I’ve done my fair share of speaking in front of large audiences. It’s not for everyone—a point I shall be coming back to—but I’ve always enjoyed it, in spite of the odd disaster.
There’s something about standing up in front of loads of people and talking passionately about an experience you’ve had, or something you really believe in—an idea that you truly own—that just floats my boat.
In the past I’ve given talks on my travels, on research I’ve conducted, and even on the intricacies of bike racing, for those thinking of taking it up! For years I spoke about career change, and these days I give talks on wellbeing, from an Innate Health perspective. (Not bad for an ‘introvert’, eh? 😉)
It’s the last of those that is the least subjective, the least personal (even though it’s something that’s related via the medium of a personal journey) and the most objectively ‘true’ of all the topics I’ve spoken on, and yet… it’s the one that I’ll get the most pushback from.
Which is why, whenever I'm sharing with a big group for the first time, I’ve learned to manage that tension somewhat, by starting out with the following slide and making it perfectly clear that any of these reactions are just fine and dandy with me:
For the ‘Meh’ 😐 and ‘Ooh!’ 😲 responses that form the bulk of reactions that lie either side of the median, I made up the quotes for comedic effect. But those at the extremes—the revulsion 🤬 and the elation 🥰—are actual things people have said or written when I’ve shared the inside-out understanding with them.
To this day I remain blocked by a senior clinician in the wellbeing space on Twitter/X, for my heretical views; a badge that the Giles Ego Construct 📦 wears with pride, even though it freaked me right out at the time.
I’ve also had people email me after an hour’s talk I’ve given (or from them listening to one podcast episode), telling me that their lives had completely changed as a result.
That’s the power of insight. It’s pretty cool.
And the big old elephant in the room here, is that, in and of itself, this normal distribution curve response to everything we encounter in life (including giving talks to audiences), is barn-door evidence of the inside-out nature of experience, staring us straight in the face.
We all feel very differently about the exact same thing!!
It’s so obvious, it’s as if it’s painted itself purple and is dancing naked on top of a harpsichord, singing “Living in the feeling of a Thought-created perceptual reality is here again!!” … but we’re so blinkered to our own little version of what the mind calls ‘reality’, that we can’t see the wood for the trees.
Our experience is real, for sure, but it’s not true.
If you’d like a visual representation, to get this fixed in your consciousness, I asked the old pixelbot to create this for me:
I hope it springs to mind, the next time someone disagrees with you.
😉
Giles
p.s. the real key to this I think, is seeing the absolute, 100% nature of this process – the fact that we can only ever experience things one way. If you want help with that, this video of mine might bring it a little more into focus for you: Your reality is a perception of the mind
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Giles P Croft
You can’t just take my word for it, because this is not about belief. You have to get your own, insightful evidence for it working this way 👊🏻