Real. Smart. Now.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about who I most enjoy working with.

The list of qualities was pretty easy to come up with. Here’s what I wrote the other day:

• passionate
• smart
• curious
• not easily duped
• up for it
• want to convince without selling out
• interested in authenticity/being real/being normal (ie not fake or sales-y)

And then I thought about what the people we had trained had in common apart from this psychological profile. I realised that most of the people we had trained fell into two major categories: IT people and small business owners. There are also some people in marketing/PR who have gotten on pretty well with our class too. The IT bit was pretty easy to find, as we have taken 350+ IT managers through our masterclass. What I realised is that the other people had something in common: they were specialists.

We don’t tend to train what I would call ‘professional managers’ ie people whose job it is to manage people. We certainly don’t train sales people.

We tend to train people who have specialist knowledge and need to convey that, to both a specialist and a non-specialist audience.

So you’ll notice that the tagline for Real.Smart.Now has changed. It now reads ‘Credible presentation skills for IT professionals and other specialists.’

That’s because ‘Credible presentation skills for IT professionals and other specialists who are passionate, smart, curious, not easily duped, up for it, want to convince without selling out and are interested in being authentic and not fake’ was a bit long.