Imagine standing before total strangers, pouring your heart out and then, that night, breaking a five-month stretch of insomnia.
"I don't know how or why they are connected, but they must be," said Sarah Cook, a Santa Fe real-estate agent. "In my job I do a lot of public speaking, but I never really speak from the heart. I've slept every night since."

Cook recently participated in a Ta Da! Workshop held at the Inn on the Alameda and given by Gail Larsen of Santa Fe. The one-day workshop was a short version of Larsen's four-day Real Speaking workshops, which she conducts around the country.

"This was my first time conducting a one-day workshop," said Larsen, who has been coaching keynote speakers for 11 years. "I didn't know what would work, what wouldn't or what the experience would be. Then again, I never know what will happen. But I always know people start to come alive."

Larsen got her start working with groups when she ran an employment agency for women in Nashville, Tenn. In 1979, she organized a women's business convention and 4,000 women from 16 states showed up. She lined up the governor as keynote speaker, and introducing him was the first time she'd made a speech. Since then, Larsen has gone on to organize other large conventions, one being a 1993 healing event in Hawaii that attracted 6,000 participants.

"I like doing things big," Larsen said. "But I also like working closely with smaller groups."

Kathryn Grace, a hair designer for 30 years who recently moved to Santa Fe from Asheville, N.C., saw a flier for the Ta Da! Workshop and decided to sign up. "I didn't know I was ready to embrace what came out," she said. "But I was able to give voice to something that's been lurking in the background for some time now."

Grace is now ready to go forth with her desire to be an artist, and says the workshop helped make her more consciously aware of that. Tears marked Grace's last speech in front of the group. Standing before strangers and telling them all what she was ready for, she said, was "a profound experience."

"I'm truly able to accept that part of me now," she said.

This isn't the usual experience of speaking before a group. When addressing even the smallest gathering, who hasn't had the sensation of sweaty palms, a quivering voice, going blank and having nothing to say? Some celebrities even admit to stage fright before stepping before audiences. The fear of speaking in public is common, but Larsen believes much of that nervousness vanishes when a person finally begins speaking from the "home zone."

"The home zone is the place where we're most comfortable. It's speaking from who we are and what we know," she said. "It comes from a feeling level as opposed to a head level."

The 12 participants at the Ta Da! Workshop broke into pairs in the morning. What took place during that experience carried over into the evening for Rhea Goodman.

"I've been concerned about aging," she said. "Being able to talk about my fears about that with a stranger was so healing. And that night I went to a small gathering. I began talking with a 19-year-old boy. Suddenly I felt so good about being an older woman. I have a lot to give, being older. The workshop has given me a whole new outlook," said Goodman, who hosts Living Juicy, a Thursday-evening radio program on KRSF.

Perhaps it's making a personal statement before a stranger that becomes significant. Maybe it's taking a risk about who you are and doing it openly that suddenly turns into an authentic experience. Larsen said giving voice to our talents and gifts can be quite moving.

"We're living in scary times right now. There is a lot of upheaval," she said. "To truly get in touch with what you came into this world with, those personal talents - your own medicine - takes you into the well. That deepest part. Once we're there we can begin to bring those gifts forward."

The latest issue of Utne Reader focuses on conversation, saying "significant social change arises from people sitting down to talk about what matters to them."

Writer Margaret Wheatley believes conversation is the natural way people think together and that conversation gives us courage.
While talking together is often the way ideas get flowing with action following, meaningful conversation needs to go beyond the surface.
"Most of our daily conversations with people is surface talk. What I try to do is move people below that surface into a new place," Larsen said.
Margaret Paul's participation in one of the longer Real Speaking workshops changed her way of being. "I learned to speak from the inside out and to be more spontaneous," said Paul, a nationally recognized psychologist and author of eight books. She has been giving speeches since 1975 and said she never really liked it.

"Now I enjoy it. It's really fun," she said. "I developed a format with Gail that I use, but I never plan my speeches anymore. They are all spontaneous. Now I speak like it's coming through me from a deep heart space." She also said people tell her she's a fabulous speaker, something no one told her before.

Larsen said one reason that people leave her workshops feeling transformed has to do with taking the time for reflection. "I ask them to answer deeper questions, then they begin integrating the insight through speaking out," she said.

The one-day workshop begins with various activities, then participants speak about the resulting experience.

For Mark Little, the mask-making project turned penetrating for him. "At first I thought, 'Oh, boy, here we go with the obligatory art project.' But then I got into it. It really became art therapy for me," he said.
After the activity, Little explained to the group that his mask helped him feel the feminine and masculine parts of himself and how they are interrelated.

He said instead of being in crisis, he is in "mid-life opportunity" and wanting to make a career change. Making the mask helped him externalize some of his personal brooding.

"I even took the mask to my men's group to show them," he said.
A woman who says she lives a secret life - hidden even from close friends - says she was able at the end of the day to speak up. "I'm a witch at the end of the road. Truly. I have visions. I hear voices. No one wants to hear this stuff. But I felt safe enough to tell these people who I am," said Ann North.

Larsen believes working openly with the raw material of the self is liberating. "To see ourselves as originals nowhere else duplicated, and to experience that as we take risks in front of a small group, is a powerful moment," she said. "And it always blows me away that it works."