“Communication is not simply speaking. Communication
begins with connection. When two people have a connection then there is communion….
And heart speaks to heart, communication happens and a community is born. A
community is not a collection of bodies in the same space. A community is a
collection of hearts speaking the same speech.”
…. Ravi R. Iyer, MD
The domain of great speaking contains several vital
capabilities that are intrinsic to the experience of life itself. First among
these is CONNECTION. The second is IMAGINATION and the third is LANGUAGE and
STORY as a representation of experience. These vital capacities are
quintessential to the domain of being a healer. The annals of literature are
filled with physicians as authors and storytellers. The very definition of
being a physician is to be able to connect and care deeply about the stories of
humanity. The act of caring requires that you be able to connect to the world
of the individual enmeshed in the struggles of their life. The task of
transforming the possibilities of their life requires you as the healer to
stand in these spaces of connection and skillfully weave the stories that will
set them free. Our mothers were the very first healers of human civilization
because both caring and weaving stories through language come naturally to the
female psyche. There is something about the woman's capacity to become
impregnated, conceive, nurture, and give birth to life that has earned her this
automatic role as the mother of the idea of life before life itself. Who cannot
relate to the experience of being drawn into that healing cocoon of connection
that seems to always reside on the lap of a young mother? She croons, kisses, and distracts the pain
of life’s harsh treatments while skillfully weaving a story to distract the child
as she applies the salve to the wound of that scraped knee.
The first storyteller in my life was my mother. Every night
after the kitchen was cleared, she would gather us in bed and my brother and I
would snuggle up on either side as she would read us the stories of Brer Rabbit
and Caramel the Cow. The animal characters of British authoress, Enid Blyton in
the form of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer Bear, and Brer Wolf taught us the
varied faces of how life would present itself later to us. Through these
stories, we learned to be savvy against cunning and trickery, and to be resourceful
yet open to the simple joys of life. These stories were our learning laboratory
about life before we would leave the nest to live it. Sometimes the exhaustion
of a long day’s worth of caring would hit my mother and she would in her
sleepiness, weave the real with the fictional and send Caramel the Cow
backpacking to Little Flower School (our school those days) where she studied
in first grade. My brother and I would look at each other in amazement for
surely this was not the story of Caramel we had heard yesterday. Regardless it
was my mother who instilled in me a love for language and reading and through
her persona an instinctive ability to connect with whatever was happening in
the lives of those in my presence.
The connection between language and life is ancient
knowledge. The ancients of India had a word for the letters of the Sanskrit language.
They called it Matrika or “Little Mother”. They recognized that the language we
use to create, clothe, and set flight upon the winds of sound, the ideas of our
soul are intimately linked with the being of womanhood and motherhood.
The second major influence on my journey into storytelling
and story creation was my English teacher, Mrs. Daphne D’Souza. A charismatic
young woman, Mrs. D’Souza would set our teenage minds ablaze with the
possibilities in language and induct us into our capacity to create through the
language of our compositions. I remember vividly how one day she asked us to
create a story with us beginning the story in the middle of the plot and then
weaving the back story into the main storyline in the next paragraph. That was
my first introduction to what would later become the basis of powerful openings
in many of my writings. The “opening hook” that I would use to establish
engagement and connection with my audience before delving deeper into the
message. Mrs. D’Souza’s class was my first introduction to a through-line…. (she
called it a “theme” ) …. The central idea of the story or the speech, that is
the string upon which are threaded the various pearls of the story. Decades
later the idea of the through-line would resurrect itself as my principal tool
when sculpting my TED talk.
When applying these foundational elements to the structure of a TED speech, the elements of the opening hook and the through-line are the tools we use. But the domain of transformational speaking resides in the ability to connect and be a space where the ideas you seek to transmit cohabit as your language with the psyche of your listeners. I would learn all about being a space for connection through my 41 years of labor at the bedside of the ailing from the streets of Patna, Bihar to the ivory towers of academia of Harvard, Boston to the seat of the most powerful government on the planet in Washington, DC. My first introduction to connection as an inner space, however, came during elocution training in high school.
Speaking is not just speaking words. It is the connection
that allows speech to have an impact. When the connection is built upon fear and control,
then the impact is one of anxiety and pain. When the connection is built upon
love and freedom to discover then the impact is one of uplifting transformation. The secret I learned
about speaking is that at any given moment you are only speaking to a single
person. Even when standing before a crowd of 10,000 you are only speaking in
that instant to one person. So the secret of great speaking lies in the ability
to connect to one person at a time and here my coach was a charismatic high
school elocutionist, Deepankar Bhattacharya. Deepankar taught me the ability to
walk on any stage and immediately segment the audience into five zones. Front
Left – Front Center – Front Right – Middle and Back. He would then have me target
one person in each zone and connect with that one person.
“Your eyes, Ravi! Your eyes”, he would exhort. “You don’t just
use your eyes to see! Whatever you see you instantly grasp into your being.
That person or object now resides within your space of reality. They are you. So,
connect and speak to that entity in you.”
Deepankar would insist that I could project my speaking with
my eyes to land upon any person in the audience before me.
“When you are on that stage all eyes are upon you so they
are already connecting with you. All you must do is connect back”
Deepankar taught me that when I connect, I can draw the
listener into my space of being, and in that instant, we would be one, our
hearts and our voices would be one.
Years later I would echo these teachings when I would say.
“Communication is not simply speaking. Communication begins
with connection. When two people have a connection then there is communion…. And
heart speaks to heart, communication happens and a community is born. A
community is not a collection of bodies in the same space. A community is a
collection of hearts speaking the same speech.”
Ravi R. Iyer, MD
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