Hana recounts the preparation she did for an online presentation, including some advice from me. I’m right in the middle of preparing my own online presentation right now, and I should really heed that advice. But I fear what I told Hana was “do as I say, not as I do.”
I’ve just come back from running a workshop at Webstock in New Zealand, followed by another one in Hong Kong. I heartily concur with Tim’s advice here. I’ve certainly migrated to having a more modular approach to workshops. In fact, these days I have little to no slides. Instead, it’s all about being flexible.
You can spend forever carefully crafting and refining your workshop and coming up with solid exercises but at the end of the day, you need to be ready to go with the flow.
Some sections you wanted to cover you may not get to. Some topics you hadn’t allotted a lot of time to may need to become more detailed. That’s all fine because the workshop is about helping them, not yourself.
Rachel describes her process of putting technical talks together:
This method of creating a talk is the one that I find gets me from blank page to finished slide deck most effectively.
She also acknowledges that many other processes are available.
If you are stuck, and your usual method isn’t working, don’t be afraid to try a different approach even if just to get the ideas moving and take you away from staring at the blank page! You might discover that some types of talk benefit from an alternate starting point. There really are no rules here, other than that you do end up with a talk before you need to walk out on that stage.
Continuing the topic of public speaking, Jenn has a really good technique for figuring out how to arrange the pieces of your talk without getting bogged down in designing slides.
Lena’s in-depth run-down of how she puts together a conference talk. If you’re new to public speaking, this is well worth reading.