Showing up
These days, as students wrap up their final papers and prepare presentations of their research, I am doing a lot of listening and asking questions. What is worrying you? What is really important about your work? What do you want the audience to think, feel, or do when they read or listen to you? I reflect back what I hear them saying, and make suggestions. Slow down. Less is more. Help the audience follow your argument. State your goal and remind us periodically as you go. “The audience is the hero of your idea,” as Nancy Duarte says. Make sure you are bringing your audience along with you. I help students and scholars work through what they are doing and why, to present the best version of themselves. But before you present yourself, you have to show up. And how do you want to do that?
As you may have noticed, I am always picking up tidbits and thinking about how they connect and how they might be useful for academics, whether I am reading, listening to podcasts, or being a baseball mom. Last week I listened to Mel Robbins’s conversation with Erin Walsh, a stylist for people preparing for the red carpet. I love clothes, but was a little skeptical of what could be learned here. And it was a great conversation. Walsh tells us to start the day with one question: how do I want to feel? So you can go into your closet with that question, not, what do I have to wear, what will people think, or worse, not even thinking about it. She argues that being intentional about how you get dressed each morning can help you feel more confident and set you up for being your best self: “You have to get dressed anyway, so why not dress as your most supernova self… and not be afraid to be that person? What are you waiting for?” So I might add this to my toolbox, as I play the role of “stylist to academics.” How do you want to feel today?
I am often talking to students about how to be authentic. What is true about you, and how do you want to communicate that? You aren’t supposed to think about what you have to say in your teaching statement, for example. The statement is meant to be an opportunity for you to share something essential about you. On another recent podcast, Seth Godin, a marketing expert, shares that authenticity should not really be your goal, and true authenticity should be reserved for a few close friends. Instead, you should aim for consistency. You should always be playing the role of the best version of yourself, even when you are having a bad day. Of course that best version should be authentic to the you you want to be. The more you work on this, the more you become that person! The key is deciding who you want to be, because “everyone will want to make the story of you true.” I love this idea. If you can be in touch with how you are at your best, and how you want to be, that is the person who needs to show up for the talk or the interview, and after a while you will get used to showing up that way all the time.
And of course I was also thinking about these ideas in the context of baseball, because it was opening day for my sons, and for the Red Sox, this past weekend. If you think about it, sports are designed to help us with these lessons. You wear the uniform and all the related gear to feel like a player. Both of my sons have to have their socks just the right way. Now I understand that’s not some trivial thing, and I take my role as the washer of the uniforms very seriously. For baseball, consistency is everything. They put in the reps and have the rituals they do before each game so they can go out on the field feeling like the players they want to be.
You may not always get it quite right, but the key is to persist, to keep showing up, and keep working on it. So, how can you show up as your best self? What support do you need to get there? I am here to help.
