In high school, Alissa had piano recitals and competitions and she was always so calm about it, even while performing. I never understood it. I asked her why she didn’t get nervous, and she said – as if this were the most obvious thing – I am ready. Why would I be nervous?
When I was in high school, the only thing that frazzled me
was speaking in front of a group. By definition, I was never ready. My most
painful memory is an 11th grade English class toward the end of the
year when we were practicing public speaking (in hindsight, I think the teacher
had no lesson plan). The topic was a complete gimme: talk about yourself and
what you like to do the most. What could
be easier? I knew everyone in my class,
this was the third year we were all together, we had established our roles in
the group. I certainly felt at home in that classroom. I started out okay but as my monologue went
along, I could feel myself getting more and more anxious. By the end, there
were actual tears rolling down my cheeks. I was mortified. No one ever said a
word to me about it. We pretended it hadn’t happened.
This experience reinforced what I knew about myself. I hated
talking in front of people. As a result,
I never did it. The only exception was giving tours to school groups. These
were preschool kids with parents and we walked around the farm, interpreting
what we were seeing. I was funny, relaxed, completely in charge. The parents did not make me nervous.
For about ten years or so I was in and out of classrooms, as
a college student and later as a substitute teacher. Never nervous around
kids. I felt comfortable in front of any
group that knew less than I did.
In my late 30s and into my 40s, I was absorbed into the world of synagogue
leadership, serving on the Board, leading committees. I was fine with all of my
responsibilities, but we were required to make announcements in front of the
congregation seven times a year. This just about killed me. But making
innocuous announcements seven times a year for about ten years, that much
practice helped me to be less anxious and more myself. By the time I became
president of the congregation, I was not so afraid. I delivered speeches on
many occasions, and it did not kill me.
Right about that time, we were building Blueberry Hill.
There were times when we had to speak in front of large groups of people who
didn’t know us. Anna and I would make low-tech presentations, relying on our
natural charm and good humor, and it wasn’t scary. Over a two-year period after
we built Blueberry Hill, I participated in a very intense series of quarterly
workshops where we went to other cohousing communities and facilitated their
real meetings – possibly the most intimidating public work I have ever done. It
was terrifying. I learned so much.
What I was learning, one small success at a time, was that I
can speak publicly without panic if I know the topic well. Teaching is never
scary for me. Leading workshops at
farming conferences is also fine. I
would say that in the last 15 years or so, I have gone beyond the goal of No
Panic and learned to be myself in front
of groups. I lead shiva minyans, I officiate weddings, I have delivered
eulogies and led a burial service.
So when we learned recently that we were going to have to
appear in person at a competition of grant finalists, I was not flustered. Our
occasional grant writer, Katherine, made a last-minute decision to try for an
innovation grant for our future farm kitchen a couple of months ago…we did not
imagine we would ever come close to winning.
Yesterday we had to appear in front of a panel of six judges and present
our project in ten minutes. Amazingly,
we were not nervous. There we were in an Executive Board Room in a fancy hotel,
facing down some not very smiley people. We delivered our speeches, reading
from notes and occasionally going off script. We noticed that when I spoke
without the notes, they perked up, so when we prepared for the third round of
competition this morning, we decided to do the whole thing without reading.
This time we only had five minutes. We honed our message. I got even funnier.
The judges were pretty stone-faced. Not unfriendly, just
inscrutable. There was some complicated rubric they needed to follow. Katherine
was in charge of making sure our comments were
rubric-adjacent. I was unofficially in charge of giving our presentation
some personality. We were the only women finalists and I was definitely the
oldest of all of us.
We did not win the People’s Choice Award but a young entrepreneur did (I
was rooting for him to win the big prize because $10,000 would have made a huge
difference to his new oyster business). We did win the Runner Up (second
place), a $5000 prize. The real winner was a company that had created a
technology for making fertilizer out of air and electricity. If that invention can become an affordable reality, it would be good for everyone, not just a small region or the state of Virginia. Each of the five finalists had a project that
was completely unrelated to the others, and it was impossible to predict which
one would appeal to the judges. Katherine and I felt bad for the two young
people who didn’t win anything beyond the finalist prizes. One was a beginning
hops grower and one had a safety curriculum he wanted to market. So random!
Anyway, the stage fright that caused me so much distress in
my youth is a memory. My own piano recitals do make me nervous, but I am not in
a panic and I don’t worry about melting down. I think that teaching,
facilitating meetings, getting older, knowing more, lots of repetition and
practice – all of those normal life activities helped. Being older than most
people helps a lot. Age gives me a lot
more confidence. Being old makes me ready. If not now, when?
