Earning The Right To Teach

Have you ever sat down in a seminar or lecture and the presenter simply walked on stage or in the front of the audience and started teaching?

At any time during his or her presentation, did you wonder who they were, where they came from, how they came to know the information they are sharing? Most of us wonder what gives the person in front of room the credibility that makes it OK for us to accept information from them.

Earn The Right To Teach

Well, if you have, you’re not alone. What the presenter failed to do is “Earn The Right” to teach you and because he didn’t, you have a difficult time accepting the information coming out of his mouth as fact.

Earning the right to speak and stand in front of an audience is critical with adults. What many people fail to understand is that it’s also important with kids and especially teens who are beginning to question everything.

Most adults like to point out that kids PUSH adults, testing boundaries every chance they get. Well, what if what they are really doing is testing you to find out if they can trust you enough to listen and respect your wisdom?

Learning how to create and present the Earn The Right section of your lessons is critical to your success. And if no one every taught you this part of teaching, again, you’re not alone. But now that you know how important it is…let’s get one crafted for you.

How to create YOUR “Earn The Right”

There’s a very easy way to begin this part of your talk, presentation, workshop…whatever you want to call it. Simply stand in front of your audience and ask them…

“So, since we’re going to be spending this time together, is it OK if I tell you a little about myself?” (I learned this at Peak Potential Train The Trainer events.)

What are they going to say? No? They say, “Sure…tell us why we should listen to YOU and believe YOU!” And then they sit back, ready to hear your story.

Earn The Right Guidelines

  1. What you’re about to tell them must speak to why they are there. If you’re doing a seminar on cats, don’t tell them how you came to love dogs! It has to be relevant.
  2. Keep this part of your talk as short as you can…maximum 8 minutes. Rule of thumb is that the shorter your talk, the shorter your Earn the Right section. It’s a great idea to come up with different length stories for different length presentations. One minute for a short twenty minute talk, maybe eight minutes for an all day program.
  3. It’s got to be engaging…tell a story they can relate to.
  4. It’s got to be emotional. Ask yourself what emotion you need them to be in at the end of your Earn The Right piece for them to be receptive to the information you’re about to share with them. If you need them to feel empowered to take on a new challenge, include a story about taking on a new challenge in your ETR piece. If you need them to want to help others, tell them about a time when you helped someone else. And the emotions that you need your audience to be in will change from topic to topic so always ask yourself, “What emotional place do I want them to be in in order to be receptive to my presentation.”
  5. You must know your audience. Who are they? Why are they there? Is is mostly women? Men? Are they in their 20’s or 50’s? Are they successful, there to learn how to be successful or what? Speak to THEM.

Once you understand these guidelines, sit down with pencil and pen or your computer and start writing. Do NOT think you’ll get this right the first time. It’s impossible to know how an audience is going to take an Earn The Right story and every audience is different.

An exceptional way to present an ETR section is to use the GAP method that is taught by Joel Roberts where you start off by saying something like…

“Hi, I’m Elisabeth Donati and I’m an expert at teaching kids the money skills and habits they need to eventually move out and stay out…but it wasn’t always this way…

Where you go from there is right into your Earn The Right Story. This particular earn the right story would be used for people who want to learn how to each The Money Game or Camp Millionaire. I use a different ETR when I’m teaching my Creative Wealth for Women program.

Using one of my own Earn The Right stories, I might continue on as follows (depending on the audience)…

“You see, when I was 35 years old I started looking around at many of my friends and I started wondering why some people had money and other people did not. Now don’t get me wrong, I can’t stand here in front of you and sing any type of a sad song. I’ve always had a nice home to live in, plenty of clothing to wear…even though I made most of it myself in high school and college. I’ve always had a car to drive and whatever food I wanted. It’s that I haven’t ever had the EXTRA money people have to go on vacations, buy stuff I really wanted, put money away for when I’m an old bag (laughter)…stuff like that.

“But I’ve discovered that something happens when you start to wonder about stuff. Things begin showing up in your life…coincidences begin to happen as if someone turned on a magic switch to show you the way. This is what happened for me.

“About that time, someone gave me the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. My life has never been the same since.

“I ate this book up, studied it. Bought more money books and couldn’t get enough. I realized that the only reason I didn’t KNOW about money was because no one ever taught me about it.”

“It was about this time when…”. And then I go on with my story. And again, I tweak the story based on who I am chatting with.

Lastly, TEST your story over and over again. As I said before, you will never get it perfect. You will continue to tweak and refine and add to and delete from the story based on how each group reacts and embraces the story. This is exactly as it should be. How boring life would be if people and circumstances and situations were always the same. Yawn…

OK, it’s your turn. Now that you know how important it is to Earn The Right to teach kids, teens or adults BEFORE you start teaching them, you have no reason not to engage them from the beginning.

Get to work…you have lives to set up for success!