The Talk on Talks

Most people are scared to present at a conference, or a meetup, or at a company meeting. Public speaking is a common fear, and many find themselves at night waking up from nightmares involving a disastrous speech. All too often, people think public speaking is something to be afraid of.

THEY”RE TOTALLY RIGHT OH MY GOD PUBLIC SPEAKING IS ONE OF THE MOST STRESSFUL THINGS YOURE EVER GOING TO DO PLEASE HIDE AND AVOID ALL HUMANS AND STRANGER DANGER

Now, that said, sometimes you’re stuck. You can’t very well turn down the speech at your best friend’s wedding now, can you? Or maybe you can because secretly you don’t like your friend as much as they think you do. You meanie.

The best public speakers are as nervous as you are. They’ve just done it before, and they all do certain things much better than you. But you can change that. It’s an extremely learnable skill.

That’s what this talk is all about.

Slides

Video

Behind-the-scenes video of how this talk was created

While building this talk about talks, I also made a video that talks about building that talk about talks.

It’s half an hour long — about as long as the talk itself — and gives you a different viewpoint of how a talk is made, from planning it all out, designing the slides, and delivering it to an audience. I’ll even show you all the embarrassing things that happened to me during the talk itself.

Companion Site

I’ve published a gigantic mess of writing about public speaking up on speaking.io.

Give it a gander if you’re into that.