The past week has been an interesting one - one that I'm still making sense of or trying to get my head around.Last week I went to give a presentation to a group of individuals - it was set in a corporate environment, outside of london (both of which I was not used to). In the past, I never imagined that I would be doing 'public speaking' but life has it that it occasionally puts me in 'stretching' situations:)
To make a long story short - the presentation didn't go very well and it's only because I picked up one person's criticism in the room and I allowed it to influence me. On the train ride back, I didn't feel great about the presentation and was reflecting on why it wasn't successful...I was measuring the success of it!
A week later I was speaking to a colleague and she said something quite interesting...she had to do a similar presentation somewhere else and I asked her how it went and she said that it's sometimes good not to measure an experience as good or bad but wherever you go you are simply planting seeds.
Planting seeds is an incognito process - the results may only be visible in a month or even a few years - one needs to plant with the good intention that ultimately a garden will emerge from those seeds. If I plant with hesitation - the wind will just blow the seeds away. So often we go into a situation expecting a certain standard or result or some form of 'praise' - which ultimately is the one thing that prevents us from maintaining our own integrity and dignity. Where there is self doubt (i.e. as a speaker) of any kind your success ruler will always be dependent on what others say or what you think, which is so often based on ego.
Choosing not to measure one's success enables one to stay in control, stay free, enjoy the experience and move on!
2 comments:
Hi Otis - It sounds like you were judging the presentation even as it was happening. Otherwise you wouldn't have allowed the criticism of that person to put you off your stride. My experience of public speaking is that it's fatal to judge while you're in the middle of it or you're not in the moment any more. And once you're not in the moment, you've lost it!
I think it's OK to think about the experience afterwards and see what you can learn. That's really what you're doing in this post. The trick, though, is not to identify the presentation with you personally. The presentation has been and gone and was probably a lot better than you thought it was anyway. But irrespective of that, you remain, a remarkable manifestation of the universe, just as you were before. Though maybe a little wiser now...
Sound like a smart arse, don't I? Wait till Wednesday when I have to speak in public myself!
Hi Otis - I tried to post the following on your new blog but it wouldn't let me cos I don't have a blogger account. I'll be happy to re-post it there if you change the required credentials.
Thanks for the remarks you left on my Secret of Life site. I've posted a response there.
This Ramu and Shamu story strikes a chord with me. Since I started doing my own blog a few weeks ago, I've been aware of some subconscious resistance to what I'm doing. One of the stories I've been telling myself is that other people may take some of my uncopyrighted material and put it into a book and sell it and make lots of money! Well, wouldn't that be terrible?
Or would it? Because aren't I really interested in getting my thoughts out there and letting other people read them? So if somebody else puts them into a book then so much the better because more people will have a chance to see them. I have to ask myself whether I'm really interested in bringing this stuff into being for its own sake and bringing these stories and ideas to the world's attention or simply in "owning" what I've written? There shouldn't really be any contest, should there, but the need to cling to what we think of as ours can be deeply ingrained.
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