your self-talk, mindset and thinking patterns - most of our emotions form
as a consequence of our thinking, so notice what thoughts are happening in your
head, and how is each of these thoughts impacting your emotion

When you discover a great tool or an insight based on self-observation, make sure to
capture it somehow and build your own “toolbox to manage emotions”.

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Variety as a tool for guiding attention and energy

Humans are wired for novelty: when something new happens or we notice something
new and di erent, our curiosity rises, our attention is magnetically drawn to the “shiny
new thing”, and our energy spikes following our curiosity.

We feel more awake, more alive, and often more eager to step into action of exploring
that new, shiny thing.

While that makes novelty, variation and surprises an amazing tool to use to manage
participants’ energy, attention and emotion, it is also a valuable asset for you as a
trainer to manage your own level energy.

An example can be to redesign a session if you’ve done that topic already, to

experiment with new activities and approaches, or to get curious about participants or
about their perspective.

Moment to re ect:
How else could you use variety and curiosity during the call? What helps you awaken
your own sense of curiosity at a workshop you are delivering?

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Snowball e ect of energy management: avoid the danger

and use the potential

“Snowball e ect” is that curious event when you start o by throwing a snowball
downhill and it keeps on growing and growing as it rolls down.

It is similar for our energy tendencies on the call: we can build the “snowball e ect” of
both positive or negative energy management for ourselves during a workshops
(similar is for our participants and management of their energy).

Let me give you an example: my energy drops a bit so I nd I hard to focus on

participants and instead I start speaking faster and faster without properly engaging
them. That then in turn again lowers my energy cause it is less meaningful and
engaging and perhaps I breathe less, and I keep falling into that cycle deeper and
deeper.

On the other hand, here is a positive snowball: when I create positive energy and
connections within the group, it builds more of their engagement and curiosity and
positive attitude, which in terms builds positive emotions and more of positive energy.
Their excitement and energy is contagious so my energy grows as well. Also, I feel that
I am creating a meaningful impact on this call, which further drives my motivation and
energy.

They key to positive snowballs is then to:

1. start of right - put focus on managing own energy and creating positive emotions
since the very beginning of the call
2. monitor - notice how is the emotion and energy changing throughout the call, use
all the chances to support positive snowballs, and ensure to interrupt pattern of
negative snowball early (before snowball gets too big :)).

Moment to re ect:
How can you ensure that you are creating a positive snowballs on your workshops?
How can you ensure that you avoid negative snowballs?

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Potential danger: your energy in relation to participants

energy
While this article is focused on managing your energy as a trainer in a virtual training
room, and not on managing energy of the group, the two can be intertwined and
impact each other.

The rst aspect of that impact is that if you manage your energy well, you are more
resourceful to be able to manage the participants’ energy too, plus your energy might
“spill over” to the group too (even though this happens less strongly in virtual calls than
in live training room).

But there is also an interesting trap in virtual training room - and this is how to avoid it:
Be careful not to mix up participants’ energy levels with your own energy level!

If you as a trainer are really good at maintaining your energy high, there is a danger
that you might think that they have high energy all the time too. This is especially so if
you are using a standing desk, and happen to forget that they are sitting for prolonged
periods of time.
The trap in that is that we can “lose” the participants’ attention as their energy drops
lower than our own.

A trick to mitigate that is to ensure that we observe (or even better, to measure)
participants’ energy separately from our own.

If you choose to observe, it just means to look for cues from their side, in their body
language and level of interaction./

It is even better to choose a way to measure their energy consistently throughout the
call. A nice way of doing this is to ask them in chat every now and then to share
number that matches their energy level, from 1-10. Also, to ask for their feedback on
when they need a break, instead of making assumptions.

Moment to re ect:
How can I transmit more of my energy to the group? How can I ensure I don’t mix up
my own energy level and energy level of the group, but to observe them separately?
Which of the two is more likely for me to neglect? And how can I avoid that trap?

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Summary of Managing your own energy

With growth of virtual training, many challenges for trainers showed up: How to keep
participants engaged while in “virtual” training room? How to keep their attention, in
spite of all the distractions? How to build the group and the “cozy feeling” in a group of
strangers meeting in an online setting?

One of those challenges that keeps being mentioned is also the one of trainers’ feeling
way more tired after the virtual workshops then they would be after “physical” ones.

That is why in these article we explored the main aspects of managing own energy as
a trainer in virtual space.

We shared many aspects and ideas how to get better at this -

• recognizing the challenges and monitoring what impacts your energy level most
• multitasking and how to diminish it’s impact
• looking into di erent aspects of physical energy and how to maintain it
• impact of emotions on energy
• variety as a tool to renew your energy
• snowball e ect and how to use it’s potential
• connecting between our energy as a trainer and the energy of the group

However, in the end, as all skills of self-regulation, managing own energy remains an
individual journey, one that requires a lot of self-re ection (I hope you went through
our Moments for re ection!), self-monitoring and experimenting with what works best
for you.

Last but not least, the biggest treasure for any trainer are other trainers we can learn
from, share the journey with, and exchange perspectives and accountability on our
own journey.

Looking for more ideas, learnings and your tribe of trainers? Make sure to join as
at https://www.trainers-toolbox.com/newsletter/ 


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Where to go next?

While this article is o ering many diverse tips for managing our own energy, in the end,
it is an individual thing.
That means that the most important thing is to get to know your own energy levels
and tendencies intimately - to monitor yourself on calls, what drains you and what
recharges you, what makes maintaining energy easily, and to approach calls with the
importance of maintaining your own energy always in mind.

Moment for action:

Look into the tips from this article and choose 1-2 tips that would be most valuable for
you to implement, and 1-2 tips about which you want to re ect deeper or explore and
experiment how they would work for you.
And remember to enjoy this exploration - it is really about you bringing your
“superpowers” as a trainer to a new level ;)

Book recommendation: “The Power of Full Engagement” is an amazing book for

managing your energy (not focused on workshops, but own energy management in
life in general).

Looking to learn more? Join us for Trainers Toolbox courses

Looking to learn more about trainers’ skills for virtual training?

Join us for an online course Keys to successful and engaging virtual training.
https://www.trainers-toolbox.com/keys-to-successful-virtual-training/

Looking to get better at managing your participants’ energy and emotion in

training room?
Join us for course in 3 modules https://www.trainers-toolbox.com/managing-
energy-and-emotion/

Looking to build your skills as a trainer? Join us at Trainers Toolbox’ Train the
Trainer education: https://www.trainers-toolbox.com/train-the-trainer/

Any feedback or further ideas how to improve these ideas? Feel free to connect by
sending email to hello@trainers-toolbox.com - we would love to hear from you!

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