Whew!! What a week!! It has been a great week but I am worn out and it is not over yet.
I spent Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday in Atlanta at CLASSeminar. WOW!! CLASS stands for Christian Leaders Authors and Speakers and it was founded by Florence Littauer who wrote ‘Silver Boxes’. She is quite a spiffy lady.
CLASSeminar was three full, and I do mean full, days of learning everything I ever needed to know about being a speaker and writer. We learned how to teach a gazillion different ways, how to structure a message ( oh thank you for this, Mrs. Florence), how to use personal stories to flavor our message, how to use all kinds of visual aids to enhance our message and soooooo much more. I truly got my money’s worth and more. My brain was just about to explode with so much information.
The focus was on speaking, but there was lots of good information about writing and getting published. As much as I love to write, I decided that it is not my primary love and I don’t have a burning desire to write a book at this point.
In addition to Mrs. Littauer there were incredibly gifted CLASS staff there to coach us and encourage us in our speaking. We had to give two impromptu speeches and one that we could plan overnight. The lady who was my group leader was Karen Porter and she was such a fun and dear lady. She gave me great feedback on my speaking and in fact, she confirmed exactly what the Holy Spirit had already begun to speak to me about.
I met some incredibly neat people and hope to keep in touch with them. Susan, Jill, Cheryl, Vie, Gayle, Bev, Cynthia, Laura, Monica, and Robin–ya’ll were so much fun and I am honored to have spent some time with you. I hope our paths will cross again. Robin, God bless you as you go to work for CLASS!!!
Now, I need to spend some time implementing the things that I learned into my messages. One of the things that I took away from this week is that I need to flavor my messages with personal stories, even though they are primarily Bible teaching messages. So, I sure hope the Lord helps me with my memory and scoots some interesting stories to the front of my brain as I work on refining some of my messages.
