For 29 years, teenagers and young adults have been packing a bunch of technology into a bunch of cars, driving them to Mecklenburg’s no man’s land and setting up a veritable tent camp there for five days - complete with stage, microphone and their own radio station. The event is called the Youth Media Camp and is supported by a large number of sponsors and volunteers. At the heart of the event are various workshops on the topic of media, which are open to people between the ages of 14 and 27. Originally a participant, I have been giving a workshop on moderation there since 2017. I change the focus from year to year so that the workshop remains exciting for me, but the general aim is always the same: to give the people taking part the courage to take to the stage and inspire the audience with their presence for at least one evening.

Expectations are often very contradictory: every year there are people who don’t dare to go on stage at first. Who are uncomfortable using their voice and speaking loudly. Who wish they finally had “more charisma”. Almost inevitably, there is also at least one person who already has a lot of experience with rhetoric and speaking freely. Perhaps they have taken part in debating events, are politically active or run an association. This naturally has an impact on the workshop. The experienced participants can’t do much with theory, but rather want and need detailed feedback for their final polish. However, if I start the workshop at the level of the more experienced people, I only reinforce the feeling of “I can’t do this” in the others. A situation that is probably familiar to anyone who has ever had to convey content.

I have found that everyone is best picked up when I start with the goal: stand on stage and speak freely for at least one minute. The insecure people confront their insecurities and can start to consciously reduce them and the experienced people are happy that they have something to do.

A whole host of other lessons can be learned from this workshop and applied to professional life:

  1. Inhomogeneity: Most groups (even if they don’t look like it from the outside) are diverse. Whether in workshop facilitation, project management or marketing, it is our job to recognize the relevant similarities and differences and deal with them accordingly.

  2. Success is relative: An insecure person who dares to take the stage at the end of the camp has successfully gone through the workshop, even if they do not yet speak as fluently as the experienced person.

  3. People don’t know what they need: This is also a well-known saying in startup circles: many of my participants know roughly what skills they lack. But they don’t know how to remedy this lack. It’s the same with customer needs - we’re lucky if our customers know what’s bothering them. Often enough, we have to find out through trial and error.

  4. Groups grow together: The people in the workshop usually not only have different levels of prior knowledge about rhetoric, but also different levels of reading and writing skills, different ages (14 to 27 is a wide range!) and different levels of social skills (one participant once told me that she could never cope with groups). Nevertheless, at the end of the workshop, the participants were always able to stand on stage in pairs and moderate and speak freely. It is true that it is easier to work with some people than with others. At the end of the day, however, we humans are social beings and can get on very well with each other, provided we have the right environment.