Nope. I love it. I will speak where the fuck ever and when the fuck ever I can get an invitation/permission to do so. I would do it for a living if I could get enough willing listeners.
I'm curious, and I am not trying to be rude or presumptuous, but what drives this desire to be heard? Is there something that is satisfied for you when you speak in front of an audience, that otherwise is lacking? I might not enjoy jumping out of a plane, I would have too much fear and probably would not be able to carry through with it. There are certain people though that are able to transform fear into adrenaline and this adrenaline gives them a sensation that they crave. They willingly jump out of planes. I wonder, is there any of this for you when you speak in front of people? Do you crave the rush that you get from speaking in front of an audience? I know I had a bit of that when I used perform live with the band in front of an audience. There was a bit of conversation that didn't make the podcast around the difference between speaking in front of an audience about something you are emotionally vested in and speaking in front of an audience about something that you are not. For me there is a big difference. How about you?
Words are the thing that I love the very most in life. Not because of how they look or sound, but because they convey meaning. They do the seemingly impossible, taking a thought out of my mind and, if I use the right words in the right way, putting it in someone else's mind. Or, I can take words from someone else to add their thoughts to my mind. I can discover things that I never knew, simply because someone recorded a series of words. I can experience things that ARE impossible, like being on a spaceship or being a mouse, if I view the right series of printed words. Public speaking is the very most fun use of words, because it can cause a group of people to collectively experience the feeling that I want them to experience. We're all having an experience together, an experience that I orchestrated, and everyone feels good after we've had it! Maybe they're going to go home and start a blog. Maybe they're going to go out and knock on a door for a candidate. Maybe they just realized what they were contributing to a problem in their relationship. Maybe it later helps them get a job. Or maybe they forget it entirely, but, for a few minutes, they let a selection of words, spoken in particular tones, accompanied by body language and perhaps visual aids, trigger them to have a collective experience with a room of other human beings having the same experience. That's exciting to me. To me, that's being able to do magic in real life. That's hypnosis and telepathy rolled into one. If I'd been born a man 100 years ago, I'd probably have gone into ministry. I've always loved the concept of collective emotional and intellectual enlightenment, and the thought that perhaps we really are all conscious together, rather than separately. I wasn't raised in any particular religion, so an obsession with the specialness of being a conscious organism is the center of my individual spirituality. Yes, I like receiving attention, but if that was all it was, I'd go into porn, not public speaking.
Well said Saydrah. I too love communicating, very much. I mentioned this in a previous comment, but when I was in high school I wasn't a very good student. I had a teacher take me aside and tell me that I was good at public speaking. This gave me a confidence I had never had. Around the same time I was failing a science class and during a parent teacher conference, I heard the teacher tell my parents not to worry about me because I could convince anyone to do just about anything and as such I'd be successful. -This too stuck with me. I've managed to take my ability to effectively communicate and carve out a pretty nice career. It's something that like you, I really love. I love that going in to a meeting, the people across the table from me have a firmly held position that I am trying to change. I love taking their assumptions and challenging them with thoughtful questions, steering the conversation in a direction of my choosing but making it seem as though it is theirs. I too love that at least some of my words "sink in". When performing music, I feel the "collective experience" that you are mentioning. In the podcast, Olive and Clive Watson mention how there can be a "string between performer and observer" and their is this nourishment from the audience. Clive refers to it as the "heat lamp". -Some of my favorite parts. Glad you choose public speaking and not porn ---though that might make an interesting podcast topic too ;-)
If you're doing a podcast on porn, I want in!
This could be pretty interesting. I'd love to know what other people think of porn. And a podcast is all sound, so no harm done there :P
From a music perspective it would certainly be a lot of fun to make. I'm not sure how many people I could get to participate in the podcast though? Although pornography is something most people have consumed at some point in their life, it's not something a lot of people are willing to talk about openly. I have an idea for one but it would be only tangentially about pornography. It will happen.
Well, I know that I personally would be willing to speak very frankly about my use and problems with pornography.