I gave a presentation at a small business conference, and it ended up being one of the clearest examples of something I’ve been noticing lately—how differently my head and my heart function.
My brain receives an invite to speak and immediately feels confident. Excited, even. I don’t feel like I need to prepare anything. I don’t need a topic, or a preamble, or to know the questions ahead of time. I just have this underlying certainty that I’ll be able to walk in and deliver something meaningful.
That confidence is absolutely real, but I’m starting to understand where it comes from.
Historically, I’ve learned how to communicate through theory—through distillation. Taking something complex, breaking it down, and presenting it in a way that makes sense. It’s structured. It’s observational. It’s me stepping slightly outside of the experience and translating it.
I spent five years studying pure mathematics, and in many ways, that shaped how I think. When you’re proving something, you don’t always start with certainty—you start with belief. A theorem, an assumption, something you choose to accept as a baseline. From there, you build. You pull in supporting ideas, connect concepts, and layer them together until something coherent emerges.
So while it’s scientific, it also requires faith.
And that’s a skill. The ability to believe something before it’s fully proven. The ability to sort through information and construct meaning. We see this across disciplines—writers have processes, athletes have rituals, creativity itself is often supported by structure.
This “head” way of teaching is powerful. It’s how we learn frameworks and tools.
But there’s another way of teaching that I’m now stepping into, and it feels much less familiar: Storytelling.
Not just sharing what happened, but sharing what it felt like. The embodied version of truth. The sensory experience.
I’m realizing I haven’t practiced that in the same way. Even when I try, I tend to stay at the surface. It feels safer there—cleaner, more controlled.
But this presentation asked something different of me.
My business partner and I went in with very little structure. A couple slides. Photos of us as kids. A loose thread of talking points around confidence—not as a set of steps, but as something built through inner work and community.
We talked about how real estate became the vehicle for what we do, but not the reason. What actually lights us up is the ability to do inner work inside of these spaces, alongside the women who share them. To feel seen and to see others.
From there, we talked about conflict—about a moment last year where things weren’t aligned, and what it took to come back into alignment both individually and as partners.
There was no tight outline. No clear “five takeaways.” Just conversation.
And leading up to it, my brain was still saying, “We’ve got this.”
But my body was telling a completely different story.
I was sweating. Moving furniture around the room before we started, trying to create some sense of control. My partner looked at me and asked, “Rocky, what are you doing?”
And I said, “I’m nervous. I need to move things.”
It’s such a strange experience—when your head is calm and confident, and your body is reacting as if something is wrong. Your brain says everything is fine. Your body says pay attention.
And my question has become: which one do I listen to?
What I’m learning is that I don’t actually have to choose. I can be nervous in my body and still trust the confidence in my mind. So instead of hiding it, I said it out loud.
“I’m sweating. Is anyone else sweating?”
And the room immediately shifted. People laughed. Nodded. Relaxed.
In that moment, it didn’t feel like I was the speaker and they were the audience. It felt like we were just sharing a human experience. That’s something no slide or framework could have created.
At one point, my feet were sweating so badly in these plastic sandals that I just took them off. No hesitation, no internal debate. I just did it.
And then I noticed what I was wearing—a Canadian tuxedo, a Chimayó vest, barefoot, standing in front of a room at a business conference.
And I had this moment of thinking, you’re so fucking cool.
Not in a performative way. In a very grounded, honest way. I wasn’t trying to fit into what a “speaker” should look like. I was just showing up as myself. And that felt like real confidence. The kind that comes from knowing you feel best when you’re being yourself—and trusting that.
After the presentation, a woman came up to me and said, “I can’t believe you took your shoes off. That was so cool.”
I told her my feet were sweating, and she said, “I hate my shoes.”
So I said, “Then take them off.”
She hesitated. “Wait… can I?”
And I said, “Yeah, you can.”
She took them off, and then she started crying. Because it brought her back to being a kid—wanting to be barefoot, fighting for that freedom with her mom, until someone finally told her it was okay to just run around without shoes.
In that moment, she felt like herself again. And hearing that brought something back up for me too. I’ve always loved being barefoot. It makes me feel grounded, connected, safe. It’s something I’ve carried from childhood into adulthood without questioning. And without trying to do anything “impactful,” just by being confident in myself, that moment created something for someone else.
No framework. No takeaway slide. No structured lesson.
Just experience.
Coincidentally, the topic of our presentation being embodied, and I did a stellar job at it.
Regardless, the entire time I was speaking, my inner critic was present.
You’re not making a point.
This isn’t valuable.
You should be more clear.
But I kept talking anyway. I let the critic exist, but I didn’t let it stop me. And that always feels important. Because I know that with practice, that voice will quiet. I know I’m capable of reaching a flow state—I’ve done it before when I’m teaching in that third-person, structured way. I just haven’t fully accessed it yet in storytelling.
When I’m speaking from theory, I’m grounded. Clear. Confident. I can hold eye contact, command a room, deliver ideas cleanly. So I know that ability exists in me.
Now, it’s about learning how to bring that same presence into storytelling—into sharing lived experience, not just distilled concepts, which means moving through discomfort, not around it.
At the end of the presentation, even though I felt messy and unsure, I didn’t fail. People came up to me. They shared their own experiences. Some of them cried. There was connection.
Something landed.
Maybe not perfectly. But meaningfully, and that feels like proof.
Proof that this work matters.
Proof that I don’t need to be fully “good” at storytelling for it to create impact.
Proof that practice itself is enough to begin.
And maybe the most exciting part is this: If I keep practicing, I’ll eventually be able to do both.
To stand in that grounded, structured clarity—and to share my lived experience with the same level of confidence. That feels like a different kind of power.
