I've just arrived home from my World Masters Athletics Championships trip and am slowly emerging from the five-day jetlag experience that is the joyous end to European travel for Australians.
The only pleasant aspect to this is that I get to see the sun rise over the sea each morning - a rare treat for a night-owl like me.
I absolutely loved my European adventure! I love Europe generally - the beautiful built environments of old Euro cities is something we just don't have in Australia. Three of my five weeks were spent in Sweden - beautiful, calm, organised and friendly. Everyone speaks good English which makes it easy to loiter there. Bike paths everywhere - loved it!
Often when I get home from a World Champs trip there's a bit of PWB - Post-Worlds-Blues. The comp is always so intense - highs, lows and everything in between and when I get home, life can feel a bit boring.
I went in to this comp half-baked athletically - a hurried return from injury and I've had no track to train on as my local one is closed. This led to me under-performing in my hurdles events (the lows) but I somehow managed to bag silver medals for the High Jump and Long Jump, and gold medals for the 4 x 100m and 4 x 400m relays. The latter also delivered us a World Record which was a thrill!
This year however, there's no time for PWB because I have another high-intensity project arriving fast! In five weeks, I'll be walking onto that TEDx stage in the US. It's time to turn my full attention to a different kind of performance!
It's all starting to feel very real, with emails flying around about pre-event rehearsals and dinners, transport and accommodation details, and feedback from the TEDx team themselves on talk content.
I had booked myself into a talk practice while I was away so that I maintained at least some focus on preparation and didn't return home feeling panicked. That was an excellent move, with my talk becoming more refined, and feeling more natural.
All the way along, I've received feedback that what I've got is already good and could go to stage as is, but we could make it even better. At first, I had to tweak it because it was more of a keynote address at a conference than a TEDx talk - the latter is it's own thing - a different animal. But now, it's about making it really engaging.
It's funny the cues that can really help. I'd been struggling with the tension between including the two very important points I want to make in the talk - in enough detail to be helpful, and keeping it simple enough that people will remember something - walk away with a practical 'take-away' as I call it.
In the last talk practice, the coach said to me: think of the audience like they're 8.y.o. boys. She didn't mean this as an insult, just in terms of attention span, hooks to keep people's interest, and simplicity of language.
For whatever reason, that cue just clicked. The feedback I'm getting now on my refined drafts is minor. My challenge for today's work on it is to find one minute of content to strip out, because I have a strict 15 minute time slot and the talk is currently 16 minutes long.
Once I've done that, and I'm on to memorising and practising it, I'll feel very relieved. My primary fear about this challenge is not a fear of public speaking or that people won't find it valuable, it's that I'll have a mental blank in the middle of the talk and forget the words. And the only antidote to that is practice and creating mnemonic links (memory aids) between sections of the talk so that the transitions have mental signposts attached to them, reminding me where to go next.
I'm hoping that my habit of practicing courage by fronting up to the start line in athletics, in front of thousands of people (World Champs is live streamed) will serve me well in this challenge!
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