Your Audience Wants You to Win

While fighting off apprehension and nerves before my first tech talk, my CEO shared a valuable lesson with me about how your audience always wants you to win.

Preface

This may seem familiar.

You are about to give your first tech talk. Maybe it’s not even your first talk, but you still get those same feelings of butterflies, anxiety, and maybe even outright fear. Heck, maybe it’s not even a talk. Maybe you are about to play your well-rehearsed cover of Wonderwall at the local open mic night, or presenting a new technology initiative to your team or adjacent teams at your organization.

It can be a little scary, right?

The Talk

I gave my first tech talk, which was also my first time speaking in public since giving a small “sermon” for my even smaller church on a Wednesday night youth service.

The event was sponsored and organized by my current company at that time, Vincit USA, called “Vincit Dev Talks”. It was a regularly occurring event where speakers, sometimes company employees and other times external speakers would get together for a very casual evening of sharing code, ideas, and networking. I was asked by our CEO if I would be interested in giving a talk because our steering group were impressed with a presentation I gave on accessibility in our internal monthly “Lunch and Learn”, where the company would buy everyone lunch and someone would give a short 45-60 munute presentation about a technical topic we were excited out.

I was nervous. Honestly, just calling it “nervous” is a glorious understatement. I even tried to skip out on company lunch at local Irvine ramen joint because I was too nervous to even want to eat. They convinced me to come to lunch anyway and nobody made fun of the little southern boy who didn’t know how to order ramen correctly.

My topic, by the way, was “Hot Talks About Automated Testing”.

Everyone Wants You To Win

Back the office, my CEO Ville Houttu sat down to chat with me about the talk. I shared with him that I was very nervous, had gone over my presentation multiple times, but I was still feeling a little unprepared. I also felt uncertain because I decided at the lats minute I did not want to have busy slides with examples, different codes, and instead opted for very plain slides to merely guide the conversation so the audience could focus on my words, and as to not lose any of the non-developers in the rooms attention.

Ville was already well down the road of public speaking at that point, and he shared some extremely simple yet profound advice.

”Don’t be nervous, every person sitting in the room wants you to win”

Because it was a company organized event, I would have several dozen co-workers in attendance. I knew my co-workers wanted me to win. But this was a public event. Not only we heavily advertised in a city with a large tech presence, but we also booked the event in a local WeWork office that was home to other tech companies and I would an audience of not only friends and co-workers but also strangers.

”Most of the people there don’t even know who I am”, I asked. In hindsight, looking for an escape hatch or excuse of any kind of rationalization to justify my continued anxiety.

”Those people also want you to win”, he stated.

He went on to remind me that nobody goes to a talk, whether it be a large-scale conference like Render ATL or a small single evening event like Vincit Dev Talks, and sit for a boring or uninspiring talk. Everyone will have different motivations and expectations, as humans are diverse, but they will all be unified in wanting value for their time. Whether that be being informed and learning something new, being entertained, or any other reasons. They want you to win, because when you win, everyone wins.

This applies to virtually anything. Nobody wants to buy a music CD and it be a bad listen, or go out to eat and the food not taste very good, or the local dive bar having a band that sings out of key. When people look up a blog post, or buy a conference ticket, or pull up a video on YouTube, they may not be personally invested in your life, career, or success… But fundamentally, any audience wants quality content, and because of this, they want you to win.

I still had some butterflies stepping out to speak, but I just kept Ville’s advice on mind, and within a few minutes found myself in the zone and delivering what I wanted to deliver. While I didn’t get a standing ovation like the fellow in the image above, I had several people come up to me after the event with questions and advice, a few in the coming days on LinkedIn, and one person in particular that stands out in my memory that was trying to land his first job in tech and had not only taken notes on my talk and the other talk that evening, but had also written a separate list of questions that he wanted to ask.

This alone made the experience: nerves, anxiety, and all, worth it.