How I trained myself for public speaking

Aman Alam: Hi, everybody. My name is Aman. I've been a software developer and developer relations professional for almost ten years now. I have worked as a developer relations professional with Twitter, Akamai, and most recently with the Open Application Network in Toronto. And I've also been a software developer with Open Application Network.

What I have been doing is trying to give back to the community in many different ways. Okay. This was a setup of one of my first community meetups that I organized in one of my first companies where I worked back in India. The year was 2011. I'm not pictured here because I was the organizer, but what actually happened was I could imagine myself being stared on by 25 people.

Pitch dark. The only illumination in the room was the projector screen, and I could see eyes twinkling, either the eyes or the sunglasses. And those eyes was looking at me for answers. And that was terrifying. I felt like all my mistakes in the life are going to be just tonight, and this is not going to be easy.

I was so terrified that I would often run out of breath. I would skip my lines. I would forget what I had to say because I was forgetting to breathe. Thankfully, if you can see in these pictures, the laptop powering the projector was put in the backside. So I would often turn around to change my slides, and that's when I used to breathe.

It was so terrifying just to be in front of more than five, six people and in the capacity of somebody who wants to tell you something. Not a story, not a joke, but something that you are probably perceived to be an expert in, and then teach it to everybody else. How did I land here? I I was one of the early Android engineers in Ice I would say in the country at that time. And I was working with this company, and I had suggested to my boss lady that our teams should be knowing more on what we do in Android development.

So I should prepare a document and send it to everybody. My boss already said, you should do a talk instead. Invite everybody from the office and have them listen to you. I said, okay. Great.

I did not know what I'm going to get into. Only when I was at the stage, at the podium, and everyone were looking at me did I find out that, oh, man. What did I land myself into? So, yes, it was very terrifying, but I still continued. Why?

How I continued and how it all went all well for me? How I overcame all my challenges? We'll be talking about this in in this presentation. So that's me, the next year at a Gtech, DevFest event, the year 2012. And I was talking about how OAuth works and how you can use your own authentication servers.

And this is a purely community driven event, and at this point of time, I was a software developer. I was not working as a developer person, but I was constantly speaking. So if it was terrifying, why they still keep doing it? When I try to go back and find the answer to this, I I find that I learned personally a lot from the community. I came from an education system, which did not prepare us very well for what is expected out of you as a programmer in the industry.

So I had to teach myself a lot. And during those self teaching moments, it was just the forums and sometimes Stack Overflow, which was the only help. So I naturally wanted to give back and help other people. That was one of my biggest motivations. And trying to give back to the community, it felt like being on stage and telling people in voice how it is like to do something is the easiest and most interactive way possible.

I have my own writer's block, and writing takes focus, a lot of motor skills, but speaking is just a lot more natural. Along with that, this whole experience excited me. It made me feel a sense of achievement. It challenged me, and it made me focus on the things that I need to improve. And when I improve them, I felt good that, yeah, I'm I'm improving.

So these were the few things which kept me going, and I and I still keep improving. So let's see what the things that I did to make it better for myself while I continue to learn from all the other people around. So one of the fundamentals thing that I did was find out why. Why am I doing it? So I have said my motivation was that I wanted to help people back.

I wanted to help the community back, and speaking was one of the easiest way to do it. Then I found out, okay. I'm not probably a natural speaker. I'm stage shy. I'm camera shy.

So I found out my fears one by one and listed them. And once I had them, I started winning over them one by one. A lot of them I still have. I continue to work on them, but I was able to find out how to work around or how to win over these challenges and these fears. And then it's in the cycle of iterating, optimizing, and improving on different aspects.

What were my fears? And these fears are shared by many first time speakers because I've tried to help other first time speakers too. One of those fears was, what if I say something wrong? Another was what if someone in the audience knows more than me and just try to correct me? In some cases, it it has happened where it felt that somebody in the audience purposely asks tricky questions to put you down.

We can come to that later on. What if I lose myself and start humbling on the state? What if my demo fails? What if the things that I'm carrying, they fail? Do I still feel that I am qualified enough to speak about this?

And what if there is a question I don't know the answer of? These are some of my fears. I found out that the answers to these questions or these fears were more philosophical than practical or tactical. So I took a step back and tried to find my reasons and align them with my motivation. And then I came to conclusion that the reason I should be speaking and I should be going out talking to public is to share what I have learned so far.

When I go with this philosophy, that means I'm not teaching. I'm not portraying myself as the only expert out there in the field or the Oracle in this area. And I'm sharing with people what I have learned so far. That means I still have more room to learn. Once I internalize this philosophy, it instead of making me feel as if I had the responsibility to be the source of authority or source of truth on this matter to a place where I am a fellow learner, And I might have learned something that some people haven't yet, and I still have to learn something that some of my audience know.

So it became more of a community or communal experience where I'm not above anybody and I'm not below anybody. We're all equals, and we are sharing because we all have the same common goal to learn more. I'm speaking doesn't mean I know everything or I know all the things. I'm still learning. I also did not want to establish myself as the only expert in the field, and I think I would want to take this philosophy to my grave that even if on the things I invent in future, I will not be the only expert.

If I put them out there, there will be people who'll be able to contribute to those stuff better than me, and they can be expert, and I'll be happy about it. I'll be very happy about it. And then I had to accept myself. I had to accept that I was I'm not a native English speaker. My English back then was not so fluid.

I still have some limitations on my vocabulary, and I keep learning every day. I am still sometimes speaking too fast. So people sometimes cannot really understand what words I speak. So I started accepting who I am. Only then I could see my problems, and then once I found the problems, I could correct them.

So the solutions or the answers to the questions that many first time speakers including me had, what if I say something wrong? So I can always correct them and say sorry. What if someone in the audience knows more than me, then it's great. I can learn from them. And what if I fumble on stage?

That's okay. We are all humans. I can fall down and laugh on myself and get up even if that goes to that stage. What if my hardware or demo fails? Well, this has happened to me many times, and I always laugh it off.

I at least now do. Earlier, I used to be very concerned about it, but once it happened for the first time, I said, yeah. Morpheus laugh. Whatever has to go wrong will go wrong. You can change it.

You cannot change it. So you I can, like, laugh it off. Am I qualified to speak on this subject? This is something very normal to feel about. We have a lot lot of talk about imposter syndrome, and this is one of the manifestations of imposter syndrome where you feel you're not qualified.

And I I still get those feelings, but even the best of the people get this. And when you talk to people who are into psychology or into therapy, they say this is one of the signs that you are empathetic, compassionate, knowledgeable, and a skilled person. If you don't feel imposter syndrome, that means you are taking yourself too seriously. So it's it's totally normal and it can be tackled, and I I'll talk about how I tackled it. A fun fact here is even Neil Armstrong felt that he is an imposter.

There's an there's an anecdote. I'll probably talk about it in the towards the end of the slides because we might run out of time otherwise. But it's completely normal to feel that you're not qualified. You can accept it publicly or personally and then move on. If you don't know the answer of something that people ask, it's completely fine.

You cannot know everything. You can always say, hey. That's a good question. I I don't know the answer, but I can always go back, research about it, and give you the answers. This has happened to me multiple times where I told this to people, asked them to get in touch with me, over Twitter.

They did. We drag it on DM. I asked my seniors about a product question and sometimes a technical questions, and I got them the answer. So it also gives me credibility and makes me more human. Right?

And that's the that's the whole point. Yes. The Murphy's Law, whatever has to go wrong will go wrong, so don't worry about it. Don't worry too much. Then I got myself into some discipline, and that discipline helped me a lot.

The discipline had two parts. I I had to always prepare myself really, really well and then rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Let's see how I did that. I felt that the more confident I am with the content that I'm presenting, the better my on stage time is going to be. So how I prepare my content?

For some contents, it can take a few days to a bigger presentations can take up me up to four weeks. So I often take a lot of time before the date to start preparing. I have to become comfortable or confident with the tech or the product that I'm talking about. So I play with it a lot. I try to make some small stuff with it, like a note making software or maybe a small website.

Just try to get the nuance of the product and see where all it can be used. Use all the credit operations, create, retrieve, update, delete to see how the product works and I so that I can become comfortable with it. If the prediction requires a demo, I make that demo myself and then record it so that I know what's going on in the demo. Oftentimes, this demo, it has to be done live on the stage, but because of many reasons, the Wi Fi being flaky or the hardware not working, those demos can fail. So the the recordings that I have done, they help me in in in those areas.

And all this is done before the day of of the show. And then I also try to do the messaging where I'm first describing a problem that people face that they're here for, and then I, throughout the presentation, show its solution. So that's my messaging, and everything else to prepare the content falls along this narrative. So this is how my written content becomes. I and this was something that I slowly arrived on.

I used to spend a lot of time staring on a blank paper to figure out how to write, what to write here, or just opening up a slide and not having any other way to begin from. And one of my mentors helped me a lot in this, that I now, of course, will start with an outline. That outline evolves to become multiple drafts. That multiple drafts going through multiple stages finally becomes a final draft, and that draft is not then transformed to a script which I can follow, and that script gives birth to the actual presentation. When I say script, these scripts are talking points.

So I write them in a way that I can copy them in my speaker notes or print down a paper and carry them with me if required. I talk about presentation here because they're talking about speaking, but this presentation can also be a blog post or landing page, anything. But as long as it's about generating content, I follow this discipline for myself, this whole pipeline or funnel, whatever you want to call it, and it's been very helpful for me. And final finalizing an outline is an ongoing process. So I don't sit and just try to finalize the outline in one hour.

I often use Google Docs or Google Keep so that it's with me on my phone all the time. And as I keep thinking about stuff, I let the things that I wanna talk about, I let it cook. Even for this talk, I it took me a week to finalize an outline before even submitting a CFP. So that outline keeps getting finalized on my phone, on my Google Docs, or Google Keep. Once I have to believe that, okay.

Yeah. This is what I wanna talk about. This is a story that's taking shape. Once that has cooked and it smells nice, then I take it and start making it into a draft. And as I said, any demo video, I record it beforehand for backup purposes.

So that if my actual demo fails, I can show the video. One of the funny incidents I remember is I was demoing robot that I and my brother built, which would interact with an Android app via SMS. And this this tiny evil robot worked right one night before but failed on the stage. So, thankfully, we had a video of it. And after making a joke about it on the stage, we showed the video on the stage and we see it ourselves.

So that's that's a hard learned lesson, but videos help. Then when I talk when I talk, I often use my presentations, and this is how my presentations look. They I try to make them friendly for nonauditory environments where, let's say, my presentation is shared by people with each other or it's shared on SlideShare where I'm not there to speak about things. So whatever people see on the slides, it should have some brevity, but not too crisp to not make any sense at all or not just a gift or not just an image. I try to write content in a way that if somebody is trying to follow along from my presentation, they can get the idea of what I'm gonna talk about.

If there are speaker notes, I always write my outline speaker notes. If the PPT is shared, great. People can look at the speaker notes. If there are no speaker notes, the the content of the slide is always friendly for non auditory environments. This is also helpful because sometimes the people who might be going through content are are visually impaired.

They are using screen readers to read your content. So it helps them as well. So your whole idea is to give as much value out as possible in order to receive it back. Okay? And whenever I use any image or any stats, I take those citations, put them as speaker notes.

So if somebody asks me, I can give it right away. And this is not something that I finalize the presentation first, and then I go and find them out. The moment I find a start, I take the link where I found it and put it in the suggestion right there so I don't forget it. Okay? And then I think about presentation meant to be shared since the inception of it.

So when I'm making the transition, I always feel that this will be shared at some point of time. So if it's going to be shared as PPT or a Google slide or, let's say, if it's going to be shared in the PDF, my animations are not going to get transferred. So I try to not use animations in the cases where the animations would basically transform the information. So let's say if I'm using Keynote and the way I want some graphic to appear, it has to animate well before it lays itself nicely on the screen. If I transport that on a PDF, all those graphics might appear jumbled because PDFs won't have the animation.

And without animations, these graphics won't take their correct places on the screen, and it won't make sense. So I don't use those kind of animations. I would often use animations where the slight transitions are happening, but I'm generally very judicious about animations because I generally go into areas where the Internet is not good or the connection to protector is not very good. So animations are janky. I generally try to be very low on animation, and I always have a PDF of my talk ready, including this one, in case the Internet connection doesn't work and I need to even let's I imagine that even if my parent is you cannot go on for any reasons at all, I can share the PDF in a thumb drive right away with everybody.

And this will happen if you go to developing nations environment. It just happens a lot. Sometimes With that, actually, I have to co close you off. Sorry. We are at completely time.

We're ending the event right now. So thank you so much, Ivan.