 and welcome to my talk about overcoming imposter syndrome to become a conference speaker. I'll start by telling you just a teeny tiny bit about me. I have been in the technology industry for well over 20 years, working mostly on open source projects from within companies like Puppet, Intel, and now at VMware, I'm responsible for our open source community strategy within the open source program office. I'm also on the steering committee for the Linux Foundations Studio Group. I'm a board member of Open UK. I'm a governing board member and maintainer for the Linux Foundations Chaos Metrics project. I'm co-chair of the CNCF contributor strategy technical advisory group, and I have a PhD from the University of Greenwich where I researched how people collaborate together in the Linux kernel. When I started being publicly visible by giving talks at conferences like this one is when my career really started taking off. Now, public speaking is not something that came naturally to me at all. Early in my career, I was absolutely terrified of speaking up in front of other people, even just like little internal company meetings, but I knew it'd be hard to be successful if I didn't get over those fears. So, I started accepting every internal opportunity to speak or give presentations that I could find at the companies where I worked. And I also took advantage of loads of corporate training sessions and training classes to help me learn more about presenting. Now, as I mentioned, my career really started taking off in 2006 or seven when I started blogging and speaking at events. I was lucky to have a well-known colleague, Denise Cooper, who recruited me into several of my very first panels, Enlightening Talks at conferences like O'Reilly's Oskon. Lisa Kimahort Page of early blog, Her Fame, was a regular reader of my blog. Now, I didn't actually know her at the time, but because she read my blog, she reached out to me and invited me to be on the panel about open source at South by Southwest, which was my first really big conference. And this gave me the confidence to start doing my own toxic conferences. And I've done over a hundred talks at a, as you can see from the slide, a wide variety of different types of conferences. And around the same time, I also started organizing conferences and being on program committees, which gave me a whole new perspective on the talk selection process and why certain talks get accepted and then other talks don't make the cut, which I'll talk more about during the session. We'll start by talking about the benefits and why we're here. The real work starts by selecting a topic and a conference. So we'll talk more about how to do that. I'll also talk about writing titles, abstracts, bios and other supporting information to increase your chances of getting your talk accepted. I'll give you some insights into the talk selection process, along with a few tips for writing and preparing your talk. Then we'll wrap it up with links to a few resources and just a couple of final thoughts. So wait a minute. Okay. There are a lot of benefits of speaking at conferences that people underestimate. First, most conferences, not all of them, but most of them, allow speakers to attend for free. So it's way easier to convince your boss to let you attend if they don't have to pay a gigantic conference fee. And second, speakers usually get special access to other speakers and maybe some VIPs as well. You get access to use the speaker lounge if they have one and maybe even attend some VIP events for speakers, which gives you opportunities to network and get to know other experts. Third, speaking at events will help you become more well known as an expert within your field, which can help you gain credibility at your current job and make it easier to advance your career. And by speaking at conferences, I've been able to travel the world and meet all kinds of really interesting people along the way. And now I can travel the globe and meet up with friends that I've met at conferences. Conference speaking has been amazing for my career, but it's also just been a really positive personal experience for me. But speaking at conferences doesn't just benefit us as individuals, it also has a lot of benefits for your employer. Speaking at industry conferences provides visibility for your employer and showcases your expertise and maybe your technologies. In my case, customers, ecosystem partners, peers, potential future employees see that VMware has smart and talented people who are respected for their expertise. And third, there's a lot of visibility that comes from giving conference talks. In the months and weeks leading up to the event, you'll typically see posts from the event on Twitter, LinkedIn, maybe some other social channels to promote individual talks along with the conference as a whole. And your company will often help you promote your talks on their social channels to make sure that you're getting, they're getting some visibility for the talks that their employees are giving. And many talks are also recorded, right? And posted online, which also lets you gain additional visibility for those talks way after the event is already over. It's also a great recruiting tool. Potential candidates see us giving presentations and they might get excited about the work that we're doing which can make them want to work for us or work with us. And the next time they're looking for a role, it's great if they remember your talk and think about applying at your company. It's important to keep in mind that you are representing your employer when you're speaking at conferences. And what you say will reflect positively or negatively on your employer. So be professional and kind when working with others at events. Different companies have different approval processes for getting approval to speak. Even within a single company, the process probably varies depending on your business unit, your team, your experience, the topic, timing, and loads of other things. So the best place to start is always by talking to your manager. Your manager should be able to help you understand and navigate the processes you'll need to follow and your manager will need to provide approval for you to attend. I cannot emphasize enough that it is very important to get your manager's approval before submitting your talk proposal to a conference. It can be super disruptive for conference organizers when someone has a talk accepted that they didn't actually have the permission to deliver because that means that the organizers need to replace that speaker. And not only that, it tends to reflect poorly on you as an individual but also on your company as a whole. So get approval from your manager and help yourself avoid getting in that situation. Now let's talk about selecting a topic and then the right conference for your topic. The first step in writing a proposal is indeed to come up with a topic. And this is the first place where imposter syndrome can really get in the way of your success. Coming up with a topic is hard for a lot of people because they feel like they need to be the expert in the technology or know absolutely everything about the topic before submitting a talk. But this really is just not the case. You only need to know enough to provide useful content for people who aren't as experienced as you are. At most conferences, the audience probably has a lot more people who are just getting started and are eager to learn, in particularly the people who are attending the sessions. A good way to find a topic is to think about why people come to you and ask for help. Or think about the technologies that you love to work with and talk about those. Many conferences are also filled with talks about things like process, culture, community, management and loads of other topics that lots of people can talk about. So think of something you've done, love doing or know a lot about and talk about that. My biggest caution about selecting a topic is that you should be really careful not to propose a topic that's really a product pitch. Most conference organizers will reject any talk that even seems like maybe you're trying to sell something or pitch a vendor's technology. So this can be a pretty fine line to walk, right? For those of us working at a software vendor, like VMware in my case. If you work for a software vendor and propose a talk that's related in any way to the products your company sells, even if you're talking about an open source project, it's a little bit less likely to be accepted. Conference organizers tend to be very skeptical about talks from vendors. And it's really hard to get some of those talks accepted. So you really have to be careful when you propose the talk. And keep in mind, there are loads of other ways to promote your company and your products at conferences with various types of sponsorships. And sometimes those sponsorships even come with sponsored talks. But even for the sponsored talks, I would really encourage you to find a creative way to talk about your technologies that doesn't seem like a product pitch. Because the reality is that pitchy talks are declined for a reason. People just don't like them. People do like talks that are compelling and interesting. So when selecting a topic, think about how to make your talk unique. The topic itself doesn't necessarily need to be unique, but it can help to find ways to make your approach to the topic unique and innovative. You can do this by bringing your unique perspective to the topic. The topic should be important and relevant for the conference and their audience. And it should be focused enough that you can tell a compelling story within the time available for your talk. I'll talk more about some of these areas when we get to the section about writing your abstract. Before we talk about picking a conference for your topic, let's briefly talk about CFPs or calls for proposals. The most common way to get your talk into a conference is by submitting a proposal into the CFP for that event. Now, the catch is that most CFPs are only open for a pretty short period of time, maybe a couple of months at the longest. And the CFP usually closes many, many months before the conference actually happens. So this requires careful planning in advance if you want to speak at an event. In August or September of every year, and I've already done this for 2023, I put together a document listing the conferences that I want to attend next year. And then once a month, I look to see which ones have their CFPs open. And for the ones with open CFPs, I put those on my to-do list with a date so that I don't forget to think about them, you know, maybe a month before the deadline ends. And this is really important because if you miss the deadline to submit into the call for proposals, you just probably won't get to talk at that conference. And it's also important to remember that CFPs, every CFP is just a little bit different. They may require different information, they'll have slightly different word limits for things like abstracts. So you really carefully need to read the CFP instructions for proposing a talk to make sure that you follow the whole requested process and that you include all of the required information. Now, once you have a topic, you need to find the right conference. Spend some time researching conferences and looking at open calls for proposals. You want to make sure that you submit a talk that's relevant and likely to be accepted for that particular conference. So please, please do not, whatever you do, just blast your talk out to any conference with an open call for proposals. Find a couple of conferences that have had similar talks in the past and have an audience that you think would be interested in your topic. And tailor your submission to that event. For each conference, you can review the titles, abstracts, bios for talks that they've accepted for previous conferences, and you can use these previous talks to get a feel for the types of talks that they've accepted, the length, the amount of detail included in the abstracts and the types of speakers they've had in the past. And keep this in mind when writing your proposal, and then you can tailor your title, abstract, and even your speaker bio to that specific conference. You can also do this the other way around, which frankly is what I do. I find conferences that I want to attend and then I pick a topic I can talk about that fits well with that audience. And looking at past CEPs or past agendas is a good way to get ideas for a topic that might be a good fit for a conference that you want to go to anyways. If you're new to conference speaking, local meetups are almost always trying to find talks for upcoming events. And they can be a nice friendly place to do your first talk, having a presentation in front of maybe a slightly smaller audience. Especially a local one where you can get some friends or maybe some colleagues to attend can help take the pressure off while you get some practice. And these local events are also a great place to try out new material before taking it to a bigger event whether you're an experienced speaker or a new one. And there are loads of very friendly regional open source events. So there's Siegel in the Pacific Northwest in the US, there's Scale in Southern California, Foss Backstage is a really great one in Germany, Open Fest in Bulgaria, Open Source Lisbon, there are loads of them and there's probably one somewhere close to where you live. Writing the title and abstract is probably the most important part of preparing your submission. And this is another area where I see imposter syndrome rearing its ugly head. This is not a place to downplay your topic or to be mysterious. You'll want your topic to shine and you'll need to be clear about why this is an important topic for this particular event. Your abstract should be clear, descriptive and detailed. It should give the organizers enough detail to really understand what you plan to cover. Since it often becomes part of the conference guide it should also provide a clear description for potential attendees. And the abstract should be long enough to describe your talk, but not so long that organizers feel like it's a burden to read it. So keep it as concise as possible. The scope also needs to be realistic. Find out how long the conference session is likely to be and make sure that you really think about how much you can reasonably cover in that time while also leaving room for questions at the end. Use the abstract to list or describe the key points that you want to make during your talk while also being clear about why the talk's important and what people can expect to learn from it. Keep in mind that you don't actually need to write the presentation until your proposal is accepted. In fact, I would actually discourage you from trying to write the entire presentation before the talk's accepted. You run the risk of spending time on a topic that for whatever reason just is not interesting to conference organizers. And sometimes organizers, and I've done this, they'll respond with special requests to make slight changes to your topic. So you want to have the flexibility to incorporate that type of feedback as well. I actually have a bit of a formula that I use when writing my abstracts. And the level of detail varies by topic and conference, but if you look at my past talks at past conferences, most of my abstracts look something like this. I always start with a paragraph that tries to draw in the audience and generate some interest by focusing on why the topic is important and relevant to the audience. Now the goal with this first paragraph is to help attendees understand why they should attend my talk and make sure the program selection committee knows why my talk is important and relevant for their conference. The next section usually includes maybe three to five bullet points with details about what I plan to talk about. And this helps attendees and the selection committee understand exactly what I plan to talk about. And I also try to end my abstracts with just a quick, maybe one sentence summary of what the audience can expect to learn. Now, this is definitely not the only way to write an abstract, right? But it has worked well for me in the past, so I thought it might be helpful for people who are writing new proposals. Titles for talks can be tricky. You want a title that sounds interesting enough to stand out, but also it has to accurately describe your topic. And it should do this in maybe three to seven words. Now, I am super guilty of writing really, really long talk titles, which just makes it hard for me to tell people about my talk because the title just becomes too much of a mouthful. And from a practical perspective, long titles can be hard to fit on conference programs. So do as I say, not as I do, I guess is my motto on this one. Also try to avoid buzzwords in your talk titles. Those of us who regularly select talks for conferences, we get a bit jaded and we get tired because the same buzzwords make every talk and every title sound exactly the same and it sounds really boring. So keep in mind that many people will decide to come to your talk based mostly on your title because that's what shows up first on most of the schedules. And you don't want people to be disappointed if the content of your talk doesn't actually match your title. A lot of people do not understand how critical it is that you have a well-written bio to go along with your talk proposal. And this is another area where imposter syndrome can get in the way. You should use your bio as a place to brag about yourself and help organizers and attendees see that you have the expertise to give this talk. And this is not the place to be modest or downplay your experience. Your speaker bio is actually a critical part of the acceptance process. So often when I'm reviewing talks for proposals, I actually read the bio first so I know who the person is and then I go back and read the abstract for their talk. So you should customize it for different types of talks or conferences and emphasize your expertise, your experience in the particular topic or the technology. Conference organizers want to know that you have expertise that's relevant to your topic. And your bio is probably the only opportunity to demonstrate why they should select you to speak about a topic. You might also want to cut some less relevant information from your bio to give you a little more room to be specific about the expertise you have in your topic. But like with the abstract, your bio should be short and concise, it's not a dissertation. And also remember, again, this is not a time for modesty. You need to brag about your accomplishments and make sure that your bio puts your expertise in the spotlight. Many CFPs also ask for links to supporting materials like presentations, blog posts, maybe videos of previous talks. Again, this is not a place to be modest but a place for you to show off and demonstrate your expertise. If members of the selection committee haven't seen you give a talk before, this is what they'll use to learn about whether you have the expertise and the presentation skills to give the talk. And if you don't have something ready to share, if you're a new speaker, you can write a blog post on a related topic and contribute it to one of the many blogs that accept guest content like opensource.com or maybe to one of your company's external blogs. And if you need a video, you can prepare a short five-minute presentation, record it and put it up on YouTube yourself. And for supporting material, I do recommend focusing on quality over quantity by using your best examples, so not necessarily everything you've ever done. Okay, now we move into the Here Be Dragons section of the talk where I will provide a few warnings about what not to do based on my experience being on program selection committees. A lot of people don't want to give away the point of the talk in the abstract or maybe they want some mystery or some big reveal. In my experience, this is a mistake. When selecting talks, I need enough detail to know if it's actually going to be a fit for my event and I need to make sure that it isn't going to be too similar to some of the other talks that I might accept. And the only way to make these decisions is by having a detailed abstract that actually tells me what you are going to talk about. And honestly, I've often rejected a lot of talks simply because the abstract was just too short or lacked enough details for me to actually make a decision about the talk. When I see poorly written abstracts or bios that look like maybe they were thrown together at the last minute without any proofreading, I worry that the presentation will be of similar quality. If someone doesn't take the time to proofread a proposal, what will their presentation look like? And as I mentioned before, I've presented loads of conferences, but I still try to make sure that someone else reads my proposals before I submit them. I've had great feedback and suggestions from friends and from colleagues that have allowed me to make my submissions way stronger than they would have been if I'd just written it myself. It's also important to remember that your talk is competing with a bunch of other talks and proposals are declined for loads of reasons. Yours may have been a great proposal, but maybe they had another very similar proposal that was accepted instead. Or maybe your talk wouldn't have been a great fit for this particular conference, but it would be a great talk at a different event. And I know it's easy to get discouraged when your talks are declined, but even very popular speakers don't get their talks accepted at every event. We all get our talks declined for some events. So it's unfortunately a part of the process. But then after you get your talk accepted, you need to start getting your little ducks in a row and prepare an awesome talk. So I know that some people like to write their talks on the plane on the way to the conference. I am not one of those people and it's not something I'd recommend, especially if you're new to speaking, but I don't recommend it anyways. If I'm preparing a brand new talk that I've never given before, I'll usually start working on it at least a month in advance. I've already started working on my talk for All Things Open, which is at the beginning of November. But this gives you plenty of time to think about what you want to say. And if you run into a bit of writer's block, no big deal, you have plenty of time to just put it aside for a little while and come back to it when you're fresh. But I also find that when I'm working on other things, I'll get ideas for what I've forgotten to add to the talk. So starting early just gives you plenty of time to think about additional material or improvements that you can make to the talk. By starting early, you have plenty of time to figure out what you want to say and then organize your talk. If you used something like my abstract formula, those key bullet points are likely to be the main sections of your talk. In general, most people would recommend organizing your talk before creating slides, using maybe an outline of some sort. I have to admit that I actually organized my talks using my presentation software, but I don't start right in creating detailed slides from beginning to end. I create slides with just titles, maybe a couple of key points that I want to make, which I can then rearrange and make sure that I have some logical groupings and then a good flow for the whole presentation before I start adding the details for the slides. I also recommend having plenty of speaker notes, especially when you're taking your time and preparing early, because it's really easy to forget the key points that you wanted to make on a slide, especially when you're standing in front of a bunch of people who are watching you speak and you don't want to get nervous and forget what you wanted to say. And I find having speaker notes just makes me a lot less nervous because I know that they're there when I need them. Also, do not worry about over-rehearsing. I see way more people come into talks who are under-prepared rather than over-prepared. I practice my talks out loud, just like I plan to give the talk, and I use these as dry runs for the actual presentation. This helps cut down on the nerves because you know exactly what you're going to say and how long it will take to say it. Now, it's really important, very important to practice by actually speaking out loud, because if you just think the words in your head rather than actually saying them out loud, we think faster than we speak. And so, if you raise your timing on this, you are almost always going to run out of time before when you do the real thing. So always practice by actually speaking out loud as awkward and annoying as it may feel. It can also help to do a practice run with your teammates or even some friends or you're in front of your cat or your dog, whoever. But your friends and your colleagues are likely to be interested in the topic anyways, right? So it's a win-win for everybody. You can also record your talk and watch the video. And while it can be super painful to watch yourself present and watch yourself talk, I almost always see something that I can improve when I do it. It's also important to speak slowly during presentations. Many of us, myself included, we tend to talk faster when we're nervous or when we're excited. And it's important to remember that we need to slow down and actually pause between topics to give the audience a little bit of time to process what we're saying. And this might probably will feel uncomfortable at first since pauses will almost always seem longer to you than to your audience. And again, this comes with practice, practicing your talk out loud while speaking slowly and inserting pauses will help you get used to the slower cadence before you actually get in front of an audience. You'll also want to promote your talk both before and after you give it. You can talk about it on your favorite social media sites like LinkedIn or Twitter before the talk to encourage people to attend. And then again, after the talk with links to your slides or maybe video if the recording was published. You should also do the same via your internal channels, work channels like Slack or various other internal updates. I also recommend reaching out to your marketing folks who will almost always be happy to find ways to provide even more visibility for your talk. I also keep a list of every public talk I give on my website, which honestly helps me remember which talks I've done at which events. But more importantly, it gives me a single place that I can use to promote my talks. And it becomes kind of a speaking resume. And if you don't have a website, you can keep them in a Google Doc, HackMD, GitHub, any other format that you can easily share with people. As a reminder, you are representing your employer when you speak at a conference. So they probably want you to be as prepared as possible. In addition to the tips I just talked about, you probably have other internal company resources to help you prepare. There might be training from PR to help you answer questions and avoid disclosing anything. You shouldn't be talking about. There might also be options for training on public speaking, writing presentations, and related topics. And finally, as I mentioned earlier, during a practice presentation in front of your colleagues is a great way to get feedback in a safe space so that you can improve the talk before you present it to a broader audience. And hopefully you work with a lot of smart people so they'll have good feedback for you. Before I wrap up this talk, I will mention that the slides are already posted so you can go to the slides and just click these links. But here are a few resources that I think you might find useful. I wrote a two-part blog post series that covers most of the topics from this presentation if you want to refresher or share maybe with some colleagues or friends. A couple of people who work with me in the VMware open source program office and are on the open source summit program committee, they wrote a great article on how to craft a better talk proposal and make it more likely to be accepted. So that's a really nice resource as well. And there's a nice article that I found on Dezone about how to become a conference speaker and why you should. Let me leave you with just a few final thoughts. I've talked about imposter syndrome in a few places during the talk. It's easy to default to doubting your abilities and feeling like you don't know enough to give a talk at a conference. But that's just not true. We all have expertise and knowledge that we can share with people who are just getting started. You do not need to be the world's leading expert on a topic or a technology to give a presentation about it. You just need to know a few things that can help other people learn something. And by bringing your authentic voice and your unique perspective to the topic, people will walk away from your talk with new insights that they might not get from another speaker. With that, thank you for coming to my talk and we can open it up for questions. I think we have about eight minutes for questions. Perfect. All right, I know there are questions. I'm not letting you off this easy. I wasn't that clear. Okay, go ahead. Oh, that's an excellent question. So the question was, how can we, let's say within your company, help provide resources and help other people get talks at conferences from within your company? So there are a few things. One is really good. It's usually PR type training where people go through some training to understand how to answer questions and what to say and what not to say. And that can be really helpful, especially if that training is given in kind of an interactive format where they do some role-playing because a lot of people get trapped by questions. And also, it's fine to just say I don't know how to answer a question and that takes some practice as well. But one of the most beneficial things you can do is put together a little group of people who review all of the talk proposals or anybody that will give them to you and help them make them better. So I'll be honest, I have looked at some really horrific talk proposals within companies that I've worked at and provided loads of feedback and we've completely reworked some of the proposals and they've gotten accepted at places like KubeCon. But a lot of people just don't, really just don't know how to write talk proposals. So any help that you can give them would be really great. And then any additional training for how to give presentations is also helpful. And then giving people opportunities to give internal presentations, like round-bag lunch sessions or things like that where people can talk about just about any topic and give presentations that their colleagues might be interested in that's in sort of a low-pressure situation. So not like big corporate presentations but more like over-lunch brown bags in an informal setting can really help. The other thing that can help is providing reminders for CFP deadlines for people. And what we used to do when I worked at Puppet, I had kind of a program that we, I would sit down with the leadership team once a month. We would look at all of the upcoming open call for proposals and we would target specific people and ask them to submit proposals to those conferences because if you'd be like, oh, well, Josh knows loads about security, he should really submit to this talk or submit a talk to this particular conference. And then we would follow up with them and remind them and help them not miss the CFP deadlines so that we could not lose the opportunity to speak at those conferences. I'm at the Decentralized Identity Foundation and they're an open source membership org. And it's also difficult to offer the opportunities that I can see in the speaking circuit but they're to find people and encourage people to take those up. Yeah, yeah, it can be hard to find those people but it can be really, really beneficial. And I've often encouraged people to submit talks for conferences that I've organized as well, encouraging specific people to submit talks because I knew they were working on something really interesting even if maybe they weren't all that interested in submitting talks. And I've had people tell me later that they really appreciated that because they wouldn't have submitted talks to conferences on their own and it was kind of their first opportunity for speaking and kind of kicked off other opportunities for them. So think about people who are newer to the space, who might not think that they really have those opportunities. That can really help. This question in the back, Josh. Yes, so that's an important point. So Joshua made the point that what I'm saying is sort of implicit in the fact that your employer actually supports you doing this and encourages you to do it on work time and then it's not something you have to do on your own. So yes, and I think that good companies and good managers will see the benefit of having their employees go out and do take on these speaking opportunities. And if your manager and your company isn't supportive of that, maybe it's not the best company to stay in, maybe more look elsewhere. Not that I'm encouraged to people to jump jobs, but if your manager and your company aren't supportive of the things that you really should be doing, then that is something to think about. Other questions? We have three more minutes. I'll just stand here awkwardly for three minutes and wait for someone to have a question. No more questions? Okay, whoop, sorry. Magnus. Yeah, so the question was how do you get honest feedback from your colleagues about your presentation? I've actually, one of the things I've seen that worked reasonably well was that they had people write feedback about the presentation on post-it notes and then someone would just collect them afterwards and you didn't know who gave you the feedback, so it was more a little more anonymous, a little more safe space to get that feedback. And I would say that's probably a good way to do it if people aren't forthcoming. I guess it kind of depends a little bit on the company and the culture. I worked at Intel and people were not hesitant to give you any feedback when I worked at Intel, but it does kind of depend on the company and the culture, but post-it notes or other types of like anonymous feedback can help. Joshua, you had another question? Ah, how do you recover from a bad talk? Wow, I don't know, what's up with the mic? That's a good question. We all have bad talks, we all have bad days. And I would say not to beat yourself up about it and really just kind of think about what you can learn from that experience. Why was it a bad talk? And how can you improve that and not have that happen again is a good way to think about that. But I think also you really just need to not beat yourself up about it because we all have those. I gave a talk once where I was super sick and I coughed during the entire talk and it was terrible, it was a South by Southwest and it was probably the worst talk I've ever given. So I felt really bad about it, but it's one of those things. Okay, now I'm out of time, because she's standing up, giving me the signs. All right, thanks everybody for coming.