(in no particular order)
This seems like a good idea.
These are points I should cover.
Why the hell am I doing this. I should not be talking about this topic (reasons: assorted).
Ooh break through! This is the angle I’ll take! Excited!
It’s happening so just write the damn thing.
I’ve given so many talks now which have gone well, been invited to progressively bigger and bigger events. And still. Every time.
My notes from @jessiechar‘s talk at @nsconf [video].
Going through a period of transition. Very fluid. Feel uncomfortable prescribing processes to people.
Ambivalence is not the same as apathy. Ambivalence – caring too much about both sides to make a decision. Apathy – not caring enough to make a decision. Same result, but different. Why process is so interesting.
Really easy to spout an opinion out and find people to agree with you. Like a drug. Feels so good to have people agree with you about things.
Then people grow these army of supporters, live in this world of everywhere they think turns to gold. And then why not profit about that.
Common in design critique.
Part of it is moving fast – want to make quick calls, save time for people. But realise later lost elements they liked, or gained elements they don’t.
What appears convictive and decisive crumbles.
Can be easier to be convictive when not constantly stating opinions.
State what isn’t working, not what should happen.
Prescriptive feedback can have good intentions, but if no description provided it can lead you down a rabbit hole.
Taking a step back from opinions can help you give a much more clear explanation of what you think.
White dress / blue dress – good illustration of how people can perceive the same information completely differently.
Develop a shared vocabulary. When you work with other people, important to have shared goals, want to have the same end goal. But some things can get lost in translation. Debates where people agree, but think they disagree because of the words they are using. Or the opposite, can really bites you in the ass later.
PSA: Sometimes you find someone’s understanding of something does not match up with your own understanding. Lot of people correct people on the internet. Starts with “Actually”, it sounds like a question, but not a question. Actually is a state of mind, where you feel the need to adjust everyone’s opinion. Sentiment – you hear something somebody else thinks and “actually, I disagree with you”. Actually is the truth or fact of the situation. Try and avoid that kind of interaction with people, that kind of corrective tone.
Communication on a scale: literal meaning, to colloquial understanding. Sweet spot in the middle. Then buzz words, the aspirational words that people use. It’s like language inflation, and even appropriation.
Rock star. What it really means is a celebrity known primarily for making music.
Means: we want someone who is good at their job
Read: an entitled engineer who sends passive aggressive emails to the office manager when the kegerator is tapped out.
Raconteur. A person uses captivating narrative to convey a story.
Mean: A person who cares about the overall experience of a project to which they contribute.
Read: A marketing person who didn’t get their MBA but still wants to sound fancy on LinkedIn.
Bespoke: Made to order clothes.
Mean: Artisanal solutions for discerning customer.
Read: Regular work with a different name.
Ladies
Commotion over GG. Feminism finally became widely discussed topic. Think she might be exempt for it, because doing pretty well. But death threats and violent comments are not the entry level to sexism.
“But you can fix a computer but I bet you can’t cook an egg!” ~Guy at the Apple Store
Used to get way worse comments than this working at the genius bar. “Are you sure”, wanting 2nd opinions.
“Since you are competent at a traditionally masculine activity, you must suck at traditionally feminine activities.”
“I’m sorry but we just have to ask: are you an escort?” ~Dudes at WWDC.
“It is so unimaginable that a woman would attend a tech conference. You must be here to serve us in some way.”
“I work on things that make your computer work” ~Bro at a party
“I bet you don’t understand what I do for a living, so I’m going to make myself sound really impressive.”
(He worked on Yahoo Weather)
“You might make a good junior recruiter.” ~Tech Recruiter
“You don’t look like a senior manager”
“Mike, you sound calm knowledgable and respectful.
Jessie, for how cute and bubbly you sound, you know what you’re talking about” ~Podcast feedback
“Complements I receive because the bar is set so low for me, that anything I do is over it.”
Unconscious bias. Not about being a good or bad person. Insidious. Not just about how people view her, about how she ends up viewing herself.
Feedback most often get is about how her voice sounds. Sounds like nails on a chalkboard. Fast forward through every time talks. Other person said they had to stop listening to podcast because voice is so annoying. External say, that is a jerk. But wondered if just had a high pitched voice, not for radio, but podcast okay.
NPR feedback on women’s voices.
We don’t really know why this phenomenon happens, but probably, you know, “unconscious bias”
Might put a target on her back, but putting it out there, because men need to know. And women – to know that struggle with things do.
Talked about language, and how we should adjust, but ladies we have already adjusted too much.
It’s important to cater to the way people hear you, but it’s important that you don’t change who you are.
Kanye West “Everything in the world is exactly the same.”
Last November I was in New Orleans with a friend, and we went on a couple of the many (many!) walking tours offered. These are essentially 2-hour long presentations, but the stage is the street and the slides are the city itself.
Whilst I often find the presentation style a bit overdone (especially in a city like NOLA, where much was made of the ghosts – the best walking tour I ever did was quite low key, letting the history speak for itself), I’m taking some lessons back to the presentations I’m preparing for 2016.
You cannot cover all details of a city (or a technical topic!) so often a sub-theme is picked within the topic. In the ghosts tour we took, it was French buildings. It’s a heuristic as to what goes in and what gets left out, and it ties things together.
Cars driving by with music blaring, a group of people walking past, a child having a tantrum, interruptions are constant and the best guides have developed ways to handle them without it throwing them off. Even just pausing whilst the noise passes, and doing it confidently, like “you can wait, because the story I’m telling you? It’s worth it.”
A walking tour is set in a city, and also in a time period within it. This is a powerful way to orient people up front.
A walking tour is made of stories, not facts. All the better to draw people in.
The order of the stories is carefully chosen, the guide for our ghost tour choose the penultimate story to be the most creepy. The gradual escalation draws people in, especially in that context where the stories get increasingly improbable.
Tours always end with instructions: here’s where you are, here’s where you came from, and here are some places you can go. Normally bars and restaurants, which isn’t that relevant outside this tourist context. But – thinking critically about where the kind of people who will be at your talk, and where they want to go after seems like a useful thing to do.
I saw live tweets and follow up posts from Beyond the Code last year so I was really excited to be asked to speak or moderate this year. Since reading Denise’s book about moderating panels, I’ve been wanting to try out everything I’ve learned. So I was pleased, but also nervous to be moderating my first panel.
Like everyone, I’ve seen a lot of badly run panels and was determined not to be one of those! Add to my nerves: the topic was diversity in tech, a topic I normally avoid talking about. This kind of topic can be a minefield (we’ve seen it go horribly wrong), or just a series of boring platitudes. If I was going to do a panel on this topic, it had to go beyond what’s normally discussed. In fact, one write up noted that the panel started where others usually end which captures what I was aiming for.
Even though I’ve given talks all over the world, I still get nervous. I have a simple strategy for dealing with this: Prepare, Prepare, Prepare.
But usually, I have a pretty good idea of what I’m going to talk about! This time, I didn’t really. I knew what direction I wanted to go in, but not really much idea of what topics would best fit the panelists.
My preparation started with 1-2 hours on the phone with every panelist, talking, and taking extensive notes. I asked broad questions about their views on the current state of “diversity” conversations, like “what makes you angry?” and more specific ones like “what career advice are you ignoring?” (the shallow level of the conversation around diversity sometimes degenerates to fixing women, which results in some pretty flawed career advice). Conversation flowed, so other points came out that weren’t directly relating to questions I had asked.
Then I turned these notes into a document with broad topics (“Hiring”, “Culture”) and slotted my notes from the conversation. I shared this with panelists, and encouraged them to add to it. We had a call to discuss this.
A couple of days before the panel (specifically: on the long haul flight there) I went through the doc and wrote a suggested run through, including the kind of comments I would make to tie things together, the questions I would ask, and the points I suggested each panelist made, pulled from the longer responses.
The day before the panel, we had a rehearsal time allocated. Not everyone could make it, but I found it really helpful and I think those that did make it found it helpful, too.
At the last minute I realised that a handout of our key points and running order would be really helpful, so each panelist had one of those. I had my iPad, and I bolded who I planned to call on first, trying to balance that out, so I didn’t always start with the same person.
I pushed off a lot of organisational stuff onto the conference organisers. At the best of times I’m not good at email, or coordinating multiple people’s schedules. I just asked Anna (BTC organiser) to take care of that kind of stuff, which she did far better than me! She also made sure we got our handouts (thanks Anna!)
The point above about organisation is important, because I think we often expect the moderator to take on this role of corralling all these people to be in place, on time, etc. I did not take on that role. As a moderator I embraced three roles: curator, coach and conversationalist.
This was finding out: 1) what the panelists were opinionated about, and 2) organising it into a format that would have maximum impact. I tried to pull out the unique perspectives into my suggested points.
Goal: no-one says “I agree, and…” (yawn).
This was building a relationship with each panelist, so that I could help each of them present their most powerful, interesting selves on stage. We actually had a mantra! All day I was asking panelists “What’s our mantra?” and… well they kept forgetting it. But they demonstrated in on stage which is what matters. That manta? “Concrete, and concise”.
A couple of the panelists were worried about rambling and encouraged me to cut them off, instead I said “say half of what you think you need to, and then look at me: if you need to elaborate, I’ll tell you”.
A brief diversion about rambling: I don’t think people want to ramble, I think people do it, especially in these situations, because they lack feedback. Hence: offering that feedback. I hate interrupting people in general, but particularly for a panel of people who are more likely to be talked over in meetings, I really didn’t want to. In general my approach to things like this is very much an engineer approach: e.g. I am terrible in an emergency, so I see ensuring there aren’t emergencies to be part of my job. Here: I didn’t want to interrupt, so I tried to make it so I didn’t need to. Firstly by providing this feedback mechanism, and secondly by doing all the preparation that meant that panelists all had powerful, concrete points, to make. In the end I only needed to cut someone off once! Winning!
This was an aspect that panelists really had to choose to engage with. But a highlight for me was that one of the panelists reached out to me for extra coaching, and I gave her concrete and actionable feedback with examples. She came to the rehearsal and tried to put it into practise, and then practised by herself for the morning. By the time she was on stage her delivery was unrecognisable! She made “concrete and concise” points that were vastly more impactful as a result, and I was so incredibly proud of her.
Goal: Each panelist is interesting, and presents powerful and unique points.
This was the aspect of introducing, linking things together. Sometimes summarising with a pithy, tweetable, quote. It was also focusing my attention on the panelist who was speaking, bringing other people into the conversation, setting them up.
Goal: Conversation flows and no-one dominates the conversation.
I used to live in Ottawa, so I got to bring one of my friends along as the designated Live-Tweeter! Kelly did such a great job, as you can see in the storify. Because of all the prep we did, we were able to make it easier for her by sharing the document we’d been working in. Also, it meant the panelists could share resources in the document and have them tweeted as they referenced them. This was really cool.
In the last couple of hours before the panel I realized that firstly this had really challenged my control freak nature: I was nervous and wanted to prepare more but other than bugging people about “concrete and concise”, I had nothing left to do! Secondly: I have never worked so hard to be invisible. I think the panelists really appreciated me, and a lot of people complemented me on how well run the panel was, but I didn’t have the same buzz as when I give a talk and give people something to think about myself!
All in all I don’t know if I would run another panel: the prep time was comparable to prepping a talk, but I feel like I have much less to show for it. I’m super glad I did it once though, and got to connect with all my awesome panelists!
This post originally appeared on the Moderating Panels blog.
Chiu-Ki and I ran out first in person Technically Speaking event at 360iDev which was super exciting. It was great to meet some of our subscribers in person and go into more depth on some of the topics we cover in the newsletter.
The topic was about putting together your first speaking proposal, and included:
We really think that everyone has some expertise that they can share so for us the highlight was seeing people’s ideas develop through the session, from the vague “this might be interesting” at the beginning to strong pitches for talks we would love to see at the end.
We put together this handout with some good resources on these topics, and we’ll be exploring how to make this content more available over the next few months.
Meanwhile some of the key takeaways were:
Massive thanks to our fabulous facilitators, and our inspiring attendees. We also really appreciate those who bought supporter tickets, which allows us to compensate our facilitators.
When I decided it was time to leave my corporate tech job, I made an 18 month plan. One key item on it: speaking at conferences.
I prepped one talk (building it off some of my more popular blog posts), and submitted it to a number of places, hoping it would be accepted at one of them. Actually it was accepted everywhere I submitted it, and I got invited to give it as well.
Honestly, it was shockingly easy. Way easier than I expected it to be. Terrifying. But I survived. Even thrived.
But here’s something it wasn’t: cheap. I had pretty low expectations for myself and wasn’t sure of my value, so I submitted to places that didn’t cover travel costs and had to pay them myself. Because the company I worked for wasn’t generally supportive of giving external talks (other than Token Women talks), I took vacation days. I also got speaker coaching, which I used to improve my narrative and my confidence.
I thought this would be the kind of thing that would be interesting to track, so made a spreadsheet. As a result, I have a total cost of what I called “The Year of Being Visible”. This is travel and hotels not covered by conferences, speaker coaching, and extra haircuts.
Here it is: GBP 2528.14. USD 3767 at the current exchange rate.
What is not included: vacation days taken. Food (I figured I was going to be eating anyway). Some flights (twice I was able to get part way there on flights covered by work things). Time.
The biggest thing I learned over the course of the year of being visible, was that I could totally be a public speaker. That I could give talks that people loved. That I could use this to see more of the world.
Because where I used to work was very insular, I had rarely attended conferences. I discovered that attending these conferences was one of the biggest perks of speaking – I learned so much from other talks, met so many great people and really felt a lot better about the tech community and particularly men in the tech community. In part I think this is because of the abundance mentality – if I do a great talk, it doesn’t take away from anyone else’s. Also I felt safer in conferences with Code of Conducts (especially when I had seen them be enforced) than I used to at work.
I learned how to ask for things that officially aren’t covered, and started negotiating more.
I got a lot better at taking notes!
My main tip is to find your story, the one that only you can tell. Maybe something you’ve already been tweeting or writing about that is already resonating with people.
Submit it everywhere that it might fit. Rejection therapy!
Get help. If I was to redo this on a budget, speaker coaching is the one thing I wouldn’t cut completely. There are people kind enough to offer free office hours for this, and conference organisers who are willing work with potential speakers to help them submit. I’d replace further flung trips with local meet-ups instead.
My friend Chiu-Ki has a similar story (see her resolution from 2012), and together we have a newsletter that might help.
Edited notes from a section of my talk at Oredev. I plan on expanding this topic into it’s own talk for 2015.
My talk “Distractedly Intimate” evolved out of a blog post I wrote over two years ago now, called “Building things for Humans”. I wrote it after I hit this crossroad, career-wise. Do I move to Zurich and work on data? Or do I move to Sydney and keep working on mobile.
I moved to Sydney, Australia. Kept working on mobile. Got to run my own little team, ship something I could be proud of.
When I thought about building things for humans, I started to think about what was different about working on mobile. What I loved about working on mobile. What makes it appealing to me – people love their phones! – is also a responsibility. As developers we screwed up with the experience of the computer. We created things that people fear, and that stress them out.
We have, I think, a social obligation to not screw up on mobile. So far we’re doing okay, but I don’t think that’s always intentional.
So I put this talk together, and submitted it, and it just kept being accepted, and also invited places. I wanted to start a conversation about love, give people some things to think about. And now I’ve given it to a lot of people, and I’m starting to feel guilty that I just send them away with a bunch more things to worry about, we all have enough to worry about, right? And maybe a newfound appreciation for hedgehogs (I don’t feel guilty about that. Hedgehogs are awesome).
Now, I want to take a few minutes to talk about where do we go from here. Because finally, I have something closer to an answer.
Mobile is a systems problem.
And this is the insight really, this is what I want you to walk out of here thinking about.
Mobile is a systems problem.
We talk about it though, like it’s form factor. And when we talk about “beyond mobile” we talk, mostly, about wearables. About smart watches and Google Glass.
I wear two, sometimes 3 activity trackers, but no smart watch, and now that I no longer work for Google I can admit that there are few things I want less than a notifications bar attached to my face. Distraction is a far bigger problem for me than turn around response time on Twitter or whatever.
But mostly I think wearables are cool. But that’s not what I’m talking about here.
When you see mobile as a systems problem, you see the user as part of this system. They’re being Distractedly Intimate with their device. They’re effectively drunk. They’re obsessed with the Kardashians. They’re contemplating their future internet stardom as a pro hedgehog photographer.
OK, that’s pretty much me. Maybe your users are less weird. Probably not though.
The user is not alone with your app, the world is happening around them. There’s this great video from CapitalOne, which shows someone doing their online banking whilst being chased by a bull.
So when you want to find out what is going on, you might turn to your logs right? You can log the hell out of your app, please do that, but what you can’t do is log what is going on in the world around them.
Your logs are the best chance you have for figuring out what is going on. Just, y’know, don’t be creepy.
Mobile is just part of a multi-device world. People move between devices as they go about their day.
We see this especially with shopping, conversion rates on phones are lower and if you’ve tried to pay for something on a mobile lately maybe you think you know why, because it’s often terrible. But actually when we drill into patterns of behaviour in shopping we see people browsing on mobile during the day, earlier on their phones, and then later converting on their tablets, or on desktop. Switching between is important.
And I still go to websites on twitter on my desktop, and click on links others have shared to open mobile sites, which aren’t great on my laptop. Or worse on my phone, I open links others have shared from desktop, which don’t or barely load on mobile.
We’re not doing great supporting these transitions, yet.
How many of you sometimes feel so wrung out, that you just cannot make another decision? On the small screen, you have to work harder to be sure that you’ve seen the information that you need to.
But we really want to feel like we have all the options. Filtering becomes really hard – how do you simultaneously convince your user that they have seen all the information they need to, whilst preventing them from feeling overwhelmed? And how do you do that on a screen the size of your palm.
There’s a bunch of design and information organisation problems there that we got away with on desktop. We can’t get away with them on mobile.
We have to do better. Part of this comes back to logging, again, and really learning what is going on, and what is useful.
I worked on this thing, and they were logging four different front ends to four different backends. Which is… I have no words for this, right? Or not that I can use whilst being recorded. Not like a 1-1 mapping either. And it turns out, when your logging is that much of a mess, it’s not exactly abundant either. It gets that way because no-one cares about it, no-one prioritises it.
Anyway we had what I term a “dangerous amount of data”. Which is worse, in some ways, than no data. Because whilst there isn’t enough there to draw conclsion from, there is enough there for people to use to prop up their pet theories, and “yeah not sure we can actually conclude that, we don’t have enough data” sounds a lot less compelling than something a number of people would like to believe.
There’s a great quote from Douglas Crockford in Coders at work, and he talks about how computers used to be social because a group of people shared a computer and an email address. There was a community around it. And then we moved to the personal computer, and computers became anti-social. Now we move back to them being social, because we’re humans! Social is normal. And nowhere is that more true than the phone.
What does this mean? It means your app is going to get interrupted by the ding ding ding of text messages, and twitter notifications, and email.
It also means that social is a normal part of mobile interaction, and sharing what you’re doing is standard. We’ve bastardised the meaning of the word social in this industry, and it’s come to mean “one person broadcasting channel” but that is not what I mean. If I’m booking a holiday with a friend, I want to show them what I’m looking at. If someone is being annoying I’ll be discussing it privately. Pulling out a phone and showing things to people we are with is normal.
Let’s talk about the systems themselves, because part of what this means is that our mobile apps have become bigger and more complicated. This is really a whole other rant, but as our mobile apps become more complicated we have to scale our infrastructure and processes with them.
For a long time on iOS, people barely wrote unit tests. And Android was pretty untestable too.
And I still find things. Like, I was using the G+ app a couple of months ago (I know, yet more strange behaviour), and I tried to open the locations tab, and it just… crashed.
Which to me is a sign that there’s not a UI automation test just like, checking every single view controller loads. That should be a bare minimum.
Or the twitter for Android app. I tried to take a picture of my passport and a cup of tea at the airport on the way here, and I carefully cropped it and added a filter to make it less generic.
And it discarded my edits. I had a couple of goes and had to just post an image that in no way reflected my limited talent with aesthetics.
And I just asked the world, futilely, how do you not have a unit test for that? Why?
It’s bigger, and more interesting than ever. The future of mobile is the future of technology, which is especially interesting, because we see the developing world leading in mobile innovation and I wonder what will come of that.
You all, I’m sure, know the quote from Spiderman. “With great power, comes great responsibility.”
As mobile developers, this is ours. Let’s not screw it up this time.
The other week, I live tweeted one of my own talks. It’s captured here (thanks Kelsey!). I’ve been live tweeting a lot lately, and when I attend talks I take notes and/or live tweet so this became a natural extension. I’ve noticed a couple of other speakers (Kronda and Jo Miller) using tweets as part of their talks, so I wanted to try it.
I picked this talk because it was a small audience, and a last minute invitation so I was okay with being slightly less polished than usual, and because of the topic. I was talking about what happened at Grace Hopper (GHC) and live tweeting things that other people’s talks, so live tweeting my own seemed fair.
It was a slightly last minute decision, as I was going through my notes I had a thought “what if I do this” and so I didn’t have time to optimise it! I used Jo’s strategy of saving the tweets that I would send out in my drafts folder, and decided to number them at the start (1), (2), etc., so it would be easy for me to see at a glance which one came next. I accidentally tweeted instead of saved one as part of this process, but I quickly copied the text and deleted it so it was OK! I made sure to put my phone on DND mode so that I wouldn’t be distracted by notifications.
The best thing about live tweeting my own talk was that it allowed the reach of that talk to go beyond the small audience in the room. The collection itself has been pretty popular (and it made me very happy that someone had thought my remarks worth collecting!) as well as the individual tweets having good levels of engagement. It’s also nice that the message of this was curated by me – records of women speaking are often imperfect (my friend and amazing speaker coach Denise has been working on this for a long time) and I have been diligent about documenting my own talks in part because of this. One thing that I have done for a while is collect the tweets that happen during my talk into a Storify, it’s always a surprise what people have pulled out, or haven’t. In this case, the people in the room didn’t tweet at all, so if I hadn’t captured it myself there would have been no record, other than my notes (which I will eventually put up in a blogpost).
The drafts section of Twitter for iOS is not really set up well to do this. It was multiple taps to share each tweet. Buffer and “share now” would have been far better, so if I decide to do this again upgrading to Buffer Premium might be a better way to go, or giving my phone to a trusted friend in the audience.
I think I do need to pause more, so I figured taking this time for silence would be a good thing for my audience but I don’t think this worked as I had hoped – rushing to work through the UI to get to the buried drafts folder, scrolling down to the bottom. Not ideal. I know it made me less good at eye contact. It also meant that I was working from two devices – my notes on my iPad, and my tweets on my iPhone. A talk that I’d spent more time preparing and been more familiar with, I could have used the tweets as my prompts and just shared them as I progressed through the talk. I did this talk without slides, and adding those transitions in as well would have been way too much!
The final question that I have to ask myself in a debrief of this – will I do it again? Not in that format, but maybe. I tend to prep a talk really well and reuse it, and I don’t think I would want to live tweet a talk more than once. This particular one was full of tweetable soundbites and timely, my talk on mobile is full of stories and I don’t think it would work as well. Maybe the talks I prep for next year will work better. I’ll either get a friend in the audience to help, or use something like Buffer with a better interface for storing a backlog of tweets and sharing one by one.
There was an amazing response to my previous post, it was really gratifying to have people find it worthwhile.
I wrote it, finally, for two reasons. The first was to take ownership of the experience, to not sweep it under the carpet like it was me that had done something wrong. When you allow someone to silence you, you let them define the story. I was done with that jerk defining that one.
The second reason was because I kept hearing people talk about women needing to speak up, but either glossing over the harassment, or just ignoring the effects of harassment. There are some women who have been horribly harassed, far far worse than I was, and yet they come back, sometimes they even give talks about it as with Caroline Criado-Perez or Anita Sarkeesian.
I found it hard to relate to these stories. These women are usually by some definition public figures – journalists, media commentators, politicians. I could deem their experience too far away, too un-relatable. Well they needed to get on stage and speak again, it was their job, a bigger part of their life. As a software engineer I could get away with staying hidden, keeping quiet. An intellectually dishonest justification of a decision born of fear.
There was a lovely response to that post, people told me that I was brave, thanked me for sharing. And I thought, it’s not really that brave, after over two years. It’s not really that brave, to give a talk at a women’s conference.
That was the warm up.
For my next trick, I talked to a bunch of dudes about love.
I exaggerate slightly – the first in front of 90 people at iOSCon, of whom about 10% were women. The second in front of hundreds of people, a pretty mixed audience, at ModevUX.
My talk was Distractedly Intimate. You can find my notes here, but the short story is, it’s about how people’s feelings about mobile effect what we should build, about how we love our devices but rarely give them our full attention. I reclaimed the feminine rhetoric, and told stories around these themes of – we are in love, we have changed, we are not really here. I talk about adorable hedgehogs, goats, imaginary girlfriends, and the time that I live tweeted a date with a misogynist.
I was terrified. This flowery descriptive explanation, became distilled in my head to “speak to a bunch of dudes about love”. In the days running up to the first event, some mansplaining – a common occurrence as a women working in a male dominated field – had me retreating and panicking. The audience was surely going to think I had nothing to offer, and critique me accordingly. Sitting in a room full of men, not relating to the content, I felt sure this was a precursor of what was to come. Surrounded by people, but feeling other, and alone.
I was blocked on my script. I know, substantially, what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t fit it into my narrative. Denise coached me through it. Then I just couldn’t seem to sit down and write it. Rushing around at work, heading to the gym for a couple of hours instead of sitting down and cranking it out. It occurred to me, as in an elaborate fit of panic-based procrastination, when I chose the 90 minute walk home in the drizzle over the 20 minute tube ride, that I could throw money at this problem. Denise worked my content into the format we’d discussed, and I could breathe again. The problem was manageable. It always had been, but I was stressing too much to realise without help.
It occurred to me, that it was reasonable to ask them to cover an Uber across town. This would make me dramatically less stressed, as it would be faster and more private that two tubes and a 20 minute walk. They agreed.
I wanted to avoid the speaker dinner, figuring that it would only make me more terrified. But I went (Denise talked me into it), and had a really good time. The organisers were no longer names on an email thread, but real, warm people, who were positive about my talk.
I booked the day off work, so that I could focus the morning on last minute bits, going over my slide deck, going over my notes. Double checking my timings. I felt OK about things; I even found time to get a haircut.
I found myself, in a room full of men, miking up. Trying to get the thing over my ears, and under my hair was a reminder that I would be the first woman on stage that day. Too late now, keep breathing. They found me a different mike.
I hid behind a pillar as I was introduced, and then came to the front. Looked out at the room, and could only see men. Took a deep breath. It’s too late now, go with it. Started speaking. Got my first laugh. Good sign, keep going. Spotted a woman at the back. A woman closer to the front smiled at me. Keep talking.
And so I did it, I talked to a bunch of dudes about love. And then a couple of days later, I flew to another country and did it again. Bigger, with tighter timing. Getting dressed that day, I put two items of clothing on back to front, and one inside out. It could have been terror, or jet lag. Thankfully, these wardrobe malfunctions were long resolved by the time I stood on stage, blinded by the bright lights, and tried to make sure my 15 minutes was a worthwhile experience for the people there.
I was shaking with fear. Probably the entire time. I was thrown by the handheld mike, and the clicker, and discovered that my iPad was too heavy to hold one handed for an extended period – time to upgrade to the air, I guess.
When I came off stage, a fabulous amazing woman, one of the co-chairs, told me that I had seemed poised.
I was transported back to the workshop in Oxford. We each gave a word which we felt captured the idea of an eloquent woman. Mine, was poised.
You can see the comments and live tweets, captured in Storify, here and here. I feel compelled to tell you at this point, that one guy thought there was a disconnect in my narrative. I have this urge to apologise, to write some kind of in depth explanation of how those two things are related, just for him.
But in the end, his criticism is intellectual, and not personal. And constructive, not an expletive. So I will leave it, and consider it overall, a win.