Chris: Yes. It was a pretty personal kind of organic evolution, that one. As you may know, I have talked about this in a few different contexts but my wife and I, this is probably getting close to 10 years now, when we first started trying to have a child. In the first few months, nothing was happening, but not nothing to be concerned about yet, but after a year we started to realize that we needed to look into it and see what was going on. Then we found out that my wife, at least at that time, I don’t think she has this anymore, but had Graves’ disease, or autoimmune hyperthyroidism. I did a really deep dive into that and also into just fertility, pregnancy, and nursing in general, and ultimately, fortunately, she was able to conceive and deliver a healthy baby.
A lot of the people around us, our friends … I was going back to school around that time too, and so students and other people kind of knew what was going on and saw the success that we had had and said, “I’d like to know about that.” It was mostly just judging from anecdotal feedback in my immediate community and also just from my personal experience. I mean, to be honest, in many points of my life with this kind of thing, I’ve just followed my own interests. Fortunately, that’s worked out pretty well and I think there is something to be said for that.
If you’re really interested and passionate about something, unless it’s just a bizarrely arcane topic, chances are there are other people that are that have a similar interest. And if you’re passionate and knowledgeable and you’re able to put together something that’s compelling, then I think there is a market for that, whether that’s a local market or an online market, that will depend on where you are and what the topic is, but you got to start small and start somewhere. It’s good experience, even if you give a talk to five people, it’s really a good experience to do that. I mean, I think back on some of my first talks, and I kind of cringe now thinking about how those were and how far I’ve come from then to now, but the only way that I was able to make that progress was to just start and do it.
I think those early Healthy Baby Code workshops were pretty well attended, surprisingly well attended, for me, at that time probably 75 people or 80 people, which seemed like a lot of people at that point. But certainly after that, I did some other talks, and then there are much smaller groups, I think 10 or 15 people or something like that. In a way, those are harder, I think, than bigger audiences because it’s such a small group of people and all attention is on you and you kind of hear a pin drop in the silences. But those were such good practice for me in terms of just how do I develop the presentation, how do I think it through, how do I deliver it. My wife was generous enough to come to a few of those early presentations and give me some candid feedback and I also videotaped some of those early presentations as well and watched them myself, as painful as it was, because that also gave me some insight into how I can improve both in terms of content and delivery. Hopefully that helps.