TEDx Vashi – What An Experience!

A few months ago I received an email from someone inviting me to speak at TEDx Vashi.  While I was over the moon that I was being offered the opportunity to speak at my second TEDx forum, I tried to mask my excitement by writing a cold, formal response of, “Yes, I accept your invitation” to the organizer and then proceeded to call my wife and parents so that I could remind them how lucky they are to have me as a husband and son, respectively.    

The invitation was sent September  5,  2018 and the date of the talk was January 19, 2019 so I happily penciled it into my calendar and didn’t spend a minute to think about what I would actually talk about. As a self-proclaimed ‘seasoned public speaker,’ I honestly thought that I would be fine working on my script in December or possibly even in January a few weeks before the talk.  The TEDx Vashi organizers had other plans for me.

It was around November that the first set of calls from the organizers starting coming in. “Hello Sir, please share the topic that you will be speaking about.” “Hello Sir, please share the outline of your talk.” “Hello Sir, what type of visuals will you be using.” I had never been asked so many questions months before a talk and, while I may have seemed slightly annoyed on the calls, deep down I completely respected the organizers for the level of professionalism they were bringing into the build up for the event.

I reluctantly put together a talk outline along with the list of visuals that I would show on the screen, hit ‘send,’ and felt relieved believing that the organizers probably wouldn’t bother me again until sometime in January. Boy was I wrong. On Christmas Day while in Sri Lanka with my family, the whatsapp messages started coming in, “Sir, please send your full script.” “Sir, we need your final script ASAP.” I couldn’t believe it, how could someone ask me for a script of my speech over 3 weeks before the actual talk? Was I making a State of the Union address? It was around that time that I was regretting my decision to do the talk.

I used every bit of whatsapp charm that I could muster to push my ‘final script deadline date’ back until January 6 (still 13 days before the talk) which is when I would return to India.  The script was all I could think about on the flight from Colombo to Mumbai so as soon as I entered my house, I turned on my computer and started writing. I completed it a few hours later, hit ‘send’ and felt relieved again…for 24 hours until an email from the organizers popped up on my screen which said,  “Sir, please send us your visuals ASAP.” Bloody Hell.  

A few days later the final, final, final script was done as well as the visuals, I hit ‘send’ and felt happy. “Finally, I’m done until the 19^th.” Then “Sir, we need to do our first dry run.” I was about tell the organizer where he could stick his ‘dry run’ when it hit me, this is the kind of preparation that I have been asking my students to go through before all of their presentations.  It was at that moment that I surrendered all of my resistance of this rigorous process and happily scheduled the dry run.

My first dry run was okay but I found myself wondering if I would be able to memorize the entire speech which was filled with long, descriptive sentences and vocabulary which sounded good earlier when I was frantically trying to fill up my blank Microsoft Word page but didn’t seem natural when coming out of my mouth.  The other thing that was going through my mind was the fact that my Mother and Father would be in attendance at the TEDx Vashi event which was creating another level of anxiety. Also, the last TEDx I spoke at was TEDx Youth which means that the room was full of teenagers – I typically do well with this age bracket as a few images of me with Premier League and LaLiga players and officials usually creates an immediate acceptance in the room.  This was different, it was a regular TEDx event where the audience would be all corporate adults who were not easily won over by a few images of Manchester United and FC Barcelona.  

The night before the event, I couldn’t sleep. I actually had butterflies in my stomach. By that time I had memorized the talk, had completed countless dry runs and had been given the green light by my most important critiques – my parents and wife. However I was really nervous. What made it worse is that the organizers generously sent a car to pick me up at my home at 1:00pm to bring me to the venue where I wouldn’t be speaking until 8:30pm.

Instead of using the 7 hours at the hotel to practice, I mainly spent time with the other speakers sharing our war stories about the persistent organizers.  Finally, at 8:29pm, I was called up on stage to deliver my talk in front of 100 people who had just listened to 4 other people who knocked their speeches out of the park.  As soon as I started speaking, I found my comfort zone and shared my message through my heart. The talk seemed to go better than expected, at least judging by the audience reaction and smiles on my parent’s faces. 

At the end, I was all gratitude for each organizer of this TEDx event and couldn’t hug and thank them enough for their hard work as it really made a positive difference to everyone’s experience during that special evening. I finally left the hotel with my family full of joy, relief, biryani and self-promises that I would never again resist any event organizer who pushes me to prepare early. 

P.S. I will share a link to the talk in about 2 months when it gets uploaded to the TEDx website