So what happened at the big fancy pitch night??
Free-range Feelers, Graham here.
Last we spoke, Honor and I were about to go and do a terrifying thing.
The pitch night for the accelerator program we've spent the last 3 months pouring our every waking thought into.
What does that mean exactly?
In a nutshell, the pitch night is what any accelerator program is building toward. It's the night when you stand on stage and present what you've been working on to a room full of potential funders, backers, and allies. The front row of our audience included the Hon. Martin Foley MP, Minister for Mental Health.
So, you know, quite a group to be telling all about this little club about feelings!
You're really presenting years of hard work, including all the time you've poured into your project before it was even a real thing in the world that anyone cared about. So it's fairly intense.
Plus for us, there's that everpresent extra layer, given what our work is all about. We were also presenting some of our own squishiest, most vulnerable parts - the big scary feels that make us do this work in the first place. To a massive hall of strangers.
Yay!
Crap soundcheck... good show??
After much back and forth, we decided that Honor would do the actual 'standing on stage and pitching' part.
In the days leading up to the pitch night, we must have run through it together at least 100 times.
Then came the final run through, with full soundcheck. And of course about ten things went wrong.
There's something we always used to say on tour in my musician days: "crap sound check, good show." It means, "you don't want to peak too early". But really it's just something you say to calm your nerves after a crappy soundcheck.
So then... what happened??
When lightning (aka Honor Eastly) strikes
Accelerator pitches are these very structured, very focused ‘lightning pitches’. You have a carefully chosen handful of slides, and a tight script that’s been pored over word-by-word for days before the big night, to boil down 12 weeks of highly intensive activity into just 3 minutes on stage.
Phew.
Just to ramp things up a little more, Honor was going on last, after everyone else had totally nailed their pitches.
I was watching on from backstage like an overly invested theatre mum, mouthing the words along with her and desperately wanting it to just be over for both of our sake. Until this one particular moment about halfway through. A moment when I could see the look on Honor’s face shift. The days of nervous energy just lift as she realised all at once:
This audience, this massive room of potential funders, supporters, and future club members? They were completely in. She had them.
It’s quite a special thing to watch a great big hall full of strangers hanging on every word about a weird little club about feelings that we started from our living room. One more reminder that this thing we’re doing, it’s bigger than the two of us. I genuinely have no idea how much bigger it could go, which is both extremely exciting, aaaand utterly terrifying.
Woo! Let's do this!
UPDATE: See the full five-minute pitch here.
So what happens now?
We’re officially finished the 12-week accelerator program. Our immediate next steps include:
Creating the rest of the Kinder Mind course, which after incredibly selling out in less than 24 hours has its first full run on July 22 (more on that below!) and figuring out just where we can take this idea next
Developing some of the other ideas we created during the accelerator, after many hours of fascinating conversation with many of y'all about the 'life + feelings' equation
Getting on with all the many (MANY) things we had on the boil before the the accelerator took over -- including Big Feels @ Work, that training package we’re building specifically for all you mental health workers out there with your own big feels going on
Two really cool mental health system change projects Honor and I have been asked to help lead - including:
Honor’s ongoing role advising the Royal Commission into Mental Health, which she is throwing herself into with her usual gusto
And some work we’re doing with one of the big Primary Health Networks in Melbourne, exploring how people who use mental health services can play a greater and more meaningful role in designing and delivering those services (woop!) - a subject close to my heart. Updates on that when we can. . .
Meeting with some of the fancy people who approached us after pitch night to talk about potential funding and other support
Preparing for a couple of Sydney events we have in the works for October this year -- including a live show of a certain beloved podcast, that we’ll tell ya more about when we can
Some much-needed QBT (Quality Bodie Time)
Getting back on track with that 'tending the garden (jungle??) of my mind' stuff that's fallen off a little in all the busyness (because for me at least, all this hard work seems to have left me feeling a little less on top of my usual pickle jars. You know the drill.)
Aaaaand sleep? Does sleep happen now?? YES BUT WHEN
Yowzer. Ever feel like you’ve been drinking out of a firehose?
If any of this stuff we're doing jumps out at ya, hit reply to this email and say 'TELL ME MORE ABOUT *THAT* THING'.
And a little public shout out. The reason it's possible for us to spend more and more of our time trying to carve out space in this world for big, scary feelings? Our card-carrying members. Thank you.
If you want to directly support this club yourself, read all about that here.
Important Kinder Mind update!
To those of you who signed up for the first run of Kinder Mind, thanks for taking a punt on our next experiment! It begins on July 22.
You’ll get an email from us near the end of this week with all the info you'll need before the course starts. (If you haven't heard from us by Friday, email us and say 'HEY I DIDN'T GET THE EMAIL!')
Any questions before then, just hit reply here :)
Those of y'all who didn’t get a spot this time but are keen, we will most definitely be running this again. You can sign up to the waitlist here to get an early announcement for next time.
Okay. That's it for this issue. Hoo boy that's a fair bit hey? Must be time for some QBT with this guy...
