Ambitions

I have a challenging relationship with my career as a speaker. On one hand, I love getting the opportunity to share my story and help others, but that is starkly contrasted with the fear and anxiety that comes with getting up on stage. This is a battle that is routinely fought each time I book in a speaking gig and it’s something that causes me to be very reserved when it comes to expressing my ambitions with my speaking.

The reasons I’m reserved with those ambitions can be drawn back to these fears, the self doubt and the typical syndromes - imposter and tall poppy. I’ve always shied away from expressing my desire to expand and grow my career as a speaker because I always struggled to take myself seriously when compared to what is an incredibly competitive and saturated market. Reading these doubts may come as no surprise to many people as I have written about them in the past but there is a realness in how difficult it can be to overcome these ever-present obstacles that I’m sure everyone can relate to.

I thought this would be good to write about today because I wanted to use it as a bit of a reference point for where I stand with the issue as of today and I’ll no doubt look back on this at some stage in the future to ask how my current point of view stacks up. The current view, as it stands came from a realisation I had a few days ago when I was asking myself what’s my favourite thing in the world to do. Ordinarily I would expect the immediate and confident response to come back as “surfing” but this time I felt different. I’m sure you can guess where this is going, but having time to reflect on how far I’ve come as a speaker, what it’s given to me, what it’s given to others and how I’ve had the ability to change someone’s life doing what I do have all led to this important answer.

My favourite thing in the world to do is speaking.

There it is, written publicly for the first time. And I truly mean it. If someone was to ask me this 4 years ago, 1 year ago or even a month ago I couldn’t have honestly had this response but I feel like I am only now reaching a point of maturity within my own speaking where I’ve started to realise my place and my impact.

I’m proud to be at this point too. There are still the doubts and criticisms I have within myself but if there’s one thing I’ve learned through hearing a good friend of mine who’s finding his own feet in the speaking space (Bradley Dryburgh) “What you believe is what you’ll become” and if I want to have the impact that I want to truly have in this space I have to start looking at myself differently.

I am unmeasurably lucky to be in the position I am, with the story I have and this is something that contributes to the motivation I have to continue growing and developing my speaking while I have the opportunity to do so. So these are my ambitions; I want to connect, I want to inspire and I want to motivate as many people as I can during this lifetime and I believe that by facing and overcoming these fears and doubts, I will be able to look back on this moment and be grateful that I took the challenge head on.