The most memorable event I ever did was 15 people. No microphone. 40 minutes talking. Then 2 hours of conversation that nobody wanted to end.
I have thought a lot about why that one, out of all of them, is the one I come back to.
It was not the best talk I have given. It was the room. 15 people is small enough that nobody is anonymous, and once nobody is anonymous people stop behaving like an audience and start behaving like people in a room.
A big room has its own rules. Everybody faces the front, the lights are on you and not on them, and the whole shape of it says one person will speak and the rest will listen politely and leave.
A small room has no front. So the thing that happens afterwards, the 2 hours, is not a bonus. It is what the room was always going to do if you let it.
I do not do corporate platitudes. I do not have a slide deck with stock photos of mountains. What I have is 22 years of building something, losing myself inside it, breaking down, and rebuilding from the body up. And a willingness to tell the real version.
The talks that terrify me, the ones where I say the thing I have never said publicly before, are always the ones that land hardest. Because the room can feel it. Authenticity is not a brand value. People know when you are performing and when you are present.
I want to be careful about the word terrify, because there is a version of this that turns into a dare, and that is not what I mean.
The fear is not stage fright. Stage fright is about whether you will do it well. This is different. It is the particular tightness of being about to say something true in front of people who will now know it about you.
That one is worth walking towards. The other kind, the one that says you are not ready or this is not safe to say yet, is information and should be listened to.
The difference matters, because the useful fear is about exposure and the other kind is about harm. Only 1 of those gets you a room that stays talking.
Here is what I think is actually going on when a frightening talk lands.
A room does not mainly read your content. It reads your state. If you are 2 inches outside yourself, managing how it is going while you say it, everybody can tell, and they match you. Polite, attentive, slightly braced.
When you are actually in it, the room settles, and a settled room asks real questions.
Which means the preparation that matters is not the writing. It is turning up in a state where you are not performing, and that is a much less impressive thing to work on.
What people tend to notice, and organisers say this to me more than anything else, is that the room will not leave. That is the measure I care about now. Not the applause at the end. Whether anybody puts their coat back down.
The practical version of this, if you are the one giving the talk.
Say the hard sentence early. If you save it for the end, you spend the whole talk braced for it and the room spends the whole talk sensing that something is being withheld.
Say it plainly and once. The temptation is to soften it on the way out, explain it, add a caveat. The caveat is where the presence goes.
Then stop talking for a second. Most of us rush past the thing we were frightened of saying, which is the one moment the room needed to sit in.
And do not take questions in the last 4 minutes with your bag already on your shoulder. If the conversation is the point, you have to leave room for the conversation.
For an organiser, the thing worth knowing is that the frightening talk needs a room that can hold it. A small room, chairs that are not bolted in rows, and time afterwards that is not immediately filled with something else.
I would rather 15 people with time than 200 with a hard stop.
The other thing, said honestly, is that I will not do a version of this that leaves out the difficult part. The difficult part is why the room stays.
There is a version of my story that is all Portobello Road and department stores and it is perfectly true and it does nothing for anybody. Nobody has ever stayed 2 hours after that one.
Based in Hampton, London. Travels nationally. Online welcome.
More like this
Visibility anxiety, why you're not showing up and what to do about it. https://www.annalouwellness.com/work-and-money/visibility-anxiety-why-you-re-not-showing-up-and-what-to-do-about-it
Why I started making videos, and what I was most afraid of. https://www.annalouwellness.com/reset-stories/why-i-started-making-videos-and-what-i-was-most-afraid-of
What event organisers say. https://www.annalouwellness.com/work-and-money/what-event-organisers-say
The things I have not said publicly yet usually get written down first in the Reset Letters, which go out on Substack. They are at resetletters.substack.com.