I have an acquaintance who says we all have talents and gifts, but we also have what he calls a “pinnacle gift.”  He describes a talent as something you are good at, but do not necessarily enjoy.  A gift is something you are good at, and enjoy so much you lose track of time.  A pinnacle gift is your most affirmed gift.  It is practicing your craft in such a way that people say, “She is one of the best.”

I have been blessed with a lot of talents and gifts.  I have been affirmed as a CEO, writer, counselor, teacher, and pastor.  But I have been most affirmed as a public speaker. I am very much at home in front of an audience, whether that audience is 5,000 people at TEDxMileHigh in Denver this past Saturday, or the worshippers at Middle Collegiate Church in New York City this coming Sunday.  Public speaking is what I do.

At the TEDxMileHigh after party, a number of attendees noted how comfortable I appeared to be on stage.  Once I settle into a rhythm, I do feel comfortable on stage.  It is easy to find that rhythm when you have an audience as amazing as those who attend a Ted related event.  The audiences at TEDxMileHigh are among the best I have ever known.  But as comfortable as I might appear, it is never as easy as it looks.

An inordinate amount of time and energy went into last Saturday’s speech.  After Briar and Helena suggested starting over, I worked for the better part of two days before declaring to both seasoned TED coaches that I didn’t think what they were asking me to do was possible.  They said, “Yes it is.  Try again.”  The final talk was edit number 29.

When the final script was completed, just a couple of weeks before the event, I began earnestly memorizing a few hours every day.  I memorize sequentially, beginning to end, and had most of the talk in basic memory mode about 10 days in advance of the event.  But at any TED related event, “basic memory mode” is not adequate.  The talk must be memorized, word for word.  The talk was memorized word for word about seven days in advance.  Except that it wasn’t.

When I have a script locked in, I usually have it truly locked in.  This talk did not follow that pattern.  Late Friday night, less than 15 hours before I’d be on stage, I forgot my lines in two places I had not forgotten them before.  That had been happening all week.  I ended up with about 12 transitions in the script that I kept forgetting, a different one each practice session.

When it happened at 11:00 PM Friday night, I cursed loudly and went to bed.  Saturday morning as I got ready to go to Denver, I went over the talk two more times, then another time in the car.  Every time, I got tripped up someplace new.

As soon as I arrived, I went over the talk in the green room.  Jennifer Reich, one of the other speakers, said she had just started to go over her talk for the umpteenth time and remembered pretty much nothing.  She asked if that was normal.  I said, “Yep.”  Jennifer was the third speaker and did an amazing job.  She did not forget a single line.   I kept going over my talk right through the first five speakers, until 10 minutes before I went on stage.  Not once did I do it without a mistake.

Then Jeremy announced me, and I was on the red TED carpet looking out at an expectant crowd.  Twelve minutes later I finished without having made a single error.  I had even thrown in an extra line or two.  When I walked off stage, I asked Helena and Maegan (another coach) if I’d really done okay.  They looked mildly annoyed that I had asked.  Later Maegan said, “Of course you nailed it, you are a pro.”

I suppose I am a “pro” in that I do speak for a living.  But I also know I work extremely hard on every single speech, whether I have an audience of 10 or 10,000.  I figure there are a lot of cumulative minutes out there I do not want to waste.  Last Saturday it was about 60,000 minutes.  That’d be a lot of minutes to waste.

This was not an easy talk to give.  You’ll understand why it was when the talk is up on video sometime in December or January.  I said a lot of hard things that are difficult for men to hear.  I also bared my soul, which is fraught with danger.  Baring your soul is one thing.  Shedding your sickness before an audience is another.  The line between the two is thin.

My daughter Jana was at the talk.  (I am at TEDxMileHigh with Jana in the picture above.) She sat with my friends from Left Hand Church.  They had to hurry back for services, but Jana stuck around through my book signing time.  She said, “My whole life I loved hearing you speak, but today is the first time I’ve ever heard the real you speak, and I could not have been prouder of who you are, what you said, and how you said it.”  A standing ovation is nice and all, but to hear those words from your own daughter?  That makes every minute of preparation worth it.

I went over the talk in my mind while I was running today.  I thought of changes I could have made that would have improved the talk.  There were several.  I am rarely satisfied with my work.  I always want to improve.

I am a speaker.  It is what I do.  I try to speak words that will make the world a little better than it was before.  Sometimes I succeed.  Sometimes I don’t.  Saturday wasn’t perfect, but I did the best I could, and that’s about all we can ask of ourselves.

 

I am one of the speakers for TEDxMileHigh’s Imagine event on November 16.  I love Helena and Briar and Jeremy and all the good people at TEDxMileHigh.  They run a wonderful and inspiring show. TEDxMileHigh is one of the largest TEDx events in the world, and from my perspective, one of the best!  It is such a pleasure working with them.  It was my TEDx talk two years ago that launched my speaking career on  issues related to gender equity.

Occasionally people contact me and ask for help putting together a pitch to do a TED or TEDx talk.  I’m not a curator for TED events and have no idea what causes someone to be chosen to do a talk, so I’m not much help.  But I do know how much work you have to do once you have been chosen.

I have kept track of how many edits I have done for my upcoming talk.  Each dated edit has about four or five smaller edits embedded within, and at this point I am at dated edit number 22, including two edits I named “Try Again” and “Try Again2.”  That’s because Briar, my coach and the head of coaching for TED, and Helena, one of the leaders of TEDxMileHigh and also a coach for TED, kindly told me exactly 19 days ago that I needed to “start with a blank page.”  In other words, in spite of all of my brilliant writing and wonderful edits, my talk was not measuring up to their expectations.

Briar and Helena are the kindest and most upbeat humans you will ever encounter.  They bring sunshine with them all day every day.  (And Helena has the most beautiful engagement ring known to man.  Just sayin’ ) So, when Briar and Helena tell you to start over, they do it in the nicest of ways.  But they are also very clear.  You start over.  Doing a TED talk is not for the thin-skinned.

So, I started over.  And I ended up with a talk that has been painful to write, because it has asked me to examine my post-transition life for signs of lingering privilege.  But the problem is that I do not want to examine my post-transition life for signs of lingering privilege.  It makes me uncomfortable.  I lost a lot when I transitioned, and lingering privilege is a right of mine, dammit.  Except of course that privilege is no one’s right.

I am memorizing the talk now.  That’ll take the better part of two weeks, which gives me hundreds and hundreds of opportunities to be reminded of my desperation to hang on to my remaining white male privilege.  Sigh.

It’s not that hard speaking when you do not choose to be vulnerable.  You just talk and people laugh and life is good.  But being publicly vulnerable is another issue.  You always risk crossing the line D. H. Lawrence talked about when he said, “A writer sheds his sickness in his writing.”  Not a good thing.

Being willing to be human and vulnerable can be healing, both for you and your audience.  But it also can be exhausting.  To be vulnerable in front of a crowd of 5,000 and millions more online can be very exhausting.  Our Red Table Talk episode has been viewed over three million times.  That’s a lifetime worth of vulnerability.  I’ve watched the show exactly three times and that’s enough for me.

I speak because I can, and because it is important.  Not every transgender person has had the opportunities that have been afforded to me.  Those opportunities have given me a resilience that allows me to speak candidly about my life.  It still does not make it easy, but if not me, who?  We all have a responsibility to advance the narrative from within our own experience.

I have learned a lot as a female, and I believe it can be helpful for men and women to learn from my story, both to validate their own experience, and to help them explore areas for potential growth.

If you live in the greater Denver area, I encourage you to come to TEDxMileHigh Imagine at the Bellco Theater on Saturday, November 16.  This year’s speakers are an amazing group of inspiring men and women.  I am enjoying getting to know most of them, and I feel honored to be speaking alongside such capable and dedicated people.