Hi there and welcome to week 16 of Contemplation, where we share our responses to a prompt from my Kikki.K A Sentence A Day Journal. If you wish to join in, please write a new post answering the prompt below, use the tag Contemplation and link back to this post.
Today’s prompt: What motivated you today?
It was quite difficult to motivate myself today. I am in Brisbane for a week, visiting scientists and talking about our new technologies. This is generally good fun and something I quite enjoy. But I arrived in Brisbane on the weekend and promptly came down with a cold/flu thing. It’s hard to feel motivated when you are exhausted and can’t breathe through your left nostril and then you keep coughing every four and a half minutes. What were we saying last week about challenges being enormous when you’re sick?
Once I found a coffee shop that made me a coffee the size of my head, my motivation kicked in and I got a bunch of work done before my first meeting.
And then my first meeting stood me up! Which left me with an extra hour on my hands. Not very helpful when your head feels like it’s packed full with cotton wool and your eyes don’t want to stay open.
But I was booked in to give a talk this afternoon about our new microscope so I had to push through. I arrived on campus early and spent some time checking emails and discussing some plans for an upcoming conference and then went to do the talk. It was great – everyone was excited about the system and they’ve asked about having a demo in their lab. I generally find it easy to get motivated when giving a talk – I love presenting, it’s something that I actually enjoy. It wasn’t always that way, I used to be terrified of speaking in public. But by now I’ve done it so many times that it isn’t really a big deal anymore.
I remember my first “real” boss made us give talks on the progress of our projects every month. We hated it, agonized over our presentation preparations and sat nervously at the back of the room while our more “seasoned” colleagues did their talks. And he asked so many tough questions. We thought he was pretty mean but it turns out he actaully had an evil and cunning plan to help us become better public speakers and also better scientists by encouraging us to explore beyond what we already knew.
I’m pretty sure that was his plan 😉😉
I think that being comfortable with speaking in public helps in other areas of life as well. It’s easier to open up and to get to know people and to have conversations with strangers as well.
How about you? What motivated you today? And do you enjoy public speaking or are you petrified of it?
x desleyjane
Musings of a Frequent Flying Scientist 
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