I’m writing this somewhere between Melbourne and Brisbane on my way to Cairns for the Global Speakers Summit. I’ve had one of the busiest weeks of my life and I haven’t even got to the 4 day Summit yet. It started off with MC’ing the Ballarat Begonia Festival for three days over the long weekend and ended up hosting a Q and A with an actual and amazing astronaut, Dr Jeanette Epps last night.
The universe delivered, as it often does, by giving me something to talk about over the next four days in Cairns. It’s common that speakers ask what you talk about and up until last friday, my answer has been ‘not much - yet’ but now I can confidently say that I MC’d the band stage at a record breaking Begonia festival with some 70K people attending - obviously not all of them came to the band stage but lots of them would’ve walked past when I was up there confusing them all with my kiwi accent.
I was quite worried about pronouncing names correctly because I suck at it but I should’ve been more concerned that people would mishear my accent. There was a high school band called ‘Feet’ and when I double checked the pronunciation, they said, no it's ‘Feet’ and I said, yah, like ‘Feet’ and pointed to my shoes, and they said yeah but ‘Feet’. Turns out we were both right and if I want to get comfortable on stage I’m going to have to lean into the kiwi accent.
Lucky with a three day event you get lots of time to iterate and improve upon your performance. It became quite clear that the harder I tried to say something clever the worse I got. Too many notes made it hard to sound conversational so as the days progressed my notes about the artist became just a few words and I simply joined them together live on stage. I’m not saying I was great at it but I had my moments and I think for my first ever gig it went pretty well. My boss and best buddy who happened to be the event manager was happy and I became great mates with the sound guy so it was a pretty successful event all round.
One thing that I am particularly good at which makes this job feasible for me is that I am able to build rapport with people quickly. Having to introduce 15 bands in a way that sounds and feels authentic when I only have a few moments in the green room with them before sound check was a really fun part of the experience. You have to come in hot but also read the room - who is nervous and needs to be left alone but who would be happy to give me an interesting tid bit about them that I could turn into an engaging introduction.
I enjoyed thinking on my feet and I hope the bands enjoyed having someone bouncing around backstage getting them pumped. I do lots of event organising at the Tech School so watching the clock and making things happen on time is my jam which also helps when you're an MC - it's a weird job but I loved it. I definitely had the swing of it by the time I got to day three. I was completely wrecked by the end of it though. Managing my energy is absolutely something I’m going to have to work on if I want to continue this line of work!
Wednesday's gigs with Dr Jeanette Epps were at a completely different pace. The first one was a Student Leaders event bringing together our current and past student leaders. 30 of them sat in awe as Jeanette explained how she went from working for Ford to the CIA to then becoming a NASA Astronaut. I employed a similar tactic of building rapport quickly because I need to get her set up on stage with her presentation, introduce her to the students (quickly as we only had an hour) and then read the room and make sure Jeanette was going to get enough of her presentation in while the student still get to ask some questions.
It was hard because her presentation had me literally sitting on the edge of my seat. She has had such an extraordinary career and every slide she showed was incredible. Working for the CIA. Being accepted into the NASA astronaut program in 2009. Learning Russian. Having to spend weekends working in an emergency department so they had adequate medical training. One of the surprising but now completely understandable parts of her career has been the intense team building work she had to complete before going to space.
Spending a large amount of time in the wilderness as a team. Living together in a gloried shipping container 50m under the water's surface with 6 others. Caving deep underground. It makes sense that astronauts have to go through this type of training but I guess I never thought about how hard out it was. It needs to be. These people literally have your life in their hands. You need to be able to trust your crew completely. You need to be able to do lots of different tasks on the International Space station but you don’t have to be ‘the expert’.
There are literally 1000’s of people back on earth who are supporting the ISS crew. These people are the experts. If something goes wrong, they have access to some of the smartest people on earth. Being able to have good rapport with these people is essential to the success of the task at hand. I’m fascinated by the importance of these instant high trust relationships.
Luckily Jeanette is an absolute pro and we had good rapport from the get go which was important because I was hosting the Q and A part of the evening event she was speaking at with the Committee for Ballarat. Some 150 members had come out to hear her talk and I was lucky enough to spend some time on stage with her. It was pretty special so I’m going to share a few photos as a reminder of how important it is to be able to build rapport and how far it can take you. Huge shut out to the committee team and Andrew the photographer for sharing these with me!
