I was lucky enough to be able to present my master thesis at the IRPA 2018 in The Hague. After finishing my talk I started to notice a big shift in my perception of my role models. Let me walk you through the experience.
Over the years I have had plenty of chances to practice my public speaking skills and I am convinced I’m no bad presenter. I like to take a personal approach and try to tune the presentation to the public involved. This time was no different, I had thought up a catchy title “Smartphones as Dosimeters”. I was reserved if this wasn’t too simple for a congress of this nature but I decided to run with it. In addition to this I used some pictures of my children to explain how I ended up at this subject. In case you are wondering; it was relevant to show pictures of my kids at a scientific congress ;) (*).
When the day came I had some healthy nerves, no worries. Before the session started I walked to room as I always do to get a feeling for the space, there was space for about 100 people I would guess in retrospect. Still no worries. The turnout for the first speaker was somewhere about 30 people…still no worries. As soon as it was my turn I stood up and took the microphone and turned around to a room filled to the brim with people were lining the walls…somehow in a span of a few seconds the number of people in the room had quadrupled.
At this point I was overcome with anxiety. These people, these physicist, physicians, professors, PhD students and others were all here…for my talk…about smartphones! I became nauseous, dizzy, hot…all the other fear related symptoms showed up. I got myself together and started my talk and entered a flow outside of my physical reaction. After roughly 15 minutes I finished my talk and answered a few questions as is normal. I wasn’t very pleased with myself; why would I have this extreme reaction?
As the session ended I got some complements of people I have known for some time, most of whom did not notice my anxiety attack. During the day several other people complemented me on my presentation, people who, even though I didn’t know them I looked up to because of their function. It slowly started to dawn on me, my talk was better than others during the congress (not the best, but that was not the point)…If I were to clone myself I would look up to myself for an entertaining and informative presentation.
Sure I am no professor or physicist but I have certain skills that other people don’t have. It dawned on me that I had been cherry picking all the positive attributes of my role models in order to create an ideal image. This image, this personal goal was an unattainable and had attributed to my depression.
My view on role models has changed, it is still ok to have role models but you should careful to compare yourself with them. Try and look at yourself from another person’s perspective, clone yourself…
To those wondering if I would ever go through an ordeal like this again the answer is yes. Definitely yes! Forcing myself into situation like these has made me grow from a shy timid teenager to a confident professional. And as this situation demonstrates I am still not done learning on a personal and professional level.
* I do like to tell people how proud of a father I am…yeah I’m one of those people ;). However, including my kids in my presentation however serves multiple purposes. The most important of which is to establish a personal connection with my audience. It makes me feel more comfortable and in my experience people tent pay more attention to those whom they share a ‘bond’ with, small as it may be.