I didn’t like teaching back then. Everytime someone asks me to teach something about design I will 100% refuse it. Not just teaching about design but almost anything. Why? The answer is simple, I don’t know how to teach. How come you don’t know how to teach? Because no one taught me. Almost every soft skill, hard skill, and almost every aspect of my life are self-taught. Can’t you teach the way your teacher used to teach? No, I don’t want to look at my school teachers as an example because they are boring when teaching.

I’m a self-taught person, I got my knowledge, my hard skill, and my soft skill by learning from many resources and not having a structure. It’s random. What I mean by that is when I learn I just learn by a case study. For example, when I want to know how to write a contract, I will find a tutorial about that, or if I want to know how to make an animation icon on After Effects. I will google the After Effects tutorial. See, pretty random and my learning process didn’t go from basic, to medium, then advanced. It will jump back and forth between those three levels. So it depends on what I want to learn at that time. See, no structure.

That’s why when someone asks me to teach, I don’t know how to start, I don’t know what to teach next, because I don’t have any structure on my learning journey. I don’t have a good curriculum if you may say.

Long story short, right now in the office we are beginning to grow, grow as in recruiting new people and also grow as in self development. Now, since I’m the lead of the creative department. I have to be able to share my knowledge and experience to my designer, so our team can grow. My boss asks me to teach my designer everything I know that can help him grow and give more impact to the company. Then we set-up a schedule for 30 min every Wednesday where I will share anything that I have to help him grow.

The first session of me teaching him or we can call it sharing, was awful. I stuttered, I didn’t know how to start, I didn’t know where I should go next, I didn’t prepare anything. But that’s a good start for me, at least I know what I need to fix from myself. 

Personally, even though I don’t know how to teach, I really love learning, my favorite one right now is learning from online platforms such as skill share and master class, but I never analyze how those mentors from those online classes teach, but now since I have a responsible to teach, then I start breaking down their structure. I begin analyzing how they start the class, how the bridging to go from one part to the next part, how they end their classes, how they speak, everything.

After breaking down their method, after several trials and errors. Slowly I can start teaching someone, slowly I know where to go next, slowly I can make my own curriculum based on my experience. Slowly I can start public speaking, believe me I was a terrible public speaker, we will talk about that in different episodes. It’s been almost a year since I taught or shared my skills and experience to my designer. Now, I am confident and planning to teach more and share more on my social media, my YouTube, my website, or maybe my podcast. I will share everything that I have, it can be soft skills, hard skills, or my experience spending my 12 years of work in various creative industries. So you might want to stay tuned.

Listen to this post in audio format from my podcast on spotify.