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Preparedness & Feedback Matters by Joseph Guadagno || Public Speaking Virtual Conference
Oct 30, 2023
Watch the third session of Public Speaking Virtual Conference by Joseph Guadagno as he talks about -
👉 Preparedness & Feedback Matters
How do you prepare yourself including any practicing, setting up and testing machines, any gadgets you carry with you.
Watch Full Conference here: https://youtu.be/h3YySNz-rcA
Conference Website: https://www.2020twenty.net/publicspeaking
C# Corner - Community of Software and Data Developers: https://www.c-sharpcorner.com
#csharpcorner #virtualconference #live #public #speaking #feedback #prepardness
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0:00
And here we are
0:04
Well, that must be me. Yeah, that's definitely you. Joe looks like we don't have a speaker slide
0:10
That's fine. Welcome Joe to our. I do have my speaker slide
0:14
Conference, then awesome. You are all good to go and take us there
0:19
Thank you. Hello everyone. My name is Wu Dagnu. Do you notice one of the things Magnus talked about was being
0:29
present, being ready, being prepared. He talked about dressing as my first real day
0:36
dressing. So I put on full speaker gear, my polo shirt, my Quicken Loans outfit
0:45
I even got pants and shoes. You can't see it, but I got pants and shoes on, which is
0:49
It is very unusual nowadays with all of our current scenario. So I'm here to talk about preparation and feedback
1:02
Hopefully, I'll be able to cover a lot more with everything that Magnus and Monica talked about
1:13
Because, you know, in all honesty, they stole some of my thunder. But I'm super passionate about this topic
1:18
and I have a lot to cover. So let's start off with a little bit about me
1:29
My name is Joe Guidagno. You can follow me on multiple social media platforms
1:34
at jguidagno on Twitter, Facebook, josephguidagno.net, LinkedIn, josephguidagno. Or if you want to learn more about me
1:42
or some of my presentations, check out jjg.me slash about me. So preparation. You've heard Magnus mention it. You've heard Monica talk about it. There's a lot
1:58
to going into preparation. It's kind of funny that I got asked to do this talk because I am
2:06
super when it comes to preparing for talks. I have a certain regime of things I do
2:15
I go through a certain kind of rehearsal just amongst myself when I have a talk, whether
2:24
I'm creating a new one or working on an existing one. And we're going to kind of walk through some of that
2:31
I had one of my coworkers earlier this week asked me about public speaking because he
2:38
knows I speak a lot at conferences and he was trying to get into it
2:42
So I sat there and talked during our one-on-one for almost a half hour
2:47
And at the end of the one-on-one, I told him, I was like, this is perfect
2:51
I just literally gave the talk I'm giving in four days to you without any memory or any preparation for it
3:03
So as Monica said earlier, granted, he wasn't my pet, but he was my team member in the unfortunate trial run
3:12
for this. So talking about preparation, this tweet came out, I think it was last Friday
3:22
if I remember correctly. And then me being the Uisenheimer, I put in, I guess I should start
3:29
preparing. In all honesty, for a lot of my talks, I prepare way out there, assuming it's not an
3:38
impromptu. Like if I'm at a conference and someone wants to learn about technology, why
3:43
I might just go and start talking about it right there. But for something like this or a
3:50
another conference talk, I actually start looking out could be weeks, could be months out ahead of
3:58
time to start preparing. So I'm going to walk you through a lot of those tips and a lot of the things
4:04
I do. The first start is content. And if you notice, I only have one focus point on the majority
4:13
of my slides. So I sat through that presentation that Magnus gave about, I want to say three or
4:21
four years ago when we were at the C Sharp Corner Conference in India. He gave an impromptu talk
4:27
about that, which was awesome. But as Dave McCartan mentioned, he had to go rewrite his scripts. I had
4:34
to go rewrite all my slides and I only had like two hours left to go and do it. So they all went
4:39
from this bright white to this darker, more eye pleasing. This one's mostly white because there
4:46
are simple images in it. But content is the key. Sit down and think about it. Think about it like
4:55
you're doing a book report or you're planning out your next software project or you're planning
5:02
out a wedding or some other festivity. Think about what you want to cover. Think about what
5:09
you want to do. Put that together in a series of notes, whether they be mental, whether you use
5:16
OneDrive, or whether you use something like old-fashioned pen and paper. So this is a
5:23
screenshot of my notepad that I took when I was actually preparing for this content. I started
5:31
outlining some of the stuff I wanted to do, you'll see that there's the preparation steps. I started
5:38
doing the basic outline where we talked about content, which you saw our slide that said content
5:43
Talked about the outline where we're right now talking about outline. We'll eventually get into
5:48
the plan, the scripting, the rehearsal, time, commitment, et cetera. But I write down everything
5:56
what I want to cover. And then I kind of rearrange it. Sometimes I do it in paper. Sometimes I do it
6:02
in OneNote. It usually starts off quickly in paper and I'm just jotting things down and then I'll
6:09
translate it into OneNote or something like a notepad, something like that, where I can just
6:17
copy, paste, move stuff around. But the important is to have a plan and an outline that takes you
6:25
from point A, point B. One of the things I've learned in the three days I've been speaking in
6:32
public is that you want to tell a story. Start off with the beginning, build up, get some content in
6:42
there, get audience engagement, which is kind of hard to do when you're just doing a remote
6:48
presentation like this, but get the engagement, get them bought into the story where they're
6:53
interested they want to learn then complete the story with an end which is usually action items or something very similar to what you seen in the last two presentations so far So building out your outline takes you off to the next step which is the rehearsal itself
7:17
So with me, I have a script that I follow. This is a sample script from one of my presentations
7:24
All of my content has that outline that I gave you on the previous slide
7:30
This one. Let's go back. This slide. It has the basics outline
7:39
Then we go through and we script it out. So this script kind of covers everything I'm talking about
7:47
I start off with the title of the talk. Presentation setup. These are things I need to do for this particular talk, building native mobile applications with React and JavaScript
7:58
I had a presentation set up. I needed to go back and make sure I have Node.js set up
8:07
I have this app called JSON Server set up. If I'm on a Windows, because I go back and forth between Windows and Macintosh computers, I use Chocolaty and Yarn
8:19
These are steps I do. So I have a presentation script, which kind of tells the story, goes back to telling the story and being
8:28
I also, if you look at my website, I have a lot of presentations I do
8:32
I think on the website, there are currently 20 some odd active talks that I do ranging in technologies and soft skills talk
8:41
it's hard to give a really good effective presentation and be that expert that Monica
8:49
talked about if you're doing so many. So I script that because even if I'm doing the same talk over
8:56
and over again, there's times in between that I'm not doing anything. Like I haven't given a
9:02
presentation in the current environment for probably three or four months. So even if I gave
9:07
this talk four months ago before we started to, you know, not be able to fly, not be able to meet
9:15
in public, I would still go through this script day before, two days before to make sure that I
9:22
have everything that I want to bring out to the audience. And this kind of gives me a walking
9:29
script. I don't memorize it because a lot of what we do, you talk about and you do as you go along
9:38
but it covers a lot of the basics. And I usually have this around just in case, especially if I'm
9:44
doing code heavy talks, I'll be able to see the actual code and it will trigger something in my
9:51
head to say, okay, Joe, you need to go and do this. Part of those scripts come up with a timing
10:01
So timing and rehearsals are very important when you're going. Magnus talked about how he started
10:11
his timer. I have mine right here, which kind of shows me what time it is and how much time I
10:20
have left. Monica talked about hers. We all have timings. You want to be, you got to remember
10:27
people are either, you know, pending, they're paying in some way, shape, or form. They're paying
10:33
with their time to be there, or they're paying with currency to be at that event. So you want to
10:39
make it as cost effective as it can be for them. So you should value their time just like they
10:46
should value everyone else's time. Be prepared. Go through. Here I have an outline. In this
10:54
particular script for introduction to ASP.NET.Core, I have a set of timings, as I call them. These are
11:04
the topics I cover. I'm going to walk through an agenda that slides one, two, three, one through
11:10
three of my PowerPoint slide. And that should take me on average two minutes and 37 seconds
11:18
let's say. Then I go through ASP.NET Core. By the time I'm done with that, I'm at my five-minute mark
11:28
After that, I cover the why ASP.NET Core, which should cover slides five through eight
11:35
And then I'm at 1014. Now, these are averages. This is not the first time you run through it because rehearsal is important
11:43
Like all the previous speakers mentioned, you are selling yourself. You're selling your experience and you're trying to educate people
11:53
So you want to make sure you're clear and concise with what you do
11:58
If you have to stumble and, you know, look at your diet or sorry, I'm going to go through the side
12:05
and talk about something, you're going to lose the audience's interest, and then they're going
12:11
to devalue what you're saying to avoid that. So I go through these several times. I write out the
12:20
basic concepts or the basic timings, and then kind of walk through that myself, whether it be with a
12:28
dog or a local user group or just talk to myself, I constantly go through them over and over again
12:37
to perfect it as I'm doing it. So once I perfected the talk and I'm ready to move on to the next step
12:46
you go to what I do before the talk. There are actually quite a few things I do just before
12:55
the talk. The first one I do is get backups ready. Super
13:06
super, super and lots of different things can go wrong. Call out the
13:15
C Sharp Corner India conference that I won the first time. We tried out Mahesh was in a new venue
13:22
We were trying out different things, and I remember one of the biggest problems we had was the video displays
13:32
We had one VGA cable that went into the laptop and then about 100 feet of VGA cable to the next projector, which then daisy chained 100 feet off to the next one in the back, which is great
13:52
It was doable. The room we were in allowed us to be able to sit
13:59
It was a quite large room. The problem was people getting up people getting up taking over the cable The cable would knock out one set of the screens which if you on a Windows PC would knock out other things So the moral of that is
14:17
just be prepared for whatever can go wrong. I typically have screenshots of code just in case
14:25
or screenshots of the working application just in case, like I had a screenshot of the tweet
14:31
earlier. I have code backups in a lot of my demos. I am writing code from beginning to end
14:42
So I back up my code the entire time. Usually it's a point in time backup. So what I do
14:52
was here, this is a new code. So this is where I start. And then I have a separate, you know
15:01
If I look at my outline that I showed you earlier, I have different steps
15:05
At this step, this is the code base I'm in. This allows me to be able to go back to the code if anything else happens or anything else goes wrong in the process
15:19
Another thing to do is have a USB drive. You'll never know if your computer happens to die when you're doing it
15:28
And it's hard to, hey, that's my next point, David, about bringing the video adapters
15:37
I always have the code on USB drives or somewhere in the cloud so that if, knock on wood, I ever have an issue with my laptop, in theory, I can find another presenter that has everything that I might need and use that for it
15:58
Another thing, I wrote a blog post, a selfish plug. If you go to jjg.me slash git tag, I wrote a process for speakers that I use git that allows you to kind of checkpoint your code
16:13
So you don't have to have 200 meg of source code sitting on your laptop for each day
16:21
You can use the abilities of git to do that versioning along
16:24
So as you're talking, yeah, I had mine die one time just before I was on an airplane and Windows 95 decided to do an update at the time
16:38
And it was just before a talk and I was got it just up to the time of the talk, which is why backups are super important
16:50
In addition to having backups of your code, you need backups of your gear
16:58
So as David McCarter mentioned in his, I carry a bag similar to this
17:06
With all of us not traveling right now, I have it crashed away
17:12
But this bag is very similar to what I guarantee every one of the speakers that have been in this show
17:19
so far, and even I know David does, have something like this. Backup VGA cable
17:27
backup DVI cable. I have from whatever laptop I'm using to VGA, DVI, HDMI, every possible video
17:39
combination, because you never know what you're walking into. I have backup batteries. I have
17:45
backup power cables in the event my power travel adapter dies in the middle of a talk
17:51
I have charging cables for my phone, my phone plugged in. That's my timer for it. So these are
18:00
important. Yes, it's a little bit investment, but remember people are making an investment into you
18:06
make an investment into your craft to be prepared and have something like this. And I'm saying go
18:12
out and buy this bag right now and fill it up. As you start to do more talks, you'll realize
18:20
things that you need and that you should have as you're going forward. Which brings me to my next
18:29
step, preparing. Drink water. Drink lots of water. I drink so much water that by the end of my talk
18:38
I am ready to run to the restroom to go. It's important to stay hydrated the whole time
18:47
And it's just hydrated before so that your throat is lubricated and ready to go to talk
18:54
Because the last thing you want to do is to be at your talk and start talking like this because you have no voice
19:02
You want to make sure your voice is fully lubricated so that you can change the tone of your voice
19:08
Or you can laugh with the audience or cry with the audience too, depending on the story you're trying to tell
19:16
So drink lots of water. Have one or two with you on stage while you're there
19:23
There's no harm in stopping for a second, taking a swig of water to do it
19:31
But if your voice is perpetually dry just prior to, you might have done yourself no good
19:40
So drink up before the talk. Be ready for it. Next step is keep calm and arrive early
19:50
So it's funny. Magnus put up a talk with the person in the broken glasses
19:56
is Monica put up a talk with the person checking his phone, which by the way, you'll notice I'm
20:03
not wearing a watch. One of the things I learned from Magnus two or three years ago was to not
20:07
wear a watch. It's not even on my person. Arrive early. I know it's hard, but with me being what I
20:18
call myself borderline OCD with things, I arrive early all the time. I'm usually in a
20:26
I'm usually in the room 15 to 30 minutes early. And I do it for a couple of reasons. One is I want
20:33
to see the stage that I'm working on or whether or not I have a podium or if I have to walk around
20:42
or if the acoustics for the room. So I'm looking at all those things
20:47
so I can help my students deliver the best performances. Yes, make sure their spill proves for me
20:57
I have yet to do that knock on wood, but I always keep them super far away from the equipment
21:03
I'm guessing there's a story from tech in there. oh arrive early to make sure you there and it not just early to get the audio video but there a couple of things when you arrive
21:21
Get your computer ready. If you're like me, you have a thousand different things running on your laptop
21:29
I mean, even right now, given this presentation, I have PowerPoint running
21:34
I have a slide deck notes that has all the different things I want to talk about
21:39
I have the streaming software on there. I have Twitter running. I have a lot of things running
21:45
Get those things off. Turn off any application you don't need. Turn off that virus protection
21:55
Turn off your notifications. Turn off those unneeded applications like Stream Deck or your work connecting software
22:08
Get your PC ready so that it can provide the fastest response to the talk
22:18
Also, set a timer on your phone. You've seen this twice mentioned already
22:23
set a timer get it ready so you know the last thing you want to do is in a 70 minute talk end
22:31
at 45 minutes and tell the audience i'm done i got nothing see ya it's an instant zero on the eval
22:39
for that but show up early get ready also get yourself ready take off your badge if you're
22:51
wearing a conference badge, take it off when you get on stage, take off your watch. And then
22:57
remember, go. That's the next part. Go. Have fun. Remember, we're not all perfect. This is going to
23:09
happen. Mistakes happen. Things happen. You want to be that expert, but life happens. You're never
23:16
going to be prepared. You're never going to be perfect. So don't worry about it. Don't be nervous
23:22
If you're nervous when it happens, the audience is going to see that you're nervous and think that
23:29
you might not know what you're doing. Show them that you know what you're doing. I could be nervous
23:35
like I'm nervous right now. And I've given this talk many, many, many times. Funny point you brought
23:42
up, Monica, with setting and starting your timer. Catherine Dollard of Microsoft PM gave me this tip
23:51
one time that when she remembers to start her timer, she doesn't start it at the talk. So 10
23:59
minutes before she goes on, whenever she's doing her preparation, she starts her timer then. So she
24:06
doesn't do if like right now we have a 60 minute talk or a 30 minute talk, she does it 10 minutes
24:12
too. She'll set it for 40 minutes because way too many times she's forgotten to hit start
24:20
That's it. Once you're done with the talk, don't do what a lot of what some public speakers do
24:26
And that's bolt and leave. Remember, people are paying to be there. So stick around afterwards
24:34
If you can, sometimes flights come up and you have to run or have to leave
24:39
That's happens. But try to avoid that. Try to be around and listen for feedback
24:45
Both Magnus and Monica mentioned to listen to your talks, rehearse your talks
24:52
Listen, I've started a live stream on Twitch two weeks ago. I've been recording them and listening back and forth to them to see what mistakes I'm making, what things I can do better
25:07
Is my audio OK? Are my expressions OK? Am I using my hands enough or using them too much
25:14
Listen to yourself, but listen to your audience to take that feedback and listen
25:21
Listening is very important. People are, in most cases, paying for you to be there
25:26
You're providing a service. Listen to your customer, your audience. Let them tell you what they got out of it, what they didn't get out of it
25:36
Work with that to help make yourself better, your talk better, and then ultimately the next experience better
25:46
But what do you do with that feedback once you get it? you continuously improve. So we work on, if you're into agile or any other software development
25:59
practices, you're always trying to make ourselves better. I have one model that I follow in life
26:04
I actually have a couple, but I want to lead this world better than it was when I arrived
26:12
So I am always looking for ways to improve myself to make everything else around me better
26:21
So I want to listen to you. So I'll be going through Twitter, live comments on here to see if there's anything I could have done better for this as well as all the talks I do
26:36
And then what I do after I get all that feedback, I take it back and I try to implement it right away
26:48
So someone might tell me, well, your slide on backups, the colors were off
26:54
I'll go back and change that right there to see. Only because if you take your notes and write them down on a pad and then I'm giving this talk four months later, I might not remember what an audience member was talking about by gray on blue
27:15
I'd have to go through all my sides. Take the notes down. Go back to your hotel room or wherever you're staying
27:22
start doing those changes right there. Rerun through it to see if that change makes sense
27:30
This allows you to grow. And if you have that script, like I talked about four or five slides ago
27:36
update that script so that next time you give it, you're implementing that feedback right away
27:44
That's all I have for us right now on slide preparation with three minutes left to go
27:51
If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the chat right now
27:58
Monterey's will take a look at it. You can reach out to me on any one of these mechanisms right now
28:07
Thank you. I hope you have had a great time