Speaking of Me

This week, Tuesday to be specific, I gave had my first official speaking engagement. It was for United Partners for Human Services Annual Conference for Nonprofit Leadership. I delivered. How to Generate Generational Momentum, which covers the challenges and opportunities with all four different generations in the workplace. I can tell you that the process leading up to delivering the presentation was very limited on fun but the feeling afterwards was fantastic.

Go ahead and ask. You're thinking were you nervous? No and yes. I wasn't nervous about being in front of people, I've done that often in theatre but I was nervous about my preparation for delivering the content. Though I knew the content and am passionate about Generational Challenges I wasn't 100% comfortable with the "script" and the order of the content as I just reworked the PowerPoint component of the presentation. Creating effective PowerPoint is frustrating/tough/annoying/sucks. As some people learn more visually and some verbally it is hard to balance the two and still have stunning visuals. Although, many of my professors in college used PowerPoint to teach and they never seemed to care how dull they were.

I wasn't originally supposed to speak at this conference, I actually tricked the conference planners into it (just kidding). Tom was supposed to speak at the conference but was going to be in Portland, OR speaking at another conference so we were going to have to cancel. Instead I volunteered myself thinking, "how hard could it be." Speaking wasn't hard, the preparation was (as you may have notice my blogs have been severely limited the last two weeks). But because I enjoyed speaking but have only one gig under my belt, meaning I could be a big risk to a planner, I'm going to start tricking organizations into booking Tom and then tell them he's busy forcing them to use me.