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I had a speech in Sydenham, Ontario yesterday which is about 3 hours from my house and to cut costs for the schools involved, we put the speech after 11 am so I could drive in an out on the same day. If it was an 8 am speech, there’s no way I could have gotten up at 3 am (that’s usually my bedtime) to get ready and drive out there so this was a nice compromise.

It was weird because with 6 hours total of driving, coupled with an hour long speech and an hour of set-up and shut-down it ended up being exactly an 8 hour day. Certainly I’ve had longer days of travel and of grinding away at my computer, but this ended up being a pretty tight little 8 hour package. Now I know what it’s like to be a working man!! I thought about it on the drive home and realized I haven’t actually done a stable full day of work since my last year of High School. Sure I had classes in University, but spread out and with days off. Even when I worked for the Member of Parliament, I typically worked afternoons, evenings and weekends. Somehow I’ve managed to spend the last 10 years abiding by no set schedule. FREEDOM????

I was definitely happy with how the speech turned out and had a lot of kids rushing the stage after and E-Mailing me last night. It was a nice day that will lead into next week (my birthday week) where this year I’ll be spending my birthday in Sudbury, Ontario!! Last year it was Glasgow, Montana and this year, Sudbury! Do I know how to pick em or what!?

So while I was sitting here posting a message on my Blog at the National Conference on Student Leadership in the Westin in Boston, I looked up at their big board of flights and noticed that all of the flights going in and out of JFK in New York were cancelled. Knowing that I had a flight going through JFK to Buffalo, I quickly got on the phone to Delta and they informed me my flight had also been cancelled. Thankfully, I had gotten to them in time and they were able to push my ticket over to US Airways on a direct flight to Buffalo. I NEVER check my flights ahead of time, so this was an amazingly freakish coincidence that the Westin happened to have a board and I happened to look at it! If it wasn’t for that board, I would have been stranded in Boston for the night and unable to make my next gig in Buffalo the next morning.

Hooray for luck!

So I was given an amazing opportunity to run a couple of workshops for the National Conference on Student Leadership in Boston this past weekend. The NCSL is a Conference for College student leaders from literally around the world. It’s big time! The kind of event speakers drool at the opportunity to present for. There were students there mostly from North America, but also from Puerto Rico, Egypt, Rwanda, Australia and of course CANADA! Holy small world, but one of the three Canadian students that were in attendance heard me speak at the Canadian Conference on Student Leadership in Calgary this past fall. American readers take note…this is merely a coincidence and we don’t all know each other!

As per typical major Conference protocol, I had to be on my game from start to finish. This was a HUGE opportunity to meet and make connections with hundreds of students who have hiring and firing power! I would be performing only 2 smaller workshops (about 180 people total between the two) but it’s very different for me because it doesn’t give me the chance to show off my STUFF on the main stage. One of the workshops was my event planning workshop which I just altered a little bit for the College audience. This was my first time performing it for a College audience, but I knew the material (FREE STUFF, sponsorship, marketing) was still universal, just with a few tweaks.

The big and crazy workshop was my public speaking workshop. Now, I’ve had it on my web-site as an offer for the past 18 months. Unfortunately, everyone seems to love my event planning and leadership styles workshop so much that no one has ever asked me to run the workshop. So when NCSL asked me to run it last fall, I couldn’t say no, but had to hope that someone would book that workshop ahead of time. Of course…no one did! So here I was at one of the biggest and most important Conferences of my life testing out new material on an audience that you have to be as sharp as possible for.

I spent the week prior to NCSL dedicated to fine tuning my material and trying to amass as much interactive information as possible. The results were out of this world! As great as I felt about how the workshop would work, I was blown away by the response and the results! The students and staff were hanging on my every word and writing down the points and tips I was giving at a feverish pace. See to me, the information I was giving (body language, posture, practice, practice, practice, etc.) comes naturally to me and I guess I forget that there are so many people out there who have never been exposed to the material. One of the students event came up to me after the workshop and said, “thank you for being the highlight of my conference”!!! That was enough evidence for me and I had a big grin on my face the rest of the day. It was an amazing feeling to be essentially testing out new material and have it work so amazingly well!

In the end, it was an amazing weekend. The workshops went better than I could have imagined…I made some great connections and contacts and had the opportunity to hang out with some terrific students from Purdue, Fulton-Montgomery CC and the University of Calgary among other places. Next step? Convincing one of the schools to hire me at the same time they’re playing a basketball game against Duke! I’d do that gig for free in exhange for tickets! Let the dream live on…