Don't Just Teach- Inspire!

My Weekend with Dave Ramsey; Lessons from EntreLeadership & Total Money Makeover Live!

Don’t Just Teach- Inspire!

If you’re not familiar with Dave Ramsey’s EntreLeadership, you need to start here by watching the first lesson online.  That’s how I got started and it took only that 45 minute online lesson to convince me that this was something special.  Not new, not revolutionary, but special.  See, that’s the magic of what Dave does.  He’s not reinventing the wheel, he’s not always breaking new ground.  But he’s making you believe you can do it.  He’s proving it works.  And by proving it works, he’s giving us hope and inspiring action.  And that was my first lesson from EntreLeadership.

As a trainer, a teacher, my job has to be about more than just transferring knowledge.  Yes, that’s important.  No doubt about it.  But it’s not enough.  Because in many ways, what I teach isn’t new, or extraordinary, or even profound.  Most of the time, I’m teaching common sense and expectations.  So what makes me, or any trainer, special is if we can get the people we teach to take these thoughts and put them into action.  When your words have the power to transform in to real energy and momentum- that’s when you’re successful.  And watching Dave on stage for two days was like a master’s course in motivation.

So what can I share with you about it?  Here are few things I’ve realized.

1)      You Have to Believe What You’re Saying.  I know how simple that sounds, but a lot of trainers teach material they didn’t write.  I know I do.  What I realized is, as a participant, you can feel the energy Dave has because he lives what he’s saying.  It creates an emotion in the knowledge that acts like glue and makes it stick. 

2)      Great Materials Can Keep You on Schedule.  I think that “Ramsey” is originated from an old Irish word for “ramble.”  And as a trained trainer, I noticed when Dave would stray a little too far from the timeline and have to make it up in the talking points.  It’s not his fault, and honestly, I might have some “Ramsey” heritage myself as I can easily get side-tracked when a good story is making a good point and the audience is right there with me.  But Dave’s materials are brilliantly designed to help him make up the time.  Key words are highlighted, there’s ample white space for note-taking, and he puts all the answers to the fill-in-the-blanks at the end of the chapters.  So even when rushing a bit on the book points, the audience has the knowledge they need.  It’s going to make me re-think a lot of my design.

3)      It’s the Details That Make It Amazing.  You have to get the little things right.  The books have to be spelled correctly.  The slide deck has to work.  The colors and fonts can’t be distracting.  The lighting should be good.  Give everyone a pen that writes well.  All these little things won’t make a training good, but any one of them can become a distraction that makes a training bad.  So take the time to get the details right.  It clears the way for participants to focus on nothing but the message.

The bottom line is, you have a job as a teacher that is more than just knowledge transfer.  You have to inspire action based on that knowledge.  It’s not easy, but it’s really the only part that counts.