Putting the Erotic in Public Speaking

When the carefulness gets cast off in Bridgerton and in your life 🔥

“How does your body feel when you have to speak in front of people?” I asked a roomful of teens in a workshop last year—and they responded with a billion synonyms for nervous. Anxious. Worried. Tense. Nauseous. Scared they’d make a mistake.

We have all these shades of fear in our language.

When for love, we have basically… love.

We know the Greeks didn’t: they distinguished between deep friend love and flirty love and selfless love and erotic love. I talk a lot about love when I talk about public speaking—because caring out loud is such a better bet, strategically and wellbeing-wise, than keeping close all the ways you could make a mistake.

“I want to share what I love” releases a whole different chemical cocktail of permission than “I hope I don’t ruin everything.”

The kind of love I’m invoking is probably what the Greeks would have called agape. The selfless one. The one C. S. Lewis referred to as “gift love” or we might call empathy. Or see no stranger. It’s good will and good intention and good faith.

But after binging Bridgerton this weekend I’m reminded—as I am every time I get sucked into Shondaland, shout out to those early Scandal days—that public speaking has more in common with the erotic than we might admit.

The moment when a character finally unzips their heart, when they say the true thing, when they stop hiding and start showing all the way up, that’s when things get hot.

And we know it.

We all know it.

Part of the fun of watching a show like Bridgerton, or reading novels from the Regency era, is the overwhelming formality—the grip of rules upon rules—and then the blessed, charged moment when the characters cast them all away and say fuck it.

The best public speaking, presentations, pitches, panel answers, moments that capture the room or capture the nation, are those moments too. The unzipping, the saying the true thing, the not hiding but showing up. We in the audience feel the heat whether we categorize it as eros or agape.

It’s hot love, not cool. It’s urgent, not reserved.

And it’s what works.

As well as a man you’ve been pining for telling you he’s been dreaming of you does, eyes wide, heart a drum, achingly present, the need is so great.

It works.

Partly because, for all our fewer corsets and chaperones these days, we fall into traps of formality too. We assume rooms can’t handle the heat. We out-boring each other in meetings and then out-boring each other on the conference stage too. We follow the norms and hope to avoid scandal and say what’s expected and keep ourselves safe.

Sometimes this level of carefulness is necessary.

I know the dangers of the internet as well as you do. You know your workplaces’s margin for error better than I do.

But there comes a moment, a take a deep breath, feel the thrum of possibility (plus nerves, nauseousness, anxiety) moment, when you decide fuck it. And step up to that microphone or turn on that camera or answer that question or start that slide show showing up truer and more unzipped than ever before. When you finally share the story that actually means something to you. When you catch yourself by surprise. Eyes wide, heart a drum, achingly present, the need is so great. When you stay in your spine and summon your courage and center your joy and show them how you really feel so it’s undeniable and there are no backsies.

How fiery or invested or thrilled or heartbroken you really feel. But like, really really.

And then, not always but more than you fear, they will fall in love with you.

And vote for you or fund you or support you or spread your message or say yes.

But: that moment tends to come when your care is bigger than your carefulness.

I coached a Zoom room of women last week who had signed up for the Emerge America candidate training, and it turned out many of them weren’t running for office this cycle. They were waiting till they understood more, till their families approved, till their kids were out of the house. This is TOTALLY OKAY, to be clear. No shame in discerning that your carefulness is currently bigger than your care.

But take responsibility for the shift, when it’s time.

When you know it’s time.

It may be in a single instant. When you decide that every second you stop yourself from posting about your services is another second someone who desperately needs you feels alone and lost, and you can’t tolerate that a second longer. When you decide that you’re going to hit the button and post, despite the fear, because you were born for such a time as this. When you realize your care, your love, is big enough to stop being so careful and try unzipping your heart and loosing your heat.

I can offer all kinds of tips on what to do next, but that choice—when exactly you’re ready to say fuck it—is yours.

Your carriage is waiting,

Samara

PS. Next Group Zoom Q&A will be FRIDAY JUNE 7TH at 10a PT. Please put it in your calendar now and if you’d like to join but you haven’t upgraded, this is your invitation to join us for the good stuff.

To get a sense of the vibe, check out the last one.

And read this comment on the post 😍