I Know What It’s Like

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

Yesterday I did a PechaKucha, and I went to Manchester to do it. I had prepared considerably for this moment. My preparations concluded around 1pm with a cheeseburger and fries before I headed to the conference venue where I would face 200 people and deliver a presentation lasting exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds. And I thought about how Sophie Ellis-Bextor likes to munch on gherkins before her shows, how she eats hers straight from a jar, how mine were sandwiched between carbs and fat.

It's one of the hardest formats, said Jackie who was doing the chairing, about the PechaKucha, 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds, each slide advancing automatically, the words supposedly matched to the visuals. Presenters need to be well-prepared, skilled in conveying information clearly and concisely, fast-paced and engaging. There’s no room for lengthy explanations. There’s no room for panic. To succeed, you must be willing to trust yourself, believe that the pace of your voice will not suddenly change, know that it’s ok to leave space for your message to land, accept how vulnerable you feel. You must be able to watch your slides and watch your audience.

As I waited to pay for lunch in the BrewDog near the campus, I listened to one man talking to another. I have everything I’m supposed to have in life, he said, a great partner, a great kid, a great career, a great social life. I’m in great shape. I’m supposed to be happy, he said, but 90% of the time, I’m not. And the other man just nodded, like he was listening too, but he didn’t quite get it because what could someone who had ticked all those boxes possibly be missing. And I wanted to interrupt those two strangers and say, “I know what it’s like”. But I didn’t.

I hadn’t been in front of a crowd for a long time. I wasn’t sure if my confidence was shot. Any mics I’d held recently had been within safe environments, amongst friends, in a radio studio, just me, a producer, and a few other non-experts. Editing was usually an option. “Do people still wear shoes?” I asked on Instagram with a picture of the leopard-print heels I’d last worn in 2019. I wasn’t sure what was happening out there anymore. Had power poses been replaced by comfort. As usual, I went with my gut. I wore my Spezials, packed the stilettos just-in-case in a handbag that hadn’t left the house in more than half a decade.

And if preparation is about what you can control, I did what I could. I got my nails done. “I know what it’s like,” I said to a woman who had collapsed in a chair beside the magazines. I’d watched her from my drying station as she’d manoeuvred an elderly lady and her two sticks through the door. She’d settled her into a treatment room on the ground floor. She’d got her in. Now, she was having a breather before she got her out again. And I thought of my octogenarian duo, and how many times I’d exhaled a sigh of relief at getting them in somewhere until I remembered I had to get them out again and I said, “it’s not easy parking round here”. And after that, the conversation flowed. We shared the squeeze. We did the life stage, the parents and the teenagers, the end of the GCSEs and the post-exams deep clean where everything in the bedroom had to be moved to the landing, the laundry and the swimming lessons and the flashcards and the whiteboards, the hospital appointments and how we hoped it would all work out.

The purpose of a PechaKucha is not to showcase your strategic timing. It’s to tell a story. Which matters most, the words or the visuals, what you see or what you hear? Each reinforces the other. What matters most is being real. No performance can ever trump authenticity. I wasn’t sure about the content of my 6 minutes and 40 seconds. I was telling a large group of people working in higher education how to leave higher education. But I wasn’t telling them they should leave, only that they could. Here’s what happened to me, I said. Let me tell you what I’ve seen.

“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one”¹.

I’d read somewhere that leaders, those who want us to do something or go somewhere, don’t leverage the power of storytelling. If storytelling is the language of connection, the secret to creating shared meaning, humanity’s weapon to make sense of the world, the best-ever change agent, they make four mistakes. They don’t tell stories, showing up instead with theory or data which most people don’t understand. They don’t answer the “why am I telling you this story?” question, failing to connect a story to an action. They expect story to just happen rather than making an intentional effort. And most importantly, even though story speaks to the emotional system, even though we are emotional rather than rational creatures, they avoid using emotional content.

And in my PechaKucha, I talked about grief, the grief of losing a status and an image, a title and a salary, an identity. I talked about having a listlessness of the soul and crawling up the side of the cauldron of transformation. I said I may be an author of a book but I’m an author of a book that’s sold less than 200 copies. I said I may have found my vocation but that it hasn’t come with what the world might consider success.

"The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it"².

There was probably a fifth mistake that leaders made about story. They just didn’t ask people to tell theirs. There’s a psychologist at Northwestern University called Dan McAdams, said David Brooks³, who studies how people narrate their life stories. And David explained how Dan brings research subjects into his office and says, “tell me the high points of your life, the low points of your life, the turning points of your life”. And half the people cry. At the end of a four-hour chat, he hands them a check to compensate them for their time. But a significant chunk of them say they can’t take any money, that this has been one of the best afternoons of their life. And what he has learned is that people have never had the chance to tell their story.

“I’ve been feeling like that too,” said a woman who came up to me at the end of the conference. She’d been in higher education for twenty years. August was imminent and she didn’t know if she could do another September. “I know what it’s like,” I said. And I suggested she get in touch to tell me her story.

1. John Ruskin, Modern Painters: Volume 3. Of Many Things

2. David W. Orr - Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World, 1991.

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