Unfolding brains at FITC Amsterdam

There are some experiences that are so good that they set the bar for any other experience past or future to try to match or emulate. Facilitating my first full day workshop on creativity at FITC Amsterdam goes on record as being one of the best days of my life. Yes, it was that good. Seriously.

For starters, I was bolstered by the fact that I had been in contact with a few of the attendees beforehand. One woman emailed me in advance to tell me how excited she was about the workshop. Another gentleman flew in to Amsterdam for the day in from Madrid, Spain expressly to take the workshop (he further interviewed me afterwards to get Inside the Creativity), then left soon after it was over to catch his flight back home.

I was further encouraged by the number of attendees: 16, which was more than I thought would be there. Because the workshop focused on more “soft skills”, I figured that at a technical conference it would be the least well-attended out of all the workshops offered. Much to my surprise and delight, it turns out that The Unfolded Brain had the highest number of attendees of the four workshops that day.

There was minor hiccup to the day: my computer’s hard drive completely died at 6am, four hours before the workshop was about to start. However, my new method of preparation not only put me in good stead, but totally saved me. Having used the Post-it Big Pads to organize my ideas and work out the course flow, I was able to use them as my workshop notes with all of the reminders of the content that I wanted to cover, the exercises to do in class, and the practices for the attendees to work on at home.

The attendees were ready, eager to do some work, and eager for the content. In order to get an idea of what people were hoping to get out of the day, I had everyone write some of their goals for the workshop on post-it notes and put them at the front of their desks. Everyone had great ideas, and it was great for me to see them and know that my content was in alignment with what folks were looking to get out of the course.

After that, I intro-ed the content, and dove in with the first exercise. Despite not having any slides and doing the whole day “analog”, the information flowed and everyone delved into the assignments with gusto. Some of the exercises were individual, some required a partner, a few required small groups, and one exercise included everyone in the class at once.

For me, the experience was amazing. I felt very honored to be able to share my process for enhancing and expanding creative productivity. Workshops are truly my element, as it was through teaching a hands-on handmade herbal soapmaking workshop back in 1998 that showed me my gift for teaching and love for sharing practical information. And from the feedback, no slides was no problem:

“Nice job presenting ad-hoc (broken computer)”

“Great work solving the session without your computer.”

“Laptop was broke, so no slides could be shown, but I didnt miss them.”

At the end of the workshop, the students seemed buzzing with positivity and possibility, and many lingered past the end of the course to chat with each other and stay in the zone of the day. The blogger for the conference was one of the workshop participants, and he wrote up a really nice recap of the day for the conference site.

But that only partially explains why the day was so poignant for me. You know those moments when you have a vision of how your life could be better in the future than it is at the moment? Well, doing this work was part of a vision that came to me at the end of February 2010, when it became clear to me that I wanted to help people feel that incredible surge of energy that you get when you’ve created something amazing and have been in “the zone” creatively. This day and this workshop represented the culmination of three years of work in creating this experience, not just for myself, but for the people in the workshop as well. And seeing that I have the power to create something like this was phenomenal.

If you are wondering what happened to my computer, it turns out that had to spend all of the next day at the Apple Store working to get it fixed. But that did not impede on the great feelings that I had from the workshop the day before, which carried me through the rest of the week, right up to the next amazing experience that I had in Frankfurt, Germany the last week of February. That, however, is an entirely separate blog post.

Full disclaimer: This blog post is sponsored by Post-it Brand Big Pads.