Speaking to the Masses
In a few weeks (July 20th) I’ll be flying back east again to speak at the University of Pennsylvania’s User Interface Conference. It’s been in the works now for about 6 or 7 months and as the date approaches I find myself closely examining every detail of my presentation.
Initially I was slated to speak for about 60mins to 50 or so people and I had the presentation all laid out (for the most part), it was going to be a fairly casual thing and I was hoping to engage in more of a conversation with the audience as it’s more of a classroom setting. And I felt pretty good about that until they moved the talk into a larger room to accomodate the popularity.
First off, I think that’s awesome, and I’m totally pumped to try and educate more people about HTML 5 and the direction of the Web. But it caused me to trash my entire presentation and rebuild it for a larger audience. Which is fine, I don’t have a problem with that at all; it just adds to the intensity a little now that it’s 18 days away and I’m still building what I hope will be a great talk.
I always get nervous before speaking, so it’s nothing new to get butterflies – especially speaking to a good size crowd at a conference. But I think it’s pretty awesome talking to someone who is taking notes about what you’re saying. It can be a little intimidating, but I like it. I’m usually nervous until about 30 seconds into a speech/talk and then I’m fine. I actually kinda like public speaking and that intense nervous feeling when you crack the first awkward joke wondering if anyone’s going to laugh. Let me tell you, if you get that laugh early, the rest of the talk will be easy as pie. If you don’t… you’re in for a wild ride.
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