This afternoon I logged onto zoom with my new laptop and discovered that it doesn’t recognise its own built in camera. So I set up a phone on a tripod and used that instead, self tape stylee. Of course I’ve got corners of my flat full of tripods and lights. I can’t do phone tomorrow though. Tomorrow I’ll be sharing my screen with international young entrepreneurs and I’m gonna need to know what I’m doing and I’ll want my voice to come from the screen I’m sharing. This afternoon I just had a bit of training and then I watched Ben deliver today’s workshop.
Facilitating is literally just about making things easier. Ben was delivering material and moving the speaking stick around and about, and taking it gracefully when it was dropped. The workshop is on zoom and most people aren’t sharing their screens because they’re brushing the dog or abseiling during or whatever – that was me in every Buddhist meeting in COVID, building a crane out of chips until “Al are you still there?” “Me, oh yes of course, Oh did I switch off my camera?”
Ben runs it well. “Any questions about that?” Resounding silence. “Excellent, it’s clear we all expressed ourselves very well indeed.”
The client is American. We are introducing business software to people who might well be able to use it to build their ideas into something that will fund their future. I’m thinking about my various businesses as I’m watching Ben deliver his content. All he has to do is speak the slide like it’s his language. It all makes a kind of sense anyway if you’re not an eejit. I can do this standing on my head, it’s why they often find actors for this work. We know presentation and we know how to embody text that isn’t ours. And yes I can brush my hair if I have to.
Often we mistake the presenter for being the one generating the content, because they’re delivering it. Frequently that’s not the case. Perhaps David Attenborough, a few others, but I can think of a well known world leader that gets up in the morning, goes into hair and make-up a few hours, and then just says what he’s told to say (with a few off piste riffs that make him entertaining). The content and the agenda isn’t really theirs. They’re the face.
I’ll be the face tomorrow. And I might learn something about what I’m teaching. I need to step up my various grifts so I’m not always stressing about money. And boy oh boy have I got the software for you.
AlBarclay 