gratitude Archives : Conferences That Work

5 Reasons I’m Grateful for My Clients After 40+ Years of Consulting

Monday, May 20th, 2024 by Adrian Segar

I got my first paid consulting job in 1983, solving IT problems for a lumber yard. I’ve been a consultant ever since. I’m so grateful to the hundreds of clients I’ve served over the last 40+ years.

Here are five reasons why I’m grateful for my clients.

1—It’s always a people problem

I was a technology nerd when I got that first gig. I was your guy if you had a problem with personal computers, flaky local area networks, or database systems. It took me about five years of having CEOs confiding to me their non-technical woes despite being hired to solve “tech” problems to learn the truth of Weinberg’s Second Law of Consulting:

“No matter how it looks at first, it’s always a people problem.”

I became fascinated by the culture of organizations. As an outsider, I marveled at the variety of dysfunctions I observed. Over time, I got better at solving the people problems I uncovered. Eventually, I realized I was more interested in working with people than technology.

Without the copious experiences of people problems that my clients provided, I’d never be doing what I love today: facilitating connection between people.

2—My clients allow me to try new things

My clients come to me with problems they can’t (at the time) solve. As I work with them they give me opportunities to try new things. Yes, occasionally, I discover I already know how to solve their problems, but that’s rarely the case. My clients’ wants and needs challenge me to be creative. I invariably end up recommending and doing things I’ve never tried before. Consequently, I learn about what works and what doesn’t. My knowledge base and skill set expand.

Because my clients allow me to try new things, I become a better consultant.

3—My clients are my teachers

I’m grateful for my clients because I learn from them. Here are a couple of examples.

Improving Conferences That Work

I designed and facilitated my first peer conference in 1992. I ran them in my spare time for thirteen years before writing my first book. Conferences That Work: Creating Events That People Love took four years to write. Having spent seventeen years developing the why and how of peer conferences, you might reasonably expect that the book provided a somewhat definitive guide for peer conference rationale and design.

Not so.

I’m still proud of how well Conferences That Work lays out the fundamental reasons for the importance and value of peer conferences. However, it turned out that the implementation sections, adequate for their day, had some important gaps and limitations. When it was published in 2009, my peer conference work exploded.

And, my goodness, I got feedback! It was great feedback. Clients critiqued the approaches I’d developed. Participants said, “Why don’t you do that this way?” It was scary but exciting because much of the feedback included great ideas.

The result was that I wrote two supplements to the book that I published in 2013 and 2015. They included everything I’d learned from my clients that improved peer conferences. I made them free to download. It seemed the least I could do.

Getting thoughtful specific feedback

This doesn’t happen very often. But last week I received a long email from a client whom I’d consulted a couple of times on the design of her organization’s online conferences. After sharing that “our second peer conference was even better than our first” she gave details of “three tweaks…that worked really well for us”.

Her process changes were extraordinarily well-described, creative, and innovative! So good, that I expect to write about them on this blog soon.

Feedback like this is a gift that helps me improve my craft.

4—My clients get me more work

During my 20+ year IT consulting career, word of mouth generated all of my work!

Today, because consulting on meeting design and facilitation is a niche practice, marketing via sharing my website posts with subscribers and on social media has also become a significant source of new clients. When potential clients visit this site, they can view my sample client list, assuring them I have credible authority as a consultant.

5—My clients pay me for work I love to do

Yes, I do pro-bono work (e.g. industry education). And I’m happy to discuss innovative ways of getting paid. (No, not by “exposure”.) But, otherwise, my clients pay me for work I love to do.

How cool is that!

Thank you

Finally, I also want to thank everyone who isn’t a client (yet) who has given me feedback over the years.

That includes the ~2,000 folks who have commented on this blog, my professional friends and colleagues, in person and on social media, and tens of thousands of participants who have supported my work and continue to help me learn and grow.

Thank you.

I’m grateful for you.

Tags: clients, consulting, gratitude| Posted in Consulting, Event design, Learning | No Comments »

750 posts

Tuesday, November 8th, 2022 by Adrian Segar

My WordPress dashboard tells me I’ve written 750 posts since I began this blog exactly thirteen years ago. At least one new post every week since 2009. I have a few thoughts.

Surprise and delight

If you had told me back in November 2009 that I would be posting on this blog every week for the next 13 years I would not have believed you. I’d be sure that I would have run out of things worth saying. Yet I am still writing weekly posts — over half a million words to date! — with a healthy set of new ideas biding their time in drafts.

Did I underestimate my creative ability? Could I not see that my lifelong curiosity would guarantee the ongoing discovery of new things to write about? Did my initial difficulty putting pen to paper convince me that I’d never be able to keep up the effort to write something new week after week?

Probably all of the above. Educated in a Victorian-era environment, I was taught that creative people were artists and poets, not scientists like me. As a lifelong learner, I’ve always been curious and asked questions, so it turned out I will always be learning new things about the world and myself, some of which may be worth sharing. And after struggling for four years to write my first book, it was natural to assume that writing would always be hard for me.

So I’m surprised and delighted that I still have something to say. However, whether I would have kept writing continually since 2009 depends on an additional factor.

Gratitude

In 2009, about a million new blogs were started. As far as I know, no one was blogging about meeting design. There weren’t any obvious ways to let anyone know what I was writing about. Googling “meeting design” returned hits about meetings for designers. In 2009, this website received a mere 24,238 page views. Was I wasting my time?

Well, apparently not. The following year somehow brought in over 400,000 page views. The popularity of this website grew steadily, and it now gets about five million page views annually, putting it in the top one million active websites. Not bad for a niche site on a topic that few people ever think about!

And this growth has come about from tens of thousands of folks who have visited, subscribed to, and linked to my posts. ~1,300 subscribers get an email whenever I post. Social media, especially Twitter, brings significant traffic. And search engines are no longer flummoxed by the concept that people want well-designed meetings.

I am so grateful. Grateful to you: my subscribers, the folks who share my posts, and the thousands of people who have purchased my books. Without your engagement, support, and continuous encouragement, I would have given up long ago.

And, of course, I’m grateful for the friendships that have grown between us, the in-person and online experiences we’ve had together, and the community that we’ve developed over the years.

Love

Speaking of community brings me to love. Yes, love. We don’t talk much about love in the professional sphere. Isn’t it a little unseemly? Expression of pleasure and happiness is okay, but being genuinely effusive about loving your work might be awkward.

And, sure, most of us—me included—have spent time or are still spending time doing work that we really don’t fundamentally love. Which is a shame, even if it’s virtually unavoidable.

I have been blessed with finding work that I truly love to do.

(No, not every minute of every day of course. Writing posts, for example, isn’t always the most pleasant activity when you’re driven to share something new just about every Monday morning.)

For the last thirteen years, designing and facilitating hundreds of events, writing books that have influenced how meetings are thought about and held, and sharing a growing body of (now) 750 posts have been a privilege and a pleasure!

I love what I’ve done, the community that has made it possible, and the possibilities of an unknown future.

What more could I want?

I love you all.

Tags: 750 posts, blogging, creativity, delight, gratitude, surprise, writing| Posted in NoRepost, Writing | 1 Comment »

Movement

Monday, October 3rd, 2022 by Adrian Segar

Yesterday, my trusty Apple Watch told me that I had surpassed my daily move goal every day for the last three years.
“Movement is life,” said Captain Mac Elwin in Jules Verne‘s A Floating City.

I’m glad to be alive!

Today, I’m tired and achy, recovering from yesterday’s COVID booster. So I replaced my daily run with a long walk.

I continue to move.

My Twitter bio includes that I love to dance, sing, and meditate. All these are different ways to move. For me, dance evokes the very essence of movement in my body. Singing requires the movement of my vocal cords, forming moving sound waves in the air. And even meditation involves movement as I watch breath move in and out of my body.

More than life

In fact, movement is more than life. At a deeper level, everything is moving. Every lifeless atom—whether in a bar of copper, a vat of mercury, or a tank of oxygen—is constantly changing position. At the deepest level, quantum mechanics tells us that no particles in the universe are static; all exist in a probability cloud of possible positions.

I am grateful for the movement in my life, both for the joy it gives me and movement’s constant reminder that I am alive.

Image attribution: Fka Twigs Dance GIF By Sarah Wintner

Tags: change, gratitude, movement| Posted in life lessons | No Comments »

Lessons From Improv: Giving Appreciations at Conferences

Sunday, March 28th, 2010 by Adrian Segar

We can and should be giving appreciations at meetings.

Thoughts triggered while rereading Patricia Ryan Madson’s delightful, straightforward, and yet profound improv wisdom.

“…once we become aware of the level of support involved to sustain our lives we quickly realize how our debt grows daily in spite of our efforts to repay it.”
—Greg Krech, Director of the ToDo Institute

Patricia Madson’s ninth maxim is “Wake Up to the Gifts.” Gifts? What gifts? Well, although this post is about giving appreciations at conferences, first we need a little context.

The Japanese practice of Naikan, an art of self-reflection, uses three questions to examine our relationships with others:

What have I received from (person x)?
What have I given to (person x)?
What troubles and difficulties have I caused to (person x)?

When I meditate on the answers to these questions for a significant person in my life, I usually quickly discover that my list of what I have received is far longer than what I have given. When you extend these questions to the things that surround and support us in our daily lives this imbalance immediately becomes apparent. I owe an incalculable debt of gratitude to the countless people who grew and prepared the food I eat, who designed, manufactured, and delivered the computer I’m writing this on, who made it possible for me to live in and enjoy this world in so many ways.

It’s hopeless for us to be able to “pay off” these debts. But one thing we can do is to acknowledge them. And that’s why I include time for appreciations at every conference.

Appreciations are more than thanks. Imagine that Susan is standing before the gathered attendees, publicly thanking people, including you, Bob, for your work organizing a conference. Here are some examples of what she might say. After you read each one, take a moment to notice how you feel.

[Susan faces audience]
“The organizers contributed a lot of hard work putting on this conference.”

[Susan faces audience]
“Bob worked hard to get out the face book.”

[Susan faces audience]
“Thank you, Bob, you worked hard to get out the face book.”

[Susan points to you and then faces the audience]
“I appreciate Bob, who worked hard to get out the face book.”

[Susan asks you to come out from the audience, faces you, makes eye contact, and speaks directly to you]
“Bob, I appreciate you for working hard to create the draft face book in time for our conference roundtable, and for rapidly producing an accurate and attractive final version. This helped all of us get to know each other quickly, and gave us a valuable reference for keeping in touch after the conference ends.”

Did you find that you felt appreciated more by each successive version, and that the final version had much more power than the others? If so, you’re not alone. In the final version, Susan:

Invited Bob out in front of the room;
Spoke to Bob directly, making eye contact;
Used an “I” message—“Bob, I appreciate you…”; and
Described specifically to Bob what she appreciated and why.

Each of these four actions strengthened the power of Susan’s message.

There’s more about giving appreciations in my book. They offer a simple, effective, and powerful way to significantly increase bonding and connection in your conference community. And, regrettably, good appreciations are so rare in our everyday life that, when people receive one, they are likely to remember it for a long time.

So, wake up to the many gifts you are receiving every day! And actively, openly, appreciate the givers when you can. You will be giving a great gift yourself when you do.

Image attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/min_photos/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Tags: appreciations, debts, event-planning, gifts, gratitude, improv, Madson, Naikan, thanks| Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »