Top Tips for Terrible Tech Talks by Chet Haase

hello and welcome to this talk I'm Chet Haase I am a developer advocate on the Android team at Google and this is top tips for terrible Tech Talks here's what's gonna happen it's a talk in three parts I'm gonna give what I hope you will agree is a terrible talk and then I'm going to go over those slides again and we can talk about the exact reasons why it sucked and then I have a bunch of tips I'm going to go over in general for hopefully creating and getting better talks I should point out that all of this information is my own opinion and it is not fact nor are these opinions that may work for you they are opinions that work for me I think that there are many different ways of giving good technical talks as well it's giving really horrible technical talks I just think that after giving many of these I do have some opinions that are worth sharing hopefully they are worth hearing you can let me know at the end whether that is correct why am I here because I do a lot of this stuff I started giving technical talks about I don't know 15 years ago or something when I was at Sun I really enjoyed it so therefore I gave a lot more of them I also started doing some comedy on the side and basically being on stage as often as I could that meant that I wanted to hone the talks that I was giving and I developed opinions about what might make those better it also means when I go to other people's technical talks I tend to have opinions about how those are going most are good most are wonderful you can always take something away about ways it could be improved or opinions that you can improve on your own given something you say other people to do but basically I'm full of opinions I wrote a huge article and medium about this stuff and that I basically boiled down a lot of that stuff into this presentation I've also given some training sessions on how to do this stuff too so full of opinions hopefully you're taking that away why are you here I have no idea I suggested this to Stefan a few months ago I have given this talk a lot internally there's a recording of a much earlier version of this talk online and people that are interested in becoming speakers or in improving their speaking of skills are interested in it I didn't whether it would appeal to a crowd of this size at a conference because theoretically you're here to learn from speakers not learn how to be a speaker on the other hand I do believe that the better that we can communicate the better it is for all of us in whatever job we have whether it's engineering or otherwise we need to be able to communicate ideas I think giving technical talks is just one version of that but I also believe that every kind of communication that we do especially getting up in front of people and speaking at them and trying to articulate the ideas in your mind helps us in all of the other communications that we do throughout life so hopefully there's something in here for you to learn regardless of whether you're here to learn about this or you fell asleep in the last talk and you're stuck so part 1 welcome to j2 xdb technology assessment development of specifications in the 21st century I'm Chet Haase Technical Architect MSE llq of the N squared corporation like to tell you about myself I do have a BA in mathematics as well as a master's in CS I did go to high school I've had a very long career in programming and have worked at many companies also worked on many platforms and spoken at many conferences for outside interests I have none which I believe qualifies me to speak about this topic this is the agenda for this talk first we're going to have a title then I will talk about the speaker then we will cover what the agenda is and go on to some deep and technical things that I will discuss along with charts and data that help explain and verify those will have some very nice explanations of those topics and then finally a conclusion hopefully will end with time for questions and answers section one in which many important things are covered such as the development of the thesis I think all of this could be viewed afterwards on your own time so I'm going to carry on from here here's some important data that will probably help you understand this topic I think that's self-explanatory as is this here's a simple equation to help you understand here we calculate the height correlated Smith function given the values of U V for the view unit vector L is the light vector n is the normal vector and alpha is the roughness there is a corollary to this function in this equation we solve for the visibility V where n is the light vector L is the incident light vector alpha is the perceptual a linear roughness V is the view unit vector 2 is the number 2 Oh point five represents one half and everything on the right side is divided into 0.5 or 1/2 I'd like to go over the importance of testing for the specific goal of verification and validation testing is very important it can help verify and validate values even specifications can be tested as long as the specification is complete specification completeness is something that can also be tested for so test all of your things always I would encourage you to fill out the session survey and the following URL it's a call to action I would encourage everyone to do stuff with technology and this might help that was the conclusion and I'm sorry we're out of time for Q&A all right why did that suck so many reasons right okay let's start with terminology and abbreviations unless you are absolutely sure that everybody in the room is going to understand this immediately without thinking about it maybe don't use the acronyms and certainly don't use so many of them and also a horrible horrible title so long so many words right my favorite thing in giving talks besides actually giving the talk is coming up with really terse concise titles that capture the underlying idea hopefully in an entertaining way but that is a sublet right the most important thing is capture the idea of the talk in a really quick way so that someone can look at the talk and immediately understand what it's about without reading a paragraph of information save the paragraph for the description of the talk and then if they really want to know more they can go there right but make the title really simple if you can make it catchy great you get bonus points but more importantly make it simple I bet nobody cares what my title is the only thing that an audience should care about is is this person qualified to be using the microphone to speak at me right now right so you only need to communicate enough information to say I am somewhat of an expert in this field that is why I'm here right now usually that's communicated by I work in the following team at the following company or I am the you know person behind this open source project or I've been looking into this technology for a very long time I have some thoughts about whatever it is you don't need to go in-depth on it and you certainly don't need to start quoting your titles and trying to impress people because they won't be impressed speaking of which it's very common in in conferences especially those run by people who haven't given technical to provide you with a template and inside the template is this one slide that says about the speaker and some speakers take this much much too seriously my typical approach is to delete that slide because in fact the audience doesn't care about me right and shouldn't care about me what they care about is somebody on stage is going to communicate some information don't care who it is just care that they're the right person to communicate that at the time I have seen speakers go on at length about this and it's a big mistake because you're boring the audience right this is all superfluous information all they needed to know was is this person qualified to be talking about this also formality kind of gets me down right I have a conversation with the audience just like this one right it's all about me communicating ideas having a conversation hopefully going back and forth if there's some QA but formality I think is better reserved for maybe a really formal event and not a conference where you're speaking to peers right it's not impressing everybody if you're sort of attaching these titles and and fake formalities with yourself yeah and again too much information agenda slides this is something else it's very common the the big idea with an agenda is there should be an obvious flow to your talk right it's really good for the users for the audience to be able to understand what the mental model is of your talk right so are you explaining a bunch of features in an upcoming release that's a pretty simple model to handle it's not a terribly interesting flow you're just going bam bam bam but at least it's you know it's easy for them to understand are you instead talking about the life cycle some product like you know well we started with this idea and here's where we are right now and this is where we're going all of those are obvious and in those cases you do not need an agenda you don't need to tell people you know what I'm going to tell you about the history and then I'm going to tell you it no no they'll get it right as soon as you start talking about history and then you go in to present it's gonna be obvious and most talks are like that the agenda either is or it should be obvious or you should try to make it obvious if it's not and there are those cases if it actually ends up being more complicated than something that everybody could just just into it by listening to it then sure pop an agenda slide up there but the agenda slide should be fairly short and certainly shouldn't bring it up over and over again and say okay now here's where we are all right but but but now we're here's where they don't care right what they care about it is content as long as you have communicated what the overall idea is that's all you got to do all right I'm going to come back to this one again and again too much information on a slide is a drag there are many many reasons for this one is that the audience is hopefully here to see you explaining things not to read a document on the screen if they're doing that why didn't you just send a document to them instead because that's got to be more interesting than watching somebody wade through this amount of information but more importantly in our brains and I'm sure this because I'm a medical doctor we have one language processing core in our brains right so if I'm in the middle of explaining something and then a slide like this comes up the humans in the audience will turn to the slide and start parsing and immediately and shut me down right they will not listen to me because that brain is going to understand one or the other and for some reason words are really fascinating to us right if you're sitting at the breakfast table and somebody puts down a box of cereal I'm gonna read that box of cereal it has nothing interesting to say to me right but for some reason I want to read it same thing here this slide is not saying anything interesting but if I'm talking and that slide comes up you're gonna try to see if there's something interesting in that and you're not going to hear what I'm saying so the more information you put on slides the less information the audience is getting from you and if they're not getting anything from you then why are you there right so you want to try to condense the information as much as possible on the slide and use those more as signposts to yourself to remember what you were going to communicate to the audience as opposed to a document full of information that you're just going to scatter shot at the audience instead important data short data is important and this is a nice simple chart but wouldn't it be nice if you actually understood what was going on there a little bit more information explanation would have been nice here what are the units over there what do we mean by the time they're just something on the other hand I think especially in internal presentations we see charts like this in fact I gave this talk once and someone coming up afterwards and said where did you get that image because I've seen three different talks using that image just like that and they kind of expected the audience to get it way way way too much information is like the slide that I popped up a couple of slides ago there's just too much going on there you're gonna put this up and the entire audience is just gonna freeze like a deer in the headlights trying to understand what is there's some purple and there's some green and these dots are over there and what does that tech say and like too much information right maybe it's possible that sometimes you need to communicate a lot of information but man you got to build up to it you can't just spring this on people they're gonna pass out all right so there were there were a couple things going on with the equation that I was trying to communicate one okay so as I said sometimes you actually need to communicate something complicated and some of those things are equations but maybe you want to build into them and maybe you want to figure out how to explain them in a more real way there were two approaches that I took to these equations the first one I had memorized what the thing stood for but I'm not an actor right so if I memorize something I'm gonna have a hard time remembering it with 600 people in the room staring at me and bright lights coming down so I'm gonna shut my eyes and I'm gonna try to remember what the script was and I'm gonna look up at the ceiling and I'm gonna look everywhere except at the audience which you should be having this conversation with right so if your approach to giving a talk this complicated information or ending information is to memorize then I would argue that that is the wrong approach unless you are an actor or want to become one right so it certainly didn't work here it was really boring as soon as I shut my eyes and started talking to the back of my eyelids instead of to you then I think the audience at that point sort of Tunes me out because why should they pay attention to me when I'm not paying attention to them on the second side there was something else going on which I think is a lot more common in in tech talks especially when people either have a lot of communication information to communicate or they are very nervous maybe they haven't done this very much and they really need to nail these things and therefore I'm going to write down everything I'm going to say maybe I'll even write it down in exactly the form I want to say it and then if if I forget the script then I can look at the speaker notes and all the information will be there and it will be glorious so I got to this slide and I realize I don't know what's going on but I do have speaker notes so then I just start reading the notes how many times have we seen speakers actually just looking at their laptop screen and they're just reading this beautiful script they took all this time to create this lovely script for their presentation and why should they bother to try to speak to it spontaneously when all of the right way of saying things is directly in the speaker notes so this is the problem with notes is they are a crutch that we end up using as the main leg right we will look and see that it's got all the information and we're really nervous and we can't remember exactly how we were going to phrase this thing and so then we look at the notes and now we're in the world of the notes and we just proceed from there so many presentations died on the vine because people are just reading their speaker notes and they've lost their presence in the room entirely so this one is maybe even more common in presentations as I simply read what was on the screen so please don't do that bullets for me exists or information on slides in general exists as I said as I said signposts for what I should be talking about not the actual thing I'm going to say right so if this is exactly what I wanted to say then there's a simpler way to put that on the slide so that I can actually say it and you're not expecting the audience to read it at the same time everybody in the audience as soon as that starts happening as soon as a speaker actually just starts reading through the information that's already on the slide everybody in the audience is looking at each other going they're reading the bullets they haven't done this very much are they all right Phil have the session survey try to keep your presentation down to the information that's actually required I love this one too this goes back to the density like are you actually expecting people to get this thing you know obviously this is an exaggeration slight one but not that far right a lot of times there's just too much information in there either that you're expecting them to understand very quickly or actually take down some well everybody in the audience is quickly searching for a pen how do I get to that session survey again do you do you actually need this I started seeing this years ago I'm not sure how common it is but in particular vendor talks they always had a call to action like it was it was part of that template that they were given as people on the product team that the organizers said okay here's the template and always have a call to action so at the end of the of the slide you know they would be communicating technical information on you know the rendering engine of something and then the call to action would be go use the code I wrote like what it's a waste right if if you do not have something important to say here delete the slide right actually save your time for something that is more interesting and usable for the audience Q&A we'll come back to this later QA can be a really good thing I really enjoy presentations which are very real-time right where I'm actually engaging the audience and I'm talking to the audience and there's back-and-forth but there's a limit to that I I was at a conference for a company I happened to work for a few years ago and the organizers that year decided Q&A is really important so the sessions are going to be 45 minutes long but don't speak longer than 30 minutes we're gonna save 15 minutes for Q&A and I thought that's five minutes a really good interaction with the audience and ten minutes of wasted time right because what I really want to do is communicate as much information to everybody in the room as possible what I don't want to do is spend 15 minutes answering anecdotal questions from individuals whose issues apply to them and a handful of people in the room it's really good for engaging an audience and raising up some issues but going on to two to long is a big big big mistake so Q&A is good but limit it to what is actually useful for the people in the room otherwise everybody just gets up on mass and leaves why not use that time and communicate more to them instead alright so now I will go over some random thoughts that I had in two different ways I want to talk about how I prepare material or how I think about the material being prepared to make a better presentation and then I want to talk about how I actually present and how you might present to make a more effective presentation so first of all your material as I said earlier there should be an obvious outline and flow to the talk actually think about a way to structure this so that it's not just random information where you're poking things at users from random angles the entire time right you want to think about how the thing flows so that they can stitch the pieces together in their mind as you're explaining them you can create a story now this can be overdone I have I have heard this pushed as like well you've always got to have a story to your presentation well it kind of depends on what you're presenting on right I've been giving an annual talk at a large conference every year where there is no story I am simply explaining the new features in a platform that everybody needs to know about like there's not a story there if I tried to create a story it would be a real stretch right nobody would buy it and nobody should so sometimes it just doesn't fit but there should be a flow there's a logical flow to that one where yep it's scattershot but you know we categorized the features appropriately and we walked through them one by one but if there is sort of a logical way that you can stitch these things together certainly into an outline or maybe in a story like you want to motivate people for using this thing then you want to build up toward the point where okay you've explained all the wonderful things and then at the end you know the climax of the story is you know the the end of this of this thing this arc that you've developed so do think about stories don't think about them as much as some people would stress that you do we went over the speaker notes problem I tend to not use speaker notes or I use very sparse notes I noticed a few years ago there was a particular slide that it was going to be speaking to highly technical information I really kind of want to nail this one point so I thought well I'll just go ahead and like write this little paragraph here and then I'll know exactly how to express this thought because it can be a little bit tricky so I wrote you know two or three sentences and then I was on stage and there were you know a bunch of people in the audience and I looked down at the speaker notes and there was a blob of text and I thought I could either shut things down read the text parse it and then speak it at the audience in which case I've lost everybody's attention in the meantime or I could just ignore it which is what I did so I stayed in the flow I continued to explain I didn't nail it as much as I wanted to but you know what it doesn't matter it mattered more that it kept the attention and engagement of the audience and explained things mostly correct than it did that I all of a sudden shut down obviously read something on my laptop took time to parse it and then regurgitated it to the audience at which point the audience go you know are we less interesting than the laptop that this person is using right so what I do now is either I don't use speaker notes at all so there's nothing there to distract my attention or sometimes I will use them sort of while I'm developing ideas for each slide knowing that I will ignore those when I'm on stage and that's fine or more probably I will just put like if I really want I have you know two or three ideas that I want to express on a slide I will put two or three words there I want it to be small enough so that when I look down and I look at the speaker notes my mind can just grab it immediately right I don't want to have to take the time to actually read anything but two to three ideas you can get that pretty quickly and you can stay in the middle of the sentence that you're talking that you're speaking at the time and you can keep going as I said keep the content on your slide sparse just like this one right the less information you have on the slides the more your audience can get that very quickly just as I was talking about with speaker notes and get back to paying attention to you hopefully the real explanation of everything in the session is coming from the speaker not from the slide so keep that very basic so that they focus their attention where it should be focused instead I tend to use gradual reveals a lot sometimes there is a bunch of information you need to communicate on a slide so you have two choices you can put it up there and unfortunately all of the presentation software I've used does the wrong approach by default which is there are many many bullets in this block of text and it all pops up and onto the slide at once by default right but you can create an animation where all of these things get revealed point by point the problem is if this is not the approach that you take and instead you pop all of this up on the slide at once then that is what the audience will be reading even if you create you know smaller text like I have here generally there tends to be a bit more than that but that means that the audience is reading 0.6 while you are still explaining point 1 you really want to be on the same page with the audience right so make sure that you reveal these things as you talk about them so that you're actually all in the same conversation at the same time simplify your code on the slides it turns out that code on slides doesn't need to compile true I'm sure you can write a test for this I'm also sure you shouldn't write it is not important that it actually be semantically and syntactically correct what is important is that you communicate the core idea that they needed to know about so there was an example a few years ago where I needed to explain basically this this is a particular approach for doing a particular UI animation thing and I needed them to understand this but there's a lot of repetition in this code and not all of it was terribly important for them to get right so instead what I did was I simplified it down to saying okay at the beginning of your routine what you want to do is call this method and that I would explain that briefly and then you're going to do a bunch of things and you know this is the repeated part you're gonna do this to set up that like that's all I needed right that communicated exactly what I wanted to say and exactly what I wanted them to understand I didn't waste their time reading and trying to understand all this other noise on the screen which was either repetitious or irrelevant for the point right so it's all about communicating information it's not about you know being technically correct yes I wrote the correct code on the slide nobody cared they did not understand it right simplify the text as I said you know it's all about being sparse so some people feel very strongly that grammar and sentences and punctuation are terribly important I would argue that they're not on slides right there's a lot of information on this slide that does not need to be there right again you're not getting graded just on the code you're not being graded on building you're not being graded here on on grammatically correct right so you can simplify a lot of things here I'm a fan of not using bullets when I don't need to not a big deal right nobody's wasting time on bullets but it's just extra noise on the slide in general and generally you can get the same effect by simply having space between the lines it's it creates these natural bullets anyway you can also simplify sentences right and you don't need a period at the end of them again you don't need correct punctuation you need the points to be obvious right and you get to the third point and then there was a sub point below that well why don't you explain that sub point again you don't need everything on the slide you need enough information so that you can remember what you were going to say and they need just enough information that they can follow what you're saying right don't give them everything just give them signposts jokes I tend to enjoy presenting things that are entertaining and say funny I'm not going for jokes and that's kind of the important important point is I don't script jokes into my presentation this one's a little bit different right clearly there was some scripted things at the beginning in the way that I delivered or the points that I was making but in general I don't go oh you know on slide 17 I'm gonna say the following thing about my dog doesn't happen right and there are a couple reasons for that one most importantly that's not what I'm there for I am there to communicate information I'm giving technical talks about technical information and that's what I want the audience to walk away from I would love it if they walked away and said that was hilarious I would hate it if they said that was really funny I had no idea what he was talking about right well I wouldn't hate it I would actually really kind of like it internally but I wouldn't be doing my job right my job is to actually communicate that information and jokes can't detract from that if you're spending so much time developing the jokes that you're not focusing on the other stuff or more probably if you're not comedians and you don't know how the joke is gonna land right so it's easy to watch one of these Netflix specials with stand-up comedians and they say you know last night I was out at a bar and they come out with a sentence and it's completely natural it's obvious that they they just made it up on their way up to the stage or maybe they even just thought of it on the stage no they did that same joke in the same exact wording and order night after night after night and then the 200th time they were ready to do the Netflix special right they know how the joke is gonna win and when it doesn't land correctly then they adjust it and adjust it and adjust it and maybe delete it if it's not working us on the other hand we're gonna give a technical thought for the first time do you want that joke to not land right because it probably won't because a we're not comedians in be we haven't worked this joke in clubs over and over and over again until it's absolutely perfect so you don't actually know if a joke is gonna land which means the more effort you put into it and the more emphasis you put on you're basically going to be signposting the joke like a and here comes a joke and then crickets I saw this in a talk once it was a bit awkward the person started out and I believe they had been given the advice you know sort of put the audience at ease by starting out with a joke and you could almost see it on their speaker notes and so they did a sort of you know setup and punchline and that's what it sounded like right there just dead silence and then you saw the sweat pop out on their forehead they were so nervous they were completely put off balance because they were told to do a joke and they did a joke and it died and they almost did too right because they didn't know how I was gonna land and so therefore don't count on it if you do if you want to put in something there that you think is funny eh don't spend a lot of time on it cuz it's not your job be you don't know how it's gonna end therefore if it doesn't land that's fine don't put a lot of stress on it I say lots of things that I think are hilarious that other people don't agree and it's fine I just move on I just pretend it wasn't a joke that works too alright so that was the material what about you when you present one is to project so if you could actually stand next to me now you would think I was speaking far too loudly even though I have a microphone and you're gonna hear me no matter how I say this thing there's something about creating energy in the room and energy in a presentation from actually projecting from speaking a little bit louder and I'm not talking about just yelling right I'm actually articulating and modulating in my voice two different volumes because that's about projecting energy more than just sheer volume so be in the room and project out to the room especially sometimes you don't even have a microphone I was at a deaf fest last week in the UK and there were no microphones so learn how to project because there were other speakers speaking there that we're not used to doing that and the people in the back of the room couldn't right so do get used to the idea that no no there needs to be a little bit more volume certainly a lot more energy and excitements so that everybody everywhere can hear you and they know that you're really engaged and interested in the material it's not just this monotone presentation where you're working you through the words it's actually something you're interested in used your body so I'm not very good today about walking around on stage because I forgot my clicker which is really common for me I forget my clicker every time I travel all right so I actually have to stand next to the arrow keys here but I could be walking around and if I did that I would do it purposely right I would be making a particular point and then I would stand there while I came to the end of the point and then when I'm ready to go on to a different point maybe I move somewhere else so that I'm distinguishing the things that I'm talking about in different spaces and then moving according to that I'm not simply pacing back and forth which can be really disorienting for the audience and then they're kind of wondering what I'm going to do and I would say the same thing about body motion in general so if you're moving make it purposeful you could even build it into what you're talking about so maybe I have the story about client and server operations and whenever I talk about the client I'm going to be over here and then when I'm talking about what's going on in the server I'm going to be over here and now what I want to refer back to these things I can easily use space to help the audience understand which side I'm talking about now if I get them mixed up then that's probably worse than not moving at all but you can use it for particular reasons or you can just use it to articulate an emphasize points same thing with body motions right if I was going to sit here and you know I have like oops and I have let's say you know a badge and I'm just going to walk around I'm going to swing this thing then that is really disturbing everybody in the audience is going to be like a cat watching the thread waiting for something to happen right you don't want to do that what you want to do is to unplug your laptop at a really unfortunate time which really helps grab the attention of the audience just like that thank you you want to use purposeful gestures right I want to I want to emphasize my words right I articulate clearly I modulate my tone and sometimes I use gestures associated with that they're very abstract gestures but I'm not doing this the whole time this is not helpful right waving my hands in the air not helpful right but if I'm actually emphasizing a point right the combination of the body as well as the modulation my voice helps emphasize the important point the important point of the sentence but make in general whether you're moving around on the screen you're using gestures make them purposeful don't just make them arbitrary because then it's just distracting it doesn't help anybody I contact is really good one of the things that I tried to work on in that in that first terrible talk was I believe a lot of people will avoid eye contact probably through nervousness maybe through you know feeling that there they need to be more formal and therefore they're giving an academic talk and it's more abstract and so in general these people will either look at the floor or a look at the ceiling or a look at their laptop right it's a little bit easier to remember and to think about what you're saying if you're not actually staring at people in the audience but it turns out the audience is there to stare at you so this is your revenge so you want to engage the audience that is the entire reason that you're in the room right so actually be a part of the conversation in the room which means you're looking around at people in the room right and you're looking around all over the place you're not you know constantly looking over here and everybody on that sides like what's wrong with us what did we do wrong over there you're also not looking at somebody so much that it gets creepy right keep the eyes moving don't keep them standing like that that's not helping either but actually make sure that the audience whether you are looking directly at them at any time or not they do know if you're looking at someone or at someone's right make sure that they understand that actually you are a part of the conversation in the room and be in the room in general there's there's there's a technique that I noticed I I kind of do all the time and I I did it unconsciously which was I start to talk before the talk right so usually before I will launch into you know my name is so-and-so here's where I'm from this is the title of the talk let's go I would actually start a conversation with people in the room I would comment on something that happened while I trip down the stairs or you know somebody I knew in the audience or somebody did something in like a comment I'll basically start a conversation with the audience so that by the time I actually get to the point where I'm saying here's the title of the talk I've already gotten there right and there's a couple of reasons for this one is it makes me very present in the room it makes me it makes the audience see that I am noticing things that are going on that that we're all part of this shared experience today in the room together another is there is an inherent nervousness that I think everybody feels and if you don't you're lying and when we get up in front of people there is adrenaline and nervousness that kicks in like even me I love this right I really really love this but I'm still nervous right I just I misinterpret that nervousness as positive energy but also I'm it agates that nervousness by starting that conversation right so inevitably the first time I open my mouth and start speaking is is the maximum nervousness that I have like whenever I you know if I'm in the audience and I ask a question I'm terribly nervous because like you're trying to collect your words and I want to articulate this thing and I want to make it concise and everything sort of jumbles out and nerves are racing around in there like for some reason that's like a really bad situation well the same thing can be true when you start a talk right well I'm going to start this is really important for my career and I need to say the title in my net and and then it all you know you're all nervous and then a couple minutes in after you realize that it's going okay then the nervousness calms down well if you start the conversation beforehand you kind of get over that with easy stuff so when you're actually starting the talk then it's a bit more natural you're you're in the flow I also like being spontaneous on stage there's a couple of different aspects to this one is if something happens in the room go ahead and react to it right if somebody you know passes out and the first right hopefully not whatever is going on like there's no reason that you have to be you know aloof from this and this formal speaker up at the top instead you you can and you should be a part of the experience in the room the other element for me is that I don't script my talks and I don't rehearse at all and this doesn't mean we'll talk about this a little bit later this doesn't mean that I don't know the content really well and I'm not prepared to give the talk but it does mean that I don't know what I'm gonna say before my mouth opens and I start speaking the words this means that the words that I'm using including for this talk right I've given this talk lots of times but I don't have a script right I don't know how I'm gonna articulate the points but I know that you know I have a I have a fair number of years speaking this language and maybe I can figure this stuff out as soon as my mouth opens which means that the way that I say those words is going to feel much more natural to the people in the room then if I had a script and I started speaking the script people can tell right whether it is memorized and memorized poorly because we are not actors or whether you have a teleprompter as most keynote speakers do then chances are they're going to be articulating their words in a way that the audience can immediately detect as having been either memorized or read off a teleprompter and they disconnect right then you're not a part of the conversation in the room you're a part of the conversation on the teleprompter or in the script in your head you're not really present you're thinking about the stuff that you want to say in the way that you want to say it so spontaneity is good and one of those elements for spontaneity that I use is to have a co speaker which is kind of ridiculous today because someone that I give a lot of talks with while Maggie is actually here and I'm not doing this talk with him but you know he pissed me off I've given this talk a lot on my own so I'm actually more comfortable sort of speaking to everything just because of the way that I've given this talk but in general almost every talk I give I would prefer to give with someone else a it cuts down on the amount of work that you have to do preparing right because somebody else is responsible for half the content which is awesome but also it makes the talk itself more spontaneous not only do I know not know what I'm going say I have no idea what my co-speaker is gonna say and there's another advantage to where I believe it makes the talks better because the other person on stage can be thinking of things while you're too busy articulating right so if I'm in the middle of saying something and either I forget something that we had meant to say on the slide or co-speaker thinks oh you know what there's an anecdote about this that helps explain this a bit more then they can jump in and be a part of the conversation at the same time and that spontaneity again is one of those things that lends itself to the audience realizing oh this is actually like a real time conversation this isn't some scripted canned thing we're actually a part of this shared experience right now which is all a huge part of engaging the audience and making sure that everybody is engaged this is like one of the main things for me is to engage in audience it's you know the main job is to communicate an information but the main technique I use if I have any is to actually engage the audience right looking around making sure that everybody's paying attention waking them up if I have to but just being a part of the experience and making sure that the audience knows it as well like I'm actually here right now and everybody hopefully is aware of that just the the energy that I'm using and and the way that I'm participating in the conversation in general means yep we're all part of this shared thing so it's not just there's a speaker up on stage and then there's everybody else in the audience no no we're all in the same room at the same time I just happen to be the only one with the microphone one of my favorite things that I hear especially internally but I've heard this in many places it's especially a keynote thing is for someone to say we're so excited to announce that I always think no you're not actually I know what excitement looks like and it's not that right so maybe you're not excited then don't use the word find a different way to express the idea maybe it's a really cool thing maybe you are really proud of this thing you know may-maybe you're really bored you probably shouldn't say that but there's a way to express truth and not use words that are not expressing truth right generally they're not excited when they say maybe it's because they're nervous that would be maybe you should say I'm really nervous to announce the following then it would be truth what I would much rather say is just you know tell me what's actually going on if you're not excited don't use the word if you are excited actually be excited right instead of you know memorizing the script and then saying in the script we're so excited to know it actually is a really cool product be excited about it that's what the audience wants to see they don't want to see this mismatch between the way it's being delivered and the actual words that it's being delivered with tone is very important I think especially it would people get nervous or maybe they think there needs to be some formality then they get more monotone the voice drops the energy drops and the audience goes to sleep instead articulate right it's so important to articulate and modulate the words it actually make the point specify the important important points of the sentence right not every word is as important as every other one so make sure you do that and then it helps communicate the ideas in the words and it also helps communicate that energy and that passion that interest that you have in the topic because clearly you're engaged because you're so excited about the word excitement come prepared so this is interesting I said I don't script and I don't rehearse but I do come prepared enough right I know my content really really well and I'm I've come prepared to deliver the content so that when I see a slide with information on it like this I have a pretty good idea of what I wanted to say on that slide I don't know what words I'm going to use to express that and I certainly didn't memorize any but I do prepare the content really well I wrote the slides there based on information I had to begin with I go over the slides beforehand make sure that I remember what's coming up so I'm ready to go in the room I just don't practice a scripted talk I do practice but when I talk about practice the most important thing to me in in giving talks in general is the ability to be comfortable on stage I think the nervousness that I talked about like everybody feels that so don't feel like oh when I do this more I will know be nervous no you will but you get used to it and you realize it will be okay right it's it's important not to practice that talk over and over and over and over again but I think it's very important to practice doing talks over and over and over and over and over and over and over there are many ways to do this I happen to do a bunch of comedy I've done some stand-up I've done some improv I do the satire talks whatever it is I've done a bunch of tech talks but you can do internal tech talks you can do meetings with your colleagues you can do things I don't know pictionary with your friends you can do Toastmasters you can do acting classes whatever it is that makes you get up in front of people will help you not get over that nervousness but get used to the nervousness and actually get comfortable on stage and that comfort is what then leads itself to to having that positive energy to actually enjoying this and then being comfortable with whatever happens on stage because not only is it important to be comfortable so that you can you know communicate ideas with the right tone and and not to have this sort of you know built-in nervousness that that may be wrecking that tone or whatever but also things could go wrong I mean who knows maybe you're gonna accidentally unplug the video cable in the middle of your talk wouldn't it be horrible if that happens wouldn't it be nice if you were comfortable enough on stage that you could just walk away from the laptop and let the professionals handle the situation and eventually maybe it would go go back and plug itself in and then things would work in and in the meantime you didn't freak out right that's the main thing if you freak out and then you're frozen well the audience is not terribly interested in that experience what they want is to see the situation get resolved and then you go on with the talk and the more comfortable and flexible you are on stage the easier that's going to be to happen all right rehearse enough as I said I don't script and rehearse here's my fake data on this I believe that if you script and rehearse a talk and that's the way you're going to deliver it then the first time you give it it's going to suck and then the second time it'll suck and then the third time and it's going to suck for a specific reason it's not you it's we're not actors and as an audience we don't want to see people delivering lines what we want to see is a conversation and the more time you practice this the closer you can get to actually being conversational and looking like that Netflix comedian who made it look so natural but the first many many many times it's not going to be very good so unless you have the time to do this over and over again before you get up on stage then maybe that's not going to work for you it doesn't work for me I have other things to do my impression of my talks goes something more like this like they start out pretty good and then each time I give them yeah they get a little better because I worked on them I'm not using the same words but at least I'm getting you know more and more familiar with the ideas and eventually they get really good they don't get as good as a highly scripted incredibly over rehearsed talk but I don't have the time to do that so I kind of made my own call for my talks and I just go completely unscripted rehearsed know the content completely figure out how to say how to articulate it on the fly and then go from there but do know your content completely QA we talked about this a little bit's it's important to repeat questions from the audience for a couple of reasons one is you want to make sure that you understood it correctly so especially you know maybe they're having a hard time getting the words in the right order and you're not exactly sure what they were saying or maybe they said you know several paragraphs of information before they got to the question just repeat the question so that you make sure that you're answering the right question also the other people in the audience might not have heard unless they're on a microphone coming through the same speakers maybe everybody didn't hear it so therefore and they're not going to understand your answer also don't go on too long because a there's other questions the answer in the audience and be each question probably only covers a minority of the audience so do a few of them and then cut it and you're done I would say almost most importantly in this whole thing is don't worry so much so are you going to say um in a sentence I'm pretty sure I've said a few today it's fine are you gonna pause and forget what you're gonna say and actually be silent and then continue with it that's okay - are you gonna forget a point that you wanted to make probably but that's okay already or maybe forget exactly how you wanted to express a particular point or two absolutely you're going to do that what's the worst thing that could happen you could die you could be up here given a presentation and you could just die now chances are that's not gonna happen and that means the worst thing didn't happen but even if it does you're not around to suffer from it so don't worry about it an important one for me is to actually have fun I do really enjoy this so it's great for me because I'm having a good time up here but I also believe strongly that it's good for the audience we enjoy seeing other people having a good time if you go see a stand-up comic and even if the Stanwood comic is bombing but they're having a good time on stage it helps the audience enjoy the show right like maybe the jokes aren't landing but if they're kind of smiling and laughing and having fun with it it's all comfortable as soon as they feel awkward on stage then so does the audience they want to be anywhere else at the time so the more fun that you can have presenting the more fun the audience has and the more engage they are in your presentation and in absorbing the content that you came there to teach them one of the final rules is these are guidelines they are just my opinions they work for me hopefully some of them work for you and again don't worry about it it's not a big deal one more final points very important always wear the same shirt so if I can summarize this grand summary for the slides reduce your clutter make them as sparse as possible make sure the audience stays focused on you the presenter and you engage that audience and that is all thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Devoxx

Views: 2,785

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: DevoxxBe, DevoxxBE19

Id: DtP9jjQJjt8

Length: 50min 7sec (3007 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 06 2019