The Campbell Academy Blog (118)

2up

Just in case you're ever thinking of speaking to groups of people to do with your job and for any reason, it might be nice to read this little article in The Times on Friday last week.

It's a story of a comedian at the Edinburgh Festival and her one-woman show with only one audience member.

In this day and age, she was able to post a tearful, sad description of it on Twitter, which went viral and had many comedians sharing their own experiences of what it was like at the start of their careers.

In the next few weeks, I get to travel to Switzerland for work, talk to people about future strategies, and decide on massive things going on for 100 different countries.

Sometime after that, I go to South Africa for a week, and people pay me to do that. I will speak four times in South Africa to different groups of people on the subjects of dental business and consultations and marketing and all sorts of different things.

It sounds extraordinarily grand and extraordinarily exciting, and it is both of those things.

I still have extraordinary levels of impostor syndrome, and writing my lectures will never seem good enough before I get to those places.

It's worth recounting the story, though, that many years ago, I travelled to Durham on invitation from Straumann to do a lecture on aesthetic implant dentistry, I think before aesthetic implant dentistry was even seen as a thing.

I arrived at the University of Durham and was directed to one of the turrets in the castle to present in a fantastic and ornate room, which would be absolutely incredible and exciting and mind-blowing.

It turned out that when I arrived, two people had turned up to hear me speak (and one of those had been explicitly invited to introduce me).

I was still getting paid for the lecture for the one person who had turned up to hear me, but it didn't really feel like money that I should take.

On the way home and down the A1 in the car from Durham in the winter rain, I was finishing for a holiday, and I was on my early-style mobile phone to my wife in tears, exhausted and wondering why I was bothering to do any of this.

Alison was wonderful then (as she usually is in these circumstances).

And that is a tale from long ago at the very start of my speaking career, but it's also worth remembering that a few weeks ago, I went to London on a very wet Saturday to do a lecture on dental innovations, and I think there may have been eight proper audience people in the room.

This is what 'gigging' is like.

Every so often, and once in a while (very rarely if you're me), you get the opportunity to stand in front of 1000 people at your national congress and even get a standing ovation (that's years ago now).

Most of the time, it's a little bit like cleaning the toilets on a Saturday afternoon. A really necessary job, but not really many people get to see it, and you don't really want to talk about it too much.

An audience of one or an audience of 1000 is still the opportunity to help someone and change things for the better.