Julie's tips for NEW Presenters
Here are the things that I think made a big difference for me between my very first conference presentation and my second. The first was at 8am on a Monday morning. The second was at 8am the very next morning. Although my slides and demos were great for the first, I thought that I was a little sloppy and was not happy at all when I finished.
1) Do not make self-deprecating remarks about yourself. Even if, as in my case, it was my VERY first time presenting at a conference, the audience does not need or want to know this. They want to have confidence that they are getting good information from a good source, so regardless of your own confidence level, let them know that this is the case.
2) Definitely have an "about me" slide. No need to be humble here. Again, this just gives them more confidence that you know what you are talking about. It is not necessary to spend too much time on that slide if you feel funny about it, but at least it is good for them to get a quick glimpse of who you are. List as much as you can think of. It just looks good that the slide has a long list on it!
3) Go through your presentation in advance and make notes. I found that in a review of my presentation and demos on the night before my talk, there were things that I looked at and didn't remember why they were there! I went through the code until I remembered the purpose of it. I made comments in the code and wehre necessary a quick note on my presentation notes.
4) Clean up your code. My first session had code that was written specifically for that session so it was ok. The second session was one where I showed code from a production app. So I made sure to clean that up, removing commented out code that I decided not to use, etc.
5) Comment your code. I thought of this during someone else's presentation. I found that while they were talking, I was looking at the code and trying to figure out what it was doing. Comments in the code are useful, even if they seem like over kill.
6) Notes notes notes. This is NOT a script, but just little reminders on some slides where you don't want to forget - "demo here", "can skip if necessary", "mention xyz", etc.
7) Notes notes note - USE THEM! Probably someone who has spoken a lot won't need this as much but it made a huge difference for me on the second day when I made myself. I printed out the deck in the format of 3 slides on the left and lines for notes on the right. During my presentation, I was not shy about the fact that I was referring to them. They helped me a great deal. The most important reason is that they helped me stay on track. I can get off topic VERY quickly, distracted, etc etc. Each time I thought I was done with a slide, I took a quick look at my notes to make sure there wasn't anything else I wanted to mention and then a quick look at the notes for the next slide before I got to it. It made a huge difference. I cannot stress this enough!
8) Slides slides slides - USE THEM. Here's why. Day 1) I showed the title slide and started talking. I started saying who I was and why I was doing this talk. All of a sudden I started thinking "what am I talking about? This is not what I wanted to say" But it was a little late and for the sake of continuity I had to complete what I had started talking about rather than stop abruptly and it took me a few slides before I could get myself back on track.
9) Agenda slide. This was part of the problem above. I DID HAVE an agenda slide in the deck, but I had already talked too much about "why I was doing the presentation" when I was going on and on at the beginning that when I got to the agenda, it just seemed redundant.
10) Slides slides slides - STICK TO THEM. So on the second day, I said NOTHING on the title slide, I talked about myself when I was on the about me slide and I talked about the presentation when I was on the agenda slide. On the agenda slide is where I let myself talk about WHY I was doing the presentation and then I went through the points of the slide also.
11) Slides slides slides - STICK TO THEM part 2. Yes I know I just said that. It's important. Trust the fact that you have prepared your talk and that it is organized. Don't start rambling. Take advantage of the fact that you have already taken the time to get your thoughts organized.
12) Find a friendly face in the audience (or a few). On the first day there was a young guy who every time I look at him I thought he was laughing at how stupid I was. There were some others that looked bored. I kept checking back to see if they were engaged yet and they continued to have the appearance of hating my presentation. This was not helpful to me. It is not necessarily the case that they were in fact bored or thinking I was ridiculous. But nevertheless, it was killing me and my confidence level sank by the minute. On the second day there were some folks who were very clearly engaged. So it was them that I would look to to bolster my confidence. I noticed in a session that I attended, I was really getting a lot out of it and nodding etc. The speaker noticed and I became his anchor. It made me feel uncomfortable to have him looking at me so much, but it was someone I knew and I understood that I was helping him. So I just made sure that if I had to yawn or something (last session of the day) I did it when he was not looking at me!
13) Have fun! If you are stressing and it shows, that ain't good. Get excited about something. My user group members tease me that when I present I will say stuff like "oh, this part is SO cool!"
14) PREPARE PREPARE. I am not presuming that you don't prepare your session, but review it in its entirety before you actual give your talk. I know someone who was very confident about a talk he was giving and had done it twice before so did not review it. He was taken by surprise during the session when he couldn't remember why something was there. So in advance, go through it, if there is anything that you are only 95% sure of, do whatever you need to , read, play with code, etc. to ensure that you know the material down cold. Be prepared for anyone to ask at anytime "Why did you choose to do it that way?"
15) Think about the time alotted to your talk! It is not uncommon to either run over or get near the end and go "oh my god, only 5 minutes left and I have 10 more slides and 2 demos. So here is what I did. I noted how many slides I had (not counting title and resources). It was 33. I said to myself - 5 minutes per slide would be 165 minutes. I have 75 minutes for my presentation. So I need to average 2 minute per slide. That was a really useful bit of knowledge to have in my head. In fact, I wrote this on the top of my notes!
16) Make a list of all projects, applications etc you need to use and open them up in advance. I actually had the idea to do this for my first presentation too. I wrote on the top of my notes, exactly which things I wanted to open up. Eg. I knew I had a demo where I wanted to show them before and after in SQL Server. So I opened up Enterprise and opened up the database in advance so I wouldn't have to waste precious time during the presentation to do this. NOTES: I put this list on the top of my notes so I wouldn't have to worry about remembering these silly details and therefore be able to focus on my presentation instead.
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