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COURSE NAVIGATION
MODULE 7
ADVANCED PRACTITIONER SKILLS
Section 10
Distinctions around teaching, leading, and presenting as a natural extension of coaching.
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Screenings once again, my friends,
this is Mark David here, founder of the institute.
Let us talk about teaching
and leading and presenting.
You know, a lot of people who go into the helping
professions, a lot of people who go into health coaching,
a lot of people who get into the nutrition universe,
the personal development universe, the working with food
and body challenges universe, a good place
that we often find ourselves in if we want
to do more than just, um, work with clients.
One-on-One is we often can find ourselves teaching
and presenting and in various leadership positions,
or we might find ourselves wishing
to move in that direction.
So this is a conversation about some of the,
some core distinctions that I think are very useful when it comes to teaching and leading and presenting. And I'm wrapping all these up together because I think it's just good food combining, so to speak. And to me, this topic is important because it's a beautiful thing to teach. It's a beautiful thing to present. It's a beautiful thing to lead and to step into these various roles, the role of a teacher, the role of a leader, the role of a presenter. These are archetypes as well for many people. Again, teaching, leading, presenting, it's, it's really a natural extension, extension of coaching or of being a helping professional. And for sure, you and I can also use aspects of the teacher and leader archetypes in our private coaching sessions. So if you're the kind of person that's not interested in presenting somewhere or teaching somewhere, or being a leader, you will surely be using teacher and leader archetypes in your client session, and chances are in other places in your life. So for that reason, I'm believing that this conversation can be very useful to you. I'm also gonna tell you a little bit about my bias here. Uh, I consider myself a teacher. I consider that as a, um, really one of probably what describes me most these days. As a professional. I consider myself a leader in certain ways, and I also consider myself a presenter and I love all of these. Uh, they have challenged me for sure, being a teacher, a leader, presenter, have given me, uh, some amazing challenges, some amazing gifts, some amazing benefits, a lot of lessons learned. And if you're drawn to any of these, it's a beautiful way to express oneself. So I love the topic.
So my goal for us is to learn some new distinctions around teaching, around leading and around presenting, uh, to understand what these might be on a deeper level. 'cause chances are I'm gonna say some things about these that, um, you know, hopefully will be new for you and fresh for you and give you a different understanding. And of course, my goal is to have you consider what might be possible for you in these domains. If you are interested, curious, or, um, called in any way, you know, I want you to be asking those questions for yourself, like, what's possible for me here? Where is life calling me here?
Okay, my friends, the practitioner to Teacher pipeline.
Honestly, that was my pipeline. I pretty much started out as a practitioner and I got into teaching very early on in my career. I actually, there's a part of me that knew I wanted to teach, and there's just a natural extension here. It's a natural segue to go from working one-on-one to working one on many in a certain way. So there's part of it that is a professional evolution in a very simple way. You can reach more people when you're teaching to a group or presenting to a group. So there's a professional evolution here and, and it's a personal evolution. Um, for me, I like to challenge myself. I like to grow in my professional life, in my personal life. And at some point I really saw that becoming a better presenter and a better teacher, um, was attractive to me. And these have all made me a better person. So learning how to be a good teacher and presenter has definitely made me a better person. It's made me a better professional. If you already have a private practice or you're looking to have a private practice and you do have a private practice, presenting or teaching can, can, can be good for business. Um, not always in the way that you think though. Um, I'm gonna say a few words about that later. Uh, teaching, presenting can be a great way to simply express one's mission, one's purpose, one's passion and one's creativity. Shakespeare said the whole world is a stage, my friend. I often think of the job as a teacher these days. A lot of times these days it's about education and entertainment. Slam them into one word. You got edutainment. Somebody coined that word many years ago. I'm surprised it hasn't stuck around. But really, you know, that's what happens when you go on YouTube these days. It's, you can't just throw a bunch of numbers and fax at people and have a boring presentation and or a boring video. You gotta entertain people. And when people are, when you capture their imagination, when you capture their attention, when you entertain, so to speak, um, people listen.
Teaching and presenting can be a very powerful personal and spiritual challenge. It makes you grow in a big way. Uh, anytime being a one-on-one practitioner will make you grow. So all of these are a path in many ways. Yeah, that's something you can choose to do in your spare time. But I will tell you, for me, I often look at them as a path, the path of a teacher, the path of a coach, or a helping professional. It's a path. Meaning there's a journey, meaning that you're gonna learn some things, meaning the path of a teacher will show you all the places where you need to learn, where you need to grow, where you need to let go of some bad habits, where you need sharpen yourself, where you are having certain weaknesses, or there are certain places inside you that's not clear, that's not present, that's not confident. So becoming a teacher or a presenter shows us those places. On the flip side, it helps us become more confident. It helps us get out there more. It helps us expand ourselves. Uh, it helps you get bigger. And by bigger, I mean bigger in your energy, bigger in your power, bigger in yourself, bigger in the gift that you can give. It can do that for us.
So I've been saying, teaching and presenting, and to my mind, these are massively different.
And, and we tend to see them as the same. People often use these terms interchangeably. I understand we tend to lump them into the same category, which by the way, does both teaching and presenting a disservice. So I find it is very, very helpful to distinguish these two experiences from each other. Teaching and presenting. Let's break it down. You'll see what I mean. Let's talk about presenting first. Here's what I think presenting is. Presenting is a skill. It's a skill that just about anyone can learn. Presenting is generally about informing people. It is generally not about transforming them. Presenting is essentially, essentially a performance art. I want you to think Ted Talks, when you hear me talking about presenting, Ted talks have become the quintessential presentation for this day and age. If you've noticed Ted Talks, you will notice that everybody has the same cadence, has the same intonation, they almost have the same body language. All the people who do TED talks, the big TED Talks, the International TED Talks, I'm not talking about the small local ones, they're all coached. All the big ones that you see on YouTube, they're coached. Here is how you do it. Here is how we want you to present a talk. Here's a number of minutes, here's, so you have to carry yourself on stage. Here is your cadence and it's literally like acting now. There's nothing bad about it. You got nine and 10-year-old kids doing major TED talks. They have been trained to do that. They are literally acting.
Presenting is something you do is not who you are. Nobody walks around. Hey, what do you do for a living? I'm a presenter. Generally speaking, you're not gonna hear that. Presenting is generally moving in one direction. The presenter conveys information. Once again, think TED talk. They get up on stage. There's a one way highway from the presenter to the people sitting in the audience. Here's my information. Presenting is a bite-sized chunk of education. It is a small amount. You will generally not call a a 10 hour educational experience, a presentation that might be a series of classes. So normally when we speak of a presentation, you're gonna, you're gonna think of my five minutes, my 10 minute TED talk. You're going to think of maybe you speak somewhere for a half hour for 45 minutes or for an hour. Sometimes a presentation might go a little bit longer, but it's a short chunk in general. And these days, especially online presentations are excessively brief.
You and I want a good presenter, for example, for a corporate audience.
If you are gonna speak in front of a corporate audience, you wanna be a good presenter. If you are hiring somebody to speak for your corporate audience, you wanna find a good presenter. By the way, a good presenter does not necessarily know how to teach. And in general, on average they don't. I'm gonna distinguish out teaching in a moment. So you'll hear what I'm saying. Presenters are not teachers, presenters are presenters. So remember, it's a short chunk of time. It's a one-way experience. It is about informing for the most part, as opposed to transforming. Can you and I sit down in a great presentation and be transformed? Sure happens. That happens. Is that the norm? No. How many times can you tell me, oh yeah, mark, I went to this presentation and it transformed my life. It doesn't, it's it's, it's not a common occurrence.
Why would somebody present? Okay, here's the obvious. You got something you wanna talk about? Really, really, really, really, really, really only present. If you have something that you wanna talk about, don't say, oh, I want to be a presenter, but, oh, I don't know what to talk about. Let me see if I can come up with a subject. Eh, what are you passionate about? What, what would you just wanna talk about? If you could just talk to a bunch of people and have them listen to you, what would you wanna say? What's interesting to you? What motivates you? What inspires you? What do you feel impassioned about? So you present because you have something you wanna talk about that you feel compelled to talk about, drawn to talk about, driven to talk about why would you present? It's a really cool skill to learn. It is a great training for your mind.
Training to give a good presentation is like training for any other interesting skill. It challenges you to speak in front of an audience. It challenges you to let go of your fear of crowds. It challenges you to deal with your fears and in your insecurities to learn how to project your voice, to learn how to connect with an audience, to learn how to put together a good talk that has a clear beginning, a middle and end where people can come away with something useful. Where people walk out of the room and say, oh, that was good for me. So it is just a great training for your mind. Presenting can be very good for generating clients for private practice. I presented everywhere that I could for goodness, up until, you know, at least my forties, um, into my forties. I presented everywhere, especially when I was in my twenties and thirties. Any possible place I could present any possible audience, I don't care what it is. I have spoken in front of junior high school students, high school students, adults, adult education. I've taught at university, I've taught in graduate school, I presented in medical school, I presented to professional audiences, medical audiences, dieticians. I presented to the elderly. I have presented to prisoners. I have presented to audiences of all different colors, uh, and nationalities. Interestingly enough, I have presented to lay people. I have presented to people who are more interested in fitness, more interested in health, more interested in personal achievement. It's, it's anything I could, so I could understand how I speak to these people. And when you get out there and present enough, um, and you happen to be in private practice, that's a wonderful way to do a little bit of PR for you and your business right at the end. And by the way, if anybody is interested in learning more about me and my work and some of the private one-on-one work that I do, I have some business cards and brochures right at that table in the back. There you go. So I have built my private practice over the years in part through presentations.
It is a great way to impact people with information and hopefully inspiration. Most presenters are not inspiring. That is just my experience. Most presenters hurl information at you as if that is the gold standard of presenting. Just give information. Chances are you have sat in presentations and be bored out of your noodle. Have you ever had that happen sitting in a presentation and you're just bored? And then compare that to a presentation you were in and you were inspired and you were at the edge of your seat. That's how different presentations can be. People who are just hurling information at you do not truly know how to present. So again, presenting can be a wonderful confidence builder. I want you to think of presenting as teaching light.
It's the lightest form of teaching. It's like light beer. It's the lightest possible teaching one can do. I also want you to look at presenting never, ever, ever as a direct money maker. People think oftentimes who are new to the helping professions or they're new to speaking and presenting that universe, they think they're gonna make all this money. Giving a lecture here and a lecture there, I will save you a lot of time and tell you that it would be a waste of your time. The people who make money doing the presentations that are, that, that, that have any substance to it, meaning to the amount of money you would make, the people making money doing presentations, are people who are already famous. People who are already bestselling authors, people who are already accepted leaders in the field. You're not gonna just all of a sudden start getting, you know, thousands of dollars to go do a presentation somewhere. It doesn't work that way. I don't care what anybody tells you, so I'm just trying to save you a lot of time that way. It's, it's not a direct money maker. Once again, it's an indirect money maker in terms of, it points back to your practice. And if you are teaching IE doing a series of classes, let's say you can, your presentation can point to that
if you do some kind of consulting work. So when I used to do a lot of presenting, I was also at a point in my life I was doing consulting work for different educational organizations and for different food and supplement related companies. So presentations for me often generated more presentations and or more presentation opportunity and or generated some corporate connections. But I had a very specific skill set that I had to offer. So I'm just saying do not go into presenting. So you think, oh, I'm gonna go present at this health club and then you negotiate for money. It's like, no, $50, a hundred dollars. It, it, it's, it's, it's not worth it to try to get that money. It's better to present for free. So people want you to present so it's no cost for them for whatever venue you are at or whatever health club or spa or whatever. You don't look to make money from a used look to get in the door. Um, the money is made by creating PR for yourself. Okay, let's talk about teaching. Teaching. I'm calling it a path and a service.
Teaching is a responsibility. It asks a lot of us. Teaching is not a short term experience. The people who taught you in first grade weren't just there for one day to give you a presentation. They were your teacher for the first grade. The teacher that taught you your freshman English course was there for the whole course.
The teacher that you study with, you might study with for years. Certain teachers, they might not be your direct teacher in a classroom, but you read all their books and you listen to their videos. You might do that for years. There are certain teachers I've been following for years.
Teaching is a path and it's a service, it's a responsibility. It asks a lot of us. Teaching is not about the teacher, it's about the students. It is a far, far, far bigger undertaking than presenting. It is a commitment over time and it requires a fierce commitment because teaching is about awakening others. It is not about hurling information at them. It is about awakening and inspiring others. That is what I'm calling a teacher. Yeah, you can teach a class in how to, you know, uh, paint your house. Okay, I get it. That's not gonna be about awakening somebody. So that's not the kind of teaching I'm talking about when it comes to the health space, when it comes to the nutrition space, when it comes to the personal growth and development space. When it comes to the eating psychology space, what I wish you say is, is teaching is all about awakening and inspiring others. It is not just about hurling information to people. If people want information hurled at them, they can get online. You and I remember our great teachers forever.
We remember our great teachers forever. I remember my grade school teachers. I remember all my junior high school and high school teachers. I remember my great teachers forever.
How many presenters do you remember? Like for me, maybe one. That was a great presentation. You don't usually remember those forever by the way. A good teacher generally knows how to present.
You have to know how to hold your audience. You have to know how to hold people's attention. You have to know how to communicate with them. But it's not a show, it's not acting. It's not a one way. Street teaching is a two way street. You sit in a classroom, you dialogue, you have questions, you break the class down into diads or triads and people share with each other. And then you get together and you talk again. You want a good teacher for your children. You don't want a good presenter for them. When I was going around and looking at different schools when my son was young, I wasn't thinking I want a good presenter and no, I want a good teacher. I want, this goes with the good teachers, not someone who's gonna come in and give a good lecture and then leave. You get what I'm saying? Can you feel the commitment? Do you remember the commitment that some of your great teachers had to you? Especially if you had great teachers when you were a little kid. They're some of the most dedicated people. Those are the teachers who should be making all the money, the big money, you know, to me, the grade school teachers, the ones who really care about children and awakening minds. Um, but that's the model that I use for teaching that commitment, that love of teaching, that love of awakening others, helping others open their eyes, helping others learn how to learn. Helping others see how to see
giving tools and insights that a person can now have for life. That's teaching.
Teacher is an archetype. Presenter. Yeah, presenter's kind of a new archetype. And the new archetype of the presenter is the TED Talk. It's not a very robust and deep archetype quite frankly. So if you hear me playing it down a little bit, it's because I am, it's 'cause everybody's worshiping Ted Talks and anybody can be trained to do a TED talk and people worship it and it's a performance and that's fine. I'm not knocking that. But what I'm saying is don't give it more value than it has. What I'm saying is value teaching more quite honestly, because that's far more robust, it's far more deep, it's far more expansive, it's far more powerful, has far more value. Just does so because teachers and archetype, meaning teachers have existed since forever. And the more we stay true to the archetype, the better we are at teaching. What do I mean by that? Archetypally teachers come from a place of purpose
in a TED Talk, the teacher is up there and they're impressing you with their knowledge and their big words and there's a lot of ego up there in presentations such as Ted Talks. It's an ego show quite frankly. Uh, are there people who don't come from that place and Ted Talks? Sure, absolutely. So I'm overstating my case here because everybody's just these days, like people just go crazy over it, how wonderful it is, how great this is and no, don't give it so much value. Please. Um, so teachers can set aside their ego. They can invoke selfish selflessness.
Teaching is not about the teacher. Teaching is about the student presenting is about the presenter. Yeah. You want your people to come away with something good, but you're focused on your self when you're presenting, especially if it's a big audience and it's not a back and forth and you're not taking questions. Yeah, there are hybrid presentations where you can function as a teacher and be with a group for an hour and have question and answer going back and forth. That that's actually more of a skill. Trust me, those TED talks that you see, if they had to interact with people and bounce off of them, um, and play off people's comments or questions, they won't be very good at it
because they're putting on a show. They're a trained actor or actress in that moment. So again, I've said to you, that's a great skill, it's a wonderful skill. Great, great, great, great, great. And it's different from teaching.
The teacher archetype goes into challenging unexplored and edgy topics when needed. Teacher is here to raise consciousness, raise awareness, help people wake up, draw them out. It's a deep service. A teacher is willing to be a mouthpiece for a higher wisdom. A teacher is here to draw out, to cultivate their students,
to help the students be the best that they can be.
A presenter is in front of a room being the best that the presenter can be. So the listeners in the room walk away going, wow, that was good. That's kind of what that is.
A teacher's a longer term commitment, a teacher's a deeper commitment because there's a bigger goal to raise consciousness, to wake people up, to help draw people out, to help invite people more and more and more and more and more into their potential.
Why teach one reason? Really because you feel called. If you don't feel called, don't even bother. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it, don't do it. I don't recommend it. Uh, because you have nothing else to do. Oh, I should just be a teacher and let me start teaching classes because that sounds really cool. I'm gonna say don't do it. Do it. If you feel called and inspired, do it. If you want to impact people more deeply, do it. If you want to expand your personal and professional mission, do it. If you're intrigued by the challenge, because it is a challenge, don't expect to just start teaching and be this great teacher and have everybody loving you and it's gonna be this easy experience. It's not you're gonna learn on the job. Teaching is extremely rewarding. It is a i I will say that from a personal standpoint, um, if a teacher isn't loving teaching, then that's a sad thing to me. I've had college professors in the past who were bored outta their wits. I found that to be very offensive. Don't stand up in front of that room and be my teacher and be bored outta your wits. That's not a good teacher. You're teaching me how to be bored. Um, so teaching is a transformational path. It will make you grow far bigger than being a presenter. I also wanna suggest don't exactly do it for the money.
Sure, I would like you if you become a teacher in any way, shape or form to make money at it. But don't do it for the money. Don't do it because it sounds like a good financial opportunity. It's not. It is hard to make yourself make it as an independent teacher these days. It just is. I know that for a fact. Fact, I do it for a living and I know many people who do it for a living and there are not a lot of us at the end of the day. So you do it because you are drawn to do it. You feel called to do it. It's a passion of yours. You are intrigued by the challenge. You want to impact people more deeply. You like being more intimate with people
And then you let the money be what it is. You let the income be what it is as opposed to doing it for the money and having how much money you make at it. Drive that whole experience. If the experience is being driven by, well I'm not making enough money, then don't be doing it. I mean that, um, I wish I could say different, but you gotta be called is my belief to make it worth your while.
Even if you don't wanna be a teacher. We often find ourselves teaching. We access the teacher archetype In our coaching practice, we access the teacher archetype. When you're parenting, we access the teacher archetype In our relationships, oftentimes you're accessing the teacher archetype in the workplace. It's a beautiful archetype to come from when the, when there is a teachable moment with your children, with your friend, with your loved one, with your client, with someone in the workplace.
We often come upon teachable moments in that moment. You want to channel the teacher within and then you can. When we come from the appropriate archetype in any given moment, what we have to say is far more easily heard.
A teacher teaches out of love for teaching, not because it's a good business.
I wanna mention 11 teaching guidelines.
I wanna suggest that there's an inner game to teaching. There's a hidden set of metaphysics that guides the teaching process and the teaching journey. So to be a good teacher then we need to let teaching teach us.
Teaching will have its own agenda for us and will put each of us through a unique set of challenges and growth experiences. Such challenges and growth experiences enable us to remove the inner obstacles that would stop us from being a good teacher. Stop us from being the teacher that we're meant to be.
So let me mention to you what, to me me are these teaching guidelines,
principle number one, teaching guideline number one. The secret to teaching is to understand that teaching is a path, is a service, is a journey, and is a calling.
It's a path, it's a service, it's a journey, it's a calling. That's what I think the secret to benefiting from being a teacher is it's the secret to being quote unquote successful as a teacher. First and foremost, it's a path, it's a service, it's a journey. It's a calling. Once again, it's not a money maker. It's not something you do because you have nothing else to do. It's not something you do because you're bored. It's not something you do because it looks cool and you want to be like that cool teacher who seems to be famous and making a ton of money. Don't do it. You will be disappointed.
Uh, the helping professions are littered with people who were trying to be teachers. I think for many of the wrong reasons, because it looks sexy and it looks like people are making lots of money at it.
Approach it from a deeper place and you will have a far better journey with this. You really will.
Another principle number two around teaching is that teaching doesn't always give you what you want, but will tend to give you what you need. Another way of saying that is once again, teaching is a path. The path, when you embark on the path of being a teacher, all of a sudden teaching the teaching archetype grabs you and it puts you in the classroom called learning how to be a teacher.
When you're learning how to be a teacher, you are actually a student learning how to be a teacher. Even when you're a teacher, you're still learning how to be a teacher. I've been teaching many years and I'm still a student of teaching.
Teaching never gives you what you want. A hundred percent tends to give you what you need at the time in the moment. That's just my experience.
Principle number three, the best teachers don't see themselves as people who do teaching, but as people who embrace the archetype of a teacher. Meaning when I'm teaching in front of a room, I'm embracing the teacher archetype. When I'm not in front of the room, I'm not in teacher archetype. When I'm with my son, I'm in father archetype. When when I'm with my friend, I'm, I'm in friend archetype.
When I'm hiking, I am in my hiker archetype, whatever that is. So when you're a teacher, you are not a person who does teaching.
You are a person who embraces that archetype and listens for what that archetype, what that invisible energy is asking of us. Because a teacher is a serious job, serious means it's a big responsibility. It is a privilege to be in a position to help cultivate others, to help inspire others, to help others be the best that they can be. That is a big responsibility
to really embrace that responsibility. We embrace the archetype of a teacher. It is not I who does the teaching in a lot of ways it's the archetype that moves me.
I don't know if that makes sense for you, but it's um, it's powerful. It's For those of you who've been, I don't know, in private practice for a while, you know that when you close your door and you're with your patient or your client, oftentimes there's an energy that takes you over. You become a different person. You're not that practitioner all the time. You're that person when you're with your client
and a persona takes over a character takes over an archetype and energy takes over. And that's what we stay true to. Next. My friends, great students. Number four, great students make great teachers. Wanna be a great teacher, be a great student. I mean that. If you're not a good student, forget about being a good teacher. You must be a good student to learn the art of teaching. I mean, how could it possibly be any other way? It's like any other skill. You have to learn it.
A teacher is teaching to students. So you must understand students. You must understand what it is to be a student. You must understand what it is to be a really good student.
You wanna be a great teacher. Be a great student. Love learning. Retain the information and the inspiration that's important to you. Put it into action. Listen to a teacher. Take what works for you. Throw out what doesn't. Don't make the teacher wrong for the things that don't work for you at the expense of throwing out the baby with the bath water and missing the good things that do work for you. So you have to have a flexible mind to understand that teachers ain't perfect. If you are a teacher, you will not be perfect. You will say some things that your students find uninteresting, boring, dumb or useless or worse. And you will say things that your students find excessively helpful, extremely inspiring. Sometimes life changing is a package deal. A great student doesn't let the faults of a teacher get in their way of learning. Great student is committed to learning. A great teacher is committed to teaching.
You have to be a good learner in order to be a good teacher. I mean, doesn't that make logical sense to you? You gotta love learning, which means you gotta love being a student. If you want to have love being a teacher, it's a package deal in a big way.
And as you get more and more into teaching, you realize that in every moment that you have a teaching opportunity, you are learning.
Learning how to be a better teacher and learning how to be a better student. Number five, here's why I think you should teach. Teach to raise consciousness. Teach to bring people into the light. Teach to awaken others. Teach to draw people into their best self and their best potential through the vehicle of whatever you're teaching.
You could teach you, you can teach and help raise consciousness and bring people into the light and awaken others and to draw people into their best self and their best potential. If you're teaching art, if you're teaching dance, if you're teaching yoga, if you are, if you're teaching math, anything just about, you can do it in such a way that you are helping elevate people. You're elevating life.
If you're not teaching to raise consciousness and bring people into the light and awaken others in some way, shape or form. If you're not teaching to help draw people into their best self and their highest potential, what are you doing? Really? Like what's the point?
Don't teach to hurl information at someone. People don't need more information.
You ain't gonna make a living off of that. Um, you know, yeah, you can have your online portal where you deliver lots of information that's different from teaching. It's having an information center, which is fine, which is a hundred percent fine. Different from teaching.
If you're looking to teach to tell people to eat more greens, you will not have a big audience at all. And you'll get bored of that message very quickly. There's only so many times you can say that. Now, there are some people who can get inspired about teaching people how to eat healthy and they can do that for a long time. So for those people, I would say good for you because the world needs that. But I'm saying in general, in the health, nutrition, eating psychology and personal development space, information delivery is not enough. It is not where the value is.
The value is in awakening people. The value is in helping people raise their consciousness, open their eyes more, help them become a better them. That's value.
I think you get that. Number six, my friends. Being a good teacher is an ongoing practice in self-acceptance, in self-confidence in boldness and in surrender to a higher mission.
So you wanna be a good teacher, you gotta practice. It's gonna take some time. You gotta have a lot of self-acceptance because we're not always gonna be great at it. You gotta have self-confidence. Self-confidence doesn't mean you're gonna be doing everything great all the time. It means you have the confidence that even when you don't do something great, when you make a mistake, you have the confidence that you're gonna move through that and stand by it. And even if people throw tomatoes at you, you're gonna be fine.
It takes a little bit of a boldness to conduct a classroom, conduct a group of people as a teacher. And I believe it takes a surrender to a higher mission,
to a higher power, to a higher wisdom that wants to come through As a teacher. I believe we are channels, we are conduits, we are conductors of a higher wisdom.
Can you let yourself be that instrument?
Everything about teaching, you will never be a hundred percent ready to teach. By the way. You gotta begin somewhere. You're not gonna begin as an expert. You're probably not gonna begin as even very good. Yeah, some people knock it out of the park or right when they begin. But you're never truly a hundred percent ready to teach.
So if you've been thinking about it for a while and waiting to be ready, then yeah, maybe there's no ready. What do you say when you play hide and go seek Ready or not? Here I come. That's kind of what it is. Sometimes it's ready or not. Here we go.
Number eight, teaching will challenge your ego. My friends assume there will be people who love you and people who don't love you. That happens in presenting as well. But oftentimes when you're presenting to an audience, there's a little bit more of a buffer zone. And even in presenting, yeah, you get your ego challenge. But in teaching, because it's more intimate space, you're dealing with people more close, more closely. You're getting into more conversations that matter and you're gonna be people that like you and people that don't like you. There's gonna be people that stay with you and people that leave.
Yeah, that's gonna challenge your ego. So there's some people that just, they don't like the way you talk. They don't like the way you look. They don't like the car you drove up in. They don't like your choice of earrings. They don't whatever. It doesn't matter. It doesn understand that it's, it's not a popularity contest at all. I mean that you gotta be mission-driven to be far beyond the popularity of it.
Teaching is a craft. It's a craft like any other craft that you learn, like any other skill that you learn. And one of the key ways to improve as a teacher is to learn the art of teaching. So yeah, we have to learn the art of teaching 'cause there's an art to it. And to get out there and practice your teaching
like any craft, like any kind of art, whether you're painting in oils or watercolors, whether you're learning the craft of, um, of playing music, the craft of writing, it's a craft. So you gotta learn, you gotta learn the craft, the art of teaching, and you have to practice as well at the same time. That's how we learn. And it's really true, my friends number 10 that we so often teach what we need to learn. That's okay. It doesn't matter if what you're teaching, you happen to be learning it. I'm still learning about what I teach. What a good thing. You get to remind yourself all the time. Remind other people. And if you're inspired about the message, then hallelujah. And you're enjoying teaching it and you're listening to yourself and you're learning, that's a beautiful thing. Just letting you know you don't have to have mastered a thing that you're teaching.
You're being a good student by teaching what you need to learn. You are learning about what you're teaching. I trust a teacher like that because they're learning.
But what else? My friends teaching can simply be very, very, very, very magical. I've had so many magical experiences over the course of really teaching since I was a teenager. That's kind of the first classes I was teaching to little kids. Um, it can be very magical
and I think magic is good. World needs a little more magic. We need a little more magic sometimes.
You know, when it comes to the hidden architecture of teaching, I believe there is surely an invisible unseen structure to effective teaching. Therefore, good teaching is it's not an accident. So practicing and utilizing the right teaching tools and distinctions gives us the ability to tap into the power of the hidden architecture of teaching. So let me mention some of the, some of the skills. I'm gonna cover some skills that help you tap into the hidden architecture of teaching skill. Number one, to tap into the hidden architecture of teaching and help, the magic is to own the room.
Mocho and ante. My friends own the room. Meaning teach from your queen or king. I don't care how old you are, you're a 25-year-old. Be a king, be a queen. Teach from your royalty. Be a royal person command. Assume that the room is your kingdom. It's your queen.
So in other words, energetically you are getting bigger than the room. If you're looking, oh my God, look at all these people and who am I? What am I gonna do? You're getting smaller than the room. Now, the room might have seven people in it that you're teaching too. You have to get bigger energetically than that room. And bigger means you're embracing everyone and everything in it. You are, you are welcoming them into your large, invisible energy field that is assuming the room is your kingdom and kingdom. This is, this is my kingdom. This is my kingdom.
I am the royalty here and I am teaching from that place.
Your students don't want you to shrink. I'm not asking you to be a big ego. When I say teach from your king and queen, I'm asking you to be in your royalty. I'm asking you to be in your excellence. I'm asking you to be in your dignity. I'm asking you to be in your humility. Kings and queens are humble. I'm asking you to be in your compassion and your understanding and your unconditional acceptance. And I'm asking you
to not be in your peasant mind and go, oh my God, is this enough? Am I good enough? Do you all like me? Uh, tell me what a great teacher I am. No, you have to get bigger than that and I'm embracing everyone in the room and everything in the room and whatever happens in the room because you are the royalty. It's your queendom, it's your kingdom. Whatever happens in the room is actually your responsibility. If the lights go out, you, you handle that. Teach in the dark. I've done it.
If the, you know, if the heat's not working, okay, your responsibility, if somebody's talking too much, that's your responsibility. If people are falling asleep, that's your responsibility. If people are excited and want more, that's your responsibility.
If people have feedback that's uncomfortable, it's your responsibility to hear it.
If everybody's loving it, yep, that's your responsibility to embrace that. So whatever happens in a room, you're not a victim, you're a king, you're a queen. Something happens in your kingdom or kingdom. You don't go to some other king or queen to bring into your queen to fix it. You handle it. This is your people. This is your tribe. You're in charge. You're the conductor. What are you gonna do? Own the room. Next. Teaching skill disappear. Isn't that interesting? Disappear. When I say disappear, it's, it's a paradox. It means letting go of your ego because teaching is not about you. Presenting is more about you consider every participant in the room, interestingly enough, as fellow royalty. So even though I just said you're the king, you're the queen, guess what you're teaching to kings and queens, it's fine. Kings and queens will often visit other royalty when they visit another kingdom or queendom. They don't sit on the king's lap or they don't take his chair. They have their chairs, that's fine. Royalty understands royalty. It's like, it's okay. We don't have a big ego. It's okay, if this is my kingdom and I'm in the king's chair and you guys are sitting in these other chairs,
But you as the king, you as the queen, I want you to consider every participant in the room as your fellow king and queen, your fellow royalty. So you respect them. You have a job to do on a service to deliver. So you have to get out of the way. Your fears, you have to get outta your fears out of the way. Your ego, do I look good? Do you love me? Is this okay? And oftentimes, my friends, it's not about what you say, it's about the words that are spoken through you. It's about what you let come through you. So you're trusting in the experience. You're trusting in letting the archetype move you. Like I said, you're a conductor for a higher wisdom. When I'm worried, oh my God, what am I gonna say? Are people gonna love me? Then you're in a stress response. When you're in a stress response, you are prefrontal cortex isn't firing like it ought to be. That is the center of wisdom and integration.
Relax. It's not about you. Another teaching skill, I love this one. Find your invisible audience. So before you ever teach, or even if you are teaching, some of you might be teaching online or choose to teach online, and you won't always see your students regardless. You have an audience. If you wanna be a teacher, my assumption is you have an audience, you wanna be a teacher, you have an audience, but that audience is invisible. They exist in the ether. You can't see them right now. You're sitting in the comfort of your own home. You're in your car, you're taking a walk. You wanna be a teacher, you have an audience. Your audience is invisible.
Even when I'm sitting in a room, standing in a room talking to people that I can see in that room, yeah, I'm talking to those people, but I'm actually talking to more than them. I'm still talking to my invisible audience. I'm speaking to my collective audience. It's easiest to access your invisible audience as you become more intimate with your own passion, your own gifts, your own hunger, your own mission. As you get clear of what you wanna say,
what do I have to say and who do I think I have to say it to?
Your invisible audience in a weird way is always with you. They show up in any room you teach in, and it's best to be aware of them as often as you can. Have you taught before? Have you presented before? Who shows up? What kind of questions do they ask?
The beginning, the beginner's mistake that a lot of teachers make is they teach purely to themselves. They teach as if they're speaking to themself. Beginning writers make this mistake. They wanna write a book, they wanna write a novel, and they write it to themselves and nobody else understands it. Nobody else appreciates it.
As a teacher, you have an audience. That audience is invisible. Can you tune into them? Can you feel them? Can you sense them? Can you see what they're asking of you? If teaching is a calling, then your audience is calling you. You get what I'm saying? It's the inner game. It's the energetics. It's the invisibles of teaching. Let's talk about being a leader for a moment.
It's interesting, I I, I think it is actually a little bit harder to define than teacher and presenter. So leader is an archetype for sure. When I say the word leader, meaning you kind of have an idea at least in your mind of what a leader is. You have probably have an image, you have a few thoughts. Here's what I wanna say about leader and the leader archetype. This is an archetype. This is a role. This is a persona that you can adopt in any given moment, any given moment. There, there, there are times during a day when all of a sudden I find myself in a leadership moment
and I take leadership for 30 seconds.
You know, you could be driving your car and everybody's stopped at a stop sign and there's a four-way, stop sign, and nobody knows who to go and what to do. I, I might step into the leadership moment and I motion for the car to the left of me. Come on, you go. And then I motion for the car to the right of me. Okay, you go. So I direct traffic from my car. I make sure the people see me. They go and then I know I'm safe. They've gone. I can go, But it's a role. Okay, I'm gonna take leadership here. I'm gonna take responsibility. In a larger sense, a leader has some vision. Okay, here's my vision. I'm stopped at this four way stop sign. I want a good outcome. I want us all to move. I want to get where I want to go. I want you guys to get where you want to go. And I don't want us crashing into each other. I got a vision. A leader has a vision. A leader has a mission. A leader has a direction in some way, shape or form. A leader is very willing to guide to where they've been.
This Is one of the great ways to be a leader, to lead people to where you've been. You're a trip leader, you've gone down this trail before. You love this trail, you know this trail. Great. You can take other people on that trail. Well watch out for this. Watch out for that. Hey, you know something, this trail, it's gonna take us 45 minutes and you said you only have 30 minutes, so we're just gonna do a short part of this trail. So a leader is willing to guide people to where they've been.
A leader is also willing to guide others into the unknown. That's a little harder.
Some leaders will take us into the unknown. They're leading us through the desert. We don't know where we're going, but a leader has enough skills to manage the experience of being in the unknown.
Leader is a role you can adopt in any specific field, any endeavor within any group, within any given circumstance, within any moment. Boom, you can grab that archetype and take over. You can be a leader in your community. You could be a leader in your family. You can be a leader in your relationship. You could be a leader for a moment in your relationship. You can be a leader When there's a little bit of a crisis somewhere you can be a leader. When people are wanting to have a good time and a good experience and, Hey, I got a good idea. Follow me. Let's go here, let's go here, let's go do this.
A secret to leading, We always think of of leaders as these big egos.
In many ways, a leader is essentially a servant of the people they lead as opposed to the big guy, the big cheese, the big alpha dog.
The more a leader sees themselves as a servant of the people they lead, the better they can lead.
A leader is not the superior to the people they lead. They are the servant to the people they lead. They might have certain places where they are superior in certain kinds of knowledge or certain kinds of skills, and they are actually a servant to the people they lead that my friends would be a very good leader. Leaders who are not a servant of the people they lead are serving their own ego and they're serving their own needs.
It is essentially how the power of leadership corrupts people.
A leader thinks that they are leading people, that they are better than, bigger than, more than, and that those they are leading are less than and that their job is to be the bigger, smarter person. Just the opposite. A leader is serving the people that they lead. When you do that, I believe strongly that you are in alignment with a higher power.
Why be a leader in any way, shape, or form? Once again because you are called or inspired. That's it. In any given moment, if you're not called, if you're not inspired, don't do it. No point feeling called or feeling inspired. That's a good thing.
You know, there's all different kinds of leadership styles, my friends. It's helpful to get outta your mind. The image of, I don't know. What I used to have as a leader when I was young was, was some male figure who was powerful and dominant and tall and had a booming voice and told everybody what to do. That's the image that I grew up with of what a leader is. Um, it was a hell of a lot more than that. A leader can lead verbally. They can lead silently. A leader can lead through their intellect. We often call such people thought leaders. They have new thoughts, interesting thoughts. They take people into new thought realms. A leader can simply lead through their charisma. To me, people just have a lot of charisma and you wanna follow them. You wanna listen to them. A leader can just lead through their actions.
A leader can lead by example. They don't have to say anything. You just watch what they do. They are clearly showing up by example. They are an exemplary person
in what they do and how they conduct themselves. And their example is how they are a leader. A leader can lead through planning. Some leaders are just like, that's what they do. They're great planners. Okay, here's the plan. Here's how we're gonna roll out this project. Sometimes project managers, that's what they are. They're leaders. By being able to plan and manage, a leader can lead through the deeds that they do, through very deliberate methods, through writing. You could lead through your writing.
Some people, they're great leaders, but they've never necessarily spoken to a lot of people about it, but it's through their words. A leader can lead behind the scenes, my friends, and you'll never know them. And they're pulling strings and advising people and they have the ears and they're whispering into the right ear. So a leader can be completely behind the scenes and nobody knows them or they can be leading publicly. You can lead in any size group. You could be a leader in your family.
Everyone has a different leadership style. You have your own leadership style. You have the ways actually that you would lead
from the dte. Jing Lasu said the best leaders are those who are barely known to men. The next best leaders are those who are cherished and ex stalled. The lesser of all leaders are feared and the least of all leaders are scorned.
I love that this is the Dao is concept of saying the great leaders don't have an ego, so people don't even know them and they're leading and they don't need to be known Next best leaders. Yeah, we know who you are and thanks for being such a great leader. The next best leaders, which aren't very good, are the leaders that we fear who wants to have a leader that we fear. And you definitely don't wanna have a leader that you're scorning or you are embarrassed by. You can't stand.
Isn't it interesting how we live in a world where so many of our leaders are scorned
and so many of our leaders have huge egos, and even the leaders that were taught to worship that are supposedly good, all the people that own the Microsofts and the people that started Apple Computer and the people that are billionaires who run this company and that company, and we're taught to worship them and their images are all over the place. Really, it's an interesting, we choose interesting leaders. I don't know that those are great leaders, just 'cause they're billionaires and they sell a lot of stuff on Amazon. Are you really a great leader? I don't think so.
Why lead and to where my friends, here's a suggestion, lead to people into greater awareness. It's like being a teacher. Lead people into their best self, lead people to where they truly want to go and need to go.
When my client comes to see me, yes, I'm a practitioner. Yeah. I step into my teacher archetype the whole time. I'm with my client for the duration of our relationship. I am a leader. I am helping lead them to where I believe they truly need to go. I'm committed to their highest goal. I am not committed to their tiny goals. So I'm leading them to where I know they truly wish to go. They truly wish to go into their greatest self-expression, their greatest happiness, their greatest possible incarnation that they could have on planet Earth. Yeah, that means they weigh this and they weigh that and they have the right diet and the right body. I get it, but it's so much more than that. So you're leading people to where they truly wanna go or need to go. You're leading people into their best self. You are leading people into greater awareness in the big picture.
A good leader, I believe, starts with knowing how to lead one person that's themselves. A good leader has to trust in themselves.
I believe very strongly a good leader trusts in a higher guidance. A good leader follows the leader that leads them. Oftentimes, that leader is a higher power. A good leader, refrains from self attack, do not follow a leader that follows you into self attack. It leads you into self attack. A good leader will stand by themselves and thus can stand by others.
If you can't stand by yourself, it's harder to stand by other people. Truly, if you can't trust in yourself, then how can you expect other people to trust in you?
So yeah, leadership asks us to have a good, healthy ego in a healthy way. Just believe in yourself, trust in yourself. Trusting in yourself doesn't mean you're gonna be perfect to make the right decisions all the time. Trust in self means that even if I fall off the horse, even if something goes wrong, even if I don't have a good outcome, I trust that I can turn that around. I trust that I can recover. I trust that I can get back on my horse. I trust that I can proceed further, learn from that experience and move forward with a sense of dignity and learning and understanding and growth. That's what I'm calling trust and self.
My friends. You and I can learn to be a presenter. You can learn to be a teacher. You can even learn to be a leader. And it's all about calling when it comes to these. I really believe that it, it just has to be a calling. It's an inner desire or drive that doesn't necessarily need to make perfect sense. This is just my strong opinion and a calling tends to have its own wisdom that simply asks us to follow it. I'm always about people following their calling,
Some final musings and some questions. Really, in what ways do you find yourself teaching, whether it's with your clients, your friends, your family, your loved ones, anyone like, do you have teachable moments in your life? Do you have situations where you're being a teacher and you don't even realize that that's what you're being?
In what ways do you find yourself being a leader
with clients, with friends, with family, with loved ones, with anyone?
Little ways? It doesn't have to be big ways. How do you lead? What is your style and is life? How is life calling you more to teach and or lead? Once again, that could be clients, it could be friends, it could be family, it could be loved ones, it could be potential students. Anyone. How is life calling you in that direction?
How can you listen to that calling a little bit more?
Those are my thoughts, my friends on teaching, leading and presenting. And I as always hope that that was useful for you. I know it's a topic I find very near and dear,
and right around the corner we're gonna be talking about the future of nutrition. That'll be interesting. What is the future of nutrition? You'll see, and I'll see you on the other side. Thanks as always.
some core distinctions that I think are very useful when it comes to teaching and leading and presenting. And I'm wrapping all these up together because I think it's just good food combining, so to speak. And to me, this topic is important because it's a beautiful thing to teach. It's a beautiful thing to present. It's a beautiful thing to lead and to step into these various roles, the role of a teacher, the role of a leader, the role of a presenter. These are archetypes as well for many people. Again, teaching, leading, presenting, it's, it's really a natural extension, extension of coaching or of being a helping professional. And for sure, you and I can also use aspects of the teacher and leader archetypes in our private coaching sessions. So if you're the kind of person that's not interested in presenting somewhere or teaching somewhere, or being a leader, you will surely be using teacher and leader archetypes in your client session, and chances are in other places in your life. So for that reason, I'm believing that this conversation can be very useful to you. I'm also gonna tell you a little bit about my bias here. Uh, I consider myself a teacher. I consider that as a, um, really one of probably what describes me most these days. As a professional. I consider myself a leader in certain ways, and I also consider myself a presenter and I love all of these. Uh, they have challenged me for sure, being a teacher, a leader, presenter, have given me, uh, some amazing challenges, some amazing gifts, some amazing benefits, a lot of lessons learned. And if you're drawn to any of these, it's a beautiful way to express oneself. So I love the topic.
So my goal for us is to learn some new distinctions around teaching, around leading and around presenting, uh, to understand what these might be on a deeper level. 'cause chances are I'm gonna say some things about these that, um, you know, hopefully will be new for you and fresh for you and give you a different understanding. And of course, my goal is to have you consider what might be possible for you in these domains. If you are interested, curious, or, um, called in any way, you know, I want you to be asking those questions for yourself, like, what's possible for me here? Where is life calling me here?
Okay, my friends, the practitioner to Teacher pipeline.
Honestly, that was my pipeline. I pretty much started out as a practitioner and I got into teaching very early on in my career. I actually, there's a part of me that knew I wanted to teach, and there's just a natural extension here. It's a natural segue to go from working one-on-one to working one on many in a certain way. So there's part of it that is a professional evolution in a very simple way. You can reach more people when you're teaching to a group or presenting to a group. So there's a professional evolution here and, and it's a personal evolution. Um, for me, I like to challenge myself. I like to grow in my professional life, in my personal life. And at some point I really saw that becoming a better presenter and a better teacher, um, was attractive to me. And these have all made me a better person. So learning how to be a good teacher and presenter has definitely made me a better person. It's made me a better professional. If you already have a private practice or you're looking to have a private practice and you do have a private practice, presenting or teaching can, can, can be good for business. Um, not always in the way that you think though. Um, I'm gonna say a few words about that later. Uh, teaching, presenting can be a great way to simply express one's mission, one's purpose, one's passion and one's creativity. Shakespeare said the whole world is a stage, my friend. I often think of the job as a teacher these days. A lot of times these days it's about education and entertainment. Slam them into one word. You got edutainment. Somebody coined that word many years ago. I'm surprised it hasn't stuck around. But really, you know, that's what happens when you go on YouTube these days. It's, you can't just throw a bunch of numbers and fax at people and have a boring presentation and or a boring video. You gotta entertain people. And when people are, when you capture their imagination, when you capture their attention, when you entertain, so to speak, um, people listen.
Teaching and presenting can be a very powerful personal and spiritual challenge. It makes you grow in a big way. Uh, anytime being a one-on-one practitioner will make you grow. So all of these are a path in many ways. Yeah, that's something you can choose to do in your spare time. But I will tell you, for me, I often look at them as a path, the path of a teacher, the path of a coach, or a helping professional. It's a path. Meaning there's a journey, meaning that you're gonna learn some things, meaning the path of a teacher will show you all the places where you need to learn, where you need to grow, where you need to let go of some bad habits, where you need sharpen yourself, where you are having certain weaknesses, or there are certain places inside you that's not clear, that's not present, that's not confident. So becoming a teacher or a presenter shows us those places. On the flip side, it helps us become more confident. It helps us get out there more. It helps us expand ourselves. Uh, it helps you get bigger. And by bigger, I mean bigger in your energy, bigger in your power, bigger in yourself, bigger in the gift that you can give. It can do that for us.
So I've been saying, teaching and presenting, and to my mind, these are massively different.
And, and we tend to see them as the same. People often use these terms interchangeably. I understand we tend to lump them into the same category, which by the way, does both teaching and presenting a disservice. So I find it is very, very helpful to distinguish these two experiences from each other. Teaching and presenting. Let's break it down. You'll see what I mean. Let's talk about presenting first. Here's what I think presenting is. Presenting is a skill. It's a skill that just about anyone can learn. Presenting is generally about informing people. It is generally not about transforming them. Presenting is essentially, essentially a performance art. I want you to think Ted Talks, when you hear me talking about presenting, Ted talks have become the quintessential presentation for this day and age. If you've noticed Ted Talks, you will notice that everybody has the same cadence, has the same intonation, they almost have the same body language. All the people who do TED talks, the big TED Talks, the International TED Talks, I'm not talking about the small local ones, they're all coached. All the big ones that you see on YouTube, they're coached. Here is how you do it. Here is how we want you to present a talk. Here's a number of minutes, here's, so you have to carry yourself on stage. Here is your cadence and it's literally like acting now. There's nothing bad about it. You got nine and 10-year-old kids doing major TED talks. They have been trained to do that. They are literally acting.
Presenting is something you do is not who you are. Nobody walks around. Hey, what do you do for a living? I'm a presenter. Generally speaking, you're not gonna hear that. Presenting is generally moving in one direction. The presenter conveys information. Once again, think TED talk. They get up on stage. There's a one way highway from the presenter to the people sitting in the audience. Here's my information. Presenting is a bite-sized chunk of education. It is a small amount. You will generally not call a a 10 hour educational experience, a presentation that might be a series of classes. So normally when we speak of a presentation, you're gonna, you're gonna think of my five minutes, my 10 minute TED talk. You're going to think of maybe you speak somewhere for a half hour for 45 minutes or for an hour. Sometimes a presentation might go a little bit longer, but it's a short chunk in general. And these days, especially online presentations are excessively brief.
You and I want a good presenter, for example, for a corporate audience.
If you are gonna speak in front of a corporate audience, you wanna be a good presenter. If you are hiring somebody to speak for your corporate audience, you wanna find a good presenter. By the way, a good presenter does not necessarily know how to teach. And in general, on average they don't. I'm gonna distinguish out teaching in a moment. So you'll hear what I'm saying. Presenters are not teachers, presenters are presenters. So remember, it's a short chunk of time. It's a one-way experience. It is about informing for the most part, as opposed to transforming. Can you and I sit down in a great presentation and be transformed? Sure happens. That happens. Is that the norm? No. How many times can you tell me, oh yeah, mark, I went to this presentation and it transformed my life. It doesn't, it's it's, it's not a common occurrence.
Why would somebody present? Okay, here's the obvious. You got something you wanna talk about? Really, really, really, really, really, really only present. If you have something that you wanna talk about, don't say, oh, I want to be a presenter, but, oh, I don't know what to talk about. Let me see if I can come up with a subject. Eh, what are you passionate about? What, what would you just wanna talk about? If you could just talk to a bunch of people and have them listen to you, what would you wanna say? What's interesting to you? What motivates you? What inspires you? What do you feel impassioned about? So you present because you have something you wanna talk about that you feel compelled to talk about, drawn to talk about, driven to talk about why would you present? It's a really cool skill to learn. It is a great training for your mind.
Training to give a good presentation is like training for any other interesting skill. It challenges you to speak in front of an audience. It challenges you to let go of your fear of crowds. It challenges you to deal with your fears and in your insecurities to learn how to project your voice, to learn how to connect with an audience, to learn how to put together a good talk that has a clear beginning, a middle and end where people can come away with something useful. Where people walk out of the room and say, oh, that was good for me. So it is just a great training for your mind. Presenting can be very good for generating clients for private practice. I presented everywhere that I could for goodness, up until, you know, at least my forties, um, into my forties. I presented everywhere, especially when I was in my twenties and thirties. Any possible place I could present any possible audience, I don't care what it is. I have spoken in front of junior high school students, high school students, adults, adult education. I've taught at university, I've taught in graduate school, I presented in medical school, I presented to professional audiences, medical audiences, dieticians. I presented to the elderly. I have presented to prisoners. I have presented to audiences of all different colors, uh, and nationalities. Interestingly enough, I have presented to lay people. I have presented to people who are more interested in fitness, more interested in health, more interested in personal achievement. It's, it's anything I could, so I could understand how I speak to these people. And when you get out there and present enough, um, and you happen to be in private practice, that's a wonderful way to do a little bit of PR for you and your business right at the end. And by the way, if anybody is interested in learning more about me and my work and some of the private one-on-one work that I do, I have some business cards and brochures right at that table in the back. There you go. So I have built my private practice over the years in part through presentations.
It is a great way to impact people with information and hopefully inspiration. Most presenters are not inspiring. That is just my experience. Most presenters hurl information at you as if that is the gold standard of presenting. Just give information. Chances are you have sat in presentations and be bored out of your noodle. Have you ever had that happen sitting in a presentation and you're just bored? And then compare that to a presentation you were in and you were inspired and you were at the edge of your seat. That's how different presentations can be. People who are just hurling information at you do not truly know how to present. So again, presenting can be a wonderful confidence builder. I want you to think of presenting as teaching light.
It's the lightest form of teaching. It's like light beer. It's the lightest possible teaching one can do. I also want you to look at presenting never, ever, ever as a direct money maker. People think oftentimes who are new to the helping professions or they're new to speaking and presenting that universe, they think they're gonna make all this money. Giving a lecture here and a lecture there, I will save you a lot of time and tell you that it would be a waste of your time. The people who make money doing the presentations that are, that, that, that have any substance to it, meaning to the amount of money you would make, the people making money doing presentations, are people who are already famous. People who are already bestselling authors, people who are already accepted leaders in the field. You're not gonna just all of a sudden start getting, you know, thousands of dollars to go do a presentation somewhere. It doesn't work that way. I don't care what anybody tells you, so I'm just trying to save you a lot of time that way. It's, it's not a direct money maker. Once again, it's an indirect money maker in terms of, it points back to your practice. And if you are teaching IE doing a series of classes, let's say you can, your presentation can point to that
if you do some kind of consulting work. So when I used to do a lot of presenting, I was also at a point in my life I was doing consulting work for different educational organizations and for different food and supplement related companies. So presentations for me often generated more presentations and or more presentation opportunity and or generated some corporate connections. But I had a very specific skill set that I had to offer. So I'm just saying do not go into presenting. So you think, oh, I'm gonna go present at this health club and then you negotiate for money. It's like, no, $50, a hundred dollars. It, it, it's, it's, it's not worth it to try to get that money. It's better to present for free. So people want you to present so it's no cost for them for whatever venue you are at or whatever health club or spa or whatever. You don't look to make money from a used look to get in the door. Um, the money is made by creating PR for yourself. Okay, let's talk about teaching. Teaching. I'm calling it a path and a service.
Teaching is a responsibility. It asks a lot of us. Teaching is not a short term experience. The people who taught you in first grade weren't just there for one day to give you a presentation. They were your teacher for the first grade. The teacher that taught you your freshman English course was there for the whole course.
The teacher that you study with, you might study with for years. Certain teachers, they might not be your direct teacher in a classroom, but you read all their books and you listen to their videos. You might do that for years. There are certain teachers I've been following for years.
Teaching is a path and it's a service, it's a responsibility. It asks a lot of us. Teaching is not about the teacher, it's about the students. It is a far, far, far bigger undertaking than presenting. It is a commitment over time and it requires a fierce commitment because teaching is about awakening others. It is not about hurling information at them. It is about awakening and inspiring others. That is what I'm calling a teacher. Yeah, you can teach a class in how to, you know, uh, paint your house. Okay, I get it. That's not gonna be about awakening somebody. So that's not the kind of teaching I'm talking about when it comes to the health space, when it comes to the nutrition space, when it comes to the personal growth and development space. When it comes to the eating psychology space, what I wish you say is, is teaching is all about awakening and inspiring others. It is not just about hurling information to people. If people want information hurled at them, they can get online. You and I remember our great teachers forever.
We remember our great teachers forever. I remember my grade school teachers. I remember all my junior high school and high school teachers. I remember my great teachers forever.
How many presenters do you remember? Like for me, maybe one. That was a great presentation. You don't usually remember those forever by the way. A good teacher generally knows how to present.
You have to know how to hold your audience. You have to know how to hold people's attention. You have to know how to communicate with them. But it's not a show, it's not acting. It's not a one way. Street teaching is a two way street. You sit in a classroom, you dialogue, you have questions, you break the class down into diads or triads and people share with each other. And then you get together and you talk again. You want a good teacher for your children. You don't want a good presenter for them. When I was going around and looking at different schools when my son was young, I wasn't thinking I want a good presenter and no, I want a good teacher. I want, this goes with the good teachers, not someone who's gonna come in and give a good lecture and then leave. You get what I'm saying? Can you feel the commitment? Do you remember the commitment that some of your great teachers had to you? Especially if you had great teachers when you were a little kid. They're some of the most dedicated people. Those are the teachers who should be making all the money, the big money, you know, to me, the grade school teachers, the ones who really care about children and awakening minds. Um, but that's the model that I use for teaching that commitment, that love of teaching, that love of awakening others, helping others open their eyes, helping others learn how to learn. Helping others see how to see
giving tools and insights that a person can now have for life. That's teaching.
Teacher is an archetype. Presenter. Yeah, presenter's kind of a new archetype. And the new archetype of the presenter is the TED Talk. It's not a very robust and deep archetype quite frankly. So if you hear me playing it down a little bit, it's because I am, it's 'cause everybody's worshiping Ted Talks and anybody can be trained to do a TED talk and people worship it and it's a performance and that's fine. I'm not knocking that. But what I'm saying is don't give it more value than it has. What I'm saying is value teaching more quite honestly, because that's far more robust, it's far more deep, it's far more expansive, it's far more powerful, has far more value. Just does so because teachers and archetype, meaning teachers have existed since forever. And the more we stay true to the archetype, the better we are at teaching. What do I mean by that? Archetypally teachers come from a place of purpose
in a TED Talk, the teacher is up there and they're impressing you with their knowledge and their big words and there's a lot of ego up there in presentations such as Ted Talks. It's an ego show quite frankly. Uh, are there people who don't come from that place and Ted Talks? Sure, absolutely. So I'm overstating my case here because everybody's just these days, like people just go crazy over it, how wonderful it is, how great this is and no, don't give it so much value. Please. Um, so teachers can set aside their ego. They can invoke selfish selflessness.
Teaching is not about the teacher. Teaching is about the student presenting is about the presenter. Yeah. You want your people to come away with something good, but you're focused on your self when you're presenting, especially if it's a big audience and it's not a back and forth and you're not taking questions. Yeah, there are hybrid presentations where you can function as a teacher and be with a group for an hour and have question and answer going back and forth. That that's actually more of a skill. Trust me, those TED talks that you see, if they had to interact with people and bounce off of them, um, and play off people's comments or questions, they won't be very good at it
because they're putting on a show. They're a trained actor or actress in that moment. So again, I've said to you, that's a great skill, it's a wonderful skill. Great, great, great, great, great. And it's different from teaching.
The teacher archetype goes into challenging unexplored and edgy topics when needed. Teacher is here to raise consciousness, raise awareness, help people wake up, draw them out. It's a deep service. A teacher is willing to be a mouthpiece for a higher wisdom. A teacher is here to draw out, to cultivate their students,
to help the students be the best that they can be.
A presenter is in front of a room being the best that the presenter can be. So the listeners in the room walk away going, wow, that was good. That's kind of what that is.
A teacher's a longer term commitment, a teacher's a deeper commitment because there's a bigger goal to raise consciousness, to wake people up, to help draw people out, to help invite people more and more and more and more and more into their potential.
Why teach one reason? Really because you feel called. If you don't feel called, don't even bother. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it, don't do it. I don't recommend it. Uh, because you have nothing else to do. Oh, I should just be a teacher and let me start teaching classes because that sounds really cool. I'm gonna say don't do it. Do it. If you feel called and inspired, do it. If you want to impact people more deeply, do it. If you want to expand your personal and professional mission, do it. If you're intrigued by the challenge, because it is a challenge, don't expect to just start teaching and be this great teacher and have everybody loving you and it's gonna be this easy experience. It's not you're gonna learn on the job. Teaching is extremely rewarding. It is a i I will say that from a personal standpoint, um, if a teacher isn't loving teaching, then that's a sad thing to me. I've had college professors in the past who were bored outta their wits. I found that to be very offensive. Don't stand up in front of that room and be my teacher and be bored outta your wits. That's not a good teacher. You're teaching me how to be bored. Um, so teaching is a transformational path. It will make you grow far bigger than being a presenter. I also wanna suggest don't exactly do it for the money.
Sure, I would like you if you become a teacher in any way, shape or form to make money at it. But don't do it for the money. Don't do it because it sounds like a good financial opportunity. It's not. It is hard to make yourself make it as an independent teacher these days. It just is. I know that for a fact. Fact, I do it for a living and I know many people who do it for a living and there are not a lot of us at the end of the day. So you do it because you are drawn to do it. You feel called to do it. It's a passion of yours. You are intrigued by the challenge. You want to impact people more deeply. You like being more intimate with people
And then you let the money be what it is. You let the income be what it is as opposed to doing it for the money and having how much money you make at it. Drive that whole experience. If the experience is being driven by, well I'm not making enough money, then don't be doing it. I mean that, um, I wish I could say different, but you gotta be called is my belief to make it worth your while.
Even if you don't wanna be a teacher. We often find ourselves teaching. We access the teacher archetype In our coaching practice, we access the teacher archetype. When you're parenting, we access the teacher archetype In our relationships, oftentimes you're accessing the teacher archetype in the workplace. It's a beautiful archetype to come from when the, when there is a teachable moment with your children, with your friend, with your loved one, with your client, with someone in the workplace.
We often come upon teachable moments in that moment. You want to channel the teacher within and then you can. When we come from the appropriate archetype in any given moment, what we have to say is far more easily heard.
A teacher teaches out of love for teaching, not because it's a good business.
I wanna mention 11 teaching guidelines.
I wanna suggest that there's an inner game to teaching. There's a hidden set of metaphysics that guides the teaching process and the teaching journey. So to be a good teacher then we need to let teaching teach us.
Teaching will have its own agenda for us and will put each of us through a unique set of challenges and growth experiences. Such challenges and growth experiences enable us to remove the inner obstacles that would stop us from being a good teacher. Stop us from being the teacher that we're meant to be.
So let me mention to you what, to me me are these teaching guidelines,
principle number one, teaching guideline number one. The secret to teaching is to understand that teaching is a path, is a service, is a journey, and is a calling.
It's a path, it's a service, it's a journey, it's a calling. That's what I think the secret to benefiting from being a teacher is it's the secret to being quote unquote successful as a teacher. First and foremost, it's a path, it's a service, it's a journey. It's a calling. Once again, it's not a money maker. It's not something you do because you have nothing else to do. It's not something you do because you're bored. It's not something you do because it looks cool and you want to be like that cool teacher who seems to be famous and making a ton of money. Don't do it. You will be disappointed.
Uh, the helping professions are littered with people who were trying to be teachers. I think for many of the wrong reasons, because it looks sexy and it looks like people are making lots of money at it.
Approach it from a deeper place and you will have a far better journey with this. You really will.
Another principle number two around teaching is that teaching doesn't always give you what you want, but will tend to give you what you need. Another way of saying that is once again, teaching is a path. The path, when you embark on the path of being a teacher, all of a sudden teaching the teaching archetype grabs you and it puts you in the classroom called learning how to be a teacher.
When you're learning how to be a teacher, you are actually a student learning how to be a teacher. Even when you're a teacher, you're still learning how to be a teacher. I've been teaching many years and I'm still a student of teaching.
Teaching never gives you what you want. A hundred percent tends to give you what you need at the time in the moment. That's just my experience.
Principle number three, the best teachers don't see themselves as people who do teaching, but as people who embrace the archetype of a teacher. Meaning when I'm teaching in front of a room, I'm embracing the teacher archetype. When I'm not in front of the room, I'm not in teacher archetype. When I'm with my son, I'm in father archetype. When when I'm with my friend, I'm, I'm in friend archetype.
When I'm hiking, I am in my hiker archetype, whatever that is. So when you're a teacher, you are not a person who does teaching.
You are a person who embraces that archetype and listens for what that archetype, what that invisible energy is asking of us. Because a teacher is a serious job, serious means it's a big responsibility. It is a privilege to be in a position to help cultivate others, to help inspire others, to help others be the best that they can be. That is a big responsibility
to really embrace that responsibility. We embrace the archetype of a teacher. It is not I who does the teaching in a lot of ways it's the archetype that moves me.
I don't know if that makes sense for you, but it's um, it's powerful. It's For those of you who've been, I don't know, in private practice for a while, you know that when you close your door and you're with your patient or your client, oftentimes there's an energy that takes you over. You become a different person. You're not that practitioner all the time. You're that person when you're with your client
and a persona takes over a character takes over an archetype and energy takes over. And that's what we stay true to. Next. My friends, great students. Number four, great students make great teachers. Wanna be a great teacher, be a great student. I mean that. If you're not a good student, forget about being a good teacher. You must be a good student to learn the art of teaching. I mean, how could it possibly be any other way? It's like any other skill. You have to learn it.
A teacher is teaching to students. So you must understand students. You must understand what it is to be a student. You must understand what it is to be a really good student.
You wanna be a great teacher. Be a great student. Love learning. Retain the information and the inspiration that's important to you. Put it into action. Listen to a teacher. Take what works for you. Throw out what doesn't. Don't make the teacher wrong for the things that don't work for you at the expense of throwing out the baby with the bath water and missing the good things that do work for you. So you have to have a flexible mind to understand that teachers ain't perfect. If you are a teacher, you will not be perfect. You will say some things that your students find uninteresting, boring, dumb or useless or worse. And you will say things that your students find excessively helpful, extremely inspiring. Sometimes life changing is a package deal. A great student doesn't let the faults of a teacher get in their way of learning. Great student is committed to learning. A great teacher is committed to teaching.
You have to be a good learner in order to be a good teacher. I mean, doesn't that make logical sense to you? You gotta love learning, which means you gotta love being a student. If you want to have love being a teacher, it's a package deal in a big way.
And as you get more and more into teaching, you realize that in every moment that you have a teaching opportunity, you are learning.
Learning how to be a better teacher and learning how to be a better student. Number five, here's why I think you should teach. Teach to raise consciousness. Teach to bring people into the light. Teach to awaken others. Teach to draw people into their best self and their best potential through the vehicle of whatever you're teaching.
You could teach you, you can teach and help raise consciousness and bring people into the light and awaken others and to draw people into their best self and their best potential. If you're teaching art, if you're teaching dance, if you're teaching yoga, if you are, if you're teaching math, anything just about, you can do it in such a way that you are helping elevate people. You're elevating life.
If you're not teaching to raise consciousness and bring people into the light and awaken others in some way, shape or form. If you're not teaching to help draw people into their best self and their highest potential, what are you doing? Really? Like what's the point?
Don't teach to hurl information at someone. People don't need more information.
You ain't gonna make a living off of that. Um, you know, yeah, you can have your online portal where you deliver lots of information that's different from teaching. It's having an information center, which is fine, which is a hundred percent fine. Different from teaching.
If you're looking to teach to tell people to eat more greens, you will not have a big audience at all. And you'll get bored of that message very quickly. There's only so many times you can say that. Now, there are some people who can get inspired about teaching people how to eat healthy and they can do that for a long time. So for those people, I would say good for you because the world needs that. But I'm saying in general, in the health, nutrition, eating psychology and personal development space, information delivery is not enough. It is not where the value is.
The value is in awakening people. The value is in helping people raise their consciousness, open their eyes more, help them become a better them. That's value.
I think you get that. Number six, my friends. Being a good teacher is an ongoing practice in self-acceptance, in self-confidence in boldness and in surrender to a higher mission.
So you wanna be a good teacher, you gotta practice. It's gonna take some time. You gotta have a lot of self-acceptance because we're not always gonna be great at it. You gotta have self-confidence. Self-confidence doesn't mean you're gonna be doing everything great all the time. It means you have the confidence that even when you don't do something great, when you make a mistake, you have the confidence that you're gonna move through that and stand by it. And even if people throw tomatoes at you, you're gonna be fine.
It takes a little bit of a boldness to conduct a classroom, conduct a group of people as a teacher. And I believe it takes a surrender to a higher mission,
to a higher power, to a higher wisdom that wants to come through As a teacher. I believe we are channels, we are conduits, we are conductors of a higher wisdom.
Can you let yourself be that instrument?
Everything about teaching, you will never be a hundred percent ready to teach. By the way. You gotta begin somewhere. You're not gonna begin as an expert. You're probably not gonna begin as even very good. Yeah, some people knock it out of the park or right when they begin. But you're never truly a hundred percent ready to teach.
So if you've been thinking about it for a while and waiting to be ready, then yeah, maybe there's no ready. What do you say when you play hide and go seek Ready or not? Here I come. That's kind of what it is. Sometimes it's ready or not. Here we go.
Number eight, teaching will challenge your ego. My friends assume there will be people who love you and people who don't love you. That happens in presenting as well. But oftentimes when you're presenting to an audience, there's a little bit more of a buffer zone. And even in presenting, yeah, you get your ego challenge. But in teaching, because it's more intimate space, you're dealing with people more close, more closely. You're getting into more conversations that matter and you're gonna be people that like you and people that don't like you. There's gonna be people that stay with you and people that leave.
Yeah, that's gonna challenge your ego. So there's some people that just, they don't like the way you talk. They don't like the way you look. They don't like the car you drove up in. They don't like your choice of earrings. They don't whatever. It doesn't matter. It doesn understand that it's, it's not a popularity contest at all. I mean that you gotta be mission-driven to be far beyond the popularity of it.
Teaching is a craft. It's a craft like any other craft that you learn, like any other skill that you learn. And one of the key ways to improve as a teacher is to learn the art of teaching. So yeah, we have to learn the art of teaching 'cause there's an art to it. And to get out there and practice your teaching
like any craft, like any kind of art, whether you're painting in oils or watercolors, whether you're learning the craft of, um, of playing music, the craft of writing, it's a craft. So you gotta learn, you gotta learn the craft, the art of teaching, and you have to practice as well at the same time. That's how we learn. And it's really true, my friends number 10 that we so often teach what we need to learn. That's okay. It doesn't matter if what you're teaching, you happen to be learning it. I'm still learning about what I teach. What a good thing. You get to remind yourself all the time. Remind other people. And if you're inspired about the message, then hallelujah. And you're enjoying teaching it and you're listening to yourself and you're learning, that's a beautiful thing. Just letting you know you don't have to have mastered a thing that you're teaching.
You're being a good student by teaching what you need to learn. You are learning about what you're teaching. I trust a teacher like that because they're learning.
But what else? My friends teaching can simply be very, very, very, very magical. I've had so many magical experiences over the course of really teaching since I was a teenager. That's kind of the first classes I was teaching to little kids. Um, it can be very magical
and I think magic is good. World needs a little more magic. We need a little more magic sometimes.
You know, when it comes to the hidden architecture of teaching, I believe there is surely an invisible unseen structure to effective teaching. Therefore, good teaching is it's not an accident. So practicing and utilizing the right teaching tools and distinctions gives us the ability to tap into the power of the hidden architecture of teaching. So let me mention some of the, some of the skills. I'm gonna cover some skills that help you tap into the hidden architecture of teaching skill. Number one, to tap into the hidden architecture of teaching and help, the magic is to own the room.
Mocho and ante. My friends own the room. Meaning teach from your queen or king. I don't care how old you are, you're a 25-year-old. Be a king, be a queen. Teach from your royalty. Be a royal person command. Assume that the room is your kingdom. It's your queen.
So in other words, energetically you are getting bigger than the room. If you're looking, oh my God, look at all these people and who am I? What am I gonna do? You're getting smaller than the room. Now, the room might have seven people in it that you're teaching too. You have to get bigger energetically than that room. And bigger means you're embracing everyone and everything in it. You are, you are welcoming them into your large, invisible energy field that is assuming the room is your kingdom and kingdom. This is, this is my kingdom. This is my kingdom.
I am the royalty here and I am teaching from that place.
Your students don't want you to shrink. I'm not asking you to be a big ego. When I say teach from your king and queen, I'm asking you to be in your royalty. I'm asking you to be in your excellence. I'm asking you to be in your dignity. I'm asking you to be in your humility. Kings and queens are humble. I'm asking you to be in your compassion and your understanding and your unconditional acceptance. And I'm asking you
to not be in your peasant mind and go, oh my God, is this enough? Am I good enough? Do you all like me? Uh, tell me what a great teacher I am. No, you have to get bigger than that and I'm embracing everyone in the room and everything in the room and whatever happens in the room because you are the royalty. It's your queendom, it's your kingdom. Whatever happens in the room is actually your responsibility. If the lights go out, you, you handle that. Teach in the dark. I've done it.
If the, you know, if the heat's not working, okay, your responsibility, if somebody's talking too much, that's your responsibility. If people are falling asleep, that's your responsibility. If people are excited and want more, that's your responsibility.
If people have feedback that's uncomfortable, it's your responsibility to hear it.
If everybody's loving it, yep, that's your responsibility to embrace that. So whatever happens in a room, you're not a victim, you're a king, you're a queen. Something happens in your kingdom or kingdom. You don't go to some other king or queen to bring into your queen to fix it. You handle it. This is your people. This is your tribe. You're in charge. You're the conductor. What are you gonna do? Own the room. Next. Teaching skill disappear. Isn't that interesting? Disappear. When I say disappear, it's, it's a paradox. It means letting go of your ego because teaching is not about you. Presenting is more about you consider every participant in the room, interestingly enough, as fellow royalty. So even though I just said you're the king, you're the queen, guess what you're teaching to kings and queens, it's fine. Kings and queens will often visit other royalty when they visit another kingdom or queendom. They don't sit on the king's lap or they don't take his chair. They have their chairs, that's fine. Royalty understands royalty. It's like, it's okay. We don't have a big ego. It's okay, if this is my kingdom and I'm in the king's chair and you guys are sitting in these other chairs,
But you as the king, you as the queen, I want you to consider every participant in the room as your fellow king and queen, your fellow royalty. So you respect them. You have a job to do on a service to deliver. So you have to get out of the way. Your fears, you have to get outta your fears out of the way. Your ego, do I look good? Do you love me? Is this okay? And oftentimes, my friends, it's not about what you say, it's about the words that are spoken through you. It's about what you let come through you. So you're trusting in the experience. You're trusting in letting the archetype move you. Like I said, you're a conductor for a higher wisdom. When I'm worried, oh my God, what am I gonna say? Are people gonna love me? Then you're in a stress response. When you're in a stress response, you are prefrontal cortex isn't firing like it ought to be. That is the center of wisdom and integration.
Relax. It's not about you. Another teaching skill, I love this one. Find your invisible audience. So before you ever teach, or even if you are teaching, some of you might be teaching online or choose to teach online, and you won't always see your students regardless. You have an audience. If you wanna be a teacher, my assumption is you have an audience, you wanna be a teacher, you have an audience, but that audience is invisible. They exist in the ether. You can't see them right now. You're sitting in the comfort of your own home. You're in your car, you're taking a walk. You wanna be a teacher, you have an audience. Your audience is invisible.
Even when I'm sitting in a room, standing in a room talking to people that I can see in that room, yeah, I'm talking to those people, but I'm actually talking to more than them. I'm still talking to my invisible audience. I'm speaking to my collective audience. It's easiest to access your invisible audience as you become more intimate with your own passion, your own gifts, your own hunger, your own mission. As you get clear of what you wanna say,
what do I have to say and who do I think I have to say it to?
Your invisible audience in a weird way is always with you. They show up in any room you teach in, and it's best to be aware of them as often as you can. Have you taught before? Have you presented before? Who shows up? What kind of questions do they ask?
The beginning, the beginner's mistake that a lot of teachers make is they teach purely to themselves. They teach as if they're speaking to themself. Beginning writers make this mistake. They wanna write a book, they wanna write a novel, and they write it to themselves and nobody else understands it. Nobody else appreciates it.
As a teacher, you have an audience. That audience is invisible. Can you tune into them? Can you feel them? Can you sense them? Can you see what they're asking of you? If teaching is a calling, then your audience is calling you. You get what I'm saying? It's the inner game. It's the energetics. It's the invisibles of teaching. Let's talk about being a leader for a moment.
It's interesting, I I, I think it is actually a little bit harder to define than teacher and presenter. So leader is an archetype for sure. When I say the word leader, meaning you kind of have an idea at least in your mind of what a leader is. You have probably have an image, you have a few thoughts. Here's what I wanna say about leader and the leader archetype. This is an archetype. This is a role. This is a persona that you can adopt in any given moment, any given moment. There, there, there are times during a day when all of a sudden I find myself in a leadership moment
and I take leadership for 30 seconds.
You know, you could be driving your car and everybody's stopped at a stop sign and there's a four-way, stop sign, and nobody knows who to go and what to do. I, I might step into the leadership moment and I motion for the car to the left of me. Come on, you go. And then I motion for the car to the right of me. Okay, you go. So I direct traffic from my car. I make sure the people see me. They go and then I know I'm safe. They've gone. I can go, But it's a role. Okay, I'm gonna take leadership here. I'm gonna take responsibility. In a larger sense, a leader has some vision. Okay, here's my vision. I'm stopped at this four way stop sign. I want a good outcome. I want us all to move. I want to get where I want to go. I want you guys to get where you want to go. And I don't want us crashing into each other. I got a vision. A leader has a vision. A leader has a mission. A leader has a direction in some way, shape or form. A leader is very willing to guide to where they've been.
This Is one of the great ways to be a leader, to lead people to where you've been. You're a trip leader, you've gone down this trail before. You love this trail, you know this trail. Great. You can take other people on that trail. Well watch out for this. Watch out for that. Hey, you know something, this trail, it's gonna take us 45 minutes and you said you only have 30 minutes, so we're just gonna do a short part of this trail. So a leader is willing to guide people to where they've been.
A leader is also willing to guide others into the unknown. That's a little harder.
Some leaders will take us into the unknown. They're leading us through the desert. We don't know where we're going, but a leader has enough skills to manage the experience of being in the unknown.
Leader is a role you can adopt in any specific field, any endeavor within any group, within any given circumstance, within any moment. Boom, you can grab that archetype and take over. You can be a leader in your community. You could be a leader in your family. You can be a leader in your relationship. You could be a leader for a moment in your relationship. You can be a leader When there's a little bit of a crisis somewhere you can be a leader. When people are wanting to have a good time and a good experience and, Hey, I got a good idea. Follow me. Let's go here, let's go here, let's go do this.
A secret to leading, We always think of of leaders as these big egos.
In many ways, a leader is essentially a servant of the people they lead as opposed to the big guy, the big cheese, the big alpha dog.
The more a leader sees themselves as a servant of the people they lead, the better they can lead.
A leader is not the superior to the people they lead. They are the servant to the people they lead. They might have certain places where they are superior in certain kinds of knowledge or certain kinds of skills, and they are actually a servant to the people they lead that my friends would be a very good leader. Leaders who are not a servant of the people they lead are serving their own ego and they're serving their own needs.
It is essentially how the power of leadership corrupts people.
A leader thinks that they are leading people, that they are better than, bigger than, more than, and that those they are leading are less than and that their job is to be the bigger, smarter person. Just the opposite. A leader is serving the people that they lead. When you do that, I believe strongly that you are in alignment with a higher power.
Why be a leader in any way, shape, or form? Once again because you are called or inspired. That's it. In any given moment, if you're not called, if you're not inspired, don't do it. No point feeling called or feeling inspired. That's a good thing.
You know, there's all different kinds of leadership styles, my friends. It's helpful to get outta your mind. The image of, I don't know. What I used to have as a leader when I was young was, was some male figure who was powerful and dominant and tall and had a booming voice and told everybody what to do. That's the image that I grew up with of what a leader is. Um, it was a hell of a lot more than that. A leader can lead verbally. They can lead silently. A leader can lead through their intellect. We often call such people thought leaders. They have new thoughts, interesting thoughts. They take people into new thought realms. A leader can simply lead through their charisma. To me, people just have a lot of charisma and you wanna follow them. You wanna listen to them. A leader can just lead through their actions.
A leader can lead by example. They don't have to say anything. You just watch what they do. They are clearly showing up by example. They are an exemplary person
in what they do and how they conduct themselves. And their example is how they are a leader. A leader can lead through planning. Some leaders are just like, that's what they do. They're great planners. Okay, here's the plan. Here's how we're gonna roll out this project. Sometimes project managers, that's what they are. They're leaders. By being able to plan and manage, a leader can lead through the deeds that they do, through very deliberate methods, through writing. You could lead through your writing.
Some people, they're great leaders, but they've never necessarily spoken to a lot of people about it, but it's through their words. A leader can lead behind the scenes, my friends, and you'll never know them. And they're pulling strings and advising people and they have the ears and they're whispering into the right ear. So a leader can be completely behind the scenes and nobody knows them or they can be leading publicly. You can lead in any size group. You could be a leader in your family.
Everyone has a different leadership style. You have your own leadership style. You have the ways actually that you would lead
from the dte. Jing Lasu said the best leaders are those who are barely known to men. The next best leaders are those who are cherished and ex stalled. The lesser of all leaders are feared and the least of all leaders are scorned.
I love that this is the Dao is concept of saying the great leaders don't have an ego, so people don't even know them and they're leading and they don't need to be known Next best leaders. Yeah, we know who you are and thanks for being such a great leader. The next best leaders, which aren't very good, are the leaders that we fear who wants to have a leader that we fear. And you definitely don't wanna have a leader that you're scorning or you are embarrassed by. You can't stand.
Isn't it interesting how we live in a world where so many of our leaders are scorned
and so many of our leaders have huge egos, and even the leaders that were taught to worship that are supposedly good, all the people that own the Microsofts and the people that started Apple Computer and the people that are billionaires who run this company and that company, and we're taught to worship them and their images are all over the place. Really, it's an interesting, we choose interesting leaders. I don't know that those are great leaders, just 'cause they're billionaires and they sell a lot of stuff on Amazon. Are you really a great leader? I don't think so.
Why lead and to where my friends, here's a suggestion, lead to people into greater awareness. It's like being a teacher. Lead people into their best self, lead people to where they truly want to go and need to go.
When my client comes to see me, yes, I'm a practitioner. Yeah. I step into my teacher archetype the whole time. I'm with my client for the duration of our relationship. I am a leader. I am helping lead them to where I believe they truly need to go. I'm committed to their highest goal. I am not committed to their tiny goals. So I'm leading them to where I know they truly wish to go. They truly wish to go into their greatest self-expression, their greatest happiness, their greatest possible incarnation that they could have on planet Earth. Yeah, that means they weigh this and they weigh that and they have the right diet and the right body. I get it, but it's so much more than that. So you're leading people to where they truly wanna go or need to go. You're leading people into their best self. You are leading people into greater awareness in the big picture.
A good leader, I believe, starts with knowing how to lead one person that's themselves. A good leader has to trust in themselves.
I believe very strongly a good leader trusts in a higher guidance. A good leader follows the leader that leads them. Oftentimes, that leader is a higher power. A good leader, refrains from self attack, do not follow a leader that follows you into self attack. It leads you into self attack. A good leader will stand by themselves and thus can stand by others.
If you can't stand by yourself, it's harder to stand by other people. Truly, if you can't trust in yourself, then how can you expect other people to trust in you?
So yeah, leadership asks us to have a good, healthy ego in a healthy way. Just believe in yourself, trust in yourself. Trusting in yourself doesn't mean you're gonna be perfect to make the right decisions all the time. Trust in self means that even if I fall off the horse, even if something goes wrong, even if I don't have a good outcome, I trust that I can turn that around. I trust that I can recover. I trust that I can get back on my horse. I trust that I can proceed further, learn from that experience and move forward with a sense of dignity and learning and understanding and growth. That's what I'm calling trust and self.
My friends. You and I can learn to be a presenter. You can learn to be a teacher. You can even learn to be a leader. And it's all about calling when it comes to these. I really believe that it, it just has to be a calling. It's an inner desire or drive that doesn't necessarily need to make perfect sense. This is just my strong opinion and a calling tends to have its own wisdom that simply asks us to follow it. I'm always about people following their calling,
Some final musings and some questions. Really, in what ways do you find yourself teaching, whether it's with your clients, your friends, your family, your loved ones, anyone like, do you have teachable moments in your life? Do you have situations where you're being a teacher and you don't even realize that that's what you're being?
In what ways do you find yourself being a leader
with clients, with friends, with family, with loved ones, with anyone?
Little ways? It doesn't have to be big ways. How do you lead? What is your style and is life? How is life calling you more to teach and or lead? Once again, that could be clients, it could be friends, it could be family, it could be loved ones, it could be potential students. Anyone. How is life calling you in that direction?
How can you listen to that calling a little bit more?
Those are my thoughts, my friends on teaching, leading and presenting. And I as always hope that that was useful for you. I know it's a topic I find very near and dear,
and right around the corner we're gonna be talking about the future of nutrition. That'll be interesting. What is the future of nutrition? You'll see, and I'll see you on the other side. Thanks as always.
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