To infininty, and beyond. Or to Walsall and Back

Hello!

Today I was, for the first time in Walsall, with one of my colleagues EB. I know that I have been threatening to give a finalised post on the PLP and training in the business, I thought that today's experience warranted a blog post.

As I write this am travelling back to London, and I started to get very introspective about what went well and what went badly about the graduate project we were delivering. To give you all a bit of perspective, we were travelling from London to Walsall to deliver a one hour workshop to some of our sellers. The purpose of our workshop was to "share best practices". Here are a few things I learned from the experience:

1. Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance (but no too much): Myself and EB had practiced and prepared our workshop for about 3 hours. This does not include the direct work that goes into the slides / research, just purely on the content after we know what we wanted to say Without thinking about it, we seemed to settle on a ratio of for every one hour of deliver, three hours of preparation were required to get us comfortable with the material. Now, I am not saying that this was an amazing workshop or perfect delivery, but I was at a point were I was confident in the material and the workshop.

2. Less Talking, more walking: I discovered today that I have an urge to walk around when I am talking / presenting. Every time that I got started on a slide, I had an urge to stroll around the nice big room we were in. Why is this? In retrospect, I think it is down to two things. One part is definitely nerves. It can be a little stressful delivering a message to a group of people you have never met and I think I had some nerves, this probably manifested itself in me wanting to move around so as to distract the people present. I guess, subconsciously, that if they are focusing on my movement and not my speech, I am less likely to be concerned about what I am saying.

The other reason I think is impact. Most of the people I see talking, be it in TV or in person, do so while making some form of movement. When it feels inappropriate to use your hands to emphasise a point ( and here it did - I was not arguing after all) I think I wanted to move to add emphasis to my points. But I somehow resisted the urge to move….but what did I do?

3. Nerves? No way! I just want to be loved; This is something I noticed myself doing very early on. Once I had introduced myself and started talking, I insisted on becoming defensive. Not only did I start talking about where I am from, but started talking about how new I was to the business and, hell, I think I even started to sound more Irish! Why? Well, I don’t really know - I guess I just figured that I would use / abuse some of the fabled Irish charm. So, what does this say about me? Well, maybe nothing more than I want to be liked (hell, who doesn’t) but it may also say that I am willing to resort to wiley charm to get people on my side. Either or, its not necessarily a bad thing… is it? And speaking of bad things….

4. Bad Jokes = Bad Idea: I told two bad jokes, though each was bad for a different reason. The first was bad as it made reference to…well…how shall I say it….self love. Admittedly this was only a double entrendre but still, I think that it was definitely a bad idea. Plus no one laughed (I don’t think they got the double entendre!). The second joke was bad due to the audience….it was not awful mind you, but I used a vaguely sexist quote from an audience of which the majority were woman… though I think they liked me enough to let me get away with it…I hope…

5. Finally… How does that make you feel? Ultimately, it was an interesting day - all that travel for a one hour workshop. I had never been to Walsall and it was nice. I felt nice. I had never ran a workshop, it was nice to be able to do so. I also thought the crowd liked me and my colleague, so that was nice. I also was not too nervous, which was nice. And everyone I met was nice. So the whole thing was nice.

But for me that’s just it…nice is comfortable. Cotton wool is nice, and its fluffy, just like sharing best practices / presenting. And for me, this is the difference. I had a nice day, but I much prefer a driven, challenging one. I am coming back, a little tired and happy with the work, but I don’t feel exhilarated or like I have seriously achieved something. I would rather be out of my comfort zone, facing challenges, being put under pressure and pushing myself.

The saying "its nice to be nice" is very appropriate, but I would add that "its better to be challenged". Was I challenged today? Yes, but only in nice ways. And nice is not enough for me….and yet nasty is too far. So, I need to find somewhere in the middle? Quite possibly….but what does that mean…

Conclusion

Part of me thinks that nice is nice, the other part thinks nice is lame. So, I probably need somewhere in the middle, less nice, more spice, if you will. But then again, as my often worn red T-shirt says, "spice is the spice of life". So….I say….bring me more spice.

DD

PS for those of you who know me, you can probably guess how tempted I have been to leap into poetry here….so many words to rhyme with nice and spice….I just about resisted the urge….