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PEOPLE TELL STORIES
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I’m sorry you haven’t heard from me in a while. I lost my voice. Over the last few months there’s been too much breathing in. And not enough breathing out. But here I am, and I have stories to tell.
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As you probably know, my primary mode of communication is visual, so when I got the opportunity to give a TedX talk in Galway, I stepped into it - and immediately wondered how I could make it visual.
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Ted frowns on slides - two or three key images at most is the guidance. So leaning on my usual barrel-load of hand-drawn illustrations wasn’t going to cut it. I thought about taking a live-drawing approach (which I’ve done during a keynote before!) but decided that it was hard enough to deliver a 12-minute no-notes speech in front of an audience, never mind holding a pen still. Doing two things at the same time has never been my strong suit.
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STRANGE EXPERIMENTS
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Quite by chance, I discovered that the drawing software I use on the iPad (called Procreate) automatically records a still frame after every stroke, which can then be exported as a stop-frame animation. And then I saw it - the visual story could unfold while the verbal story is told. But would it be meaningful for the audience? And so the experiment begins - everything I do is an experiment of some shape or form - with the primary guinea pigs, my wife and kids.
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Here’s the video of the talk, given to an audience in a Galway Theatre just a few weeks ago. It seems quite different from how it was live - with the audience seeing and hearing in parallel. But you’ll get the picture... “People tell stories; Stories paint pictures.”
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I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed giving this talk. Even though it was quite far outside my comfort zone. I learnt so much about the things that bring me alive. But as the event was delayed by a year, I also had way too much time to overthink it.
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And like any adventure, there’s so many more stories to tell. How I experimented with a visual doodle landscape of my talk, in order to memorise it and “see” the stories dovetail together. How the key story was “given” to me just a couple of weeks before the talk. How I reverse-engineered some drawings, and left others as they were created, mistakes and all. How I found a thread through all of it, that I’m still following.
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The creative adventure of finding my voice, stitching the stories together, was matched by the physical adventure of returning to the west coast of Ireland - with its breath-taking wilderness - my motherland. I took the opportunity to travel right around Galway Bay from Dog’s Bay in Connemara to the Cliffs of Moher in County Clare. So many places to explore - and with the weather coming in off the Atlantic, the light changes by the minute to give the soul a feeling of shape-shifting sorcery.
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DON'T OVERTHINK IT
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It's getting harder to step into new adventures. But when I do, I'm very grateful that I have stepped into the unknown, gone on an adventure and learnt new things. And so I'm writing a note to self - one that I've written before and forgotten: life lies outside your comfort zone...
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Enjoyed this edition?
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Reach out and share your juicy thoughts. I'm always listening!
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And finally, an Irish Joke...
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(which you'll get if you've ever tried to use a weather app whilst in the west of Ireland)
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