Anxiety and Ambiguity, Your Creative Friends

I've done a lot of public speaking in my life. This is primarily a result of participating in competitive speech and debate in high school. My main event was extemporaneous speaking. I did many, many practice  speeches during lunch hour in Mr. DeNike's classroom. As a teen, I knew a lot about people like Abolhassan Bani-Sadr and Margaret Thatcher.

That said, I get nervous before public events, especially if I'm doing a new presentation. I look forward to these events, but I do experience some anxiety. I'm not sure exactly what I'll say, and I don't know what the audience will be like. I look forward to these events, even as I recognize familiar butterflies.

My own coach, Coach Joy, suggested that this anxiety might actually be a creative space for me. It's the ambiguity in what I'm going to say that opens me up to being present in the moment, so that what I do say connects with what's going on with the audience, which in turn makes me more relevant. I prepare enough to know my general points, but not so much that I lose sight of the fact that any presentation is an interactive experience between presenter and audience. Being alive to the moment is as important as being prepared for it.

I have seen this same phenomenon occurring in different ways with many of my career coaching clients.  Usually when people want to leave one career and start another, there is a period where their previous identity is used up but their next identity is unclear. Fredric Hudson refers to this as the "cocooning" stage. In this period you don't know what your life is all about. This can be really scary, especially for people who have been successful in earning external approval for various achievements and labels in the past.

But it's this lack of knowing that gives you freedom to experience the world in a fresh way. Who might you be if you weren't being who you normally are? What would your career be if it weren't what you've always been doing? Being able to hang out in a zone of ambiguity is often part of the process of getting from now to what's next.

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