In the past years I attended a lot of trainings as I love to learn and broaden my horizon. Quite a lot of these trainings took place during JCI conferences I have regularly been attending. There the trainers would have about my age or younger. But as time passed by I attended trainings given by trainers I had met as participants in other trainings.

Why them and not me?

It thus seemed natural that I should also start and give trainings, but I felt quite uncomfortable about it. I was wondering if my knowledge would be sufficient or how I would be able to make it as much fun for those participating in my trainings as I had when I was attending trainings. I was frightened to fail. I wasn’t sure I could meet my expectations as well as those I thought participants would have.

Why did I start then?

The answer is easy to find: if you don’t try you fail even more. I had seen how my peers had evolved and learned and knew that there was something to be learned as a trainer, I thus decided to start giving trainings and take it as an experiment.

At that time I mainly had training opportunities related to these tasks and challenges I had accepted within JCI making training easy on me as I was sharing experience I had gathered.

It still took me quite some time to achieve the first level of certification as a JCI trainer.

Promote yourself!

The main reason why it took so long is that I don’t like to promote myself and find it a very difficult exercise. But here again, I learned that not promoting myself as a trainer means to be doomed to fail. No one is searching for me as trainer and no one is going to find me if I don’t offer any information. On the other hand a JCI local organization preparing a training might be happy to invite me if they attended one of my trainings or heard that I can provide a good training.

I had to do something about it and as I had learned the starting point to promote myself is to have a presentation of myself as a trainer.

Find your motto

Starting my presentation meant staring at a blank page asking myself a lot of questions as to how I can present myself. One sentence finally appeared, made sense and became the title of my presentation: “train to enable”. It reflects my aim– not only – as a trainer to provide tools, methods, information which can be used by the participants of a training as well as others to learn, grow, change and experience.

Working on the presentation, it became in itself a tool allowing for change. My next challenge now is to distribute the presentation regularly, but having it available makes this possible.

Try it

Have you encountered challenges and opportunities difficult to take up? If you take the challenge one step at a time, chances are high that you’ll find afterwards that you learned, grew, changed and gained in experience.

[Original publication via frogstalk.com, July 21, 2010]