Speaking about Speaking, Part 1 — Preparing Yourself
Here are some things I’ve learned about preparing myself to give a talk. After a few talks this past week, with a few more upcoming, I thought I’d share some of my preparation rituals in the hope that others find them useful (and also that reader comments will give me some more ideas about other things I should try — please fire away!).
I’ve been doing public speaking off and on for the last 35 years. As a freshman in high school, I joined the speech and debate team. Where other friends were distance runners or chess players or actors, my “thing” was debate. I did it all through high school, and also was an assistant coach for most of college. As a result, I have learned over time some things I need to do to help me be at my best when speaking. (I actually used to throw up before every important debate round, so at least I’ve gotten past that!)
I started doing serious technical presentations in 2006 when my eBay colleague Dan Pritchett and I presented eBay’s architecture publicly for the first time. At the time, eBay was a pretty hot property and had not yet revealed anything about the things we had been doing to scale the site, so the talk generated a lot of interest. Dan and I fought hard internally for the opportunity, and it was a lot of fun. We both went on to do a lot more speaking and conference organizing as a result.
The goal of preparing myself is to be able to bring all my energy and focus to presenting well. A good talk is equally a mental / verbal exercise and a physical performance, and so I’ve found that all aspects of body and mind are important. (They aren’t really different from each other at all, but that’s a topic for another time :-)
Tip #1: Take Care of Yourself
Make sure you have enough sleep the night(s) before, and are well-rested. This can be particularly challenging if you’ve just traveled across a number of time zones, so I always try to arrive at least the day before where possible. Supposedly it takes your body a day for each time zone change to recover completely from jet lag, but anything is better than nothing.
If you have an exercise regimen in the mornings, do your best to continue it. The weather this past week in Minneapolis was very much not conducive to running outside, as I like to do in the mornings, but a few miles on the treadmill is better than nothing. (Apparently UMN actually has an indoor track on an upper floor of the student gym, but I never made it over there to check it out)
Eat and drink well in the morning. Be fed but not over-fed, hydrated but not sloshing around. For me, that means a solid breakfast of protein and minimal carbs, as well as my customary coffee. I need to have energy without being too hyped up or weighed down.
Tip #2: Practice, Practice, Practice
It’s how to get to Carnegie Hall, and it’s how to make sure you do your best at presenting.
YMMV, but for me this means reviewing the slides both in the morning and in the hour before my talk, even if I’ve given the same talk many times. I’ve found that practicing out loud and memorizing specific words does not work well for me (it does for many others) — I always come across stilted when I do this — but I do think through each bullet point and each slide transition, and remind myself the point I’m trying to make so it’s “cached”. Presenter mode is a lifesaver for this, and I absolutely rely on being able to see the next slide or bullet to be able to give a seamless transition.
I also think through any anecdotes I want to share, and practice saying them silently in my head.
As I do all of this, I actually end up editing the slide content for clarity. Sometimes I add a point or move things around, but usually I find I can tighten up the language and make a point more succinctly. It definitely freaks out some conference organizers to see me typing away the hour before, but it makes for a better talk.
Many conferences are now offering explicit practice opportunities. One thing I’ve been inspired by with the QCon conferences in recent years is that the organizer interviews each speaker, and we also offer access to a speaker community, each of whom has offered to do 1:1 practice sessions with speakers. This is great regardless of your speaking experience, but is particularly valuable if you are newer to speaking — it’s very explicitly one of the ways we try to encourage and support speakers from underrepresented groups in technology, and also a way to avoid always having the same people speak over and over every time. It’s also a fun way to get to know other people before the conference!
Definitely take advantage of opportunities to give the talk in front of work colleagues or maybe at a meetup or local group before heading up to the big leagues. You will learn a lot, and you’ll share your hard work with yet more people!
Tip #3: Timing is Everything
It’s important to consider the duration of the speaking slot, and where you need to be at what time. To be honest, I don’t really do much more than noting the halfway point in the slides, but that by itself is very helpful.
I don’t always get timing right, even if I’ve given the talk before. If I’m going to be under time, well, that’s more opportunity for Q&A. But if I’m going to be over time, as happens far more often, I make sure I know what later section I want to drop and — as surreptitiously as possible — skip ahead to later slides in the moment.
One thing I’ve found does not work well is simply charging ahead through the slides. I used to do that, and found that you’re always better off dropping a section altogether instead of giving a section short shrift. As a wise person pointed out to me once, the audience only knows what you say — you’re the only one who knows what you were planning to say!
Tip #4: The Clothes Make the Speaker
I find I speak much better when I am mentally confident and physically comfortable. So wearing comfortable clothes that make me feel great is critical.
For me, shoes and socks are the most important aspect of comfort, to be honest. Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve been known many times to build an entire outfit around a pair of comfortable socks. I have been wearing Ralph Lauren black cotton socks for the last few years, and so the shoes have to be black, and so therefore does the belt, and so on (you get the idea). Last time I checked, they don’t make my favorite sock in different colors yet :-|. I have just recently also discovered SmartWool hiking socks, though. After buying them for my son, they looked like they felt so amazing I had to try them myself (and they do feel amazing!).
Ditto with the shoes. I’ve found a few pairs that look reasonably stylish and feel great. I’ve heard that handmade Italian shoes fit like a glove, but I’ve not yet felt like I could afford to make that leap.
I tend to choose the overall outfit by prioritizing being comfortable over looking fancy. Fortunately, there are a lot of styles that work for both. For me that is usually a well-fitting shirt in a fun pattern over a pair of comfortable, nice looking jeans. Working for a clothing company like Stitch Fix has made this even a bit more important (gotta represent!), and has also exposed me to styles I would not have considered or known about (stretchy jeans are a *revelation* — how did no one tell me about them earlier?). My favorite shirts are now all from Stitch Fix, FWIW :-).
Tip #5: Crank Up the Tunes
I’ve found in my life — and there is a lot of academic research to support — that music works like liquid emotion. It is a direct line to the emotional part of your brain. I can very directly influence my stress level and emotional state by choosing the right music, in ways that I haven’t found through other means.
When I’m doing the earlier preparation, I use instrumental background music that makes me smile but that I can tune out. Lately I’ve been enjoying Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, the classic Brazilian jazz Getz / Gilberto album, and Till Felner’s rendition of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. The goal here is to reduce distraction and improve focus.
Just before I am about to go on stage, though, my goal is to get the energy level and adrenaline up. Here I usually listen to AC/DC’s Back in Black, Rush’s Exit Stage Left, or Art of Noise’s Paranoimia. I find that all of these reinforce my emotional and physical confidence. They also are a pretty good indication of my age :-).
Tip #6: Move Your Body
I’m about to do a physical performance, so I need to warm up. I’ve recently been doing a few sets of pushups before going on stage. Combined with the Back in Black — usually at the same time — that really works!
Other people try “power poses” or putting on a “game face”. Again, YMMV.
In Summary
As I started thinking about this post, it kept expanding and expanding. I didn’t actually even realize I had developed so many little rituals over time! So I’ll be returning over the next days (or weeks) to give a few more sets of thoughts about preparing presentation content, preparing the physical space of the stage, giving the talk itself, and about taking and responding to questions. And coming from a DevOps / Lean mindset, the series would not be complete without talking about how to learn and refine after the fact.
If you have read this far, I hope you found some of these ideas useful.
(Please feel free to add additional rituals and ideas in the comments)
