Preparation

Once you’ve got all that, you’re going to prepare your talk. There are several very good reasons to do this.

It tells you whether the story hangs together. When you start running through it, you’ll hit bits where you think, “That doesn’t go there, it goes over here,” or, “I totally forgot I wanted to add this.”

You get feedback. Run your talk past colleagues, family or even the family pet. If you’ve got humans, you can at least ask them for feedback. Ideally, find someone like your conference audience and run it past them. They might say, “I don’t understand that bit at all,” or, “This first part’s boring because I already know all that.” You’ll get lots of good feedback, and it’ll make your talk better.

It helps enormously with timing. Do a dry run so you know you’re roughly in the right ballpark. Don’t worry about being precise, a couple of minutes over or under is fine. You just want to be roughly right, because if you’ve got a half-hour slot and your dry run comes in at 15 minutes, you know you need more material; if it’s 60 minutes, you know you need to cut. That gives you confidence.

While I’m here: at some conferences you’ll see people saying, “I’m on the train to the conference, just starting to write my slides.” Don’t do that. There are very few speakers who can genuinely walk into a venue knowing nothing and give a knockout talk.

The key point here is that before your talk, you’ve been through the material multiple times. It’ll give you greater confidence when presenting and reduce the chances of problems on the day.