When Joseph Campbell (The Hero with a Thousand Faces) introduced the Quest and following your bliss to the world and to George Lucas, his thinking derived in part from the Sanskrit exploration of ontology, the study of what it means to be a sentient being. As Campbell explains, “There are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat, Chit, Ananda. The word ‘Sat’ means being. ‘Chit’ means consciousness. ‘Ananda’ means bliss or rapture. I thought, ‘I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.’ I think it worked.”

I love this explanation because it is both ambitious and humble. Ambitious, because he was attempting to make a highly sophisticated philosophical world accessible to Westerners. And humble, because he recognized from the start that his project involved a simplification of the original ideas. Sat, Chit and Ananda all get boiled down to bliss.

Campbell urged us to follow our bliss, and we did. A thousand books later, we all know that bliss, or passion, should be our guiding light in our career and life choices.

Fair enough. But once we choose that bliss, how do we articulate it? What I find in my world of communication and especially public speaking is that people are generally not given the tools they need to bring their ideas to life. It’s up to them. But where to begin? How do you make an idea powerful? How do you animate an idea with a story? How do you take a “bliss” and change the world with it?

That’s what I’ve been coaching people one-on-one for, giving presentations about, and posting and writing on since I started Public Words in 1997. Now, in an effort to expand the reach of Public Words, we’ve developed the first of two online courses. This one will take you through the processes involved in moving from bliss or passion to world-changing presentation. The second one will show you how to deliver that presentation. Both are necessary, and they are best taken individually. I’ve found over the years working with individuals that as soon as you present them with a delivery issue they forget all about the content and concentrate on how their nose looks on tape, or the like. In speeches on the subject, I’ve found that focusing on either storytelling or body language, content or delivery, makes for a better speech. When I try to do both, I run into audience fatigue.

So the first of the two online courses will launch in early June. It’s all about how to find your story and craft it into a speech. It’s full of videos, graphics, and text – along with a workbook – all intended to guide you through the process of thinking about who, what, and how to unleash your idea on a hitherto indifferent world and make it care.

You can sign up here; if you do so before we go live in June you can get an early bird discount. If you do give it a try, please let me know what you think, whether or not the course changes your thinking, and especially let me know how you change the world.