The Road to the RED DOT: Walking into Light

  ROAD to the RED DOT:  The Power of Coaching   There is a saying in India that without a teacher to guide you nothing is attainable. Even the doors of heaven are opened only by the grace of a teacher’s instruction. There are few more powerful statements about the value and necessity of coaching in all endeavors. In the realm of preparing for the TED stage, I realized at the outset that I need to find a coach with a track record of successfully guiding students to land and deliver their messages from the TED stage. As luck would have it, I found 3 excellent resources to help me craft my skill. The first were Amy Dix and Dave Nitzel of the Authority Speaker’s Agency. The second was Cesar Cervantes of Top Talks TEDx Mentorship. The third was Evolve Benton of Speak4Profit Academy. Each has a special target niche that served best for the path that I was crafting for the purpose of taking my message about the power of human potential to a wider audience. Before January 202...

Road to the RED DOT CONNECTION! The Magic of Life   Someone once made a comment about me, part admiringly, part sarcastically. He said, “Ravi can tell a great story.” The implied subtext in it was that the telling of stories is nice but just a form of a con. Not really honest in a truly ennobling way, but really good to marvel at or indulge your afternoon away. I am calling that out as the greatest lie that could ever be foisted upon humanity and this is why. The ability to tell impactful stories is the single greatest determinant to success in any field. Let me explain. Before you open your mouth to speak the first sentence of your story or before you write the first line in a proposal, you have to know how to connect with the person you want to tell it to. In every situation where I have heard someone speak derisively about storytellers, when I look I invariably find a person who is unable to perform that most basic of human activities…. Connection. The ability to connect b...

  …. William Blake Road to the RED DOT Language: The Womb of Creation The domain of a TED talk lies at the intersection of vision, imagination, and possibility. A TED speaker tries to push the envelope of what is possible for all of us through the medium of his or her speech. TED speeches are a peculiar use of language. It is not the use of language to describe what already exists. Nor is it the use of language to describe what does not exist. It is the use of language to bring into existence as an act of creation that which was hitherto beyond conception. It is the use of language to bring forth as a creative act. The ancient sages of India understood the creative aspect of language. They called each of the 51 letters of the Sanskrit script as “Matrika” or “Little Mother”. Thus recognizing the capacity of language to create name and form out of the raw material of our sensory experience. When we use language to describe our experience our words have only a limited power to trans...