Dreams can come true

When I was a kid, say around six-eight years old, I dreamed of becoming a schoolteacher. To the extent that I commandeered my dad’s garden shed and persuaded the other kids on my street to attend my classes. I even used my pocket money to buy textbooks from church sales and cut up and stitched paper to create notebooks for them to do their homework in.

I don’t think the concept lasted long as I was quite strict! And the dream of becoming a schoolteacher was filed somewhere safe never to resurface. Until this time last week, when I had the opportunity to play out my childhood dream for a couple of hours while I presented my internal comms business to a room full of very smart and curious first year digital marketing students at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.

The nerves were real.

As I prepared to leave home, I quietly hoped there might be a problem with the trains, but they were all running to schedule, so off I went, ear pods in, listening to my favourite upbeat music loudly (a tip I read in an excellent blog by Simon Hall).

Ironically, I’m not a fan of public speaking, particularly to a large audience, so was relieved to be told “don’t worry, not many people will turn up.” After all, it was 4pm on a Friday afternoon, on Valentine’s Day.

As it happens, around 150 students were interested enough to attend this session, which aimed to provide more context to the brief I had provided for them to create a digital marketing campaign for The Comms Smith.

I think I'll stick to my day job, but I am so proud that I did this and even more proud of the big round of applause I received at the end of my presentation. But the best thing of all was chatting to the students over the next 40 minutes or so, as they fired some great and tough questions at me.

They're now busy developing their campaign ideas in response to my brief and I'm so excited to see the outcomes.

Watch this space for part 2!