Sally Koering Zimney shares how to prepare yourself before speaking. She covers cultivating a generous spirit, shifting focus from yourself to the audience, and co-creating a shared experience with listeners through mind, body, and spirit preparation.
Chapters
We need a generous spirit in order for the big, beautiful things to happen in our talk, because we are inviting people in to our human experience. And we want them to invite us into theirs. It becomes this shared co-creative experience together, virtually, in person, either way, the words that I'm saying reach out to you and have different associations with your memories and your experiences and your life. And together we are co-creating a new other thing. Like, it's metaphysical, crazy, awesome, weird, and I love it. I think it's wild. Not a scientist. I just know just a little bit enough. And I feel that you don't need to be a scientist to know it. Like, I really feel it. So the mind, the body, and the spirit. We talk a lot about mind and body. Most of us know, oh gosh, yep. I need to do something so that I'm physically ready and mentally ready. But what about the spirit? What do you do to help make sure that you have an open and generous heart with your audience and how we get there? And I think it can be a really, it can take us a while to get there when we we really trust ourselves in the moment out front and we trust that we can handle what's coming our way, it's much easier to be a generous speaker and to have a generous spirit up there because we're no longer really thinking about ourselves. And I think the first chunk of rehearsal and preparation is very self-focused. It's like, oh, I don't like how this feels. I don't like this and I feel weird and I can't figure this out. And it's all I, I, I, I, I. But when we step out on stage, we really wanna shift that focus to you, who you are, your experience, you audience, where are you at? How are you feeling? What's going on? And sort of bring each other into the same human experience.
