Can Do!

Whereas at the Firm I worked with a lot of people who had no shortage of confidence and believed they were incredibly SMART and AMAZING (caps intended) as the company also kept reminding them, at Household Name, I am often surprised at how baffled people often are if somebody does something that is not within their actual job-description and that they assumed only experts could do. I sometimes facilitate workshops (the picture above is from the most recent one) and it's clearly no rocket science that I do. I would never regard myself an expert by any means, but I just watched other people do it and try to deliver what the person who commissioned it would like as an outcome. In fact, I am almost embarrassed when somebody congratulates me on something that I don't think is a big deal at all and always want to should "YOU can do it, too, you know! You only need to try it." I never received any formal training as a trainer, nor as a facilitator and have often rendered "services" that might well be called "coaching" or "mentoring", my main approach (arguably, the only one) being to use common sense and negative definition. By that I mean that when designing a workshop I just think of the many boring ones I have attended myself where the day felt endless and I could not see the point of the exercises. I don't force others to do what I would hate as a participant myself and that seems to go remarkably well. Sometimes I think I should offer a workshop with the goal to empower others to have a go at things they otherwise would have hired an "expert" for...