 Hi, I'm Morgan Rhodes, releasing engineer at Puppet, and I'm here to talk to you today about presenting nervously. When I first got started going to tech conferences a few years ago, I sat in awe at all of the presenters. They all seemed so cool and collected, and they all really enjoyed public speaking, and they were all great. And I was like, this isn't for me. I'm an introvert. I hate public speaking. I'll just attend the conferences. It's fine. I was sure that everyone either really loved speaking or had been coerced to do so, which was reinforced when my first speaking, I was volunteered after a coworker was unable to give his talk. And so over the course of giving a few different presentations, I've found a number of stresses that I've faced during the presentation process, and so I wanted to share those with you, along with a few things I've found to make it better. So first the stress is around the CFP. This tends to be either finding a proposal for a conference that I really want to go to, or if I have something I really want to speak about, finding the right conference fit. And so one thing I try to do here is I try to talk about things that I'm very comfortable with that tends to make it a little easier. And I also try to make sure I'm doing a lot of outlining so that if the talk gets accepted, I have something to start with. And next comes the waiting. You have to wait and hear whether or not your talk was accepted. And this can be stressful, especially if you were really excited to go to the conference and if your ability to attend is maybe tied to whether or not your talk gets accepted. And so what I try to tell myself here is that the worst thing they can say is no, and that doesn't mean it was a bad talk. It just maybe wasn't the right fit for the conference at the time. And so then it comes to actually writing the talk. And this part I'm always surprised by the outlines that I left during the CFP process, so that helps a lot. And I try to flesh those out. And also really important is trying to curate all the cat pictures so that I have something to look at on the slides. And just trying to generally find a talking style that works for me. And so, yeah, a lot of this is just writing and iterating over the process until I have enough content that I'm happy with. And then it gets to the day of the conference. And I get very nervous. And it's just all the adrenaline starting to build up about getting in front of all of these people. And so to work around this, I try to take good advantage of the speaker-ready room a lot of conferences have and just go through slides and just sit and quiet, drink some tea, and try to relax. And then it gets to the presentation. And this part is stressful for all of the standard Haiti and public speaking reasons. And there's just a lot of adrenaline involved. And the best thing I've found to sort of help out with this is just practicing over and over and over and then practicing some more. But if anyone has any really great tips for easing the stress of this, please let me know. I'm definitely not quite there yet. But and then sort of the surprise stress was after the talk. I sort of expected to get off the stage and everything would be fine. But as the adrenaline starts to wear off, it is just the introvert in me needs some quiet and some peace. And so the best way is to go back to that speaker room, maybe put on a pair of headphones, not try to immediately interact with the people who are starting to circle around you with questions and just take some time for yourself to sort of relax. And with all these stresses, you might be wondering why I do this to myself. So in general, I just, I think it's important to share things you've learned and sort of the journey you've taken through technology because your experiences aren't going to line up with anyone else. And I also really, I try to frame my talks for a talk that passed me would have really liked to hear so that someone else who's in the stage I was in in a previous time can learn the things that would have saved me a lot of time. And in the event that you haven't given a talk yet, I'd like to encourage you to submit something if talks are limited to people who like public speaking and are outgoing. That cuts out a huge amount of the possible speakers and experiences. So please submit talks and thank you for having me.