I’ve dreamt of speaking about all that we can learn from our past choices to make better future choices, but I’ve resisted. After listening to my friend Patty share how she’d spoken 50 times in 50 weeks, and the transformation she had, I was inspired to take action. As synchronicity would have it, while exploring an alternate high school for my youngest son, I got connected to Joanne. As we got to know each other I shared my work around exploring choices and told her I had a vision to speak about it.
“Did you know that I’m the organizer of the New Haven Pecha Kucha community?”
“I don’t know what that is, tell me.”
“The format of a PechaKucha (Japanese for “chit chat”) talk is simple. Speakers have 20 slides automatically advancing every 20 seconds while they talk or sing or, even dance. Their call. We supply the crowd hungry for their words and images about their ideas, their work, their research, or their passion. Would you like to present at our next one?”
“Yes,” I said without knowing more. It was life’s perfect synchronicity that Joanne had shown up just as I made my declaration that I’d begin speaking.
The biggest challenge for me in preparing a talk that’s 6 minutes and 40 seconds is how to tell a story in that short window of time. I began amassing imagery to capture many of the themes I knew I’d like to speak about, as well as screen shots of maps I wanted to discuss, with proper blurring so as not to show the personal details.
After finessing the order of my slides, working on the words for each image, so they’d be just 20 seconds, I headed off, a bit nervous but excited, to a small community theater in New Haven.
Learning I was second to speak, out of 10 presenters, I jumped in. What I quickly learned as I stood before about 60 people in the audience, is that whatever I’d prepared flew out of my brain and I was left to just recall the nuggets without my notes. Whatever was embedded in my heart came out.
Regardless of how it actually went, I did it.
I gave my first talk about The Alchemy of Choice and shared my message that you can change your life one choice at a time.
The video I’m sharing with you on this page is the complete scripted version created in the quiet of my home using the Pecha Kucha formatting. I hope you enjoy it. (And, here’s a snippet from my upcoming book about what The Alchemy of Choice means.)