It's coming up to registration time for our Autumn term in the Graphic Change Academy. As we're chatting to people interested in becoming a Graphic Facilitator or a Graphic Recorder, it's made me reflect on how much I enjoy training people from all sectors and in a variety of roles to do what I do. Especially those that start by telling me, “I’m not artistic. I can’t draw like that. Not in front of other people!”
Sometimes people see me doing live graphic recordings at conferences (in person or increasingly in virtual meetings) and say something like, "that's amazing! I don't know how you come up with the ideas or how you fill the paper/screen so naturally. It's like magic!"
The thing with doing any kind of graphiking (yes, it's a word) is that a big part of the 'magic' involved is not magic at all... it's totally learnable.
Ideas, techniques plus practise makes a graphiker. Practise helps you build muscle memory and also a good set of foundational Visual Thinking instincts. As someone who's done my 10,000 hours of practise, I can tell you, many of those hours of doing were taken up learning from mistakes... of doing things the hard, long way because I didn't have someone to learn from and I didn't know any better.
So when we were taking my experience of in person training and building online courses, I knew each course wasn't about learning information. It wasn't about ticking boxes on a quiz to see if you've absorbed facts. Or watching videos of someone talking at you in a way you can't absorb. Our courses had to be about getting a pen (digital or analogue) in your hand and getting you drawing. And also giving you lots of ideas, tools and techniques to absorb, practise and then make your own to take out into the real world. And ideally giving you a fast track so you don't have to make the mistakes I made! (I wish I'd had a me when I was starting out...)
I realised to give every student the possibility of the best outcome - back out in their job IRL doing more graphic facilitating and recording in front of their colleagues, clients and customers - people needed that connection with me. There's a virtual circle involved in learning with a real trainer who is also a practitioner - you learn how to do something, you practise doing it and you get feedback to do it better next time. You build your confidence up in the safety (and convenience) of a supportive online course over 3 months.
So I realised we'll never make our fortune setting up a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). But we will be proud of the quality of our content and, more importantly, the success stories of our students (check out my Instagram account for some of these).
So, I give you the ideas, skills and techniques and you bring the practise. It's the deal we make when you sign up to one of our courses. And when we both do our bit ...well I don't mind saying that bit is a kind of magic!
Cara Holland runs the Graphic Change Academy, an online learning platform teaching the skills and techniques she uses as a professional Graphic Recorder and a Graphic Facilitator to individuals and businesses, helping them get the benefits of working visually.
If you want to learn to Be a Graphic Recorder or Be a Graphic Facilitator, you can sign up for more information to join us this year.
You can find out more about the Graphic Change Academy here: https://graphicchangeacademy.com/
