I never liked attending events and conferences even before becoming a consultant — I'm simply not that kind of social animal.
Last year I was invited to either speak or facilitate a workshop at a conference: I choose to design and facilitate a 90 minutes workshop, I don't like speaking from a stage (again, I'm not your stereotypical extroverted coach / facilitator, I don't like hearing my voice so much despite talking is how I pay my bills....).
This is how it went:
- I got paid for the gig (not my main goal, but hey)
- I didn't find clients at that conference (100 people, it was a "very corporate" event, I was the only one with "freelance" written on my badge, I genuinely felt a bit out of place)
- I got in touch with another facilitator before the conference to ask her about her workshop and how I might "warm up" participants for her workshop during mine, and during the conference she asked me to co-facilitate her workshop.
She later asked me to contribute with an article to a collective book on facilitation that is being printed right now. I'm not making any money directly from this but it's a nice first time as a co-author of a book about a subject I know a bit about but never promoted in any significant way.
- I wrote a summary of the workshop on LinkedIn and I have been contacted by a former client who asked me to do that workshop for their company, so I designed and delivered an extended version of the workshop I did at that conference (got paid 6x what I was paid at the conference, not bad)
I don't have a system for repeating all of this, but, since I'm not great at social events and at promoting myself in general, it gave me a little bit of confidence about my ability to do this in a pragmatic and straightforward way.
I never liked attending events and conferences even before becoming a consultant — I'm simply not that kind of social animal.
Last year I was invited to either speak or facilitate a workshop at a conference: I choose to design and facilitate a 90 minutes workshop, I don't like speaking from a stage (again, I'm not your stereotypical extroverted coach / facilitator, I don't like hearing my voice so much despite talking is how I pay my bills....).
This is how it went:
- I got paid for the gig (not my main goal, but hey)
- I didn't find clients at that conference (100 people, it was a "very corporate" event, I was the only one with "freelance" written on my badge, I genuinely felt a bit out of place)
- I got in touch with another facilitator before the conference to ask her about her workshop and how I might "warm up" participants for her workshop during mine, and during the conference she asked me to co-facilitate her workshop.
She later asked me to contribute with an article to a collective book on facilitation that is being printed right now. I'm not making any money directly from this but it's a nice first time as a co-author of a book about a subject I know a bit about but never promoted in any significant way.
- I wrote a summary of the workshop on LinkedIn and I have been contacted by a former client who asked me to do that workshop for their company, so I designed and delivered an extended version of the workshop I did at that conference (got paid 6x what I was paid at the conference, not bad)
I don't have a system for repeating all of this, but, since I'm not great at social events and at promoting myself in general, it gave me a little bit of confidence about my ability to do this in a pragmatic and straightforward way.
Brilliant post - heaps of useable ideas here Richard!