 Thank you for the great introduction. Um, as Alexander mentioned, um, this is a very special moment. Two years ago, well, one and a half years ago, I started out speaking at Python conferences, and it was the first time I get in touch with the Python community, and it feels really surreal to be able to give the keynote here, um, with all of you today. So thank you for the opportunity, and hope everybody had a good time today. Without further ado, let's get started. We're talking about public speaking today. Why you should pursue public speaking, and how to get there. About me, my name is Yanyi Cheng. Originally from Hong Kong, and right now, I'm an engineering manager at Yelp and Hamburg. This is your menu for today. We're going to be talking about why we want to talk about public speaking in the first place. And if it's that good, how can we overcome this fear? Stage fright, it's pretty scary. How can we get better at public speaking? And practically, where do we get started? I'm very interested in the topic of public speaking, and so I've interviewed a lot of my colleagues about their views on this. We have prepared a video for you, and please sit back and enjoy. Hey, hi, my name is Mario. Hi, my name is Ruchik. I'm Samoylem. My name is Tyriak. I'm Nicola. Oh, I'm Antoine. Hello, I'm Birgit. Hello, my name is Yosmeen. My name is Chidi Iberi, Nadi. Short form is Chidi. I've been working here at Yelp for about a year and a half now. I'm currently a working student at Yelp. I'm a project designer intern at Yelp in ambrography. I'm kind of working at Yelp by a kind of long time and pretty liking what I'm doing. Mostly working on backend, but also thinking on how to break stuff. I'm an engineer at the core mobile API team. I work here at Yelp at the user operations team in the Hamburg office. I moved to Yelp and Hamburg in Germany from Bangalow, which is a city in India, known as the Silicon Valley of India. I'm a product designer at Yelp here in Hamburg, where we work on the business side of things. I'm working as a product manager here. I have been working in the office for a pretty long time. I work at Yelp as a software engineer. And also studying computer science at the Technical University in Berlin. I came here to Germany to actually explore different cultures, see how people live, work, eat, have fun, live life. So I got into public speaking about three and a half years ago when I started talking at small conferences back in India. It was mostly cocoa heads. So a bunch of us used to organize cocoa heads in Bangalow. My experience with public speaking has so far been pretty limited. Other than experiences on presenting something within the team or within the company has not really been exposed to the public world. Usually I'm so concerned on recording and that's kind of... One of the examples is more about also thinking of what I have to share with the community that is not already state in the world. Is that new or is just something old that doesn't really make sense to invest energy to say that? Is that sort of a rhetorical question? I've been doing a lot of talks in the last three or four years and I think it's great, I really enjoyed it. As a product manager I do public speaking presentations once a quarter or every now and then basically in front of the office or sometimes also for some bigger audience including the San Francisco offices. It's great, I was doing theatre as a kid so there is a lot of similarities like this play and being in public, arculating your thoughts being a little bit funny sometimes, engaging with the audience and everything. The majority of my public speaking experience has been related to my profession and I find that as I progressed in my career more and more opportunities have presented themselves for me to speak publicly like whether I want it or not. I've talked to more junior people in the company about what we're doing, like our tech stack. I've just had to be more comfortable with speaking to people publicly. I really like that feeling of people learning stuff and then attributing that to me. I think a few months ago I had somebody come up to me and she told me, hey, I was there two years ago when you gave that intro talk to Python and that was the first time I actually learned Python and she was telling me, hey, that made me start programming more and now she got an internship at GitHub. So this is really awesome to hear. Do you think you're funny? I think, I hope to be, but I'm pretty sure I'm not. Every time before I start a talk there's a lot of butterflies in my tummy that effectively means I'm fairly scared. I guess it's the case with the most seasoned public speakers as well almost everyone pretty much has given me the same answer. Yes, just check the video. I do feel nervous every time when it comes to the actual event but I think that's just part of the game. Most of the time for me it's just like I either forget what I need to say or I just like freeze, you know. I was working on tickets and stuff at work and it was like, yeah, that's normal, that's easy and then talking to people I was realizing that wasn't easy, that was eventually easy for me or easier for me, so maybe that is also a way a thing that I need to learn that is understanding that not everything that I see is simple and that everything that I don't think that is hazard as deserving to be discussed in front of people actually it could be a nice topic to talk about. Yeah, it's actually very hard. You would think as a Meetup Organizer that I get a lot of applications and I just filter them and choose the best ones but most of what I'm doing is sourcing so I look at other series nearby and I look who spoke there I look at the news in, well, design because it's a design meetup in my city and I try to find who is doing something interesting so it's a lot of sourcing and trying to convince people to either give a talk they have or build a talk especially for us. So I think one of the things that I found really work for me is to stand in front of the mirror and give your talk. I try to work on the way I breathe. I rehearse the same talk at least three times before I end up giving the talk anyway. It doesn't matter how large the audience is even if it's a five or a six member audience it's still important that you do not break so as to speak. Do dry runs. Dry runs, dry runs, dry runs. I think it helps when you prepare yourself a lot like when you practice how you want to say certain things because whenever I try to do a dry run I know there's a lot of like, okay I don't really know how I want to describe this or I don't know the English word for that. Knowing that the first time you're going to speak it's going to suck. So I think that's the best advice I got. My friend was like, he's been speaking for a lot of time, for a long time I think he's given hundreds of talks and the advisory game is money or your first talk is going to suck. While it sounds very cynical to give such a piece of advice the important thing that it did for me to lower my expectations of the talk and the talk actually was great. I actually want to start by going to more conferences because like that would be like I think my first step to just like see other people public speaking see the kind of thing they're talking about. I would just encourage people to just like jump in the pool rather than thinking how they are going to enter it through this ladder and everything like jump straight into this and you'll figure out how to swim. All right great. Hope you all enjoyed the video and since I asked a lot of my colleagues about their experiences doing public speaking I think it's also fair for me to give you a sense of why I like public speaking and how did I get started. So it has to start a few years ago. I remember in university I was not half as keen about public speaking as I am right now. I remember the professor asking a question you know who wants to answer I'll be sure to look away look down or send out any signal that I'm not ready to answer this question. I think whenever I talk in public in front of people something will go wrong and plus English is not my first language so I always think that I cannot be as eloquent as people who speak it as the first language but that has changed when I joined Yelp that was my first job and I remember my manager at that time gave me this feedback Hey Yenny I think you have interesting things to share with a group do you want to speak up more in meetings? So that was when the when that moment was when I realized that I need to get over this I've missed out so many chances already just because I don't want to talk in front of people but instead of trying to speak up a bit more in the next meeting or the next and the next because you know I tend to procrastinate I decided to apply for Picon Germany and that was my first experience giving a public speaking talk oh by the way that video is still somewhere up there in YouTube so I encourage you not to look it up because the first talk is not always the perfect one as Mario has mentioned but hey even when I haven't grasped all of the public speaking tricks I feel like I have already been reaping a lot of the benefits out of it so as expected it's easier for me to talk in meetings and present in front of the company when you feel more comfortable talking in front of 200 people or maybe right now a thousand people you just feel more natural to talk to your colleagues and they're more trusted as well so that was easier I got that out of the way and as I progress in my career I also realize that being a software engineer is not just sitting at your desk and cold all day it's a lot about communication and good ones too for example if you lead a project it's a lot getting your stakeholders your product managers your engineers on the same page so that you know exactly what you're working on what are the statuses even if you don't want to take on this role of leading a project leading a team even if you want to stay as a software engineer when you have to design a system you need to pitch to your colleague that's the way to go so it's also about communication and talking about communication I want to bring up the next point on crucial conversations so I wrote the book called Crucial Conversations the definition for this is when stakes are high that means it's pretty important and when emotions run strong that means the atmosphere can be a bit charged when you have these kind of conversations so what comes into mind is for example a salary negotiation it's usually a little bit awkward you think that you deserve a raise right now and your manager thinks that you're not ready or you think that it's the golden opportunity for you to lead this project but the manager thinks that there is someone else who is a better candidate so these kind of conversations is what I call crucial conversations and actually it resembles what we're doing here public speaking because first of all like stakes are high I definitely don't want to mess up in front of all of you and emotions run strong because it's scary to be standing on stage a lot of people have stage fright and at the same time since we're in the conference setting I'll share this with you it's a great trick for introverts to meet people instead of being awkward and you're like hi I'm Yany, I'm from Yelp now after I give the talk you come to me and do this awkward thing so I save some work definitely recommend for introverts in the audience now I've given this talk for a couple of times I've also led a mentoring round circle on why we're afraid of public speaking so here are some of the results I've got let's see if we can resonate with some of these reasons first of all it's our heart racing like we all remember this one time before we have to go on stage and then your heart is pounding very hard your sweating, your stomach is feeling queasy a lot of nervousness building up in our system and I would say that's only normal this is what your body is believed in for example right now my body thinks that I'm in danger I need to run away so all the blood is being pumped to my legs right now asking me to run away but obviously my brain wants me to stay right here and talk to all of you so one trick I'm trying is I think about last time I gave a talk it was also pretty stressful on stage but I managed, I survived, now I'm giving another talk so it's totally okay it's something that we can come to terms with it's not your heart pounding or racing that scares you it's how you react to this physical nervousness now there's another thing we can do which is finding our harbor something that is close to our heart something that we really enjoy talking about because once you start talking about it you forget where you are you just really want to share what you want to share with the audience and for me you have already heard a lot about myself so you know I like talking about myself that's my harbor but for you maybe it's different for some people it's food but we can try that out and also power posing this I have to show you so usually when I give a talk like having a wider stance like this have my two feet firmly planted in the ground that's what makes me feel confident that's what makes me feel powerful and when you feel good on stage that's when you give the best talks I've seen speakers do this the whole time I'm very impressed by how they can do it but if that's what makes you comfortable if that's what gives you strength go ahead and another thing people mention is humor right how do you get your audience engaged and hopefully nobody's falling asleep right now and it's by humor but I would want to bring out that if you're not naturally a very funny person and you try to crack your first joke on stage it usually doesn't work out very well so rather than us blindly imitating speaker styles it's important to find what our style is and be comfortable with it now this one a little bit scary now as Chidi mentioned that forgetting what to say on stage can be something that holds us back from trying out public speaking but good thing is we have already learned a few strategies that make us feel less nervous when we're on stage so we're off to a good start but what if I told you we can actually prep for the moment we screw up that's pretty cool isn't it so we can rehearse for forgetting what to say how do we go about that first when we do our dry runs when we practice our talk and we slip it happens all the time instead of restarting your timer and start all over again try to get back on your feet and think about a good comeback so that when that happens on stage you don't freak out because you have already practiced that moment when you slip another thing we can do is timing ourselves for example if you're giving a 30 minute talk try to prepare 20 to 25 minutes if you prepare too little unless you really want to do a very long Q&A it might get you stressed out because you want to fill up that content or if you overshoot and prepare for a very long presentation in that time frame you might have to ramble and scramble to get to the end to see your facilitator raising signs and that usually stresses people out now talking about question and answer as well a lot of people are nervous about having to deal with that because what if it's something that I wasn't expecting but good news is when we're preparing for this presentation when we're doing all this research we have read a lot of material on this subject so even if it doesn't directly hit home it's something that you know we can offer some alternate knowledge to resolve that situation or we'll talk a little bit more later about a feedback crew someone that you can rehearse your talk with and we can source those questions from them and another thing that can happen is potential problems on stage so one thing I try to do is rehearse the presentation without slides that's something that can help I've seen for example the projector not working and if you have code snippets to show if your entire presentation is that it gets you into a tough conversation it gets you into a tough situation or on speaker notes there's this one time I try presenting and I rely a lot on it but unfortunately the stage setup didn't allow me to look at my speaker notes and my slides at the same time so I ended up having to have to do this and look here and look there so it was not a very pleasant experience for both me and I hope I think the audience as well bring local copies in case the Wi-Fi is bad but the Wi-Fi has been awesome at your Python thanks for that and at the same time bring your adapters your dongles because if you're using a Mac like me you need 20 adapters to make anything work now what if actually blank out on stage just now I did a social experiment with you did anyone actually thought that I blanked out and I counted it was around 8 seconds or so I was drinking water until the end people started looking at me funny what was she doing so chances are if you don't straight out tell your audience I blanked out right now they probably wouldn't even notice your talk is 45 minutes long probably half the people are tuning out right now it's okay like it happens so that's a good thing for us and at the same time your audience is in general supportive so who here in this audience just really wants to see me screw up this talk hands up be brave whoa that corner dangerous but as you can see it's probably not the majority of the audience your audience is nice they want to see you succeed and worst case scenario if you couldn't get back on your feet what happened is they'll clap until you get back on your feet and you can continue so that's the worst that can happen if you think about it now you can also do things like oh we skip the slide for now we'll come back later or as what I did just now drinking water it's also a good strategy to buy you 8 to 10 seconds to start thinking clearly another thing that holds us back is us being afraid to be exposed as a fraud but I want to bring out this there are a lot of ways to say I don't know I've seen speakers doing this on stage that's a very interesting question I've thought a lot about it let's talk about it after or something like interesting question does anyone in the audience want to answer that there are a lot of things you can do but still actually what I want to bring up is it's okay to say I don't know because you don't have to be the best in a topic to give a talk about it it's just sharing your learnings and in fact I think it would be really boring for you if you're just sharing the same thing over and over again and not learning anything out of it in fact the first talk I gave on refactoring the circumstance was one of my colleagues gave me a really good code review on some of the Python patterns so I was thinking oh that's really interesting I want to dig deeper into it so I signed up for a talk and I want to learn more about it so I couldn't claim an expert at that time but every time I do this talk again I get some really good questions from the audience and they also point me to great resources so I learned that way and I hope you will too now this one is pretty dangerous not being good enough I want to share with you this idea of imposter syndrome I think a lot of intelligent people have it so I think I have it too so this is dangerous because for people who have imposter syndrome our perceived ability we think we're that good but we're actually this good and it's dangerous because we're walking from a lot of opportunities that can stretch ourselves that can challenge ourselves just like public speaking and I really like Mario's quote right he told us that your first talk will suck you get over it yes I really like that example as well in fact one of the interns previously at Yelp she told me she doesn't want to try out public speaking so I asked her why is that she told me she wants to be one of those speakers those speakers who on stage whatever they say she'll believe it and whatever they sell she'll buy it cool but you probably get there at your 30th talk so you gotta start somewhere even though your first talk might suck that's just how it is so one phrase that comes into mind is eyes on the stars but feet on the ground feet on the ground part is important and it probably went better than you think one time I was in a public speaking class the first assignment we had to do was an ad hoc speech so like you go you give a speech about your favorite values or something I was talking for one minute straight I think I was straight out rambling didn't make a point very illogical but then at the same time they recorded the speech you did and we watched it together as a class and I found out that actually that one minute I was giving a speech it was better than I expected I was making some sense so it probably went better than you think now that leads us to the next question right so how good is good enough for us to give a conference talk well luckily we're all at the conference right now attend some of these conference talks you can use that as a reference to see how we need to give a speech but like going to more of these talks I'm hoping you'll discover this it's not all of these talks will be engaging to you and that's great news because that one talk that you think that wouldn't make it nobody would be interested in well you're at a talk where it's full house and you're not engaged so it might have a shot it could actually be a hit just try it out so after talking about our fear in public speaking how good is good enough let's talk about how we can get better at it who here has read the book Lean Startup great it's a great book isn't it and the more I like it is because the Lean Startup model I can apply it to any talk I give it's really nice it talks about build, measure, learn and repeat so let's apply public speaking into this Lean Startup framework let's start with build how do we build a proposal and a talk that's engaging one that the organizer will pick me just want to debunk a common misconception not all meetups, all conferences, organizers are swimming in applications as you remember what Antoine mentioned in the video he is the organizer for a design meetup and a lot of his time is used to source candidates to see who is willing to give a talk so your goal might actually be aligned here they're looking for a speaker you're looking for a place to give a talk but talking about how do you build a proposal that can be easily, more easily accepted please do me a favor pick a topic that you're truly interested in because if you picked a topic that you can remotely talk for 5-10 minutes maybe a little bit so between the application and your actual talk you're standing on stage it might be months so if you think that you might be willing to give a talk and when you're standing on stage you'll fall asleep so pick something that we're interested in and that shows in your application another thing that might seem obvious but we can check the call for proposal form first to see what they're looking for and one very smart idea that I found from Raphael on Twitter is that you can mention that you can modify your talk to a shorter slot, longer slot so now you're applying for different tracks that's a very smart idea I haven't been doing that before another thing is to think about the who, what and how the more vivid you can let your organizers imagine your talk and how that can bring value to the target audience the easier it is for your talk to get in now we will also want to leverage on our own experience because that's what makes your talk unique and for human beings we actually really want to hear people's failures so if you can share some stories or engage the audience you can also share your failures like your failure using the library your failure developing software it tends to gather a lot of attention that's a lot of build-up to applying for a conference talk but don't get too discouraged if your talk gets rejected my talks get rejected all the time please don't take it too personally because chances are there are multiple reasons out there maybe there are too many people talking about the same topic you're talking about or they might be looking for a different target audience a lot of reasons but good thing in Europe for PyCon we have 10s, 20s of them so if it didn't work out for one we can always try to another one now building the actual talk itself this is my routine first of all rubber ducking we know that from programming it's talking through your code to a person or even a rubber duck so at some point you might find out why it's not working I tend to do the same for some of my talks it's to talk out the first ideas to make sure it's in a logical sequence and then I go bug my feedback crew feedback crew is a group of people where you can trust to give you good critical feedback don't confuse that with a cheerleading squad there are people who say this talk is great, very funny, it's very engaging they're being polite you want to find people who can actually give you good critical feedback for example well your joke really doesn't work here you might want to take it out these two slides don't seem to make sense together do you want to put that into a different section something like this and last is to fine tune our talks by knowing the audience when your talk gets into a conference then we'll know better what is the target audience for example is it targeting junior developers or more senior ones then we might want to adjust the content or is it talking to a non-technical audience that might want to change some of the vocabulary just want to quote Nikola on the dry run thing he says dry run, dry run, dry run good news for some people, bad news for the others good news is if you think that you can't make it well good speakers are usually not born they practice bad news is for people who think that they can wing it and do a very good job well no, it takes practice so when you see speakers shine on stage they have 10 minutes it's a lot of hard work that they put in behind them so measure we all want to know how good we are how can we improve from there we talked about our feedback crew how we can gather feedback from them another source is your audience after you give the talk you can ask them how they went or in some conference apps there are ways for you to evaluate speakers and we can also get some feedback from there you can watch our own presentation video it might be a bit difficult because not everybody likes their own voice but if you want to cut out on filler words like soul, all of this watching our own presentation video really helps because it annoys you a lot to watch it at the same time take notes on the questions that you gathered from the audience because they tend to be areas that people are interested in but you didn't include in your own talk learn this one is actually very interesting I have been giving this talk already but this little incident happened and I realized it's actually harder to take feedback than I imagined the scenario was after I gave the dry run with my feedback crew my colleague gave me some suggestions to improve he told me your presentation style seemed a bit hectic unlike usual I was thinking hectic I spent so much time rehearsing for this talk and hectic was what I got but okay this is something I'm still trying to get the hang of there are two mindsets we're talking about first of all it's a fixed mindset at this point how am I doing then I would have thought bummer I totally messed it up my colleague must think that I wasn't prepared at all that's the fixed mindset but if I have more of a growth mindset then I would be thinking I'm grateful that my colleague gave me that piece of advice now my real talk is going to go much better and between the fixed mindset and growth mindset which one do you think it helps me get to my goal obviously the growth mindset but yes it's easier said than done at the same time getting these feedback what are the action items it also depends a lot on the timeframe for example if someone gave you this feedback the night before the talk it might be better to just not take that advice because it's a lot of stress if you need to digress from what you have rehearsed so if we have action items try to take them one at a time and also prioritize them and not to overwhelm ourselves with the feedback now the most important part is to repeat one thing we can do since we have prepared so much put in so much effort to make this talk good next time we can give it again so that we can get better from our experience now jumping to the more practical part is where can we get started how do we find these opportunities to practice public speaking there are a lot of opportunities around us it doesn't have to be you speaking on stage it can be stand-ups, team meetings presentations at your company or even giving a speech at a party as long as you have that spotlight on you you're on, you're practicing public speaking one thing I also think about is if it's an internal opportunity or external internal given that it's your company your school external might be conferences meetups so personally I enjoy better the external speaking opportunities because I tend to know less of the attendees no offence but it's better that I talk to someone I don't know and I feel less conscious I want to get to know you all but maybe after the talk another thing is try to sign up for conferences in first-time speaker-friendly conferences shameless plug right here so me and my friend Teresa we're organizing a conference called Python Pizza it's gonna be in Hamburg in November so if you want to try out your talk for the first time it's definitely very first-time speaker-friendly it'll be a very fun crowd and at the same time going to local meetups or if you're from an underrepresented group in tech there are a lot of meetups for us to go to as well and the audience tends to be even more friendlier some people approach me asking about public speaking groups or classes is that something we want to do? I would say anything helps right essentially giving a talk is testing your confidence so if you go for improv drama it also has the same theory on that aspect but if you want to learn how to run you don't go swim so if you don't work out very well with an improv group it doesn't mean that you cannot give a prepared presentation it's essentially two different things in that aspect great so we have covered some contents today we talked about the why of public speaking how can we feel less afraid overcoming that fear how do we get better and practically where do we get started these are the references that help me prepare for the talk so if you're interested you can also look up more of these resources and before we close I encourage you to apply for a public speaking opportunity within these two weeks and get started now because if not now then when? thank you yeah thanks Jenny thanks for the keynote so we have questions we have microphones all over the place so now you can queue up and make your first very first speaker presentation by asking a question maybe hello hello oh here hello you mentioned you repeat your talks do you stay interested in the talks you're giving? so my problem with that with public speaking is that I'm only interested in giving a talk that I don't know at the beginning what I'm going to talk about and at the moment that I give it for the first time then it's boring no I think that's a good point and just want to reiterate that's why I tend to pick something that I'm really interested in before getting committed to that and preparing for the talk also takes a lot of time and effort but at the same time one thing I look into is how to perfect that talk for example I talk to the audience afterwards from Q&A like I get a lot of interesting information about what I can do to improve and I tend to incorporate that into the next talk to keep it interesting so like every time I have a little bit of new content here and there so that's how I keep myself engaged more questions yes congratulations and thank you for the excellent speaking I know that it should be a question not really a talking but I'd like to make a comment of a comment of our colleague because I have basically the opposite approach of him I love to talk about something that I don't knew before and the first time I do that when I finish I say my god what's horrible I have to beautify these, these and these I had to have that reference so if I have the opportunity to give the same talk for the 20th time all of them would be different and hopefully a little bit better we are human beings we are all of us different and I believe anyone of us would have different approaches to the same questions but to avoid getting out without asking a question are you feeling fear at this exact moment? good question I think in the beginning yes in fact I was about to make a joke about taking my pulse but I forgot probably because I was too nervous so it's a good time for your joke right but at the same time as I mentioned getting into your harbor and talking about something you're familiar with for example on public speaking a topic that I'm really interested in at some point I forget that I'm talking in front of a big audience and it gets better so I guess right now at this very moment I'm less nervous than I was before thank you very much Jenny so who's actually planning we have some time left so let's ask who has given at least one talk in his life please oh wow that's interesting okay and now we have to check who has never given a talk before not not come on this is not the I mean we can do the math okay well yeah it's interesting at least one-third of the conference interesting so thank you again for Jenny for inspiring to give everybody once in their lifetime at least one good talk and yeah thanks for coming by and glad to have you around thank you