Skillshare

Teacher Stories: Susanne Conrad of lululemon

Meet Susanne Conrad, Director of Possibility at lululemon athletica.

Susanne is a seasoned communication advisor with over 25 years of experience, helping others improve their interpersonal and business skills to achieve happier personal and professional lives. These days, she coaches a multi-year personal development program for executives and managers within incredibly popular athletic clothing company lululemon, helping them become strong communicators and powerful leaders.

Susanne is also the founder of igolu.com (pronounced I-Goal-You), is a body of innovative communication, vision, goal-setting and leadership training work that Susanne certifies others to lead and teach.

We sat down with Susan to learn more about her background, her work with lululemon and her experience teaching Author Your Life With Goal Setting on Skillshare.

   


What piqued your interest in teaching an Online Skillshare Class?

I saw teaching an Online Skillshare Class as a great opportunity to explore one of my goals—to have my work, currently up on igolu.com, running on a more sophisticated technological platform. I saw Skillshare’s Online program as an interesting approach to sharing my work in a more dynamic way and with a wider audience.

Tell us a bit about your class and how it ties back to your work with lululemon.

Most of the material I used for my Skillshare class comes from one of the many programs I lead at lululemon. I found it delightful to take an existing curriculum and repurpose it into an online format and make it available and affordable to a wider audience.

There were over 300 people in the class, and many were lululemon employees who would not have had the opportunity to work with me yet because I currently only work with managers and up.


Can you tell us what you think made your class so successful?

I read everything people wrote, commented on everything posted regarding projects and milestones and was quite engaged. I truly cared about the success of my students and I believe that commitment and honesty came through in my comments, feedback and office hours.

I believe people sign up for a course like this because they do want to receive help and guidance in writing vision and goals and there really aren’t many ready-made resources on the internet to help with this beyond very simplistic goal setting.

Something else that made this class successful was that the skillshare platform allowed for students to interact, form groups and meet each other and also to learn from other students by reading what they posted.

Do you have any tips for other teachers on Skillshare?

1- Become familiar with the platform ahead of time—know that the medium is the message so the more familiar you are with the platform and other types of interactions (such as google hangouts and the project system) the better you will be at teaching the class.

2- Know that your first class is also your own on-the-job training and be patient with yourself because you’re learning a new skill as well.

3- Trust that you can fully engage with the Skillshare team—they are open to your ideas about how to evolve their product. They are a willing and engaged group of young people who care very much about what they are doing and the product they are developing. This makes it fun to work with them!

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Be sure to add Susanne’s class to your watchlist, and check out the amazing community and products at lululemon.

Interested in becoming an online teacher? Learn more.