It seems like it’s becoming a tradition of ours here at Know Your Worth to kick off the new year with a series of editions and conference appearances, and although this past fortnight wasn’t quite the marathon we had last year, it certainly felt like one. With two editions in two consecutive weekends, and a talk at an international conference in between in Moscow for our trainer Julia Poger, it’s really hard to imagine it being anything else.

It all started in Merry Olde England, where we had our first-ever British edition on 19 – 20 January 2019, and were joined by one of our liveliest and most language-diverse groups yet.

Staying true to our philosophy of starting with the mindset, we examined that first, covering the main principles and ideas necessary for successful marketing, regardless of your language combination or current market. We firmly believe that one of the most important steps necessary for any marketing or negotiating to work is making sure you understand your existing and potential clients, as well as the why? and the what for? of the game, and that is why we attach such importance to getting the basics right.

 

KYW is so much more than an opportunity to hone your client interface skills (although it does a top job on that too). Julia’s insights and mindset help you to stay on top of your game right across the board. Grab a seat while you can!

Heather Adams

 

Dealing with pricing and negotiating included an in-depth discussion of the general principles and real-life practices, all necessary steps in building a more sustainable and a much more successful interpreting business. We then moved on to looking into the practices and approaches to implement in more detail, and offered our participants several case-studies, both from the interpreting profession, and from outside, to help them see the mechanisms and tactics at work more clearly.

As anyone who’s been to at least one of our editions will be able to tell you, we keep our seminars business-oriented, and with the London edition we did that from the very first moment when we all set down and started with the introductions. Taking advantage of the fact that we had two non-interpreting participants, we suggested our interpreting participants introduce themselves the way they would to potential clients, which proved an interesting and revealing exercise.

 

 

Speaking of our non-interpreting participants, we’d like to offer the warmest thanks to our brilliant photographers, Guy Ellis and Julian Wakefield from Teralon Media Ltd. We can’t wait to share the results of their hard work.

And when our participants send such glowing reviews mere days after the seminar, it makes us feel like we got something right:

I just wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your workshop in London: I gained so much from it! I cannot think of someone more motivating, inspiring and charismatic than you.

I look forward to putting the ideas and tactics I’ve learned into practice. I feel so empowered after this workshop.

Chiara Bartolozzi

 

After London our instructor Julia Poger flew to Moscow, to take part in the second Global Dialogue International Conference for Conference Interpreters, where she presented a master-class with a special focus on marketing skills for interpreters.

Global Dialogue proved to be a fabulous learning environment, and a mere two hours after Julia’s master-class, Know Your Worth was drawn into a scribing experiment, all of which goes to prove that marketing and negotiating ideas, paramount for our professional success, can be good fun as well.

It was also a fabulous opportunity to meet more colleagues from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, and a wonderful energy boost just in time for our last edition on that tour, in Kyiv. However, before we go any further, we’d like to take a minute to thank Elena Stupnikova, Dmitry Venyavkin, Daria Nossovitskaya, and everyone from the Global Dialogue organizing committee.

It was a pleasure to be a part of such a brilliant event.

 

Probably the best thing about our Kyiv group is that you could tell that while the ideas were new, people were nonetheless willing to take them on board, and see their businesses in a new light. As freelancers we face many challenges on a daily basis, and it is natural that the character of these challenges should vary from market to market, and from case to case. That is why it is so important that we do not limit our understanding of the situation to just one perspective. It is equally important that we share our stories and examples and learn from the experience of our peers. This also means that we should keep an open mind, and that is exactly what our participants did, and what helped ensure the success of the seminar.

We are big fans of an interactive approach, which is why we make sure that all our participants have their questions answered, by leaving ample time for a Q&A session. We also encourage our participants to take some of the case studies in groups to enable them to brainstorm the best solutions and practices together.

Had so much passion, inspiration and perspectives today from Julia Poger.

Victoria Moroz

 

 

Julia also offers one consultation for free to all of our participants, be it next steps, or looking at a CV or website, or a strategy question, and we are very happy that our participants are finding it helpful.

  

Everything about marketing and negotiating they should be telling people starting from uni.

Marina Myntsykovska

 

This year has already given us much to be grateful for, and even more to look forward to, and we would like to end this post by thanking all those who took part, and helped us make it all possible. We learned lots from the participants everywhere, as they brought new cases and new ideas to the table.

We would also like to take a minute to thank our two brilliant local coordinators, Sabina Metcalf and Andrii Biesiedin, without whom it would have been a completely different – and much more stressful – experience. Thank you for taking such good care of us, and for making sure our participants didn’t have to worry about anything except getting to the seminar, and making the most of it.

 

We have a new edition coming up in two weeks’ time in the Hague, so stay tuned for more updates and news from the Netherlands, and if you’d like to join us, all you have to do is drop us a line at kaplun.tatiana@gmail.com or fill out the contact form on the website.

We always look forward to welcoming new colleagues to the community, as they always have something new and interesting to share, be it a case study, an idea or a principle they’ve been trying to apply to their work. All of this feeds into the overall ‘bank’ of experience, which helps all of us avoid mistakes in the future and considerably improves our performance in the present.

 

If you would like to hold a seminar in your area, please contact us via this website, or by contacting the seminar organizer Tatiana Kaplun at kaplun.tatiana@gmail.com.