How Teaching Can Be Your New Business
I’m going to take a wild guess here and say at some point in your childhood, you thought, “I want to be a teacher.” Then as you grew older, maybe you decided you wanted to do something different. I went from wanting to be a Teacher, to Grocery Store Check-Out-Person, to Olympic Gymnast, to a News Broadcaster and then fast forward to college, I decided I should be a Marketing Director. Long gone were the days of me wanting to stand in front of a classroom and teach. It wasn’t until years later, several jobs, two companies, and some excellent advice from my brother, that I realized I HAD SOMETHING to teach.
Why don’t you teach other people how to do it?
I’ll never forget when the lightbulb went off when my brother said to me, “Kayla, You’re really good at making money for OTHER people, why don’t you just teach them how to do it?” Say, WHAAAAAT?” Tell me more.
At first, I explored the idea of teaching in person.
I thought, “Hmmm, maybe I could get a job as a professor at a local university.” I have two young children I wanted to be home with and put to bed each night, so teaching night classes to students was not going to work. Even if I did get a job as a professor, we would only be in the area for a year or two and I’d have to interview all over again once we moved. If you ARE a teacher, then you probably know all too well the struggles of trying to stay in the classroom as a military spouse. The constant moves and updating licensing with each state makes traditional teaching a tough gig. Plus, I would still be working for someone else and not in charge of my own income. The thought of teaching was sounding less and less appealing.
Then, I learned about the Art of eCourses, Digital Programs and Information Products.
That’s when my brother filled me in on an awesome new way to teach. You take what you know and create a digital program, course, how-to guide, eBook, or training program. Now THIS sounded like something I could get into. I could create the curriculum from home, in my yoga pants and nursing bra (TMI? Sorry, but it’s true), and develop a business completely based on what I know and what I can teach.
I happen to love marketing and entrepreneurship. I love talking about it and it’s something my friends have always asked me about. It’s a good fit for me based on my gifts, experience, and talents. But, before I decided that this would be my business, I thought about all of the other things I enjoyed doing too.
It took me some time to decide that THIS would be my business.
My background was in television so at first I thought I would create a digital program for business owners on how to advertise on TV. But to be completely honest, I realized I had come to hate talking about television. I had been doing it for so long that I was TV’d out. I had to do some major soul searching and exercises like in my Idea Starter Kit in order to really figure out what I wanted to teach.
I also went through a stage where I was really into making baby food so I thought, “Hey, I should write a training program on this.” I actually ended up writing a 10page PDF, emailed it out to a few friends, and that was the extent of that idea. It came in handy when baby #2 arrived but that’s as far as that idea went because I wasn’t really jazzed about it anymore.
What can YOU teach?
So, my question to you is, what can YOU teach? What do YOU love talking about? What kinds of things do your friends ask you about? What kinds of blogs do you read? What do you do for fun? I know that you have information that people need. You can teach others about the things that you love to talk about, the topics you enjoy researching, and the elements of life that you know more about than anyone else. Keep in mind that you don’t need to be an expert, you don’t need have to have teaching credentials, and you don’t necessarily need three letters after your name to teach what you know.
Your life and experiences have been your training program.
If you have something you can teach, you can take that and build an information product. This can be as simple as a PDF, a workbook, a series of audio or video files recorded on your iPhone. Or, you can put together a complete online academy that can be set up easily on Teachable.com, Teachery.co, or many other platforms currently available.
If you need a little help brainstorming what you could teach, click on the link above to grab my Free Idea Starter Kit. This is a free workbook to help you figure out what you might enjoy doing as a business.
