My TEDxOmaha Experience

Last month, I was lucky enough to experience a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: I was invited to give a TED Talk on the TEDxOmaha stage. According to www.ted.com, “TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less).

As a classroom teacher, I supplemented my lessons with TED Talks often and shared in their power as a resource to help guide my students in the concepts I was trying to teach.

Last February, I attended a local TEDx event at the University of Nebraska at Omaha with a couple of my colleagues (pictured below) and was so moved by the power of the event, that I quickly proclaimed that giving a TED Talk was my next life-goal.

A call for proposals was promoted during the summer and I quickly jumped at the chance to submit an idea tying to the 2017 TEDxOmaha theme: Everything Changes. I knew I wanted to talk about digital citizenship but the proposal I submitted would evolve much like the theme of the event proclaimed. In the end, I wrote multiple drafts of four different talks, one much more different that the other. The talk I gave was far from the talk I thought I would be giving, and the process which I used to get there would serve as a life-long lesson in writing, speaking, and overcoming anxiety I didn’t even know I had.

The initial concept for my initial talk remained a relevant thread throughout the process and is what you see below:

“From MySpace to SnapChat, and everything in between, our attitudes regarding social media have evolved. We provide children with a healthy fear of using social media by warning them not to “mess up on the Internet.” We’ve spent so much time warning them that they have the power to destroy their lives, that they are hearing the message loudly and clearly. When they DO make digital mistakes (and they will), they believe that there is no escape from the damage they may have caused their reputation.”

Initially, I modeled my proposal and talk off of an Ignite Talk that I gave at the ISTE conference in San Antonio in 2017. In that talk, I discussed the importance of providing support to young people when they overshare on social media through the story of young Reid Adler, a local superintendent’s son who died by suicide after experiencing the shame of a private photo he shared leaking publicly.

I’m forever in debt to the Adler family who graced me with the permission to share their story, but while I do share this story often in my work around digital citizenship, it was my new TED family who would encourage me to create and share my own story to guide the same message home.

After an invitation to what would be a very sweaty audition, I truly believed my TED adventure would stop there. I was overprepared with technology and slides that I was encouraged not to use, I was drilled with challenging questions, some of which I couldn’t answer, and I was unable to read to the committee who I auditioned in front of…I couldn’t even gauge their response to me and my ideas a little bit. I was proud of myself for making it that far in the process and wrote it off as something I’d shoot for again at another time.

Imagine my surprise when just a week later I received a phone call being invited to speak at the 2017 TEDxOmaha event. I was overjoyed…and also sworn to secrecy for several weeks. TEDxOmaha always has a big reveal event of their speakers and I was asked to keep my lips sealed until then…the date of the reveal event was September 7^th. I received this news at the end of July. I immediately ran upstairs and broke the silence by telling my husband.

In the months that would follow that July phone call, everything I thought I knew about public speaking would shift.

The first time our selected group of TEDx speakers collaborated was in August at an event called “First Words.” Have you ever experienced a Writer’s Workshop? This event was very similar: a group of mostly complete strangers provides you critical and compassionate feedback as you bear your soul while performing the first two minutes of your talk. It was in this very intense, yet extremely helpful environment, where my tone quickly changed. I was preparing to pack my opening with a punch, giving statistics on teen suicide and how much time we spend shaming children about their device and social media use. My audience, a mix of TEDx volunteers and speaker alum, were supportive but questioned the harsh tone of my opening. They played to the idea that in opening this way, I may engage my audience with fear when my intentions were to provide them with resources to support children. It was Lydia Kang, brilliant UNMC doctor and prolific author who I quickly looked up to who said to me, “Keegan. You’re really funny and an engaging person. Be yourself and tell your story and everyone will love it.”

Over the next couple of months, it was Lydia’s initial advice that Rita Pascowitz, TEDxOmaha speaking coach, would drill into my mind and my body, truly changing the way I created and performed a talk that was all my own.

The first time I met one-on-one with Rita was at Aroma’s Coffee Shop in Benson. We were in a crowded space, where I began by reading her my talk from off of the page where I wrote it sitting at my computer – the same place I wrote everything I never planned to say.

In the meetings that would follow, Rita would help support me by helping me to deconstruct my process, reminding me that having a conversation and telling a story is not the same thing as writing an article. Not only were the words that I was writing not the voice that she was trying to pull out of me, but they were a list of facts, statistics, and anecdotes that weren’t based on my life. As she tried helping me find my voice, she encouraged me to even use a fictional story which I could create for my audience to illustrate the point that I was trying to make.

The difference between a TED Talk, and speaking to any other crowd is that the story begins with you. They story doesn’t need persuasion techniques, unnecessary facts, or statistics. It is all about your ideas worth spreading. So, after much careful consideration of the potential consequences, I found my voice in my true story.

I recalled a time as a young girl when I was introduced to the Internet for the first time. I journey through my experience as a college student, when Facebook was meant for ONLY college students. I explore territory of considering whether to post of not to post certain images based on the contents of their background. I venture to share my fears about being a parent in a digital age…while very openly expressing that my husband and I are trying to become parents.

I wrote, unwrote, constructed, and deconstructed this talk more times than you can imagine prior to creating the final product. In the end, I didn’t “write” this talk at all. I spoke the words, thought by thought, line by line as they came to me into the Voice Memo app on my iPhone. I imagined the visuals I would use while I floated in a sensory deprivation tank to clear my mind. I spliced the language into what seemed like a million little pieces before putting it back together again like a puzzle and once I had the words, I wrote the talk. I listened to what I had to say and I typed the words down, finally writing what I thought. It was seemingly backwards, and unnatural, and uncomfortable, and messy, and awesome, and brilliant, and horrifying, and incredible.

Below is some audio of me and Rita throwing around ideas for the end of my talk. It was this personal banter that helped make every TEDxOmaha talk shine.

Even then, after saying the words, again and again and again, I still felt the need to memorize them like a song. I soaked in each line like a lyric, providing them a lilting quality that they didn’t even have just so that they created a rhythm in my mind and out of my mouth.

Through months of this process, it took me all the way up until the week of the talk to create the perfect ending, which I memorized just days before the event. Here, Rita and I throw around ideas together, brainstorming the perfect way to tie a bow around the thing.

Two weeks before the talk, it occurred to me that this live performance would be filmed and I two things became quickly clear: 1. I needed an outfit to be camera ready, and 2. I couldn’t pace the room like the maniac I am while teaching or training educators. Apparently this behavior is “frowned upon” when people are filming you. Brian Smith, the brilliant TEDxOmaha producer encouraged me to begin practicing in front of a full length mirror with books on my feet. Rita pushed me to instead stand on a magazine in an attempt to stay grounded and to only use my gestures and facial expressions to help support my story. Had this not occurred to me until the day of rehearsal, I would have been in big trouble.

It took me until three days before the talk to finally get it down, and even then, I still forgot the ending while I was at rehearsal. This created more anxiety that would feel my nerves all the way up until show time. I am an avid podcast and auidiobook listener and in the days leading up to the talk, I stopped listening activities for fear that any additional input would cause much of my talk to output itself from my mind.

The day came quickly and I was so lucky to have the amount of support that I did. Family and friends flew in from out of town, colleagues spent their weekend hanging out with me, out of town loved ones who couldn’t make it tuned in to the livestream. It was a big deal.

The stage was so much closer to the audience than I thought it would it be. It stood just a foot off the ground and approximately five feet from the front row of seats. I begged all of the aforementioned loved ones to please not sit in the front row for fear that I would get completely distracted.

I spent the morning leading up to the talk, nervously pacing around the entirety of the Harper Center at Creighton University, seeking out refuge in quiet spaces where I could practice. The video production company that my husband manages filmed the event and edits the videos. At one point, one of the guys on his crew said to him, “Justin, I don’t want to alarm you, but I just saw your wife talking to a wall.” So, yeah…the last three months have pretty much been like that. A lot of me talking to myself in odd spaces, trying to get this thing down without looking like I’m totally off my rocker.

The time came and I headed back stage to get fitted with my microphone. I prepared to take the stage. I’m not a praying woman, but started seeking comfort in talking with important relatives that had passed, asking for them to channel their humor, charm, and wit through me while I was on stage. I did a couple of power poses and I’m sure, looked like an insane person…but I didn’t care. I wasn’t ready. Nothing you can possibly do ever makes you ready to speak so candidly in front of a live audience of 500 people, and a numerous amount more streaming from all corners of the earth. Nothing really prepares you for the adrenaline rush of hitting every single line while doing so attempting to sound natural. Nothing prepares you for knowing if a crowd will laugh at your jokes, or knowing when to pause when they laugh at things you didn’t even think would be funny. Nothing prepares you for how you’ll react when you forget an entire portion of your talk, so you pretend that you didn’t, you repeat a line, and you wrap it up, apparently effortlessly, while you’re actually panicking inside. Most of all, nothing prepares you for the amount of relief, pride, and humility you encounter when you walk off the stage after bearing witness to a crowd erupting in applause, your family, your friends, your biggest friends, providing you with a standing ovation for your efforts.

The whole experience was both isolating, and uniting. Isolating in that I spent countless hours preparing, sacrificing social experiences, pouring my heart into a conversation that so importantly unites people in the idea that we’re all in this together. I am proud to share my talk with you and hope that you’ll gain insight you didn’t have before.