Because of Covid-19, many of the conferences I usually attend were done remotely. So, thousands of people were able to attend from the comfort of their home and without having to deal with the hassle of traveling. I was one of those people, with the caveat that, I was presenting at some of these conferences.
Webinars are such an interesting format for delivering a presentation; they’re trendy these days, they’re raw, and they’re real. They’re definitely different than what I’m used to. When I’m teaching, I have students to discuss, analyze, and unpack ideas. When I’m doing therapy or coaching, I have clients that I’m interacting with.
However, when delivering a webinar, I’m looking at a screen and a chat box, hoping to read all messages so I can interact with the attendees. I cannot see anyone’s face because most of the platforms don’t allow you to see the participants while using another application for your presentation; that’s very tricky for me given that I’m all about engaging with others when presenting.
While these webinars allowed me to connect with so many people all over the world, they also triggered fears of not doing things right and perfect for me – because of the format, the challenge of reading the messages, the technological problems, and so on. From time to time, my mind was shouting at me “oh boy, no one will take me seriously; aughhh I look and sound so informal.”
At the end of each one of those webinars, despite the newness of the format and the background noise my mind was making, I finished excited, revitalized, and amazed by people’s participation; forty-eight hours later, the views of the webinar were much higher than what I anticipated and received very interesting follow-up questions.
So, here is a reflection that I would like to share with you and hope it’s helpful to you in dealing with all the fear-based reactions you may encounter on your way:
-When doing what’s important to us, we naturally feel anxious.
– We feel anxious, because we care about what we’re doing.
– When doing what we care, our mind naturally comes up with thoughts like “it will be bad, terribly bad.”
Our mind is not our enemy, but a very protective device that wants to make sure we don’t mess up. At times, it comes with thoughts about the outcome of a situation with strong focus on what could possibly go wrong, terribly wrong so we are more careful, more cautious, and more intentional about what we do. The challenge is that while those thoughts are a possibility, there is no way for us to know whether they might happen or not, those are just hypothetical thoughts. So, dwelling on them is dwelling on pessimistic hypotheticals, spending time on negative possibilities, and ruminating in unwanted outcomes.
Not everything is, as we think it is.
I want to invite you to check the narrative, thoughts, or stories you’re willing to watch – and make room for – when doing what you care about this week.
