I can't believe how quickly this has come around! In seven days, I'll be standing here on this stage in Billings, Montana USA, delivering my TEDx talk.
I hope the red dot carpet has unrolled fully by then!
I'm both excited and nervous. The more seamlessly I can recite my talk, the more the needle moves towards excited. I'm only making one to two errors each time now, but until I'm making none, the nervousness will continue.
The single most challenging part of this project has been memorising the talk. It's a VERY long time since I've had to memorise what is essentially a 1900 word essay! The last time was in 1987 when I memorised two essays for my history exam at university. Thankfully I started four weeks out this time, not two days!
Mostly I've been delivering the talk to the wall in my office, but I gave a first live demo to my husband a week ago. And two nights ago, I set up a pretend red dot with a bit of rope, and gave it to my meditation group. My mind was really tired and I managed to only make two mistakes, so I'm getting close. And they gave me some good feedback which I'll use too.
However my speaker coaches tell me that I need to be able to recite it flawlessly 10 times before I'm done practising. I haven't done it flawlessly once yet, so I've still got a way to go!
Another tip is to recite in the presence of distractions - standing on your head, doing the dishes, warming up for my training session.
And another is to really focus on the transitions between thoughts. I had my husband test me by reading the last line of any paragraph, and I had to continue with the next one.
To this end I've also printed a new copy of the script, cut it up and put it in an envelope. On my plane trip to the US (which is supposed to be now except my flight was cancelled and I'm sitting in an airport hotel) I'll pull a piece of paper out at random and try to recite the following three paragraphs.
Then of course, there's the wardrobe challenge. I spend so little time thinking about how I look, I left this until the last minute and then found myself in a shoe crisis! That actually caused me quite some stress! Memorising 1900 words, sure, but dressing myself for a TEDx talk.....OMG! My wardrobe is 90% running gear to start with, then add to that the advice to avoid black, white, patterns, and stripes, and to go for block colours, and it really was slim pickings in my cupboard! Then of course shoes, and jewellery...aaaaaggghhh!!!
I never think about this stuff! Can't I just wear running tights, a t-shirt and sneakers? Not on a Youtube channel with 33 million viewers apparently. Dammit. This precipitated not one but TWO desperate shopping trips to Warringah Mall!
This crisis made me feel so lucky to have good friends. My dear friend Philippa helped me through the wardrobe emergency - resolved just hours before I left home! And my hairdresser of 16 years made me pick hair and make-up pictures before I left her place - so that I don't risk hating what the make-up woman does and stress myself out an hour before I have to go on stage.
Yet again, I'm thankful for my policy of living on PAR time. I booked to arrive in Billings five days before the event to make sure I'm over jetlag. My flight cancellation means that it's now going to be four, but that should be enough I hope.
Aside from perfecting the rote memorisation, my other two challenges for the next week are to time the delivery to exactly 15 minutes (which means I have to speak faster than I would normally), and to get happy with the style of my delivery. My meditation pals told me I rushed through some bits, so I will be reviewing that video and fine tuning that too.
I did promise last week another instalment in the Beware of highs series of posts. I'm definitely good for that. But numerous people have said they are enjoying coming on the TEDx journey with me, so now that it's at the pointy end, I figure I'll keep sharing that with you until it's over.
At that point, I'm going to ask you to get ready to join my TEDx launch team to help me spread the message!
Stay tuned!
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