OK so now it was on like donkey kong!

As I ended the last blog, on January 8th 2014 I received an email from John Lyons (twitter @hubcr8iv_john). I didn’t know John, but he was part of the organizational team putting on the TEDX event in Chatham Kent. The email from him was simple.

‘We’re so excited that you want to speak at TEDx Chatham-Kent. Please accept this message as confirmation of your acceptance as a speaker.’

Attached to the email were 2 pdf’s. One was a speaker release form which i’ve done for work many times…but the TEDx one is a bit different — a good different though. Basically a lot legal talk about conforming to a ‘Creative Commons license’ so the video can be shared and not to use any third party material. The other attachment was a TEDx speaker guide. A lot of the stuff in the guide was basic presentation tips and tricks, but section 5 talked about rehearsing and doing A LOT of it. I’m sure TEDx events have had their fair share of talks that went bad..none of which are uploaded for all to see, but when I talk for work I tend to not practice a lot. I do this because I know the work content so well I tend to focus on recent stories that are weaved into the products/messages which helps the audience believe in the idea…because my goal presenting over the years has been less and less about projecting knowledge and more about leading the audience to the idea and making them feel it’s their idea. This approach is more ‘ad-hoc’ and requires more thinking of what stories align…which I’ve learned with less traditional prep the more ‘real’ it comes off and the better it works.

Anyways, after reading the release and the TEDx guide I thought I could just study my thought document 2-3 more times and just ‘do my thing’…maybe even practice in front of a camera couple of times if I ‘had the time’.

/Sidebar

I asked John after the event why they selected me and I thought it would be interesting to share it at this part of the story even though it’s out of order. I got this information about a month after the event. Here is a synopsis of why the organizers chose me.

* The T part of TED is all about technology. I’ve been immersed in software for over 10 years and they needed to balance out their presenters backgrounds.

* GE is a big company, 4th largest in the world in fact. The theme for the TEDx Chatham-Kent event was small town big ideas…I came from the small town of Chatham-Kent and work at GE. Matches the theme.

* the concept of a passion formula backed from a tech experience really intrigued the event organizers.

* and finally, he says ‘I really really wanted to do it’. this speaks to the horizontal passion I live by…I think this is more about going outside my comfort zone, taking a risk — essentially the 2nd part of my application about inspiring others to go outside their zones. Next time I have a beer with John I’ll explore this more 🙂

/End Sidebar

So back to early January and I did my first practice talks by myself in my car while I drove to Toronto for meetings. This was a 3.5 hour drive each way and on the way up I attempted the talk 3x. I played them all back and was disappointed. Not only were they 30 mins long, but I jumped around between the concept of not deciding what you do in life and the passion formula. There were no real stories, the flow was bad and I think if I did those talks at a bar with a beer in front of me…it would just be considered drunk talk. While in the Toronto meetings I was distracted because I got really nervous about winging the talk and I couldn’t accept how badly I sounded on the drive up…it was just over 5 weeks away and I needed to work on it a lot. I needed to take a 4000 word document, a formula and some examples and qualify it with my network, practice it, get more examples and hone it down to a 18 minute talk.  In fact my goal was to do it in 10 mins.

On the drive back I must have talked with 4 people live (and left 2 VM’s) headset in while driving of course 🙂 I just asked them to tell me their story and I listened. I had some examples of people zig zagging in their lives in the thought document already but I needed more insight, advice and qualification from their stories and of course on the formula itself. I became obsessed and didn’t sleep much over that weekend…I thought of who else in my network could help qualify and hone the concept…so I edited the thought document down to around 3000 words and shared it with 8 folks. Ryan C, Amanda S, Mark S, Amanda H, Bernard C, Alan H, Jack F and of course sent it again over to my wifey Dana…which I’m sure was sick of talking about it, but has always been my biggest fan and jumped right back in.

I had meetings in Houston the following week and coincidentally it was perfect timing for that my 2nd cousin Amanda HM and her husband Justin M recently relocated there…and she happened to be a licensed professional counselor with a psych background working at UTexas. We set up a dinner at Willy G’s (yeah funny name for a nice place) and I couldn’t wait to get there to pick their brains. They were either going to jump into the concept and help me…tell me someone else had thought of this…or that I was insane. Either way we’d have a good dinner and catch up 🙂

I remember back when I got that email from John…I told myself no sweat, alls I need is a week to prepare…boy was I wrong…this talk was going to take a tribe and was going to be the hardest presentation I’ve ever done. I needed every free minute for the next 4 weeks to rock it…so it was on like donkey kong…and I was headed to Willy G’s in Houston for the next step.

More to come on my TEDx journey…I think I’ve got ~2 more posts to round out the story up to the event. Stay tuned!

BTW — They have posted the video already (ahead of schedule!) so if you want to jump ahead and watch it go ahead! TEDx Youtube Link: The Benefits of Passion – Kyle Reissner.

Be sure to follow the posts on twitter @passion_formula and subscribe to this blog via email to get updates when new posts are up!

With that I’ll leave you hanging until my next blog post. THE NEXT BLOG POST IS UP. READ ON!

— Kyle