TED talk or talking to Ted

I took Seth Godin’s ‘The Marketing Seminar’ last year.

It’s an online course where you answer prompts in an open forum and all the other students can see your answers and interrogate you (but in a friendly helpful way).

It turns out that my fellow classmates could ask really tough questions, repeatedly.

So I wanted to reply with decent, well thought out answers.

I decided not to answer immediately but to let the questions percolate in my mind.

Looking back now, I can see that this tactic was really to avoid answering out of fear.

Fear of being judged on a dumb answer.

Then the inevitable happened.

Pretty quickly I fell behind as my classmates raced past me free of this fear of judgement that was hindering me.

I’ve come to learn that there are horses for courses when it comes to answering questions.

If it’s a safe space and learning is the point then whatever is top of mind in that moment will do.

If the occasion is a job interview and the interviewers expect a presentation then a PowerPoint and a week’s worth of thoughts is more appropriate then a 20 minute stream of consciousness.

So, are you doing a TED talk or are you talking to Ted?