Workshop Planning

* Find out as much information as possible about the workshop specifics (length, audience member make-up, room set-up, content expectations, AV at your disposal, etc.)

* Create a Statement of Purpose. This is a specific, concrete, and short statement that sums up what you want the audience member's to learn during your session.

* Research quotes, activities (please peruse www.thesource4ym.com), facts, handout possibles, stories, personal stories, etc. that could possibly make it into the final flow for your workshop.

* Start a three-ring binder

* Make sure everything you put in your binder is closely related to your workshops' statement of purpose.

* If you find something on a web page, bookmark it, print it out and put it in your binder.

* If you come across something that you find very interesting or you think might work for a different workshop, print it out and put it in your binder behind a "to use later" tab.

* Get as much stuff as you can find. At this point, the more the merrier. If you have a tight Statement of Purpose, everything you put in the binder has a good chance of being valuable.

* If you are giving a leadership or life skills related workshop, chances are good you might find some content you can use at my leadership blog (www.PersonalLeadershipInsight.com). Type in a related word in the search field on the home page of the PLI blog.

The PLI Blog is indexed by Essential (Vision, Integrity, etc.). Scroll down on the right-hand side of the home page and you will see a section called Links. You can look at just the posts (there are over 250 total) for each Essential. If one of the Essentials looks like it might contain some content relevant to your workshop's Statement of Purpose, browse the posts and see if you can find some gems. For example, if you are doing a networking session, you will find some great posts on that in the Fostering Relationships posts. If you are doing a team communication workshop, obviously you will find some great posts in the Masterful Communication posts. Etc.

(WARNING - the links for these posts are NOT the Del.icio.us links that are on the rightIhand column. The links where you can look at all the posts filtered by essential are under the section titled Links. Although, if you want to peruse the Del.icio.us links, they are indexed by Essential and there are over 600 posts there! Great stuff.)