Hello Human!
Today's Newsletter is an invitation: join us at Personal Democracy Forum Central and Eastern Europe (live or live-streamed), in less then two weeks! (you can join the facebook event to get notifications about live stream). But most of all I want to share what I learned when working with over 35 presenters coming to the event.

For the last four months I have been working with an amazing bunch of people - speakers, workshop leaders, panel discussions moderators of the upcoming Personal Democracy Forum Central and Eastern Europe. As a coach and program curator, my role was, between other things, taking care of avoiding what is often killing events: the boredom.

That is why we decided that going for authenticity is the right approach. Where there is authenticity, there is passion. And possibly there is less place for the boredom of presenters themselves and hence less boredom of the public too. Of course, we were working on other aspects of the message and the delivery, but one point was always the most important:

 how not to bore yourself and others.

I loved my coaching role because I could encourage everybody to be honest, authentic, even edgy. I felt like a little mischief fairy, encouraging everybody's true instincts hidden somewhere behind the curtain of wrongly understood professionalism. From what I could see, we tend to believe, that when we get to be human, we instantly lose our professionalism like our brain stops being capable of serving correct data and moreover, we are not worth listening to.

While it is exactly the opposite! Because if, is supported by facts and data, and built on passion, there is the sweet spot what we as audience need to feel engaged.

There is a reason nowadays satirists and comedians are the go-to for many people in the search of facts. Look at John Olivier, Trevor Noah and their extensive researched pieces on politics - they are fact-based, but that doesn't make them boring. The same data can be found in many other sources, but now they, not other outlets, are the most listened to.

In the work for PDF CEE we were fighting against the notion:

authentic is almost by default naive and naive is silly, so it is easy: authentic equals silly.

And that is the exact opposite to what we have to be at work. Especially in activism - where we almost always play on somebody's else field, and it means we need to adjust to standards of other sectors in order to prove our belongings.
 
Do I mean by all that that we should just become comedians? Oh for sure not! But there is a lot of grey area between killing your audience with PowerPoint and being a clown.

Deborah Francis-White, in her brilliant TEDx Talk "Charisma versus Stage Fright" describes it perfectly: "The bar, for presenting, speaking, communication in general, in the business world is incredibly low. The expectation is so low." She then gives good hints on how to work with your posture to feel better on stage - the whole speech is highly recommended!
 

I already recommended it once in the December Newsletter, but to support my point on why is it worth not being boring (especially in activism) let me share it one more time. In the Megaphone Podcast, Borna Sor, Croatian satirists, is talking with Jakub Górnicki and discusses how important it is to fight apathy and to connect to others by using humour. And also how important it is to be authentic in this communication.

And then there are the wise words of Brené Brown from her famous TED talk about vulnerability:

"Courage, the original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language -- it's from the Latin word "cor," meaning "heart" -- and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. And so these folks [who think they are good enough] had, very simply, the courage to be imperfect. They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because, as it turns out, we can't practice compassion with other people if we can't treat ourselves kindly. And the last was they had connection, and -- this was the hard part -- as a result of authenticity, they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were, which you have to absolutely do that for connection."

Summing up: When trying the new approach and being authentic, there is a chance you will make mistakes or some of your choices won't really work with your audience. But that doesn't make you any less worth listening to. And of course, that does not mean at all lack of rehearsing, being unprepared or having badly designed slides. Being authentic doesn't mean being sloppy or inattentive to your audience needs. It just means trying to go outside of very narrow boundaries of what we are used to showing in work life and being okay with the fact that we are worth listening to, even when being imperfect.

With the PDF CEE speakers, we searched beyond the usual "conference model" and connected the main narrative of the event to what they are really passionate about, what drives them, what they can discuss late nights over and over. And I believe we succeeded (we will see on April 4-5th in Gdańsk :)

In the today's gift, I'm sharing a worksheet for preparing a presentation in the spirit of authenticity and thinking about your audience. This is where we start with the speakers when working on their presentations, workshops or even panel discussions.

My name is Anna Kuliberda and as a coach, I work with individuals as well as with organizations on finding the right ways to make activism sustainable in three dimensions: personal choices; supporting communities in building anti-burnout culture of balancing passion with reasonable resources management; and with more formal non-profit organizations and other institutions on introducing anti-burnout strategies and human-friendly, and management efficient environment.

Contact me if you want to work on your presentation or invite me to support your event using the approach of Inspiration, Authenticity, Knowledge and Strategy.

First consultation is free!

Contact me at: anna.kuliberda@gmail.com

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