Last year, before he was announced to be networking his GOLD 104.3 breakfast show beyond Melbourne, Christian O’Connell found time to create a mentoring service, Finding Fire, with personal sessions aimed at helping individuals transform their lives by shifting from ‘stuckness’ to a rekindling of creativity and curiosity as well as assisting with problem-solving abilities.
This time, his show’s audience plus his own journey from the UK to now are the back bone of an upcoming book, Unscript: The Radical Act Of Being Yourself, which explores the importance of genuine connection in our lives.
On The Christian O’Connell Show this morning he discussed why he thinks radio is such an important form of connection, and shared a personal turning point, when he realised he was “performing”:
“One thing I’ve noticed, and I know that you all would have noticed this as well in your own lives, over the last couple of years, we are becoming more and more disconnected.
“The one thing about why I think radio is a magical media more than TV or anything else, is that radio is about right now. The radio we do and the radio you hopefully like listening to, and we’ve heard this through so many stories from you guys, day in, day out, is it’s a chance to actually drop the performance that most of us do in all of our lives.
“There was a point before I decided to move to Australian and really change our lives, where I was driving home from a radio show I’ve done four hours. I was stuck in traffic, which was every day in my life in London, and I looked to myself in the rear-view mirror and I looked away because I certainly realised, you actually haven’t said anything for the last four hours that you actually meant. I’d realised I was performing a version of myself, and I think this happens to a lot of us. We’re performing a version of ourselves and it wasn’t just a work, it was starting to creep into my home life as well. I also realised how exhausting it is to keep up this performance of a version of yourself.
“Social media is great, there’s so many great things about social media, but what it also shows us is a fake version of people. It makes us think that we need to be some perfect version to have connection with other people and the one thing I can tell you is that people are starved of real connection. You don’t connect to someone trying to be perfect. You connect to someone when they drop the act, when they unscript and that’s why I’ve called the book, Unscript: The Radical Act of Being Yourself.
“I’ve written it with one aim in mind that actually it helps you get excited about having better conversations, because our lives are a series of conversations, and how we talk to each other is actually the quality of our lives. It’s how we connect with each other. The joy of doing radio is that it’s real time connection and its authentic connection.”
You can preorder Unscript: The Radical Act of Being Yourself on Amazon and Booktopia. The book is set for release in July.