Scribbling, tapping, and typing away - recently people have begun taking Notes when I Speak. From the last few weeks of tech panels, entrepreneurship workshops, business presentations, and strategy sessions - Is what I am saying valuable enough to write down?

I perceive a huge difference in my deliverance of carefully scripted material as compared to unstructured remarks. The conspicuous absence of underlying planning in my unscripted speaking yields continuous blabber in hopes of discovering a strategy somewhere along the way. This cognitive tempest is summed up best by the Michael Scott quote “Sometimes I'll start a sentence, and I don't even know where it's going. I just hope I find it along the way.”

When I cease talking at last, I humbly pray to the universe that a tenth of group got a tenth of what I was trying to say. Who invited me to be here? I am the youngest person on this panel, I have no degree, no credentials, and I don’t even know the name of the club hosting this event. Who cares what I say - it’s not like anyone was really listening.

It turns out there is a vast gap between how I perceive what I say and how others perceive what I say.

My words are being perceived by the group such that writing them down is justifiable. My scripted and unscripted remarks being equally perceived as noteworthy leads me to speculate about what the group’s perception of my words (and by extension their perception of me) may be.

Reading what I said penned in a stranger’s handwriting was akin to hearing my own voice in a recording for the first time. “Is that really what I sound like to others?” A reluctant humbling overtook me in this moment. The rearrangement of my scrambled commentary into coherent written form revealed the vehemence of my dialogue in a way that was embarrassing for me to accept as being at the source of.

Perhaps externally my spontaneity occurs as a clear and deep understanding of the topic at hand - whereas on the inside I feel like an old man slouched into a patio chair on my front lawn, rambling nonsensically at cars speeding down the street.