In This I Tried to Talk About Being Deliberate but Ended Up Talking About Identity
In this rambling (at least I'm honest), I talk about trying to be more deliberate and some ideas adjacent to that.
I’ve had the chance to do a lot of speaking lately. And, to be honest, it’s not going so great.
The approach I’ve taken with these engagements has largely been spontaneous, no forethought to what to say… not even to what I could say. While there is room for spontaneity in conversation, and even in high profile speeches (Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech” comes to mind"), I know I am doing myself a disservice.
I have never been an seat-of-the-pants person. It is a persona that I’ve adopted to protect myself. I have never really been the spontaneous thinker who seems to pull out fascinating concepts emergent from a conversation, who can talk meaningfully, and on-end about something. Nor have I ever really been the public intellectual type. I have assumed these personas in large part because I admire people who are like this, or who at least seem to be this way.
Approaching talks and high-profile conversations this way protects me from failure. As long as I can convince myself that I didn’t actually try and achieve X end, then when I fail I’m still okay, I’m still intact.
Protecting my ego from failure has, in effect, divorced me from my nature. I am more intuitive than I am intellectual, more feeling than thinking, more whimsical than I am serious, more spiritual than I am scientific, more slow and deliberate than I am fast and improvisational, but I have run from these things. Now, I want to find my way back to them, but it’s not easy. In fact, it’s a lot like returning to your hometown after a few years of being away. Things are the same, yet entirely different.
I want to start giving talks as Austin as I am, not the one that I’ve convinced myself to be. Doing so has been costing me considerable energy. Preparing for a talk, even a 5 minute talk with content that I know a lot about, fills me with anxiety and dread. It reminds of why I changed to the false persona. I can’t truly fail myself in a talk if I never gave myself a chance at succeeding.
I’m thinking of who people know me reading this and potentially being surprised. Surprised at my characterization of my talks not going well, surprised by the persona I’ve tried to adopt. Truth is, I don’t know if my talks aren’t going well in how they impact others. What I do know is that internally don’t feel great at all. And, when I did talk from a place which was more planned and deliberate, the feedback was already much more than I had ever received.
(I wanted a picture of a mask or something to go here but if you type mask in Pexels, most of what you get are pictures of people in masks, COVID has really did a number on things)
For the latter point, I can’t say to what degree I successfully adopted the persona that I’m speaking of. Perhaps those that deal with me daily already understood what my actual nature was and aren’t surprised; maybe all of this was purely internal and never quite reflected outside of that.
Either way, I know who I am and that requires becoming more deliberate. It demands from me levels of intentionality that, right now, seem pretty impossible.
I’m going to end this partially-rambling article with this: the pursuits of the multidisciplined are attempts at understanding the self. Your responsibility as a person should be to never surrender that self once you have a grasp of who that might be. Whether that means living with more intentionality or less, you owe it to yourself for your generalism to pour out of every aspect of you.
Great Things I’ve Read This Week
Co-Creating Fearless Futures: A Feminist Cartographer's Toolkit (Link doesn’t go directly to the toolkit)
Strategic Foresight Primer by Angela Wilkinson (directly to PDF)