By: Bethany Lerch, TEDxOshkosh '16 Speaker 

The invitation to speak at TEDxOshkosh came in early May 2016, when I was still working in Kabul. As an Oshkosh native and TED/TEDx talk admirer (Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Your elusive creative genius” is a favorite), I was happily surprised my city would host its very own TED-like event. Teeming with love of home, I accepted. Yes, I would be there. And I’d fly back from Afghanistan if needed.

The process to choose a topic began soon after. What did I know enough about to fill 18 minutes? Most remarkable about TED and TEDx talks is the speakers’ ability to go on at length and without notes. That I would have to do the same was an intimidating thought at first, but then I began to see it a bit differently. Speakers for TED and TEDx are eloquent because they care deeply about their topic. This changed the question from “What do I know?” to “What do I care about?”

 Always a woman of lists, I folded a piece of blank paper in half. One column was “Passion,” the other “Knowledge.” There were multiple items below each, two of which overlapped. They were “Afghanistan” and “Palestine.”

My professional background is something my father calls “inconsistent” (and I would agree), but for that it is rich in challenge and diversity. In Afghanistan I had been a Military Advisor and Gender Integration trainer for a time; in Palestine I had been an English teacher for young girls. In both places, I was seen as a change agent. “Change” would be my theme, I decided, namely how to make it and how not to make it.

Afghanistan and Palestine made for two possible contexts. While passionate about both, I opted for just one. Eighteen minutes is a long time to keep an audience’s attention. It would be important to keep my message coherent and easy to follow right to the end. Since my most recent stint had been in Kabul, and because it had been very in-depth, Afghanistan became my backdrop.

As a former writing instructor, I structured my speech like an academic essay. With my thesis statement mostly finalized and the “scene” decided, all that was left were three supporting arguments. I made another list, this time of lasting impressions and lessons learned from those 16 months in Kabul. I chose three that could be easily applicable in other places: Bigger is not better; change is restricted when change is forced; and change goals come with cultural limits.

In one of my favorite 90s movies, Never Been Kissed, Drew Barrymore remarks, “To write well, you have to write about what you know.” I figured the same applied to speaking gigs: To speak well, you have to speak about what you know. Each section of my talk, including the introduction and conclusion, had an element of personal narrative—from how I was hired, how I had to slow my hope for gender integration, and how I finally came to understand that, actually, there are wrong ways to help.

Although the writing process was tricky, TEDxOshkosh organizers were ready and willing to adjust and polish my thoughts. For positive feedback like, “You’re on the right track,” to constructive feedback like, “Have you thought about it this way…” I was always able to ask a question, send an email, even sit down over coffee to hash it all out on paper. Their guidance helped enormously.

Fall approached and the weeks leading up to 29 October came quickly. By then my assignment in Afghanistan had ended. To decompress and ease the transition back to the West, I went for a long walk across Spain’s Camino de Santiago. Each day for more than a month I walked and talked to myself, rehearsing from beginning to end. Some days I repeated a section until I had it memorized. Other days, and nights, I revised and rewrote entire paragraphs to make them clearer or more engaging. My journal was thin and fit nicely into the netting between my back and pack. Mechanical pencils I kept in my ponytail and plucked out as needed, stepping aside to mark time and make notes as other walkers passed by.

My return from Madrid, mere days before “show time,” meant I had to contend as much with jet lag as nerves. But, in some respects, jet lag helped. After six weeks in Europe, my body’s clock was seven hours ahead, so I was awake between four and five o’clock each morning. I paced in my family’s basement while my parents still slept, rehearsing to myself aloud, just as I had the month before.

There was one final piece of my preparation, a tactic from Amy Cuddy’s talk—the power pose. Backstage at Oshkosh’s Grand Opera House awaiting my cue, I put my hands on my hips or all the way into the air, as if in victory. Cuddy’s research shows that miming power can boost confidence. 

And it does. Despite the brilliance and warmth of the spotlights, when I stepped on stage, each word and sentence was there, intact. So were the pauses in between them!

Eighteen minutes later and behind the curtain again I shook with self-realization. The lists and the drafts and the goofy moments of talking to myself had all been worth it. TEDxOshkosh gave me a profound sense of achievement, and counts as one of the finer moments of my life.