On Working an Expo and Not Getting Overwhelmed
Conferences and expos are a buzz with energy and often feel like mountain top experiences. The frequent reality is that coming down from that mountain can result in a lot of nothing. You have spent time and resources on attending and networking, but how is it helping your business? I do not have all of the answers, but I do have a few strategies that work for me.
Steps I take to help Giant Leap’s ROI when it comes to expos:
1. Plan ahead – Depending on the conference or expo you’re attending, you could easily be meeting hundreds of people. While that quantity is impressive, I certainly argue that quality connections are more valuable. Our CEO Bill and I got to have dinner with a team from Pfeiffer Publishing (we worked with Pfeiffer to publish our Courageous Leadership Facilitator’s Guide). After countless hours logged in conference calls and email conversations, it was great to spend face-to-face time. In addition to getting to know each other more, we got to do some great brainstorming on future projects, which we look forward to announcing one day! Plan ahead and identify some people who are attending, speaking, or exhibiting with whom you really want to connect. Reach out to them before the event and line up a coffee or dinner. We all go to these events to forward our business, so lets spend some time forwarding our business.
2. Warm up your pitch – Now is the time to sound aware, of who you are, what your organization does, and the benefit you provide. The Giant Leap team was focused on introducing more people to Courageous Leadership, and a fly on my hotel room wall would have heard me explaining why I think this is a powerful resource. It is easy to get tongue tied in these settings, but if you have spent time practicing your pitch you will be equipped to recover. You are at this event to pitch yourself or your product; therefore your pitch deserves some attention.
3. Listen to the people you meet – You have worked on your pitch, but do not become an automaton that repeats it verbatim to everyone you meet. Ask questions of the people standing in front of you. Why are they at the conference? What are their needs and interests? Based on what you learn, you can engage in a more authentic conversation about their needs and your services. A real conversation can leave its mark; so don’t just rush off to the next thing. Show your interest in the person you are with by listening.
4. Open the door for others – When displaying at an expo, we have found the organizers will often allow us to invite a few guests. We know Giant Leap cannot solve every client or partner problem, so we use these special guest passes as a way to help clients and partners learn about other resources available in the training world – from assessment to technology advancements and everything in between. Conferences can be expensive so when we can provide complimentary access, we like to open the door for others.
5. It’s a long day, pack accordingly – Let’s get practical. Whether you are doing booth duty for the day or attending the training sessions, it is going to be a long day. Pack wisely. Even the most comfortable high heel gets tight after 10 hours. My tip, gel inserts. Whether its heels or flats I am rocking, these inserts keep me comfortably on my toes so that I can make the most of every conversation I have.
There you are. Some of my tips for making of the most of any conference or expo you attend. Do you have any other tips that work for you? Would love to read them in the comments.
Meet us in Atlanta
The Giant Leap team is off to Atlanta to enjoy the 2012 Training Magazine Conference and Expo. In 2011, we unveiled our brand new Pfeiffer published facilitator’s guide for Courageous Leadership. It was so brand new that we got our first copy of the finished product while setting up the booth! This year we are heading to Atlanta to meet even more people, learn about their needs, and explore if Courageous Leadership is the right resource for them. If you happen to be around, come by and see us. We will be at the Georgia World Congress Center, Building A from February 13-14th. You can find us at Booth #321.
In addition to displaying at the Expo, we are proud to support our own Founder and CEO Bill Treasurer as he delivers a special guest presentation on Monday the 13th at 12:45 pm. Bill will be speaking about the power of courage to transform the workplace. His talk is in Room A405 and he would appreciate meeting you too.
Giant Leap has many exciting projects on the horizon, and we are looking forward to keeping you up to date on all we have going on. To track what we are doing in Atlanta or to arrange a quick meet-up, remember to follow our Twitter and Facebook pages.
Atlanta, here we come!
Intentional Courage
You are a courageous person. I know that because I know that you have done courageous things in your life already. You were courageous the day your parents dropped you off at summer camp for your first time. You were courageous as a budding thespian in your high school play when the curtain went up and you were staring at 600 schoolmates. You were courageous in college when you contested the lousy grade your dopey English professor gave you. It took courage for you to give up your dogged independence and say “I do.” And it took courage when, after spending years caring for your ailing mother, you made the gut wrenching decision to put her in a nursing home.
You are courageous. But, in all likelihood, you have been courageous through happenstance, not intentionality. It’s not like you consciously sought out the abovementioned situations just to experience your courage, right? Yours has been an incidental courage. Your courage manifested itself as a byproduct for engaging with fear. Most often you’ve fallen into your courage as a reluctant participant.
It is healthy to shift your courage from incidental to intentional. All it takes is making a deep commitment to acting consistently courageous, that is, a commitment to living a life of courage. Instead of waiting to respond to situations with courage, you actively seek out opportunities to be courageous. You constantly ask yourself questions like, In what areas of my life do I need to be more courageous? What is the next courageous thing I need to do? and Besides me, who needs my courage most?
Before making the shift from incidental to intentional courage, it’s easy to view life as a series of situations that life dumps on you, whether you’re ready or not. But when you act with courageous intentionality, you become a sort of storm-chaser, actively searching for challenging opportunities in which to apply your courage. The shift moves you from someone who life happens “to”, to someone who makes life happen.
Remember, you are already a courageous person. The question is, are you incidentally courageous or intentionally courageous?
Stupid Courage
When I was a kid, a ferocious dog named King lived down the street. Being six years old, I was deathly afraid of King, a black Doberman Pincher. Every time I walked past my neighbor’s house, King would bark viciously. Deep in my little-kid brain I knew that I would have to confront King if I was to overcome my fear. In what was likely my first act of courage, I donned a Superman cape and headed down the street.
When I arrived at my neighbor’s house, King was sleeping in his doghouse next to his tin water bowl. This was my superhero moment! I puffed out my skinny chest, tiptoed up to his Spartan sanctuary, peered my head inside, AND GOT THE BEJEEZUS CHEWED OUT OF ME!
Here’s the deal; courage without brains is like ethics without a soul. There’s smart courage and there’s stupid courage. Just because you’re courageous doesn’t mean you’re applying your courage toward the right aims or in the right way. My moment of stupid courage with King had a lingering impact. While I have no physical scars from my superhero showdown, for a long time afterwards even a yelping Chihuahua would frighten me.
All stupid courage takes is audacity. An oat-sowing teenager who steals a car and goes on a joyride is acting with courage. Courage doesn’t take intelligence, or skill, or morals. You have to bring those things to courage yourself. And you’d be wise to do so, because without those things, your courageous act may have little redeeming value beyond feeding your ego or getting your jollies off.
If all you want to be is courageous, go stick a sword down your throat. If you aspire to be something more, like a bold leader, or stellar performer, or good salesperson, you’ll need more than a courageous spirit. You’ll also need intelligence, discipline, focus and persistence. Courage matters most, but it doesn’t matter at all if it isn’t shaped and informed by these other things. It is things like these that smarten up your courage, and keep it from being stupid courage.
Martin, Gandhi, and Me
Before starting Giant Leap Consulting, I spent six years as an executive with Accenture, one of the world’s largest management consulting firms. During my time there, I became the company’s first fulltime internal executive coach. Just before moving into the role, I was so afraid of coaching the company partners that I actually considered forgoing the opportunity. I was a middle manager and had reported to a few of these execs, so I knew personally how intimidating and level-conscious a few of them could be. Knowing that most of them were older than I only added to my anxiety. Yet, my success as a coach (and their progress as coachees) would be contingent upon my ability to give them unvarnished feedback. Unless I could develop a stronger backbone, I would be utterly useless to them. Coaching is all about demonstrating and instilling courage. What kind of role model would I be if I were a wimpy coach?
About the time I was to move into the role, I came across a poem by Mahatma Gandhi titled Resolution. One line in particular resonated with me, “I shall not fear anyone on earth.” Until reading the poem, I had always assumed that Gandhi had been fearless in affecting such transformational change. It caught my attention because I knew that for Gandhi to declare this as a resolution for his future, he must have experienced fear of others in his past.
A few days later I happened to watch a documentary on Martin Luther King, Jr. Living in Atlanta, King is one of my heroes, and I never miss a chance to learn about his life. It turns out King was a great admirer of Gandhi and even had a picture of him hanging over the archway to his dining room. King had patterned his principles of nonviolence and passive resistance after Gandhi’s. In his last speech, delivered the night before he was assassinated, King talks of the promised land and says, prophetically, that he may not get there with us. Then, as if he were speaking directly to me, he says, “Tonight I am fearing no man.” Once again I was struck with the fact that for King to have made a special point that he was fearing no man on that night must have meant that he feared men on other occasions.
It was somehow liberating for me to know that the fearful feelings I had about coaching the company bosses were very similar to the ones experienced by King and Gandhi during their struggles against the ruling authorities. Feeling part of a noble lineage, I borrowed the words of both men to come up with a mantra of my own: “I will fear no man.” That simple mantra helped me get ready for taking on the new job by stiffening my backbone during those intense moments when I found myself feeling intimidated by my coachee’s position or age. My mantra helped me coach more assertively, which, in turn, built my credibility and earned the executive’s respect.
Excerpted from Right Risk: Ten Powerful Principles for Taking Giant Leaps with Your Life (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2003).
