Earlier this week the folks at PASS reached out to last year’s speakers asking us to share a story of how speaking at PASS impacted us professionally or personally. At first we I received the email saying I had been selected I was at a speaker’s dinner for a SQL Saturday and I was afraid to tell anyone. Afterall it had to be a mistake and I was a bit terrified. I spoke at 17 SQL Saturdays last year prior to Summit but those are small intimate events with no more than 45 people in the room and as few as three. I had done a couple of virtual groups with over a hundred people watching but I couldn’t see them so less pressure. The idea room full of I don’t know how many people there to see me speak was a bit terrifying.
So the best way to get over being terrified is to practice. So I did the presentation for my local user group and totally bombed. Not much of a confidence builder. Not to mention the next SQL Saturday I was at I had another session bomb, my first two sessions that ever bombed. They say these things happen in threes, would PASS Summit be number three I asked myself? So keep prepping in between all the SQL Saturdays and working I was doing. At this point, I was pretty sure I sucked at presenting. I couple of people kept giving me encouraging words.
Then I got to Summit and things got better. I wasn’t as nervous as I thought building up to the talk. People from the SQL Saturdays I had spoken at were coming up to talking about sessions I had given and told me how they had helped them. I was meeting a lot of people I knew and was feeling comfortable. Then Thursday came, I had come in on Monday, I took my first peek at the room I was presenting in and it was BIG by my standards. So I watched the first presenter of the day in the room and got a feel for the stage and how they moved around or didn’t because they had a lot of demos like I did. Then I went in the speaker’s room and set up everything to run and ran through everything one last time and set off on my day to learn other things as I was the last presenter of the day.
Then it became time to speak, I showed up 30 minutes before the end of the person’s before me talk and surveyed the room. It still seemed BIG. Then show time came and went up on the stage (my first time on stage wired to a mic eeek). Then the nerve-racking part started watching what PASS counted as nearly 200 people filled the room. I had no sense of how many people were entering the room. We started the talk and for about the first five to ten minutes I felt a bit nervous but settled down. I even recovered from a failing demo during the middle of the presentation. Fielded a lot of questions about troubleshooting AGs although I was talking about monitoring AGS. At the end, about over 30 people came up to the stage to ask more questions and it took 30 minutes to field those questions (good thing I had the last session of the day). The next day I even ran into people from the session who were still excited about having attended and asking more questions.
Personally, this has given more confidence in presenting as I no longer get nervous if I know I am prepared and know the material. I’ve presented a couple of times since then and things have been smooth. I know I still have areas to improve on but confidence isn’t one of them. Confidence isn’t something easy to get and nothing like gaining it on the BIG stage. Now all I got to do is hang on to it, and don’t go back to my am I really suppose to be here mindset.
