Manuel

It started early. Even as I showered the morning of my presentation at last month’s conference I could feel the nervousness building. I had to force myself to eat breakfast over a bit of a queasy stomach. I found myself distracted as I wandered from room to room attending the other sessions that morning. My sparse notes are evidence to the fact that I was thinking of other things.

Nervousness always comes. No matter how many presentations I make I think I will always be nervous right before I speak. The key is to have a strategy to deal with the nervousness.

My strategy for dealing with my nervousness at this conference was to attend the session that immediately preceded mine. This would give me a chance to:

1. Find the room well in advance of my time slot
2. Observe the room layout, sound setup, and so on
3. Learn from the way the previous presenter “used” the room

As I watched the previous session, I watched the sound man, dressed from head to toe in black, as he quietly, with few words, did his job. When it was my turn to be mic’ed, he strode toward me and asked, “Are you my next speaker?” I acknowledged my role and followed his instructions as we tested the equipment. After everything was hooked up, he looked up at my title slide emblazoned across the big screen at the front of the room. “Impromptu speaking, huh?” He asked, “Are you a Toastmaster?”

The man’s name was Manuel. He had a strong, smooth voice. He was a Toastmaster. In fact, he was in the process of forming a new club. We chatted for a few minutes about our shared connection through Toastmasters. I gave him a 30-second overview of my talk. I thanked him and began the last-minute preparation for my talk.

As the talk began, I noticed Manuel working the sound equipment. I could tell he was making live adjustments to the sound. When he was done, instead of leaving as he had done for the previous session, he walked to the back of the room and sat down. He granted me the honor of teaching him–Toastmaster to Toastmaster.

Manuel honored me with his words and with his presence. He encouraged me by just being my friend.

Be a Bucket Filler

I’d walked that same path more than a thousand times, yet on that one, crisp Saturday morning I noticed a weathered bronze plaque mounted on a small cement slab level with the grass. About 4 feet off the path, the plaque had obviously been there for quite a long time but had heretofore escaped my notice. This new-found distraction was worth taking a moment to absorb.

Like I did on that one Saturday morning, today we’re stopping along the path to admire something that’s been there for quite some time. We’re taking time to notice…

Recently my boss recommended a very interesting book, “How Full is Your Bucket,” by Tom Rath and Donald O. Clifton. The ideas in this text are not new–we’ve been on this path a thousand times before–but the presentation is compelling. For example, Stephen Covey speaks of a very similar idea with his concept of the Emotional Bank Account. I was touched by the book such that I felt it was appropriate to “interrupt” the current series of blog posts about impromptu speaking to get this “on virtual paper” while it’s on my mind.

The bucket metaphor is a good one. The premise is that we all have a bucket. When our bucket is full, we feel good. Not so when our bucket is empty. The idea is to figuratively ladle water into other people’s buckets through positive interactions with them (doing what Covey would call, “making deposits in the Emotional Bank Account”). A kind word. A specific praise. Purposely catching people doing the right thing and praising them for it. (Oh! There’s “The One-Minute Manager!” I told you these ideas are not new!)

A proverb in the scriptures that I hold dear tells us that the tongue has the power of life and death. I’ve taken it as a lifetime challenge to speak life into the people around me.

One thing that is very clear from my readings on this subject: Our objective is not to get other people to fill our buckets. In none of the books I’ve read does the author even hint that we ought to be in this for ourselves. No. They consistently and correctly point us to filling other people’s buckets. As we Speak Up in our daily interactions at work or at home we ought to be looking for ways that we can genuinely and sincerely ladle encouragement into other people’s buckets. A quote from the book says it well:

Whether we have a long conversation with a friend or simply place an order at a restaurant, every interaction makes a difference. The results of our encounters are rarely neutral; they are almost always positive or negative. And although we take these interactions for granted, they accumulate and profoundly affect our lives.

Speak Up and Speak Life.