One of my goals for 2020 was to host more creative workshops. I’ve done so much teaching online in recent years, my goal was to do more in person. Well, sometimes life comes at you fast!

Before “the world changed” I’d started offering some different workshops including design thinking and creative collaboration workshops for Masters programs. The goal moving into the year was to reach companies, and also host my own. To be honest the latter felt quite distant.

One of the pieces I find myself often giving my coaching clients is to “start before you’re ready.” Funny, how sometimes it’s so much easier to tell someone else to do than do it yourself. Ha!

“Creative constraints” are another thing I live by in my work. If I was still living in the US I highly doubt I’d be doing what I’m doing today. It was the painful constraints of French bureaucracy that forced me to think outside the box and get creative. Was it always fun in the process? No. In fact, sometimes it was agonizing, but when you overcome a challenge, that’s when the rewards follow!

Anyway, that brings us back to workshops. After I took an awesome and fun self defense class through Pretty Deadly this winter (SO fun and empowering), the opportunity arose for me to host my own “Pretty Deadly presents” workshop (something they’ve been doing in Berlin for awhile, but they only just launched in Paris).

Of course my first reaction was fear, and to say no. What in the world would I teach?! There’s too much. But then I sat with it before responding immediately and thought about my goal to facilitate more workshops. Sure teaching in a dance studio would be very different from my previous experience, but once again, there’s a “creative constraint” (and a refreshing change from the size of rooms I typically have to work with when working with schools—Paris is small, y’all!).

So I said YES! Then I figured out how to do it. My Mastermind group was there to cheer me on, and encouraged me to adapt something I already had done rather than reinventing the wheel. (Great advice, by the way.) The next day I launched it! It was selling out fast. Then we all went into quarantine.

The natural response was to cancel it, but instead, I decided to reach out to attendees and get their thoughts and see if they’d be open to doing it online. After all, I figured we could all use something to look forward to these days. Much to my delight, several of them responded right away saying YES, let’s do it! And no one cancelled.

So here we are! I have not one, but TWO upcoming workshops that I’m super excited about!

The first is Write Your Own Rules where we’ll work through exercises to create your own guiding principles to help you in decision making moving forward. You’ll leave with a zine of your own, and even learn an easy self defense move from Liz, who is an instructor in Paris (trust me, this is not your typical self defense—it’s smart, clever, and integrates storytelling, keeping it fun). (My attitude these days is to be open to new experiences—so far it’s treating me well!).

Write Your Own Rules is this Friday, April 3rd from 6-8pm CET (Paris time). There are only a couple spaces let, so sign up on Eventbrite ASAP!

UPDATE! New dates have been announced!

My second upcoming event is a Creative Mornings Virtual FieldTrip. Creative Mornings is known for their free talk series that happens around the world every month (you can watch them all online after the fact). The FieldTrips were something hosted locally, but now they’ve started offering virtual ones too! The possibilities are endless…

Yours truly will be hosting Make a Map! on Thursday, April 9th from 9:30-10:30am EST (NYC time). These events tend to fill up fast too, and this is open worldwide, so don’t delay. (I know people who are brining their work teams to do it together!). It too shall be fun! And my biggest group experience to date!

P.S. If you’re catching this post after the fact or the workshops are sold out, sign up for my weekly Connect the Dots newsletter to be the first to know about the next openings + check out the workshops page of anneditmeyer.com! 💌