Opportunity + Risk = Way Out of My Screenagers Comfort Zone?
Have you ever been asked a question and were so terrified and honored you couldn’t answer?
Let me start at the beginning.
About a year after I had graduated from the Dale Carnegie Course in Public Speaking and Human Relations, I answered a phone call and the woman, Betsy, asked me how often I used what I had learned in the course.
I said to her what I blogged yesterday, “I can’t remember a day going by when I haven’t used something from the course.”
Then Betsy asked if I wanted to be a graduate assistant for an upcoming Dale Carnegie Course.
I knew it would be a big time commitment, and I thought I was too busy and couldn’t afford the time Because I can’t remember what was taking so much time, those activities must not have been so important.
Also, it was a big risk for me because I only imagined myself as an in-house trainer, and working with the public was an opportunity “way” outside of my comfort zone at the time.
After a few seconds, I said, “sure,” but I was quite concerned about this new commitment and even thought about calling back and getting out of the role.
I remembered reading in Dale Carnegie’s, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, how to give worry only so much time and then put a stop to it.
I was introduced to the instructor, Steve Holland, and the other graduate assistants, and for the next few weeks we met a few times to start to became a team.
The experience was quite new to me as everything was staged, but there were no scripts.
What I mean is there were carefully set times and activities, but we were to use our own stories and experiences.
(To this day I enjoy attending well staged training courses as they are most always very high quality, effective, and engaging.)
I was assigned 6 class members (they were not called students,) met them for coffee, and called them to rehearse their talks every week.
For the first few weeks, I as lost and my group members were not doing well, so I talked to more experienced graduate assistants, the lead graduate assistant, and even Steve, the instructor.
Most of the responses I heard centered around confidence, and so I wondered, “How do I get that confidence?”
They all told me to keep going, engage in rehearsing the talks, follow your heart, and focus on the person.
By about 4-6 weeks into the course my students started getting several nominations from their classmates for improved or performance.
A few weeks later, one of my students was the top vote getter for her talk!
Yes, I was teaching Public Speaking!
I felt like the time Mark Zuckerberg finally got that one piece for Facebook in the movie, The Social Network, as I was all quiet and happy for my group class member.
Of course I volunteered to be a graduate assistant for the next course too.
By the next course, I learned so much more and my group members were ‘rocking’ in their talks, and I reflected back one day and remembered how I had almost quit before I had started.
Low and mediocre experiences (junk-engagement) stop us from the great experiences (high value engagement) in life.
Why is coaching so powerful? Because the coachee gets a different reflection to highlight blind spots, limiting beliefs, and new possibilities for moving beyond sticking points.
Thinking back on my life, everything that has been of value followed similar steps of: find opportunity, risk, fear, failure, learning, small success, and then bigger success. BTW these are the steps to high value engagement too.
This begins with learning to walk, as I heard somewhere, “When we were learning to walk, how many times did we fail? But, how many times did we give up?”
We never gave up because the value was too high.
When we get older and become Screenagers and beyond, we try something one time and then give up the vast majority of the time.
Find opportunity, risk, fear, fail, and learn, to succeed.
Remember, come join tomorrow to see Improving Your Customer Service with Screenagers inspirational ideas for Optimal Engagement in the ScreenAge.
Remember to engage tomorrow.
Following you then.
Keep it simple.
All the Best, Warren
SOCIAL
- JOIN THE CURATION: “Engage in the Screen Age”
- TWITTER: @DrWarrenLINGER
- FACEBOOK: Dr Warren LINGER
- GOOGLE+: +WarrenLINGER
- LINKEDIN: www.linkedin.com/in/DrWarrenLINGER
- TUBE SUBSCRIBE: http://gg.gg/DrWarren_Subscriptions
Dr Warren LINGER © 2017
Comments
Post a Comment