Are you keeping up your "match fitness"?

One of my clients has been on a self-imposed writing sabbatical. She recently got back into giving a presentation, and confessed that she was lacking "match fitness". In other words, despite being an experienced presenter, the lack of practice surprised her, and she wasn't as fluent as elegant as usual.

Are you in the same boat? If you're not presenting regularly - by choice or otherwise - what are you doing to keep up your match fitness? Here are some ways to ensure you keep in practice, while delivering value as well:

• Phone a regular client and offer to do a complimentary presentation for them.
• Phone a long-list client and offer the same.
• Create a presentation topic different from your main topic (so you don't harm that topic), and offer a community presentation free of charge.
• Run a public webinar - which you can do at any time, at no cost.
• Run a public seminar and invite a group of friends who would benefit from your message.

Whatever you do, stay match fit - and keep spreading your message.

Give more to get more

What you teach is no longer valuable purely because it's rare or unique. Somebody else somewhere else is teaching the same thing, for a lower fee and possibly even doing it better than you.

You're not going to win by hoarding, protecting or tightly holding on to your intellectual property. In the next 12 months, give away more than you've ever given away before. Make money from the experiences you provide - experiences that can't be duplicated or found on Google.

The World is Flat - Three Threats and an Opportunity

In Thomas Friedman's book "The World Is Flat", he talks about the growth of the upwardly-mobile middle class, particularly in places like India and China, where millions of people now have the skills, education, money, technology and desire to raise their standard of living. In short, they want what we've got.

This probably isn't news to you. But if you're a professional speaker, trainer, coach or consultant, have you really considered what impact it will have on your business? I reckon it presents three threats and one (big) opportunity.

Threat #1: Your competition just got bigger.

Your competitors are no longer only the people in your own city, state or country. could be experts from anywhere, beamed into conferences, training rooms, networking events and board rooms from the other side of the world.

Threat #2: Your clients just got smarter.

The flip side of this is that your clients are more demanding - and with good reason. Not only do they have a bigger range of speakers to choose from, they also have many other ways of getting the value you deliver. After all, why should they pay for a one-off speech or training course from a local speaker, when for the same money they might be able to watch three TED.com videos, use Open Space Technology to embed the learning, and then use a collaborative workspace to create meaningful action?

Threat #3: Your business probably won't exist in a decade.

Well, not in its current form. There will always be a place for face-to-face communication, of course. And the more you create unique experiences, the more you'll carve out a place for yourself. But your competition will be other experts delivering the same message - and the same value - using e-learning over the Internet. They'll be doing keynotes by video; training by webinars and on-line courses; facilitation through collaborative workspaces; coaching and mentoring by Skype; and consulting using all of the above.

That's the bad news ...

The Big Opportunity: YOU can own this space.

The good news, of course, is that you don't have to take any of this lying down.

You're the expert.
You've got valuable information to share.
You know how to structure it effectively.

Now you just need to learn how to deliver that expertise differently.

E-learning isn't just about automating the delivery of your programs. It's about adding electronic teaching tools to your current offerings.

If you embrace this rather than rejecting it, it opens up - literally - a world of opportunity.

Opportunities for new ways to deliver your message.
Opportunities to reach more people.
And yes, opportunities for greater business success.

The opportunity is there. The choice is yours.

Is the one or two day training course dead?

Somebody recently asked this question on LinkedIn:

"Is the one or two day training course dead? In a time-poor world i wonder if all training from now on, will be either online and/or in say two hour (face to face) bite size chunks?"

I'm a big fan of blended learning, with a combination of face-to-face and on-line; group and individual; synchronous and asynchronous; video, audio and text; interactive and passive; and so on.

So in general, I agree with the idea of moving away from long training sessions. After all, they were probably only originally designed that way for convenience and logistics, not for maximising the educational benefit.

However, there are situations where the extended training session is exactly what you need - for example, the 2-3 day "boot camp" where you eliminate all other distractions and focus on one practical, well-defined task for that time - e.g. constructing a business plan, designing a training program, building a presentation, facilitating a strategic leadership summit. These are examples where the long focussed session is an advantage - a key advantage - not a drawback.