Showing Up
I’ve been attending conferences, both as a speaker and as an attendee. And once in a while my friends at @ HasGeek asks me to be part of their presentation trials to provide feedback to other fellow speakers.
I am sharing a few references which helped me to improve my presentations.
How to talk to Developers by Ben Orenstein was one of the initial talks that gave me a different perspective about public speaking.
Ben’s talk gave me the confidence that one’s personality doesn’t matter much for presentation, it's about the topic and practice.
Here is the link to a short note by Ben:
Another talk is Zach Holman’s — The talk about Talks.
Speaking.io by Zach has detailed write-ups about each stage of public speaking — the topic selection, preparation, delivery and reflection.
Slides are for the audience, not for the presenter. Having slides help to get the attention back to the talk, so keeping it simple and relevant is very important.
Above is a crucial point I learned early on. But I’ve seen this being violated many times. A few examples:
- Too much text — resulting in audience ignoring the entire content
- Presenter reading from slides — the audience will feel if provided the same material they can read it themselves
- Too small fonts — making it difficult for people to read, especially those sitting in the back
Get help from your “designer” friends to spruce up your presentation. That is a good test for your topic, flow and delivery.
I’ve been lucky that I had friends like Manish Chiniwalar and Vaidy Bala to support me. Manish provided me with a template for my presentation a long time back. I am continuing to use even today. I thank Manish every time I hear the feedback that “your slides were good” :).
I learned from Vaidy the importance of “good experience”. I always thought UX is not for me it is for UI designers. But learned from Vaidy that “experience” is not just about “looking good”. It is a lot about content and delivery.
I still struggle…
I’ve become much comfortable with stage now. Realised that I don’t need to be an expert to give a talk. Talk about things that worked out well for you. Share things that you wish someone else had shared with you.
I enjoy the preparation for the talks and likes the iterations by giving them in multiple conferences.
I get bored hearing my voice and, my inner voice starts telling me — you are talking too much. This results in me increasing the pace, making it explicit that I am in a rush to finish the talk. I used to hear from people — you talk too fast, so better to slow down in the stage.
It has always been difficult for me to come out of the thought process — don’t talk too much, instead listen :). So I started leveraging that constraint, i.e. restrict the talk duration to a max of 25 minutes :). I am happy with 30 minutes talks, 20 minutes of talking and 5 minutes for question answer.
What will I do if the talk duration is 45 minutes? I realised I don’t have to pressurise myself to use up the entire time. Sometimes I do interactive sessions, which avoids hearing “my voice”. Otherwise, I finish the talk within 30 minutes and use the rest for question answers.
If there are no questions, its ok. This happens if its the last talk and people are too tired. But hardly I had a case where I don’t have any hallway conversations after my talk.
Recently, I finished 15 minutes earlier than expected, that's fine. The audience was happy because they could have their lunch 15 minutes early :)
But…
After my DevOps days India talk, one girl came and told me, that was a great talk. And I am glad to see a woman in the stage. My response, there is nothing special about it. You should do it too, by identifying your exciting topic.
To be frank, the feedback made me sad. It showed me a significant lack of “diversity”— the lack of variety in topics, race, religion, gender — on a variety of factors.
What can we do for that? I don’t know. It is a huge problem. The only thing is reminding ourselves the need and importance for showing up because that is the only path for growth.
