Seize the Shibir

Bill Clinton, Lady Gaga, and Chris Rock all have one thing in common - they know how to work a crowd, and we can too at a shibir or a convention! 

Sure, it’s a larger audience, but to be an effective shibir speaker, we will have to do a few things different from what we already do on a Sunday-to-Sunday basis. Aside from a larger audience, we have a new setting, a new microphone, and new faces in the crowd.

As always, we will need to do our SUS in order to to give our talk meaning, but an article at Lifehacker gave us a few more pointers:

Know Your Environment: Presentations always start with knowing the environment. How many people will be there? Am I presenting to K1, K2, Kindergarteners, or 8th graders? Will I have a screen? Remember, you, the presenter, are responsible for getting the message across to the audience. Therefore, don’t be afraid to make a simple request in order to make your presentation flow smoothly.

Body Language: Every Sunday, we have the chance to have one-to-one eye contact with every single person in the room. When talking to a bigger crowd, eye contact is still important though much harder. Therefore, we have to be strategic. Break down the audience into different blocks, and work with each of the blocks one at a time. Imagining the audience as a huge mass will make it harder for you to develop a connection with your crowd.

Keep it Simple: Try to avoid using a large amount of special effects in the presentation. Don’t sacrifice clarity for animations, sounds, and/or background images. Even if we’re using PowerPoint, it’s best to keep the slides straightforward and clean.

Interactivity: Without being a afternoon talk-show host, there are certainly ways that we can connect with our audience at shibirs. Because there is a large audience, things might get tricky when we’re trying to get interactive, but we can always create exercises to make it happen by asking the audience to do any of the following.

• "Turn to the person on your left and talk about..."
• "Write 3 things on your sticky note that..."
• "Raise your hand if..."
• "Rub your tummy, stomp your feet, etc." (for bal mandal of course)

Getting out from behind the podium is also another way to connect with the audience as well as getting a wireless mic to ask the audience questions to get interaction. Of course, we would be wise to avoid frivolous inquiry like, "Who is the President?" "What is agna?" "Who can define raajipo?" 


All in all, a shibir talk just requires a modified approach that would not be possible without the basic understanding of a Sunday talk, for only after captivating a sabha audience can we hope to hold a shibir audience. 

Know your Audience - But first get feedback

Many centers had graduation sabha this weekend. We had one. We were asked to give a small 10 minute keynote talk. Awesome. We fired up the SUS engine and also were sent a link to a great commencement talk that has been making its way across the internet. The entire video is embedded below. In it English teacher David McCullough makes the audacious statement to the audience that they are not special. He was looking at the entitlement attitude that pervades high school

His best quote two quotes:

You see, if everyone is special, then no one is.  If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless.

The fulfilling life, the distinctive life, the relevant life, is an achievement, not something that will fall into your lap because you're a nice person or mommy ordered it from the caterer.  

So we read all this and we felt we were set.

Simple: Graduation is the start of trying to become special, even though we are not right now.
Unexpected: Telling all the graduate that they are not special.
Stories: We had a few prasangs that fit the bill.

We gave the talk.

A few people told us - That was a great talk.

Then we asked our board of people who we trust to give feedback. And one person gave us a gem.
"You started off great, but then you went to the you are not special part. I see where you were going with that. It definitely engaged the older kids. There were many shishu and small bal/balikas. When you tell them they are not special, they can really take it the wrong the way."

Think about your audience. We have mentioned it so many times before. But this time we simply forgot about it. A very good learning point. We hope we don't forget it again.

Spelling Out Kusang

As always, we love to share examples that communicate our timeless topics of Satsang in a contemporary if not relevant way, and a fellow sabhaologist sent us this example to explain the idea of kusang.

More than often on the topic of kusang we find ourselves hearing about immoral folks who threaten to take us off the path to moksh, but kusang is much more subtle than we often think it is - just like the words we input into a search query on Google.

Grammar predicts a query as much as the people we choose to include in our circle. We all have our flaws, but some flaws carry more danger (e.g. pressure to break our niyams) than others (e.g. crave chocolate incessantly). Our awareness of these defects can do much to safeguard our satsang like a simple spell check can do to guiding a more meaningful search.