How You View Your Talents

I gave a presentation on Wednesday to a group in one of my primary fields of business, healthcare finance, more specifically, the relationship between CPT-4 codes and revenue codes.  It was a fairly short presentation, about an hour, but it was well received.

I got home later in the afternoon, and while catching up on my email learned that a speaker I’d set up to speak to another organization I belong to had to cancel because her father had been rushed to a hospital out of town.  The president of the organization had gotten the news, since I hadn’t been home, and sent out an email saying we had to scramble for a speaker for Friday morning.  No one really had any ideas, and it looked like our meeting would turn into an impromptu roundtable discussion.  The thing about meetings like that is that, if planned in advance, people come ready to talk and share ideas, but when you spring something like that on people, they get upset because they’re now not going to learn what was promised, and didn’t get the opportunity to decide on whether they were interested in the new topic or not.  Sometimes, members aren’t as forgiving as we all would like them to be.

Because I’m also on the board of this group,. I had some kind of idea of the types of topics they thought the membership would be interested in learning about.  So, out of the blue, and without thinking it through first, I sent out an email offering to do a presentation on website optimization.  It was something I’ve learned a lot about over the past six months, and I’ve done some pretty nice work in regards to my own two websites.  Within an hour, I had received thanks for agreeing to do this in such a short period of time.

Now I had to put it together, but this was something new, something I wasn’t considering myself as an expert in, though I’d learned a lot.  Where do I begin?  What do I say?  How do I present it, as far as visuals; handouts, powerpoint, slides?  I spent the rest of the day on Wednesday trying to figure out what I was going to do.  I even spent some time writing a couple of paragraphs in Word, just hoping for an idea, because I’ve found that, every once in awhile, if I just start writing something, ideas will come to me.

The idea came to me around 2:45 in the morning, as I had to give up a night of practicing my new relaxation technique because I was on the clock.  I knew what I was going to do, knew it was going to take some time, and now I was ready to go to bed.  So I did, waking up around 9:15 on Thursday morning, and went to work.  Cutting, pasting, copying, and writing, seven hours later I had finished putting together my presentation.  I thought it looked pretty good, but how would these people respond to what I was going to show them?  After all, they knew me for the other things I did; leadership, management, diversity, healthcare.  Would they question how I could know anything about websites, let alone how to help increase their presence?  What credibility had I built that led me to think I could pull this off?

I gave the presentation this morning, and it went very, very well.  Turns out I built up more credibility for versatility than I could have ever imagined, and people now had an even greater appreciation for my perceived talents than I could have imagined.  They were not only impressed with the presentation, but stunned that I could put it together in such a short time.  And I was able to answer every question as though I had been the one who invented the concept.  After the meeting, a couple of people said they’d like to talk to me about possibly helping them to optimize their sites, and pay me for it; amazing!

There are always other opportunities out there for those of us who are willing to step outside of our comfort zone and tap into something else.  Many of us present ourselves as one-trick ponies.  The thing is, those ponies always know other tricks; they’re just never asked to show them.  And maybe that’s our fault; we wait to be asked instead of getting out there in some fashion and showing ourselves to the world.

I learned a big lesson today, and I needed it.