My Reason and Journey to My First Tech Talk

My topic was “Event loop in JS”, I randomly came across this while digging more into the details of how JS works. It was like painting JS onto my empty canvas. So I was simultaneously learning and preparing for the talk. The only thing I knew at the time was that I love to study topics in detail. This is the moment that I chose between studying or worrying about the stage. Even so, sometimes I chose to study and sometimes I just got stagefright.

I would like to share what helped me walk from a comfy bed to the stage.

For my first talk, I, was definitely full of these thoughts:

1. This is a common topic.

2. I don’t know enough about this topic and don’t have enough experience in JS.

3. There are other people who have already talked about it so well.

4. You will get blank onstage.

5. I would prefer to die rather than exposing my tech side or knowledge to people!

There are certain questions that I ask myself:

Why am I giving a talk?

I am giving a talk because I want to be part of building an IT community. I know I am doing something good. I love doing deep dives on topics and I’ll get to do that here. That was enough reason to do a talk.

Why do you want to face people or face your fear ?

What I realised with this question was that I was not facing people, I was facing myself.

I wanted to let the world know who I am and what i think. I was ready to transform scattered thoughts into shaped thoughts.

What empowers you, right now, to do the talk?

I love the topic, I’m ready to work hard on it. I am a fun person. I have already been on stage before for dance. The thought that no one gives a perfect talk the first time :)

Cool, so I decided I am going to give a talk no matter what. And there was a knock, at the door of my mind, of the following thoughts; fear, fear of being wrong, you cannot do it, people will not accept you, it’s very scary, your english is bad.

Even after deciding to do a talk, I still had to face all these negative feelings. My next step was to surround myself with only positivity.

My dancing experience reminded me of how good it feels to dive into your dance completely when you are on stage. I knew I had to dive into my topic so I could explain it better and with joy. I immediately saved that image of positivity in my mind and reminded myself of it until I was on stage.

I have attended lots of conferences before and being a part of the audience I knew what kinds of things people expect from a talk. Nobody expects a perfect talk or super good English for a talk. They expect to learn your topic and to gain lots of motivation to work on that topic on their own. About What, Why and How they should learn about that topic. They want to know your experience. One more thing they, or I, expect is fun during a talk ;)

One thing I was sure of was that I was not giving a damn engineering exam. It’s just a talk where I just have to be myself.

Also I am a bit of an introvert and I definitely didn’t want to share my feelings. But these fearful thoughts, they knock randomly and unexpectedly. I have some very positive people in my life and I told them about my feelings and they shared their experience of giving talks and sent links to good, motivational blogs. One of my friends reminded me not to compare myself with others and just be myself. I captured these images of being myself and replayed them till I could reach the stage.

I have a severe anxiety disorder, I had a continuous headache for three days and was not able to work properly on my talk and slides. One afternoon I just told myself, no matter how my talk goes, I am just going to do it. “I don’t give a fuck about people(’s judgement)” I literally chanted this while walking in a garden for half an hour. To my amazement, my headache went away. I was light. The next thing I did was to start working on my slides so that my slides will remind me of my efforts when I get another anxiety attack. I never got any as I was busy preparing.

I started to practice giving my talk and yes I was blabbing. Instead of stressing myself for not being able to talk properly I read some of the improv tips written by Jen Oleniczak Brown. I reminded myself everyday that I have put a lot of effort into gathering and understanding the material for this talk so what I want to do is just believe in myself and present it. To do that I created an imaginary audience in my mind and started giving the talk. I remember how good it felt to hear my own voice as she was giving the right shape to my words for my talk.

So when I was actually on stage, I felt that I have already done this and am just doing it again. I know everything about my talk, I was done fighting with all the negative thoughts and here I am to talk.

A beautiful coincidence happened during my journey, I went for the movie Black Panther and there was a character named Shuri, she portrayed an intelligent and confident tech woman, building interesting tech for her brother. The joy she had with her tech filled my mind because I wanted that joy for myself in this tech industry. Expressing that joy through my talk was just the first step to achieving it.

This is me and I love it.

Some sentences I told myself about people

1. Aim for good people because they will help and guide you.
2. Good people always appreciate efforts.
3. Some people will know everything about my talk and I should trust that they will find something valuable in my talk too.
4. I should never judge anyone for their talk and not worry about judgement on my own talks.

My special thanks to Preeti Wadhwani, Aniket Kadam and Manjula Dube to help me through this journey.

Thanks again Aniket Kadam for editing this blog and helping me to express myself more clearly.