Image: Contributed
I imagine myself as Captain James Tiberius Kirk every time I click into a Zoom meeting.
“Beam me down, Scotty,” hovers on my lips as a new world comes into focus.
As I click, I cross my fingers—and toes and eyes—hoping this world, this meeting, this time, will not be as boring as the last and I won’t spend an hour with my elbows on my desk, head in my hand, fighting a yawn, as bored as Mr. Spock on a dating site.
I’m tired of incomplete/talk-over-the-top-of-each-other Zoom room discussions. It is like talking through jail bars.
I’m taking charge of this “let’s get to know each other part.” Maybe there will be a zap of energy and we can have a real conversation.
What have I got to lose? I’ll never see this person again.
I peer into my screen. I squint like Clint Eastwood looking at a bad guy—and resist the urge to make the shape of a cocked gun with my hand.
“Sooo, Bryan, what do you really do?”
My Zoom mate blinks and is knocked back into his standard, black office chair. A bookcase lined with the latest business guru books and equally appropriate but uninspiring ceramic vases and family photos are behind him.
He pauses.
I wait.
“I coach people to do their unimaginable.”
Really? I lean in.
Unimaginable? Bryan does a real-life, “Beam me up, Scotty?”
He takes his clients’ desire to be somewhere else and makes it happen?
My mind leaps to my unimaginable. Like everyone else, I know what it is. I just don’t talk about it, let alone dare to dream about it.
Bryan pauses again. Looks puzzled and shakes his head like a Canada goose shaking its wing after a fight. He looks away and then, finally, meets my gaze.
“I’ve never said that out loud before.” He pauses again, looks away before looking back at the screen, this time with a rueful smile and glittering eyes.
My soul tingles. My eyes sparkle. My ears want to hear what the world has never heard.
I was ready for a Vulcan mind-meld.
Since that initial conversation, Bryan and I Zoom every Monday morning to discuss life, politics, leadership, business proposals, challenging clients, our dogs, Okanagan grapes.
Bryan’s clients are skeptical but open to possibility. And if they express a passion they believe is unachievable, out of reach, he asks them, “What can you do to bring it within your reach?”
The desire to do the “bigger thing” must be stronger than just the intention to do the bigger thing.
I think about a time when I had a desire to do the bigger thing and all I wanted was for Scotty to beam me back home.…
······
It was the first day I had ever facilitated a workshop, a sales course called Organizing for Success. I was a small-town girl in a big city, about to go into a room of 60 people who I was certain were way smarter, way more experienced and came from better backgrounds than me.
Hoping no one knew who I was and hoping no one noticed me, I ducked into the bathroom. With the deepest of sighs, I slid the lock on the cubicle door, put the toilet lid down, but before I could sit, my shaking knees dropped me to the cold, tile floor.
I’d wanted to facilitate groups my whole life. I had a message, a way-of-being to share. This was my “bigger thing.”
But that wasn’t what my mind was saying. Elbows on my knees, I held my head up, took a deep breath, hoping to stop the shaking.
“How did you think this was a good idea? Why could you not just be happy to stay in your own world and do what you know how to do? Who do you think you are? You are not prepared enough … you, you, you …”
The awareness that it must be 8:58 and it is a 9 a.m. start interrupted the nattering voice.
I stood up and shook myself like a wet dog just out of the lake. I left the doubting, negative self-talk words to dry on the cubicle walls.
Show time.
······
Twenty years later, I am teleported into another version of show time.
Bryan is a business coach.
“90% of coaching is helping people put their self-talk in the right place,” he tells me as I scribble notes. I have to remember this. “If someone speaks to you negatively, without compassion, it is of no use to you. It doesn’t matter if the comment is from someone else or your own self-talk.” Bryan learned that from his yoga teacher.
“Wouldn’t it be great that when self-talk kicked in, logic also kicked in? And kicked the crap out of the negative self-talk?”
As Bryan posed questions, I beam myself back to that first workshop. I was back in that cubicle, pushing my knuckles into my temples.
······
Where had my logic gone? I had fibbed … just a bit. I was supposed to have five years’ experience to facilitate this course. I did, if you rounded up. If you went by months, I was five short. Was I an imposter?
I had prepared. I knew that more than content, I had to pay attention to the process. Great process engages learners and locks in the ideas. Too much content zones them out and the learners go to a safe space and plan their trip to the grocery store.
I had stories. Like Aesop, the Greek of fable fame, long after the message is forgotten, I wanted them to recall the story. Then the message, the learning, would once again bubble up into their awareness.
“I can do this. I can do this. It will be fine. And if not, I live five hours away. They’ll forget I even exist.”
······
Another quantum leap back to the present and Bryan’s soothing voice. His compassion made it easier to hear hard things.
“Our ability for imagination is the first ‘kid in the playground’ that your bully self-talk ego picks on,” he describes. “No matter our age or role, we need to control that self-talk or it will suffocate that spark. In listening to the negative self-talk, we miss out on a universe of possibilities.”
Bryan is on high alert for the kind of self-talk his clients reveal. He pays attention to each word, each action he sees and hears on the Zoom screen. He calls me on my stuff.
Bryan tells me about the entrepreneurs he coaches: “I work with leaders who have become cold, dead and grey. They have forgotten their spark. If they can set aside their numbers and remember their initial spark, they rekindle themselves and their business. They realize they are what makes the business tingle. My job is to gently blow on the spark.”
As Zoom-ing into meetings, training, conversations and virtual wine tasting becomes the norm, I am grateful I teleport across the continent and see my new friend. And we both get to go “where no man (or woman) has gone before.”
My spark is rekindled.
Myrna Selzler Park is a lifelong entrepreneur who works with organizations and individuals to turn their passion into impact. As former owner of Century 21 Assurance in Kelowna, Myrna uses her experience to build value in organizations. She is certified in behaviour and motivation analysis, emotional intelligence, as well as being a growth curve strategist and a certified value builder advisor. As a wannabe athlete, Myrna has run several half-marathons, deadlifted 215 pounds and has now put her mind to becoming proficient in Muay Thai kickboxing. She can be reached at [email protected].
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