Paddling Inside a Washing Machine

This past Saturday, I moved from being #thebarefootspeaker to #thewetsuitspeaker.

Definitely not a title I initially had in mind or ever thought I would take on.

I actually did an entire presentation in my twenty-three-year-old wetsuit! Yip, if you are thinking “crazy lady”, I think many of the 700 attendees at the conference would agree.

Sometimes in life, you have to change the picture of what you thought things would always be like and embrace what it is in the moment (no, I am not going permanently for the “crazy lady in the wet suit” look!). You also have to be okay with all it cannot be.

That’s exactly what I had to do and actually, human realness here - what most of life so often feels like.

Let’s get down to being honest: Most people I know have NOT had the easiest year so far. In fact, for many, it’s been an ABSOLUTE shocker! It’s knocked us left and right, side-swiped, left-winged, and has planted us nose-down, toes upward-stretching towards the stratosphere.

My talk was entitled “Finding Flow in Washing Machines”- a hard task I know, but the perfect analogy of what the current global conditions so far this year have felt like. An endless search for flow from the inside of a washing machine.

Well, things didn’t go down the way I imagined they would…

First off: Somehow I missed the fine print (at the bottom of a small-font PDF attachment to an email) that all presenters needed to have their audio-visual presentations in two weeks before… OOPS!

When the reminder came out twelve days before the talk, I knew there was NO WAY.

Earlier last week, another email arrived. I was officially THE ONLY presenter who had not managed to get a presentation in (It has been a tad busy to finalise what can take up to ten hours to get waxed, two weeks pre-event, and - a very big “and” - I admit that my best presentation ideas usually surface the night before while I have my head under the shower tap).

I decided that I was going in presentation-less. Something I RARELY do... Something out of my comfort zone.

One thing Covid taught me, was that no matter what, we make plans… so I took a dddeeeeepppp breath, and rethought.

If I couldn’t have my usual visuals, I needed props…

My wetsuit (quick change behind the stage curtains), a surfboard (my paddle board couldn’t be transported but I wanted a “board visual”), and a paddle.

I was so busy thinking about the talk en route to the venue that I was suddenly convinced that I had missed the highway exit.

PANIC alert… (before some deep breaths to re-centre my heart rate and GPS).

Then I had a few of my own technical issues on stage… It was an immensely levelling human experience from beginning to end.

Completely imperfect.

Did it all go down as smoothly as it had been planned in my head? Absolutely not. AT. ALL.

Will I present a talk in that exact outfit again? Certainly not the plan.

Did it leave more of an impact than the visual of a crazy lady in a blue and yellow wetsuit? I hope so.

But that’s yet another reminder: Life seldom goes according to plan, especially when you’re trying to paddle inside a washing machine. Part of finding joy regardless is learning to compassionately embrace all our human imperfections, all our human errors, and remembering that even when plans go nothing like you have in mind, just show up and be real. From the inside of a washing machine, sometimes that’s all we have.

With love and a wanna-be paddle board,

Naomi 🏄♀️❤️