I just gave my third talk of the year, so this marks the half way point as I will do 6 events, total. This included my first opening keynote, and the largest audience I have spoken in front of yet (>700). Now I have a break until September. It seems like a good time to talk about pre-talk anxiety.
Spoiler: I still get it, bad.
I rarely sleep well before a talk. If I speak in the afternoon, I can never eat lunch. When I spoke in the morning it felt like I had a fun choice between vomiting and keeling over on stage (actually neither of these things happened…)
How do I deal with it?
First, I try and embrace it as a positive thing.
Second, I try to channel it productivly.
Third, I try and mitigate things that have the potential to derail me.
So… how can anxiety be a positive thing? Well I don’t get anxious about things I don’t care about. I get anxious about giving a talk because I care a lot about giving a good talk. At most events I find someone who frankly I think should be a lot more anxious about what they are doing than they seemed to be. Maybe they didn’t think through their jokes, or changed something in one part of their talk without thinking about the rest of it, or maybe they just didn’t prepare enough.
How can anxiety be productive? When I’m worrying about a talk I’m giving I have two main options. One: I can hide from that anxiety in something else (aka procrastinate). Two: I can spend time preparing it. I always try to choose option two (I’m human, so sometimes I choose option 1, and then I at least try to embrace productive procrastination). One thing that can happen with this though is, preparing too much or too intensely (normally a lot of low value preparation) such that I start to hate my own talk.
How do you mitigate surprises? Through trial and error I’ve discovered some things that throw me off. I don’t take flights that get in late anymore, because when they get delayed a morning talk is a horrible thing. I always check the hotel before I arrive, because it sucks to arrive and discover it’s horrible. I aim to arrive at the venue with plenty of time to check the AV set up just so I know what I’m getting. I keep my slides in the cloud but make sure they are there on my machine too.
I throw money at things that will result in lower stress levels. Things I have done recently for talks I’m giving: upgraded flights because I was flying non-Star Alliance and I wanted a lounge and space to think. Booked an expensive hotel – I discovered the day before I was giving a talk that I was booked into a terrible hotel far from the venue, so I just booked another one instead. This kind of thing makes speaking more expensive, but it also makes it possible. If I let myself get so stressed out and miserable I would probably perform badly and decide I never wanted to speak again. It’s better (for me) and affordable (for me) to manage my stress levels by ensuring my required level of comfort is met (or exceeded). Of course for some events this is a given from the organisers, and occasionally a bunch of hassle for me and I never have to do those events again.
It feels scary to come out and say that public speaking terrifies me (although I have done this before). But I hate hearing from people who think their fear rules them out in some way, rather than makes them human. Speak, or don’t – I believe in choices, not pushing anyone into anything. But fear is not failure, it’s just information – and very, very normal.
I get very nervous presenting, although it’s something I do relatively often. This is not out of enthusiasm for getting up on stage, but rather because I find myself in the position of being the least unwilling engineer.
After my last presentation I was told that I didn’t need to be nervous, because I was good at it (and also because I have a “great personality” – awwh) but I don’t think nerves are a bad thing, within moderation, if you harness them to give a better talk.
There are plenty of people I’ve seen present who frankly should be more worried, because they are appalling at getting their points across. Every time I see someone like that present, I think “this is why I worry”.
Anyway, last time I was so nervous that I was actually having nightmares the night before (about someone who used to be underminey and gaslightey, which I don’t think is unrelated to what I was nervous about). I got more and more jittery as my time approached. And then I got up to the podium, completely focused on the points I was going to make, and the stories I was going to tell, and rocked it.
Aside from the complements above, people commented on:
The delivery of my jokes.
Their concrete takeaway.
An adjustment in their thinking in relation to a point I made (x2).
Something they are going to look into as a result.
And ranking in my top two favourite pieces of feedback after a talk:
“And you’re an engineer!” – we have a bad rep, sometimes deservedly so.
(My other favourite piece, from another talk, was “I thought you were going to end with ‘and then we all die’, but you didn’t. How did you do that?”).
Narrative
The vast majority of my prep time is spent constructing a narrative. An arc that will tie what I’m going to say together, and then I’ll fit the bits and pieces of factoids into it, as they work. If they don’t, I’ll leave them out. It’s easy to get attached to ideas and facts that you want to talk about, but they aren’t always relevant. If they are but don’t make the cut, they can still come out at question time.
Outcome
This is very tied to the narrative. A presentation is an opportunity for you to influence people’s behaviour, what do you want them to do? I wanted people to take a broader view on something, understand better where we are, and use that to influence their priorities and choices going forward. We’ll see how that worked out as time goes on, but when the goal is for people to take a broader view, then I need to draw focus away from details. When the goal is influencing priorities and choices, I have to contextualise that and make it clear that this is more important than they realised.
Rule of Three
I can’t talk about this better than Denise does on The Eloquent Woman, so I won’t. Groupings are your friend here, details can be grouped, linked together, and lifted up into three distinct strands. Optionally illustrated with pictures of adorable kittens.
Start Strong.
You have maximum attention at the start, why waste it telling people who you are? Better to capture that attention so they listen, and impress them so much they want to find out more – and make it easy for them to do so by, say, taking up a small corner on your slide template for your twitter handle.
Be Provocative
One of the things I’ve been working on is removing wishy washy caveats from my writing and my speaking. This is my blog, of course it’s what I think, and find relevant. Same with talks.
Statistics are so useful for me here, especially talking to engineers. I collect surprising and shocking statistics and pepper my talks with them. So statements like “The tech industry is hard on women” or, “studies show that women leave the industry at greater rates” become “63% of women in STEM report experiencing sexual harassment” [source]. “Mobile is increasing in importance and longer term people expect to be able to do everything on their phones” becomes “13,000 people a year buy cars on the EBay mobile app. There is nothing people won’t do on their phones.” [source].
Keep it Short
I never start with time. Never. I’ve now given enough talks of varying lengths that I have a good idea what is enough content for a given length, and then can adjust accordingly, if time is tight. But in general I aim to use 60-70% of any time allotted to me, and then either finish early, or leave time for questions.
Basically I make a judgement on what points I can make in that kind of time frame, and aim to present them as succinctly as possible, within the narrative. It’s better to come in early than waffle. Especially in a work context – no-one has ever complained about a meeting or talk ending early. It just leaves more time for questions, or for getting back to work!
In Extreme Blue we had to distill our summer’s work down to a four minute presentation. At first I thought it would be impossible. It wasn’t.
Prepare. Prepare. Prepare.
Here’s the thing about a talk made up of stories – you can break it up into pieces. I think my manager had heard the key stories from my talk in the couple of days before I gave it publicly. At no point did I ask him to sit down and practise with me, though! Same for friends I’ve been hanging out with, and err, men on dates (such a mystery why I’m single, really). I’ve practised my talk in bits to unsuspecting people, with the added bonus that since they think this is a conversation (no really, it is) they will respond, and comment, and pick apart my thinking if they find it lacking.
In the shower, or whilst swimming laps, or walking are good times for me to go through all the pieces in my head (stretch goal – start talking aloud to myself around the house).
Nothing beats nerves like knowing you’re prepared. Nothing.
If I’m talking about mobile, or my career (working in mobile), I present from a mobile device. If I have to use the standard laptop, I put my notes on my tablet. I keep my slides to a minimum, but if I don’t need them – why use them? I gave a talk about my career path once using the Google Maps app (connected my iPhone to the projector) and zoomed around talking about the places I’ve lived and the things I did there.
The Aftermath
I normally don’t remember the 15-30 minutes following a talk, as I calm down from all the stress. I definitely don’t take in anything anyone else is talking about. When I presented at Ignite, I came down off the stage and went straight to the bar for vodka. I’ll also really need some alone time soon after. I’ve learned to adjust my expectations accordingly, and just admit that I was so stressed from it that I didn’t know what’s going on for a while, or need to have a social break. People are usually pretty understanding – especially if they liked what I did.
The End
It’s a lot of work for me to give a talk. A lot of time, a lot of stress. This 10-15 minute presentation was probably about 10 hours of work, not including surreptitious practise time! Recall the nightmares the night before.
But, even 35 people, and 15 minutes, is a lot of other people’s time to waste by giving it badly. About 9 hours of their time, which makes my prep time seem reasonable. Setting objectives for what I want my talk to achieve also makes the prep time seem worthwhile.
