enthusiastic

a backhanded compliment?

the short stories continue!

as you may have seen in a recent edition of the newsletter, i detailed that my slide decks are often themed and most recently, i milked the pirates of the caribbean series dry. honestly, the content wrote itself a lot of the time. it becomes incredibly easy to craft a presentation when the analogies are familiar and close to the original narrative, so when i joked that coach education feels as useful as a jar of dirt sometimes, there was no stopping. you can check out the original post here.

there’s something to be said for a memorable slide deck - my previous stint at a conference years earlier included the pokemon evolutions to illustrate different levels of representative learning design. you can still find the full slide deck here. two years later, someone sent me an email saying they vividly remembered this talk and thought of me for a project! that’s pretty cool.

but the slide deck is only half the game, someone still has to stand in front of the projector and bring it to life ← I use that language intentionally because people were trying to be so nice by attempting to capture a photo of me while i was presenting and i NEVER stood in a photogenic position ahahaha i’m so sorry.

the dominant conversation after my presentation is rarely the content. if you’ve ever heard me speak, i am consistent. i write these newsletters in the same way i speak - so you may notice that it’s quite chaotic. i stopped planning what i was going to say in my presentations years ago, because i found saying the ‘right’ words got in the way of the story i was trying to tell. most of my research presentations centre on my own experiences - i was there. i remember the way things are said or the little anecdotes that emerged. i weave those into the narrative to help keep the raw, open, authentic way i like to engage with the world shine through what i’m about to say, all while still (mostly) meeting the criteria for a research presentation.

i speak with enthusiasm, there’s no denying that. i bring my energy everywhere with me. that’s probably why the first poem i shared in a conference presentation was called “your energy”, because there is no me without the overwhelming bubble of sound. if i am quiet, that’s not a good sign. my colleagues often joked that you could hear me before you see me and it’s taken a long time for me to be okay with that. i recently found my farewell card from my recent job and one comment read ‘we’ll miss your laugh around the office’. the same laugh that has been mocked, shhhhed, and covered up by my own hands because i was taught vehemently to not take up space, to not make a noise. now, i am renowned for it.

i am worried that the noise hides the message. a few friends of mine have mentioned this of late - that the praise often comes from the amount of energy that i bring, not the thoughtfulness of the questions or my criticality or even my ability to translate complex concepts into tangible, heartfelt stories. i mean, i am barely grasping at post-humanism etc and i wrote the whole first short story about it!? i can’t think of a way to speak and act and be without being loud and chaotic and enthusiastic. i know that i am incredibly lucky to have chased my curiosity for this long, and so far its worked out just enough to live a life i enjoy being a part of. but i am also the first person to ask the question of ‘why should i give a shit’ when something is presented, so don’t mistake my enthusiasm for docility.

maybe i’m reading into it too much but there is this undertone of bubbly = uninformed, or enthusiastic = naive. believe me, i am not energised by the content i am talking about more often than not. my most recent presentation was genuinely about my life falling apart, documented throughout a series of newsletters and culminating in an incredibly difficult decision to walk away from my first love sport because the fit just wasn’t right. turns out there is no amount of enthusiasm that accounts for being an outsider because the second my contract ended, so did the rich conversations that sparked the research idea in the first place.

while i love hearing that i am ‘keeping people awake’ on day 4 of a conference, after lunch, and during the third session of coaching stuff - there’s so much more to it than that. why do we constantly fall into the trap of presenting in bland, limiting ways when our stories are boundless. you can still make institutional slide decks fun, but you need to know why people may care about your work and help manifest this in the 10 minutes you have to speak/present. an easy way to explore is to get off powerpoint - that platform is doing you no favours. pick a theme, one that complements the story you’re about to tell and don’t be afraid to run with it. if it doesn’t flow while you’re writing your talk, then it’s probably not the right theme.

and finally, take some damn pride in your work. half-baked posters and talks that are written in the lunch break before your session, or slide decks that didn’t exist until you’re on the plane over… come on. if you care about something, you invest time in it. and we both know research communication at the moment is laughable at best, and doing us a serious disservice at worst. if you are not willing to invest in this opportunity to share your contributions to the field while they’re sitting in front of you, then i have no doubt that conferences will die out in 5 years’ time - reduced to teams meetings and screensharing and pre-recorded videos and no heart and soul. no interludes, no ‘i wanted to ask you a question to show that i care’, no ‘we should continue this conversation over lunch’. none of it.

the only research-practice gap that exists is the one we have carved out with our words and inattentiveness. with a lack of capacity or capability or time or space to join in. we spend so much time talking about people but we rarely see them in these rooms, forced to do a masters’ degree to elevate their practice and to access the conversations we (academics) have without trying. as this perceived chasm grows, we know our way back is through connection and yet, we are so disconnected in the way we share our research, the stories we are weaving. so yeah, i’m enthusiastic, and it might be the only thing you can take in when i inevitably appear at the next conference with a new theme. but the words behind the energy matter too, and all i’m left wondering is, where has the rest of this energy gone and how can we get it back?