I heard about Women Techmakers at DEIday at Google 3rd Oct 2019 and didn’t regret signing up to the Design Thinking with Public Speaking workshop for 12th Oct 2019.

So grateful to Jowylle for the Saturday session and tips:

• Practice (and she made us practise! we thought of a problem in 1min, brainstormed 20 solutions in 8min, converged to 5 and prioritised 3 solutions. Tested with a team member and picked 1!)
• Know your talk
• Work with weaknesses
• Relax
• Breathing techniques (deep breath)
• Introduce yourself
• Make an impression
• Own the stage

Some specific hints before we each took the stage:

• Don’t hide
• Use expressive gestures
• Move with purpose (hold something in your hands)
• Connect to the audience (eye contact, look at wall in the back if audience gives you butterflies)
• Your voice as instrument (not mono intonation)

Then:

• Recap before leaving the stage
• Gather feedback about your talk

We prepared a 1min story and each of us presented & gave feedback. It was an awesome experience and by sharing we learnt some more.

Some more tips came through the Q&A:

• To keep audience engaged: for a 30-min presentation, at 7min ask a question to the audience then at 20min have a quick exercise
• Energiser: everyone clap once if you hear me, raise your hand
• No need to speak slower. Speak at your pace but make sure you have pauses for people to digest your content. Slow down only if audience is not native English speakers.