From Nerves to Confidence: My Experience as a First Time Speaker
I’ll talk about my experience public speaking for the first time, to what Barbie and Oppenheimer has to do with a Product & Tech Conference!
Back in November 2023, Auto Trader hosted their first internal Product and Tech conference, known as the P&T ‘Mega Day’! A few months prior to this, I was approached and asked if I, along with my colleague Steve Morrow (Digital Analyst), could do a talk on quantitative (quant) and qualitative (qual) insight. I predominantly focus on qual research, whereas Steve is quant focused.
This article won’t be covering the content of our talk but to give some context, we would define qualitative research as exploring ideas and formulating rich insights, helping to provide the ‘why’ to questions. While quantitative research involves analysing numerical or statistical data and identifying patterns to provide the ‘what’. to questions. We felt that our talk should tackle an ongoing perceived rivalry between qual and quant that we saw as detrimental to gaining great insights. Quant and qual shouldn’t be seen as separate entities, rather you should begin with what problem you want to solve, and the type of research or insight you choose comes after that.
When I was initially asked, a few thoughts came flying through my head, including ‘oh god, do I want to do this?’, ‘a conference! that sounds scary’, ‘there’ll be lots of people there…’. You get the gist!
I was conscious this was my lovely fuzzy comfort zone telling me not to do it but after doing some smaller scale presentations, such as a group presentation at the end of one of our graduate projects, I felt this would be a good opportunity for a new challenge. Earlier this year, I attended the Reframing Women in Tech conference in Manchester, and I felt inspired to try out public speaking after attending, so I knew this opportunity wasn’t one to turn down.
This blog will recap my experiences from saying yes to the talk, all the way up to the day of the conference. I’ll also share some things that helped me as well.
Coming out the other side of public speaking for the first time, I am feeling more confident about speaking, the nerves may not fully go, but the confidence has definitely grown.
About the P&T Conference
As I mentioned before, this day was an Auto Trader first, an internal conference for all of us in the Product and Tech tribes. The day started with coffees and pastries in the reception area of the Edwardian, easing us into an exciting day full of talks from colleagues, as well as some external speakers. The day all in all was super inspiring and engaging.
The Planning
Back to our talk now! Steve and I got planning pretty quickly after we had said yes to doing the talk, and of course, a new Miro board was started! We started by throwing a few ideas around and decided on the purpose of the talk.
We wanted to be clear on what we wanted the audience to walk away with after listening to our talk. After we had that nailed down, we could start thinking about the actual content. There were a few things we knew we wanted the talk to be and that was light-hearted, fun and engaging, while still getting across our message.
Reflecting back, we’d like to think it was kept light-hearted at times, one way we did this was running with the idea that the debate between quant versus qual is basically the same as the Barbie versus Oppenheimer debate!
After a couple of check ins, we had the skeleton structure of our presentation. We still had a while to go before the conference, so I was feeling positive at this time as we carried on figuring out what we wanted to include.
Once we had the content, one of our main goals for the presentation was for it to be engaging. Our lovely colleague Lauren was happy to help us go through our slides and helped us take things off the slides we didn’t need and made a few tweaks to make the slides look visually more presentable which in turn would hopefully create better engagement (neither of us are designers so we needed a bit of help!).
The Practicing
For the upcoming weeks to the conference, I made sure to block out chunks in my calendar to practice and familiarise myself with what I was going to say. As this was my first time doing something of this scale, I knew I wanted to feel as prepared as I could be, so I found blocking a few 30 minutes here and there throughout the week helped me dedicate some time to go through the content.
Steve and I met up a few times to do run throughs together which also helped, as it meant we could tweak little bits so we weren’t both saying the same thing and to practice the flow of the slides like it would be on the actual day.
Up until the weekend before, I was feeling quite prepared, but then I was struck with a cold which resulted in me losing my voice a few days before the talk itself.
Talk about ideal timing!
It was a bit of a setback as I was worrying I wasn’t going to be able to speak or feel up to the talk, but after a restful few days before (and lots of honey and lemon lemsip), my voice came back and I was feeling a bit better. I think the silver lining of this was I didn’t really spend the days running up to the talk thinking that I would be standing up talking in front of a large group of people, rather focusing on making sure I could actually get up there and speak!
The Presenting
I felt like I had blinked, and it was the morning of the conference. I arrived early and went to go and suss out the room which made me feel at ease instantly. I think just seeing the room and trialling connecting my Mac to the big screen settled my nerves massively and luckily for me, the room we were speaking in had low ceilings which may have made the room feel less big!
Our talk was in the morning just before lunch. When the room started to fill with people, it all started to feel a little bit real especially when all the seats filled, and people continued to come in and stood at the back to listen to our talk. The talk itself, went by in a flash. All of a sudden, we were introducing the talk, then the next moment it had ended! For anybody worrying about doing a talk for the first time, if you have done preparations for it, the actual talk itself is probably one of the easiest parts about the whole process. Once you have said your first slide, you just get into it. Everyone told me it would be over before I realised, and they were definitely right.
A note to anyone thinking of doing a talk for the first time, don’t make the mistake I did and wear a thick jumper! With stresses slightly higher and lots of lights on you, wearing a jumper was not my best decision of the day. It’s super important to wear something you feel comfortable in though, that’ll make things easier when you get up there.
The talk ended back with another image of Steve and I, or even Barbie and Oppenheimer, this time in the Auto Trader office! We ended with this slide where we summarised our talk nicely, as we want both of us (quant and qual) to be in the same room when projects are getting kicked off.
After the talk had finished, the adrenaline then took over my body and I felt such a sense of relief that I had completed my first go at public speaking and it felt great!
The Reflecting
After the talk, the rest of the day was filled with enthusiasm, and the P&T Mega Day ended with an evening of food and drinks to celebrate the achievements of the day!
Reflecting back on my talk now I have done it, overall, I had a very positive experience and I’m going to summarise some things that helped me stay positive and enjoy the process as my first time speaking and hopefully they will help you if you’re thinking about public speaking.
- Start preparing the content for the slides as early as possible. They don’t have to be perfect polished slides, just the content you want you tell the audience. This then gives you enough time to practice, as that probably takes just as much time as the initial prep work. Especially if you are speaking with someone else, to make sure you know their slides which helps make the handover process feel more streamlined.
- Practice, but don’t over-practice! It may seem hard to know if you’re over-practicing, but if you know you know your stuff, then trust yourself that you do.
- Practice presenting standing up if that’s how you are going to be presenting, get comfortable with feeling a little uncomfortable as it is not an everyday situation you are standing up in front of a large audience and speaking.
- If possible, have people you know dotted about in the audience, this is helpful when you are doing the talk, just seeing a familiar face gives you that boost to carry on.
- It’s more than okay to bring up cue cards with you, the talk is not a memory test, if you need a few prompts to get you going then that’s totally okay. I found it helpful to write down some key things I definitely wanted to say and these acted as a prompt.
- Try to relax! During the process as well as on the day. Everyone is human and everyone is there to see you do well.
- Finally, I found it helpful to remember that no one but you and your speaker partner know exactly what you planned to say, so if you don’t say absolutely everything you had planned, then it doesn’t matter!
From starting as a graduate just over a year ago in October 2022, to now feeling accomplished that I’ve done my first public speaking talk, I’m feeling energised to (maybe?!) give it another go some time. Looking towards the next time, I’m not sure the nerves will fully disappear but I feel more prepared in dealing with them.
