How to Feel Confident Enough to Run Your First Creative Workshop

If you’ve been thinking about running a creative workshop, there’s a good chance you’ve already spent quite a lot of time thinking about what you could teach, where you could run it and what the lovely finished table of everyone’s creations might look like. But eventually you hit the slightly more terrifying part of the plan: you’re going to have to stand up in front of a group of actual people and teach them.

Confidence has come up in so many of my conversations with creative business owners recently. I’ve spoken to people with brilliant workshop ideas who know their craft inside out but still aren’t sure they feel confident enough to be the person at the front of the room. What if they forget what they’re saying? What if someone asks a question they can’t answer? What if everyone is looking at them and they suddenly realise they have absolutely no idea what they’re doing?

If that sounds familiar, I have some potentially annoying news: I don’t think you need to wait until you feel confident. In fact, if you do, you could be waiting for a very long time.

Confidence usually comes after you start

Before I started my creative business, I was a primary school teacher. I’d spent years standing in front of classrooms, explaining things and managing groups of children, so you might think running my first creative workshops would have felt completely natural to me. It didn’t.

I was incredibly nervous before my early workshops. I planned everything, rehearsed what I was going to say and practically scripted my introduction because I was convinced my mind would go completely blank as soon as a room full of adults looked at me. I definitely didn’t walk into that first workshop feeling like a confident, experienced workshop host. I walked into it feeling nervous and hoping I’d prepared enough to get me through it.

But I did it. Then I did another one. And another one. Eventually I stopped needing to think so much about what I was going to say. I knew which parts people would find tricky, which questions were likely to come up and how long everything would actually take. I wasn’t trying to imagine what running a workshop might be like anymore because I had evidence that I could do it.

That’s where the confidence came from.

We often think we need confidence before we take action, when in reality it tends to work the other way around. You do the scary thing while feeling slightly terrified, realise you survived it, learn something and feel a little more confident the next time.

Preparation is much more useful than trying to feel confident

If you’re nervous about running your first workshop, I’d stop trying to make yourself feel more confident and concentrate on the practical things that will make you feel more prepared.

Know the thing you’re teaching really well. Practise explaining it to somebody who has never done it before. Think about where people are likely to get stuck and how you could explain those bits differently. Work out roughly how you’ll introduce yourself, how you’ll start the session and what order you’re going to teach everything in. You don’t need to script every word, but having a clear structure means you’re not trying to invent the workshop while twelve people stare expectantly at you.

I also think one of the best things you can do for your confidence is to keep your first workshop simple. There can be a temptation to cram loads into a workshop because you want people to feel like they’re getting their money’s worth. But more content doesn’t necessarily create a better experience. In fact, trying to teach three techniques, complete four stages and make something wildly ambitious in two hours is a very good way to make everyone stressed, including you.

Choose something beginner-friendly that you know how to teach well. Give people enough time to actually enjoy making it. The less unnecessary complexity you create for yourself, the more space you have to concentrate on the people in the room.

If there are particular moments that make you nervous, practise those too. Your introduction might be the bit you’re dreading, so say it out loud a few times at home. If there’s a tricky technique to demonstrate, practise explaining it slowly while you do it. You can even run the whole thing through with a couple of friends if that would make you feel better. Preparation won’t necessarily get rid of the butterflies, but it gives you something much more useful to rely on when they appear.

Nobody has come to your workshop hoping you’ll mess it up

This is something I wish more new workshop hosts remembered. The people sitting around your table are not there to assess your performance. They’re not waiting for you to stumble over a sentence so they can mark you down. They’ve booked because they want to learn something, make something, spend time with a friend, meet people, try something new or simply have a nice few hours doing something creative.

They want to have a good time, which means they are very much on your side.

They also have absolutely no idea what was supposed to happen. If you meant to tell them something ten minutes ago and suddenly remember halfway through the next section, they don’t know that. If you stumble over your introduction or have to demonstrate something twice, it really doesn’t matter. You’re allowed to be a human being while you’re teaching.

The same applies if somebody asks you a question and you don’t know the answer. Being the person running the workshop doesn’t mean you have to know everything there has ever been to know about your craft. You need to know enough to teach the thing you have promised to teach safely and effectively. If someone asks something outside of that and you genuinely don’t know, saying, “I’m not sure, but I can find out for you” is a perfectly good answer.

Your first workshop is allowed to feel like your first workshop

One of the easiest ways to knock your confidence is to compare your first workshop with somebody else’s fiftieth. You see beautiful photographs online of perfectly laid tables, relaxed-looking hosts and rooms full of happy customers and assume that’s the standard you need to reach before you begin. It isn’t.

Your first workshop is partly about giving your customers a brilliant experience, of course, but it’s also where you start learning how your workshop actually works with real people in the room. You might discover that one section takes twice as long as you expected. You might realise everyone needs the same pair of scissors at exactly the same moment. You might find that ten people feels manageable but fifteen would make you want to hide in the cupboard. You’ll probably think of a much better way of explaining something approximately thirty seconds after you’ve finished explaining it.

None of those things mean you’re bad at running workshops. They’re how you get better at running workshops.

You take what you learned into the next one. You change the timings, buy more scissors, explain the tricky bit differently or decide you never want more than ten people in the room again. Then you learn something else the next time.

Eventually, without really noticing it happening, you become the person who knows what they’re doing.

You don’t need to become a different person to teach

I also think we need to get rid of the idea that a good workshop host has to be naturally loud, outgoing or incredibly confident. You don’t need to walk into the room and suddenly become a presenter. You don’t need a teaching qualification, and you definitely don’t need to develop an entirely different personality.

Some brilliant workshop hosts are quiet. Some are nervous. Some are introverts. Some will happily talk to a room of twenty people but still hate making a phone call. What matters far more is whether you can make people feel welcome, explain what they need to know clearly and create an environment where they feel comfortable having a go.

So if you’ve got a workshop idea that has been sitting in your head because you’re waiting for the day you finally feel confident enough to run it, I’d stop waiting for that day.

You can be nervous and still run a brilliant workshop. You can forget what you were going to say and recover. You can have butterflies while you’re welcoming everyone through the door and still make them feel completely at ease. You can finish your first workshop, sit in your car afterwards and think of seventeen things you’d do differently next time, and still have given everyone a lovely experience.

You don’t need confidence to run your first creative workshop. You need enough preparation to do it while you’re still nervous.

The confidence can come later.

Need some help getting your first workshop out into the world?

If you’ve got a workshop idea sitting in your head but you’re stuck somewhere between “I really want to do this” and actually putting a date in the diary, this is exactly the sort of thing I can help you work through.

My 1:1 creative business mentoring sessions give us 90 minutes to get all the ideas out of your head, talk through what’s holding you back and make a clear, practical plan for what you’re going to do next. If you’re not sure whether mentoring is what you need, we can start with a free 15-minute Virtual Cuppa to chat about your business, your workshop idea and see if we’re the right fit.