what makes my heart sing?

It's funny what motives people. Since going freelance and setting up a company I've never worked harder but its never seemed quite like work used to. Why is that?

by Dan Slee

I’ve been thinking a bit about what makes my heart sing. Not what you are passionate about. Anyone can be ‘passionate’. It’s a word that is rapidly losing its meaning.

What I mean is what makes your heart truly sing.

What prompted this was reading ‘Talk Like TED’ by Carmine Gallo which looked at what makes the best TED talks work. TED, if you don’t know, stands for Technology, Education, Design and has snowballed from an exclusive conference for the super rich to a global franchise of affiliated events.

They are short talks. 18 minutes is the most you’ll get. They’ll have a bit of powerpoint. But the slides help the speaker tell a story rather than provide a script.

Last April I left local government to work on comms2point0 full-time. It’s taken me to meet some fascinating people doing great work across Britain.

A few weeks back myself and my comms2point0 colleague Darren Caveney travelled to Jordan at the invitation of the Foreign Office to facilitate a two-day comms event for Middle East and North Africa comms staff. We also staged a half day unconference. There was never any doubt in my mind that the unconference aspect would work. It did. The people in the room rose to the task.

I began at the start of the event by asking the question what made their hearts sing. There were some puzzled looks at first. Then some great answers.

But what makes my heart sing?

Over the years many things. It used to be watching Stoke City and when I was a journalist writing a frontpage story. My children do. But I’m their Dad, so I’m biased.

What makes my heart sing now is working out the best ways to tell a story and communicate with people. The web has taken everything and thrown it up into the air. Who wouldn’t want to try and explore how those pieces fit?

My heart sings when I see people understanding how to communicate in an area I don’t know about.

Even though I love Twitter, I don’t care for people who think Twitter is the answer to everything. It’s not. If some print works, then go for it. That’s fine. There’s no point being a channel fascist.

Here’s a comment made at the Middle East event by a locally engaged comms professional who does brilliant work for the FCO with the Arab regional media.

“In Libya, people have Kalashnikovs and want to kill each other. There are four tribes. Just because an infographic works in the USA it doesn’t mean it works in Libya.”

You need local knowledge. You need the passion to understand the media landscape wherever you are whether that’s Derbyshire or Dubai.

Hats off to Steven Hardy and Craig Morley from the FCO for staging the event and to the 70-odd attendees who made my heart sing.

Picture credit