What if being resilient isn't a good thing?
Because 'character building' isn't that fun - here's an alternative
At the end of last week, I had to dig deep. I’d been given the opportunity to host several talks at the Allbright’s excellent Step Forward summit - something I was hugely excited about but also took seriously; wanting to get the best out of the speakers and make it genuinely useful for the audience. All of which is to say, I felt some nerves - the good kind, where you know you’re capable of doing something, if you can just avoid a minor panic attack in the meantime.
So I did what I often do when I feel a bit OmgWhatAmIDoing and asked myself a question: what’s the worst that can happen?
I tend to break this down into smaller scenarios. The conversation could dry-up in the middle of a panel (I can just ask another question). The main speaker could just not turn up (had this twice before, was fine). I could slip off my stool in front of everyone (ditto, once because I had a dead leg, another time as the leather seat got quite sweaty).
The solution: prepare, keep the energy high, listen and draw on the reserves of resilience I’ve built up over my years of public speaking and falling off chairs. Or, at least, what I thought was resilience until one panel conversation unexpectedly shifted my perspective on the whole thing.
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