• Give your email for support. Offer to come early and stay late if anyone needs it. You'll be amazed, sadly, how few take up your offers.

• Confusion is an opportunity; it is your soul mate. If the material is vague or unclear, then you must make a demonstration on how it works.

• Brushing over the tough topics, telling clever anecdotes, and ending the class early every day may deliver a rating of 10, but your students won't bother to return. The only valid measure of success is repeat business.

• In your morning wake-up session, demonstrate new technology and new Lotus products. Most students have a very small vision. Keep them excited with their choice of IBM/Lotus.

• End every day with something upbeat. This rule applies most of all to the last day.

• Stay current with problems and their solutions. Read the Business Partner forum, the CLI forum, the CLP forum, and the Notes.Net forum for trends and real-world issues.

• Stay current with technology and its business application. It's what you're about.

• Engage. Look in the eyes, move around, and draw. Put energy into your presentations. You will be forgiven for mistakes, you will be pardoned for dopey jokes, but you will never, ever escape criticism for lacking heart. No matter how competent you are, acting like Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller's Day Off will kill the class.

For learning more about becoming a CLI, see Lotus Education at http://www.lotus.com/services/education.nsf/0/b753150c3987872d8525657d007b9151.

Jack Dausman is a Principal Partner at ICI Systems, Inc., the #1 LAEC in North America (at http://TrainingDoneRight.com) and is a Dual-Principal CLI. He has served on the Lotus CLI Advisory Board. He also holds two masters' degrees and is certified as MCT/MCP, CNE, and Linux+. Nothing, though, holds as much challenge and reward as working with his young teens, Will and Anna. He welcomes all comments at dausman@icisys.com.