Well, after much preparation and anticipation, I appeared on the Parker lecture series last night up in Lowell. I think it went reasonably well, and there were a lot of interesting things that happened.
First of all, I met a guy who was a Marine veteran of Guadalcanal. I thought that was pretty cool. I confess, I’m always somewhat in awe of World War II combat veterans. Or combat veterans in general I guess.
While I’m no stranger to public speaking, it dawned on me last night that I have become ever more attuned to my audiences, and as I do more and more speaking to professional groups, I’ve come to realize that there’s a big difference between a group of people that has some commonality, and an assemblage of total strangers that comes to a public event. With the former, I have the advantage of knowing a little bit about the people in the audience. However, when I am faced with a group of total strangers with no common thread and no reference point, it makes my brain work a lot harder to process all the many possible variations that may exist within the group. Also, an audience made up of people who don’t know each other behaves a little differently from a group of people that does.
I also pushed my own boundaries a little bit, talking about relatively new stuff that’s more from the blog than from the book. I do love it so once someone in the audience raises her hand and says, “it’s so nice to hear someone address this problem for the first time.” I love pushing the edge of cultural taboos. (Pushing the bounds of sexual taboos has pretty much been done to death at this point, but there’s plenty of other taboos out there if you care to look around for them.)
Something that almost always happens to me right after I give a presentation is a sense of “let down.” Having gone from days and days of living in the realm of planning and the realm of the theoretical to the what I actually did in the show, there’s always a sense of “gee, I could’ve done that section so much better.” That feeling really used to get me down a lot, but now I understand, there’s really nothing wrong with that. Every time I push myself to a higher level of performance, that will inevitably give me a perspective with which to see all the other things that I could do better. The only way I can get that perspective is by pushing myself higher, and that process will never be perfect. If I ever get to the point where I feel like I can’t make it better or larger, that’s the day I need to quit and find a bigger challenge.
Anyway, thanks to Paul Lappin for inviting me back to speak on the series, "Wireless" Mike Flynn for having me on his radio show, and also thanks to Sean for running the event itself from the library side.
OK, time to sit down and look at what I could do better and start rehearsing for my next presentation. It’s a private after dinner talk for a bunch of healthcare professionals, and I’m really looking forward to it.
© Justin Locke
