We’re starting a new mini series, talking all about running your own face to face workshops.
In reality, a live workshop isn’t about you at all, it is all about them. A very small portion of your live event is content. The rest of the event is about everything else that happens (and there’s lots of stuff… trust me).
You don’t have a lot of time
If you have an 8 hour event… you take out your breaks, your take out your activity points, you take out your discussion time, you take out everything else… and you are presenting content for maybe 2 hours… maybe.
Your content should be short, sweet and to the point.
This isn’t about students sitting in a lecture theater and listening for hours on end, this is about you interacting with them in a way which engages them and helps them learn.
Break it down
When you do teach content, make sure your deliver it in little chunks.
Just like I teach you for online content, break it down into teeny, tiny little bits, and deliver one bit at a time. Then allow time for discussion, an activity and implementation relating to that teeny, tiny bit.
This allows them to consume content without getting overwhelmed and for you to take regular breaks without breaking the flow of content. It allows you to engage your audience, and not bore them with huge bits of information.
You don’t need a lot of content
If they just wanted the content, they could have gone online. People come to live workshops because they want other stuff too, they want you, they want networking, they want personalised input, they want the discussion, they want support… they don’t just want the content.
This isn’t to say that you don’t need content!
Build great content.
But, keep it short and sweet, which allows you to do other stuff in between. By all means, give them extra content for afterwards. Send them home with bonus workbooks or links to videos they can watch, but on the day your content should be the smallest portion of the day, as strange as that sounds.
Jump in the comments down below and tell me when you’ve been overwhelmed or underwhelmed by an event.
Analysising events you have been to is a great way to start thinking about running your own event.