Looking Beyond

Copyrighted by Lorna Tedder. Originally published in Third Degree Ebb and Flow.

I’m trying to look beyond the next grueling 10 days and keep my spirits high. There’s much to be done!

The good  news?  I  realized  this  afternoon  that  the workshop  I’d   been  preparing  for  my  trip  to  Ocala- Altoona-Daytona is for a different trip. I had to pull out my contract to double-check.  I don’t  have  to have this workshop finished up yet, as I’d thought. Yay—I can set this one aside, even though I was 98% happy with it.

The bad news? I was 98% done and happy with it. Wasted hours.  However,  I’m half-satisfied  with one of the  three   workshops,   90%   satisfied   with  a  second, and…oh, 75% satisfied  with the third. Still  have  all day tomorrow  to work on them, here and there during the week, and next weekend to smooth things out. I still have two major briefings to deliver at work on Monday, but I know  the  material  well  enough  that  I’ll  just  wing  it.  I could have picked some much easier topics that I wouldn’t have had to prepare anything for, but these  intrigued me.

I hate when I over-stress myself. Speaking in public has never been  an easy thing for me, but I’ve been revamping my style a bit, as well as these workshops so that I’m actually talking from, at most, a very skimpy outline and telling my story of how, what, when, where. My biggest problem is with short-term memory and remembering what I said 5  seconds ago. My mind jumps around, and if I forget where I was, I look stupid. At least to myself, even if I can cover well.

I hate speakers  who read their speeches.  I don’t do

that in briefings at work and I won’t do it for workshops I teach on my own time. So it’s a struggle, but I’m trying to position myself so that I can simply share my knowledge and experiences  rather than worry  about the form and whether I’m doing it “right.” My focus is on content, on substance.

I’d rather talk with my hands and be expressive  than bore people.  My first rule is, keep the audience awake, then you can teach them.

Which is  why  I’m  famous  for  using  a  sword  as  a pointer.