Speaker Myth Busting

It’s worth busting a couple of myths about public speaking and doing conference talks.

The first myth is that everyone up on stage has been doing this forever. That they did it at school, did it at university, and stepped straight onto the conference scene. That isn’t the case at all. I’d been in IT for about ten years before I did any talking. I know people who came to it late in their careers simply because they really wanted to talk about something they’d done, and others who started at university, enjoyed it, and kept going. There’s no common path. Anyone can give a talk, and it doesn’t matter when you start.

The second myth, which can be quite common, is that there’s a certain kind of person who does talks. Surely we’re all extroverts, the life-of-the-party types? But we’re not. Plenty of people who do conference talks are, introverts.

I strongly believe the more different types of people we get giving talks, the better. Talks are about sharing experiences, and we’ve all got different ones. The more varied the experiences on offer, the more we all learn, how other people approached problems, handled things, and worked things out. So I always try to encourage as many different kinds of people as possible to get up and speak.