Houston, Toronto, Paris, Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte and a lot of practice!

As I mentioned in the last post, I needed to hunker down and really prepare for this TEDx talk. I met up with Amanda and Justin in Houston for dinner. It was a great restaurant and the stars aligned for that I needed to be there for work anyways. Amanda is a licensed counselor and I got to pick her brain on the topic from an academic perspective. She told me that a lot of study has been done around ‘luck’ but not around passion and what makes people mentor or pull others. Justin had some insight as well for that he works at a large oil and gas company and has seen first hand how people pull others. One of his stories was about a guy that is now a Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and he started on the rigs off the coast of Louisiana ~20 years ago…amazing story. He sees it all the time how opportunities to move around, up, laterally, or to take on new challenges completely out of peoples trained disciplines are offered to certain people, while others sit stagnant. Justin and Amanda also have first hand experience in this for that Justin was previously based in San Francisco and relocated to Houston for a team leader opportunity. He was encouraged by others and pulled into the opp — now they live in Houston and he manages a team.

The week after dinner Amanda forwarded me a number of academic papers to which I read in detail. They were fascinating and showed that there were a few people studying this, but none had put a formula to it. I sent over my thought document to them and after words of encouragement and great feedback I kept on going. I remember hearing from Amanda ‘you’ve got to fit this into 18mins or less…its going to be hard’ So my mind kept racing and I had to simplify, simplify, simplify!

After spending the better part of the flight back from Houston editing, I got the paper down to under ~2000 words. It was time to engage others in my network and qualify it.

I talked extensively to folks from all over NA & Europe…Toronto, Paris, Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Cleveland, Chatham-Kent, Detroit and of course Windsor. The more I shared the paper and explained it to others, the more comfortable I got with the topic and it’s details. I also got to learn a ton more personal stories and perspectives. I remember some discussions going on tangents like glass ceilings, environmental influence, timing, pop culture influence, etc. Great chats for sure.

I also connected with Noah Fleming who was another TEDx Chatham-Kent speaker. We met up for lunch and my intention was first to meet someone who’s also talking, but also to get insight on how he’s preparing and of course to feedback on the passion formula idea. I remember being 1/2 way into explaining it to him over lunch at Jack’s Gastropub in Kingsville Ontario and he interrupted me saying ‘this is such a great book idea…you need to think bigger on this’. Noah and I are still in contact to this day and have became friends.

There were other meetups & chats up until the week prior to the event…in Greek Town (Detroit) with Jack, calls while Bernard was on the train between London & Paris, FaceTime sessions with Mark S. in Toronto and Alan chirping at me while he was on a racing lawn tractor in Hicksville, SC (kidding). All of this engaging was very enlightening and my big take away from every conversation was that the idea, esp the formula, made people pause, think, then debate and most agreed…so I kept going.

There was only two weeks to go until the talk so I started practicing more and more to really hone the message and get it into the 18min timeframe. Some of the input back from Bernard was to focus it all on the formula…don’t get into the concept that people don’t decide what they do in life. It was great insight for that there was no way I could hit both of those topics in 18 mins. This cut down the paper even more.

I then setup a mini recording studio in my basement…more like a camera on a tripod with a projector 🙂 While working from home for the week, I’d find a free 20 minutes during the day and in evenings to record practice talks.

I found it really unnatural to present to no one…but I’ve found my best presentations only come when i know the content cold and this was a good way to get deeper with the content. Over the years I’ve learned when to ad-lib, when to use stories and of course when to dive into the real meat but usually this comes after doing the talk a min of 3-4 times…but with this TEDx talk…I didn’t have that luxury…I basically had 1 shot to get it right.

I ended up picking the best recorded pitch every night and showing it to my wife before we went to bed. She’d give great feedback and was my biggest supporter in this journey…I remember a couple of times her waking up in the morning and saying ‘I thought of another thing you could do’ or ‘did you think of this angle?’…perhaps she dreamed of it all night. It overtook us for a couple of weeks for sure but we could tell it kept getting more and more focused.

I even bugged Mark S. in Toronto many more times just for me to pitch it to him over FaceTime video. We’d even connect while I was walking the dog in the evenings…people in the neighbourhood probably think I’m the crazy guy talking to himself while walking the dog…but at any rate Mark had great insight and helped immensely. He was the guy behind the very simple powerpoint slides…’keep it simple and use purple’ he said ‘…people will remember that’ purple passion power Mark! 🙂

At any rate, the big take away from this post is that it took a tribe…a global tribe. It was the Wednesday before the event and I got a hold of Dr. Dean K., someone who I’ve always felt connected to and I’d left a VM for while I drove back from Toronto in the last post. Dean is an ivy league educated surgical director in Detroit. He’s an amazingly humble and down to earth guy that just loves to help others. He gave me even more insight and after that chat I remember saying to myself…no more prep…I’m ready.

That Wednesday night the president of my software business in GE called me…it was an interesting conversation about my future at GE. I got the feeling that passion was going to give me a new opp at GE very soon…the weird thing was the timing. The next day at 10am, only hours before the TEDx talk, a new org structure was to be announced and one of his leaders called me while I was literally driving down to the event about a new role…passion was about to prove it’s power again in my career…

More to come on my TEDx journey…I’ve got 1 more post to tell the story of the day of the event and my reflections on it. 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 & FINAL POST OF THE JOURNEY IS UP. READ ON!

— Kyle