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When you care deeply about something, you can talk about it in a way that connects with the people you’re trying to reach without any preparation at all.
But getting to that point requires a lot of deep reflection, self awareness, and even a little mind and body mastery.
The good news is that even if you’ve never spoken in public before, you have so much real expertise you can draw upon: your entire life experience.
The bad news is that in our world, we don’t put much of a premium on the struggle, focus, and discomfort that comes with reflecting and internalizing lessons learned from our life experiences — even in writing this course, as I’ve shared in other lessons, I found myself uncomfortable, avoidant, and even panicked in ways I had never anticipated.
My hope for you is that you’ll keep going when you feel those feelings, and let yourself be okay with how uncomfortable you feel at the start.
One last note: in community organizing, people talk a lot about the idea of “skin in the game,” or the real stakes that a person has for bringing a vision to life. So much of what I’m asking you to do as a student in this course is about practicing your response to intense feelings, and it doesn’t seem fair for me as a trainer to not also use this curricula alongside you to prepare for a conversation of my own, or without my own skin in the game.
