Sharing Your Passion with the World - What it's Like to Give a TEDx Talk
/We recently had the incredible opportunity to speak at TEDxSquareMile. If you’ve ever seen any TED talks online, you’ll know they’re made of pretty inspiring stuff, so there was lots to live up to!
Anna and Emily share THEIR passion for group singing
TEDx events are independently organised gatherings of interesting and interested minds, featuring talks by inspiring speakers on a range of diverse topics. TEDxSquareMile 2015 had the theme of ‘Get Connected’, from which every speaker was challenged to deliver their own talks inspired by the topic - here's a run down of the day. Having been invited to speak (and sing!) about our work bringing people together through group singing, we didn’t need to look much further than the inspiring Starling Arts community to find life-changing stories to share.
In our talk, titled ‘Why the World Needs to Sing’, we first spoke about why singing with others - in communities, businesses or choirs - can be a hugely transformative experience, and we would like to thank the Starling Arts community for being living proof of this. Over the past six years we’ve seen how singing together creates friendship, love, trust, community spirit and a sense of belonging. It’s these things that lead to the powerful connections we’ve seen and it’s precisely that power that we wanted to share with our audience. To bring our message to life, we got the crowd up on their feet, loosened up and finally singing in three part harmony. The atmosphere was electric and so many people told us afterwards how much they’d enjoyed singing together and how they could now see why singing together can be so powerful!
The crowd were up on their feet singing togetheR
Giving a TEDx talk has been one of the most exciting experiences of our lives so far - an opportunity to share our passion for community singing with a wider audience and even get the crowd singing with us too. The process of writing, rehearsing and delivering a TEDx talk has been an incredible challenge of learning, sharing and connecting with our own stories.
Here are the various stages of emotions we went through as TEDx speakers:
How exciting - it’s going to be a dream come true to share our passion for group singing with the world!
Is this really happening? We had better plan something then...
Easy - we have so much to say and share with our audience!
This is too hard - we have so much to say, how do we possibly choose what we can fit into an 18 minute talk?
Phew, we’ve decided what we want to say. Let’s write this talk, which shouldn’t take too long...
Let’s rewrite this talk, at least five times until it says what we want it to say! And then once more… We can’t waste this opportunity!
How will we remember everything, whilst staying calm and passionate? How do TED speakers make it look so easy?
It’s all fine, all we have to do is share our passion.
How can we share our passion when we’re full of nerves?
WOW that was the best feeling ever!
Watch our TEDx Talk here!
You can find out more about our working connecting people through song at www.starlingarts.com.
