How I Ended Up Traveling The U.S. Getting Paid To Draw, Write & Teach: Part 9
Part 9: What Am I Doing Teaching this?
I asked for my old job as a trainer back, and they took me in. It was that same feeling one gets when returning to an old girlfriend.
‘It will be different this time,’ I told myself, forgetting what caused the original break up.
‘This time I’ll teach more than the same boring subject. It will be fun. I’ll love it.’ Going beyond teaching Basic Photoshop was a big step in our relationship.
First I offered to teach Advanced Photoshop. This was barely a stretch.
Then they asked if they could fly me to a company to teach them After Effects. I worked in After Effects on a daily basis at my day job, but teaching it was a major commitment. I needed to spend two weeks preparing for what amounted to a single day’s pay, but I said yes. It meant pushing myself, and that’s what mattered.
Soon after, I volunteered to teach a class in Web Design. I’d worked as a web designer for two years of my life, but trying to teach Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks in five hours seemed like a respectable challenge. After that, I took on teaching Print Design. It was five hours covering Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat Pro, InDesign, and Bridge. It had been two years since I’d last used Illustrator or Flash, and I’d never used Acrobat Pro, Fireworks, or Bridge before. It was the sort of challenge I needed.
Every so often I got emails from the company asking if I could take on more classes. Could I teach a full day class on Adobe Acrobat 9? Programming in Oracle? SQL? I’d barely touched them and had no interest in learning them, so my answer was a steady no, until they threw another curve ball my way.
They asked if I wanted to teach a class in Social Media Marketing. I wasn’t sure I could. I had 100,000+ views on my youtube channel at that point and was friends with people who had over a million and made their full time living off of it. I’d worked with dozens of companies to establish their online strategy, but was I qualified to teach a class? I’d been meaning to improve my skills in it ever since I failed to start my own business. Teaching a class on the subject would force me to learn it. And not just learn it, but become amazing at it. I felt woefully underprepared, but I signed up. I had no idea what to expect.
Next Week: Part 10. Preparing to Teach Social Media Marketing