Every so often I do something that is such a waste of time it makes me pause.
Reading a non-fiction book I’m not into, it drags and I don’t retain much of it.
Horse-riding with my friend at the weekend, we booked the trail option and it was over an hour of… walking, didn’t even make it to a trot, really (mine did for all of 10 blissful seconds). And the beautiful sunny day had turned so we were freezing.
Last week, I gave a talk to five people. Something of a come-down from around 150 less than a week before. Nothing against the five people who were there, who were lovely, and engaged. But I can’t think that taking three hours out of my day to reach five people is a good use of my time. Also, only in academia do they “invite” you to give a talk and then charge you the price of a new handbag for it.
And so at the end of my month of public speaking, I’m thinking about why I do it. It’s not the end, it’s the means for me. I want to be able to give a good demo, speak up in meetings, and acquit myself creditably when invited to something as good for female university students as ONCWIC was.
Doing some public speaking helps with these things, but I’ve passed the limit of what is a good use of time. And so I’m thinking about setting parameters – I already won’t do talks about what it’s like to be an engineer if there are not going to be any women there. What else should I rule out? No more academic talks? Minimum 50 people?
I don’t want to seem ungrateful for the opportunities that present, but I can’t take all of them. If I’m going to take some but not all, how do I select the some?
Being Yourself on the Internet was the first remote presentation I’ve given. It was really hard, and I wasn’t happy with how it went. I think there were 3 big things I didn’t consider, and that was why I found it so difficult.
1. Lack of Visual and Audible Feedback
I completely underestimated how much not being about to see or hear people would throw me off. As a result, I spoke too fast, and didn’t pause – remote pauses are much harder than in person pauses, which themselves took a lot of practise to get better at. It also felt weirdly like I was talking to myself, as all I could see was my slides and the video projection of myself. I hate being on camera, and having my picture taken, so this was another thing that I struggled with.
In general I like to make my presentations more dynamic, I love the audience to join in. I think you have to work harder at enabling this in a remote presentation, and it would be harder to manage the distraction. I’m thinking that I could have encouraged people to @ me or use a hashtag and split my screen to include that, but I don’t know how I’d react to that moving (especially if irrelevant content was on there).
2. Notes on the Computer, Not on Paper
Normally, I put my notes on paper, just in case, but then I get into the flow and don’t use them.
But, I didn’t really find my flow in this presentation, and my notes were in another tab in my browser. It didn’t seem that would be a huge problem ahead of time, but I’ve spent a lot more time in video conferences since then, and you can tell when someone is reading something else! With a piece of paper it’s clear you’re checking your notes. With another tab, you might be checking email.
3. Skipping Setup Time
When presenting in a physical location, I always get there early, have time to go through my notes, and spend some time before I start to centre myself.
I should have made that a priority here too, but the talk was at 4, and just before 3 I broke my code. One of my colleagues was helping me fix it, so I didn’t stop at 3 to spend 30 mins going through my notes, and instead we worked it out with just enough time for me to run to my 1 on 1 with my manager, which had been moved to 3:30. We meant to finish early, but had stuff to cover and then… I was rushing to set up my computer.
Of course, I’d meant to prepare over the weekend, only I’d managed lose my only car key and had to spend much of Saturday dealing with that (only for it to turn up right by my car when the snow melted) my boyfriend had arrived, so I spent Sunday with him, and then I’d lain awake most of Sunday night, making Monday horrible – and the presentation was on Tuesday.
I was really feeling stressed and thrown-off by all of this. And I realized that I should have blocked time off in my calendar before to mentally (and technologically) prepare!
Last week I gave a demo with less notice, and again the timing made it stressful, but this one was first thing in the morning and ended up going OK. I think in general, I’d prefer more notice, but it’s doable, provided I’m realistic about how long things take and needing time before to prepare.
Overall
Sacha has a great post on learning to love remote presenting, but I don’t think I’m going to start volunteering to do them any time soon. Remote meetings are hard enough! I don’t know if I enjoy presenting, period. I enjoy meeting people, I enjoy having presented – assuming people like it (which thankfully at least someone has every time so far) and I love the reactions my write-ups tend to get, and the process of structuring it and writing them. But, the act of standing up and talking, and particularly the time before I do… not sure.
The other day, I had a phone interview for quite possibly my dream job. With the encouragement of my mentors and friends I was feeling good about it, and going for it, until a few hours before when I was practically vibrating with fear.
I don’t know how it went. I definitely didn’t connect with the interviewer, though. Phone interviews are hard.
The following day, I was checking my email obsessively – even though I know I can’t possibly hear back until next week… and there was a little voice in my head that said, “You shouldn’t have gone for it, because now you’re going to be disappointed”. I had an appointment for a haircut, and the book I took to read was The Leader Who Had No Title: A Modern Fable on Real Success in Business and in Life. I hadn’t been loving the book when I started it (on the plane back from Winnipeg), because the whole fable thing bothered me, but I came to a section where a former pro skiier was talking about the need to leave your comfort zone in order to be a better skiier (I blogged about this earlier this year). The analogies spoke to me as a skier, and to the way I’ve been living lately.
I’ve been living inside my comfort zone. It was a choice, because I needed to regroup, and sometimes maybe it’s healthy to retreat to your comfort zone for a while. I needed to be there. And now, I need to leave again.
People have been saying to me lately that I’m doing a lot. I always feel slightly guilty when they do, because I don’t feel like I’m stretching myself.
It’s not a stretch for me to get up for a 6am bootcamp, because frankly it’s nothing compared to the training I did in China. Nor is it a stretch for me to try pole-dancing at 25 – afterall, I didn’t learn to ski until I was 20. The Awesome Foundation? We have a great group of people, so everything else is details and I’ve done that before, too. At my internship, we have a client and a problem to solve, but we have support and it’s a similar to other projects I’ve done. Being single is easy, because I’m not one of those people for whom being alone is out of my comfort zone – in fact, it’s probably the opposite. Even though I’ve only lived alone for short periods until now, I’ve dreamed of having my own space for so long it’s well within my comfort zone. I actually quite love it.
Dream-chasing? That’s a stretch because my dreams are normally very achievable – and depend more on my motivation, ability and finances than something rather arbitrary, like impressing one person for 45 minutes one Friday afternoon.
Team work? That I find tough – at university, mostly you work alone, and if you have to be in a team you often get to pick your own, and either way – you’re judged on your own work. It makes me nervous to depend on team members I don’t know. The technical team members are okay – we’ve connected, bonded, and understand what each other are doing. It’s harder for me, though, to depend on the MBA – I don’t understand what he’s doing, and I don’t know how I can know that he’s doing a good job, or otherwise. Finding myself in a situation where I feel unprepared because someone else didn’t do the research, is definitely out of my comfort zone.
In order to accept my internship, I had to sign a number of confidentiality agreements. I’m still working out how to navigate this – what I can say, and what I can’t. Rather than risk breaking such an agreement, I’ve been saying a bare minimum. It’s one of the reasons I haven’t been blogging as much – I don’t want to say anything I shouldn’t, and it’s hard to tell the stories of what’s happening and how we’re doing without context. Talking about what I’m doing right now? Out of my comfort zone.
At the end of the summer, we will give a 4-minute pitch – one minute per team member – talking about our project and the value it brings to the client and to IBM. I’m used to giving longer talks, workshops, and teaching in a position where I know more about the topic than my audience. Doing that in French is tough for me, but still – this is my idea, my content, my slide template. Presenting in French, I don’t really need to worry about pace because my French-French compared to Quebecois is pretty slow. Presenting in English, I’m trying to inspire passion rather than explain, necessarily. Now much of the content in my minute comes from the MBA, I’m presenting to people who have more experience and market-knowledge than I do, and I’m explaining, so I have to speak more slowly. Our slides feature white text on a black background. I’m out of my comfort zone.
OK, so having had this realization and these examples – what now? What can I do to go back to living outside my comfort zone more?
