I just spent a couple recent Saturdays with about 40 education trainer hopefuls. Witnessing talent in motion is a beautiful thing.

I've been doing these tryouts for a decade now, and there are three basic groupings of people who attend them: (1) people who are naturally talented group communicators; (2) people who have the desire but not acceptable talent; (3) people somewhere in the middle - either not as talented and/or lacking some sort of desire to really throw themselves into the requirements of being a group communicator.

These three groupings are general, and could be broken down more regarding skills, knowledge, rate of learning, creativity, humor and all kinds of areas, but it seems that there are always about 1 in 3 applicants who are naturally gifted for facilitation and presentation work. The big question that continues to arise is How do you know?

How do you know when someone is a great facilitator? What makes them great? How much is subjective and style preference? Is success quantifiable? Testable? Why do some people see a non-talented group communicator and think he is good, while others vehemently disagree?