Comment by ChrisMarshallNY
6 years ago
> This reads like sales speak.
I am not a sales person. I have been training people as a volunteer for decades. I have never made a dime (in fact, I am usually out-of-pocket by a fair amount). I am not a professional trainer or orator (or even a particularly good one), but I am an experienced one.
The people I have trained have faced enormous challenges in life, and are trying to get back up, after having been knocked down. I have not had the luxury of an eager, high-functioning audience. In fact, the audience has sometimes been actively hostile, and my training has not been effective (more often than I’d like).
Their enthusiasm is often unlike anything many folks will ever encounter; born of desperation, but so are the challenges. Many are folks with “knee-jerk” reactions to authority figures, which means I have needed to approach them carefully, and my personal demeanor and attitude could have a huge impact on my effectiveness.
The stakes have often been quite high (life and death). It’s been important for me to ensure that people get the help; not that I feel proud.
I simply wrote about my personal experience. This was not a typical “Internet armchair expert” post. Please note that I made a point of stating this was my experience.
"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment." –Attributed to Nasrudin, but made famous by Will Rogers.
I understand that your experience is different. I appreciate and honor that. I only ask that you provide me the same courtesy.
Please have some compassion. The world needs as much of that as possible, and I feel that social media has been highly corrosive to empathy.
Hey, thanks for whatever you're trying to do out there. I grew up among a bunch of kids with pretty poor prospects, and we all started building invisible barbed wire fences around ourselves from an early age. It takes guts to try to do any improve-the-world work pro bono, and even more so when you're working with people who don't shower you with praise for it.
I'm sure that even when you seemed to get nowhere or worse, occasionally some of those expressionless faces across from you squirreled something important away that helped them later on. Make sure you get the rest you need so you don't burn out too quick.
Thanks. I’m not exactly tilting at windmills. I’m part of a much larger organization.
I’m also tough as nails. I’ve been doing this for nearly 40 years.
I have, in the aggregate, made significant inroads, but there’s plenty more needs doing, and one of my more important capabilities, is the ability to step aside, and let the next generation take the reins.
I am now actually looking at doing training of software developers. It’s a different venue, but I also have a great deal of experience in that arena.