Choosing the Right Room

On debate, teaching, and knowing where your work belongs

Recently, I had two very different opportunities. One where the goal was to debate. And one where the goal was to teach. They could not have felt more different.

When I imagine being in a debate setting, I can feel it in my body almost immediately. Tense. Worried. A little angry. There is pressure to say the right thing, quickly. To sound polished. To make your point in one or two minutes in a way that lands immediately. There is not much room for anything else.

Standing in a room in Birmingham, Alabama, felt different. I was invited by the Alabama Dietetic Association to present to a group of dietitians about weight stigma and eating disorders. Walking into a room like that, I never really know what it is going to be like. Especially when the topic might be something people are hearing for the first time.

I am always nervous before I start. I worry about how the message is going to land. I worry about being questioned or challenged. I can feel myself bracing for that.

And if I am being honest, part of that bracing has to do with how I show up in my body. As a fat dietitian, I know I am being read before I say a word.

In a debate setting, that feeling gets amplified. It starts to feel like I am not just sharing ideas, I am defending my existence. Like I have to prove that what I am saying is valid before anyone is willing to hear it. That pressure makes everything tighter. More guarded. Less like me.

In a room like Birmingham, that dynamic does not disappear, but it shifts. There is more space to name it. To acknowledge the assumptions that might be showing up in the room, including the ones about me, and to use that as part of the work itself. Not as a defense, but as an example. An example of how quickly we form judgments, and how much those judgments shape what we are willing to hear. The same way we do with the people we work with.

And then I start talking. And something shifts.

I feel at home behind the podium in the same way I feel at home working with clients. There is space. There is time. I can read the room. I can say something, pause, and let it sit.

You can feel when something is landing. It is not dramatic. No one is having a breakthrough in the middle of the talk. But you start to notice it. Heads nodding. People staying with you instead of checking their phones. A kind of quiet where you can tell people are actually thinking.

That kind of space matters.

Because the work I do does not happen in arguments. Debate asks me to be more confrontational, more certain, more guarded. It asks me to say the exact right thing in order to win. If I am honest, that version of me does not really feel like me.

Debate is about convincing. This work is about opening up curiosity.

It is about creating enough space for someone to start questioning something they have always believed without even realizing it.

That is what I see with clients too. Change does not usually show up as a big moment. It is slower than that. It looks like more questions. More curiosity. A willingness to sit with something instead of immediately trying to fix it.

Sometimes it is just finding the right language for something that never quite made sense before. That kind of change needs time. It needs space.

And it needs a kind of relationship, whether that is with a client or a room full of people, where someone feels safe enough to stay with the discomfort instead of pushing back against it.

Debate does not leave much room for that. It moves too fast. It rewards certainty over curiosity. It skips over the part where something quietly starts to shift.

I am realizing more and more that my work does not live well in those spaces.

I am not trying to win. I am trying to build a relationship with the person in front of me long enough for something to land. I am trying to foster an unlearning of old ways of thinking.

And that is not something you can rush.