Well Spoken

Nervous about speaking in public? Yeah, me too, but nowhere near as much as I used to be.

Some years ago I wrote a blog post, Speaking Easier, about how I'd challenged myself to present at a testing conference to help myself with the extreme, and irrational, nervousness I was feeling about public speaking.

An absolutely crucial insight for me, as I struggled to find a way into the problem, was that my main goal was to be myself on that stage. I found that I could be comfortable with success or failure just as long as I felt that, in the moment, I'd been my natural self rather than some nervous wreck pulling speaking levers behind a calm and confident, but ultimately fake, facade.

My first conference presentation was Eurostar 2015 and although I got mixed reviews I was very pleased with what I achieved there. I've made an effort to speak at public events regularly since (including MEWT in 2016, UKSTAR in 2018, SoftTest also in 2018, and DEWT earlier this year) because I don't want to lose the progress that I made.

Last week I presented at OnlineTestConf 2020. It was my first webinar-style presentation, it was almost certainly the largest audience I've ever had, and my Zoom client crashed one minute before I was due to start and wouldn't reopen, so I found myself frantically rebooting my machine with fingers tightly crossed as I messaged the organisers on Slack and the host waffled to give me time.

Nerves?

Hardly any, and I couldn't quite believe it.

So what helped?

It's hard to give an answer that I'm confident in, but I did all of these and felt happy about it:

Practice. I find that practising as-live works best; so for the online conference I practised sitting down with my headphones on in front of the computer with my slides in presenter mode. For more traditional conferences I will practice standing up.
Hooks. Consciously applying approaches that I learned at Toastmasters. These include asking a question early on to try to engage the audience, using lists of three items to help keep things straightforward to absorb, and finding places to add pauses and vocal variety to maintain interest.
Research. I looked into differences between online and traditional conference speaking. Alan Richardson's advice, Tips for Presenting Online, felt instinctively reasonable and so I tried to follow it. (This may have been in part because Alan's description of how he practices for non-webinar talks feels familiar to me.) I also asked the conference organisers for a dry-run of the presenter view of Zoom so that I was comfortable with what I needed to do, and so that my practice was aligned with it.
Material. I know my stuff. I know that I know my stuff to a deeper level than I'm presenting it at. In fact, I make a point of choosing topics to speak about that I want to explore for my own benefit so I'm motivated to understand it well.
Testing. Trying the presentation on people whose judgement I trust and taking their feedback is invaluable. I make a point of saying that I will accept feedback on any aspect of the presentation and, whatever the feedback is, I thank the person for giving it. I may not take the feedback on board, but that's my choice, and contributes to the feeling of being myself when I give the talk for real.

After all that, I was really pleased with how my talk went. I'm even more pleased with the feedback I've got on it from strangers. Naturally, it's a biased sample — people who happened to be there to watch the talk, and who felt motivated to take the time to contact me about it — but it still feels good that anyone took anything from it.

I'm particularly happy about comments like these that talk about the delivery and style and inspiration, rather than the content:

Your performance stood out from the crowd. And that's not only because some presenters had difficulties. It felt (at times) as if you had a dialog with me. And that's valuable experience.

This session was the main session I wanted to see. 100% it did not disappoint. It was FANTASTIC. I feel as though my philosophy on testing is closely related to what you presented, but you worded it more eloquently.

Awesome topic James.. How to test anything, now I will test anything

The talk was recorded. I've watched it back and I'm pleased to report that I recognise the chap who's visible in the top-right corner as me, just me, the me you'd experience if we were talking about testing together in person. (Although in real life I'm unlikely to monologue for 40 minutes.)

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