I’m a nervous public speaker. I used to go out of my way to avoid it, and have lost count of the excuses I have used to get out of public speaking. November was the month I stopped and tackled this fear.
Create
I accepted an invitation to speak at CampJS VI about my monastic engineering experience. Seeing as the day of the talk coincided almost to the day with my departure of full time work a year ago, it was a perfect opportunity to reflect. The perfect November curiosity.
The talk was incredibly difficult to prepare, trying to compress a whole year into twenty minutes? Without it devolving into an incoherent wandering mess? Not to mention the stress and fear of it all? The first rehearsal had a couple of epic pauses where I just seized up with a blank stare for a solid two or three minutes. Terrified of what I was saying, of sharing some of my inner thoughts with others.
It went OK though, it was all filmed and will be online soon. But nothing bad happened, my fears were my own and remained trapped in my imagination. If anything it was more a case of the opposite, I got to meet some awesome people, had some great laughs and conversations. The best way to help wrap up a year of largely building things in solitude.
Photo by Kris Howard.
Read
Grinding my way back through the book I paused to read Edward Tufte last month.
Excercise
Ran through another 52.1kms for November. A couple of cool runs in the rainforest down at Springbrook national park while I was down at CampJS. A much needed reprieve from the hot and humid tropical runs at home in Cairns.
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