Mindfullness and Software

Photo courtesy of wardomatic

I’ll start with a confession – I am a very shy person. Think “that shy kid that is afraid to go and buy something from the store” shy. I’m not exaggerating – I really was like that when I was a kid. I was absolutely incapable of walking up to a stranger and starting a conversation or even doing something work-related. Could this be the reason I chose a career in computer programming? Well, it was not exactly THE reason, but the comfort of communicating with computers certainly played its part. So, why does a shy person need to do public speaking? I look upon being shy not as a character peculiarity, but as a communication skills deficiency. Anyone remotely interested in developing into a better person or a better software developer, should be interested in bringing his or her communication skills to the next level. Or so I thought. That is how I accepted my first speaking offer.

My thinking went like this: I would suck at the beginning (and I did), but, with practice, I would get better. Since my first time, I had spoken at various events, and every time I did it, it took literally a ton of effort. I had to manifest a lot of strength, so that I could overcome my fear and get up there before the audience. What was that scary? I had prepared for so many hours before! My slides and demos were perfect! I’ve rehearsed the presentation… Twice! Yet, I couldn’t shake off the fear of something breaking, of something not being quite right, something that would make me look bad before all those people. I thought that was okay, and things would fall in place with practice. I was hoping that doing something long enough would make it trivial, and would drive the fear away. The problem was that that moment never came.

Change came to me when I was writing my book. I was neck deep in work, so I turned away from any speaking arrangement that came to me. More than a year rolled by without me speaking before other developers. This April has been the change – I have started speaking again. During the past several weeks I did two presentations: one before the Sofia .NET user group, another at the yearly Microsoft-organized DevDays conference. Both presentations went great (especially compared to what I was used to in the past). I noticed a radical change in the presentation experience I was offering. Suddenly, I was not the wannabe expert that was standing before a hostile crowd. I was not the guy whose argument everybody wanted to attack, and whose tech examples were expected to fail, so that everyone could laugh at how inept he really was. I became a fellow developer. A somebody that has just been lucky enough to play with an exciting piece of technology and wants to share the cool things he discovered. People in the audience started looking to me as people eager to learn something new instead of people waiting to attack me. I found the biggest secret:

People like you! They really want you to succeed!

Yes, that is really so. Let’s put yourself in their shoes. Are you attending tech presentations to learn something new? Are you keen to get a different perspective on something you think you’ve known for ages? Nobody attends presentations in order to punish him/herself for an hour and endure a boring lecture on a subject that is not remotely interesting! When you, the speaker, get to the stage, do you think that you are speaking before a room full of strangers? Are they people that you do not know, people that you will never know too? Of course, not! You are speaking before fellow geeks. They are software developers interested in professional growth, and are on the look out for ways to improve the way they work. They wouldn’t be attending a user group meeting or a developer conference otherwise, right? You have so much in common with those people, you can’t even begin to imagine.

How did that change of perspective happen to me? The book was the catalyst – the loads of work I had to put in got me through some pretty tough times. And tough times are the universe’s teaching mechanism . I eventually realized that the fear of doing a lousy job as a presenter is rooted in a wrong perception of the world. I was accustomed to seeing the world as a place inhabited by billions of disconnected people. Like free radicals, those people bounced off each other, most of the time painfully. Now, contrast that with an alternative view – the universe is composed of interconnected sentient beings. Beings that learn from each other and help each other grow.

Which of the two views of the universe outlined above is the correct one? Well, it does not matter! To me, the correct one is the one that empowers me and is more useful on my path to becoming a better person. Do I want to cower at every interaction with other people? Of course not! The choice must be obvious by now.

I’ll wrap this up with the places where I get those crazy ideas about the universe. I have been most influenced by two books:

• The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are – Alan Watts presents an alternative view on the self based on Hindi and Vedantic philosophy;

• Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth – Steve Pavlina has been a great inspiration to me, and I have been following his blog for years.