Write about what you think is trivial — because it’s not

This weekend I had a nice chat with an old coach and colleague. We were talking about doing new things, finding new ventures and using online possibilities of advertising yourself.

One of the things we discussed was related to a request I got very recently: Can you provide our software engineers with a workshop on ‘creating a helicopter view’. Apparently, another ex-colleague of the two of us had told one of his customers that I have the ability to create a helicopter view very quickly, and create a mental picture of a new project, organisation or situation very quickly. Actually, scratch the ‘apparently’ — it is something I do. But… I didn’t consciously realise that until I got this request for a workshop. Even better, I had no idea how I do it, yet I had to come up with a proposal for the workshop.

So here’s what happened. I figured out for myself how I create that mental picture, that helicopter view, and translated it into a proposal for a workshop. A proposal that seems likely to be accepted, and I’ll be happy to write about that and the subject itself here in a while. What’s more important, however, is that in preparing this workshop, I realised something. For me, creating that helicopter view is part of my daily life — I do it, and I use the outcome. It comes naturally, although it took me some years and many tools to get myself trained (unconsciously) to do it.

And that is what we ended up talking about on a Sunday evening in the middle of the Coronavirus lockdown in Europe: you can advertise yourself online, by writing about what you think is trivial, because it’s not. I figured out that creating a mental helicopter view is normal for me, but very special to other people. Likely, that applies to a lot of things that I do, and looking at the people around me on the web, it works both ways.

Now, I was planning a series of articles here on Medium, based on training courses that I’ve been running for the past seven years, but I was reluctant to post them because they seemed so trivial. Of course, given that I trained over 300 people in these seven years, these articles and the training courses are not trivial at all — if they were, these 300 people wouldn’t have shown up.
So, with that hurdle out of the way, consider this article one of many to come. And of me expanding my life as a software craftsman, trainer and coach to (for me) unexplored territory.