Natalie Downe's Weblog

Overcoming my fear of public speaking

2008-10-14T15:49:20-05:00

I'm flying high above southern France, the sun fresh in the sky and clouds hugging close to the ground below.

This afternoon I am speaking about CSS Systems to a waiting audience in Basel, Switzerland.

Two weeks ago I gave my first proper talk at BarCamp London 5. To experienced speakers this will sound strange but I was petrified to stand up and express opinions in front of possibly the friendliest audience there is, a group of about 25 supportive and interested friends.

I have possibly the most common phobia out there: the fear of public speaking. I had accepted it and come to terms with being the one who helps on the sidelines.

At BarCamps I would organise lightning talks, show and tells and IE6 debugging games, which was a great way of conforming to the required participatory nature of BarCamp without risking what I feared would be professional suicide.

Some of you will know that my partner Simon Willison is a very experienced and excitable speaker, so I am quite accustomed to the speaker circuit without being directly part of it and in fact most of my friends are experienced speakers as well.

It's not that I don't have anything to say, nor do I mind talking one to one or occasionally socially in small groups. I am excitable and opinionated. I am even OK on stage introducing speakers for things like Oxford Geek Nights. It's all the expectant faces staring back at you and the fear that I'm going to waste several minutes to an hour of their lives. I didn't have the conviction of my opinions: what if I was wrong?

I used to clam up. Once I was even told by someone that they were worried I had stopped breathing.

In January of this year I started working for Clearleft. There is a strong culture of community involvement, writing and speaking at conferences. Writing articles and community involvement were fine for me, but naturally I felt the implicit pressure to start actually speaking and not just organising games and lightning talks.

We had a speaking coach run a day's training for us which did really help but without having that put in to practice the fear was still there.

At BarCamp London — despite pressing a button on the remote that turned off the projector — everything went well and after I posted the slides, I was taken aback by the positive response to the content.

I firmly believe that if you are afraid of something, that's more reason to do it. What good is going through life only doing things you find easy? It's the only way you can really learn about yourself. Test your limits and don't give up.

The reaction to the content spurred me on to agree to this conference in Switzerland but the desire to face the fear and overcome it was the overpowering factor. It doesn't mean I'm not scared, but I can only do my best.

So go, do something that you are afraid of and you will be surprised at yourself.

Update: The talk in Switzerland went well. I was initially very scared, but got in to the swing of things and had some good feedback at the end. It was definitely worth doing.

A quote from Eric A. Meyer

2008-10-07T19:25:28-05:00

Oh, look, the mass debating tweets are out in full force again.

- Eric A. Meyer

A quote from Simon Willison

2008-10-05T11:33:00-05:00

@natbat is making me a lasagne. Life is good.

- Simon Willison

A quote from Drew McLellan

2008-10-05T10:35:44-05:00

is typing out wedding hymns. Note: temple != template. Geek autocomplete is bad.

- Drew McLellan

A quote from Relly

2008-09-30T05:26:13-05:00

just stirred tuna into my tea. I wish I were joking.

- Relly

A quote from Drew McLellan

2008-09-30T02:45:16-05:00

So if one is paper, 25 is silver, 50 is gold, what's 5000? Or do we not do gifts for twitter update milestones? No?

- Drew McLellan

A quote from Josh Russell

2008-09-29T16:19:54-05:00

Ok, what did I miss? Did the world trip over while I was at dinner?

- Josh Russell

A quote from Hickensian

2008-09-29T14:02:50-05:00

OH "If God didn't intend us to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?"

- Hickensian

A quote from Desigan Chinniah

2008-09-29T05:36:21-05:00

Fucked off to discover that +-40, yep five o peeps did not attend BCL5 even though they signed up! Not even the decency to let us know.

- Desigan Chinniah

A quote from Paul Downey

2008-09-29T01:39:01-05:00

ah Creativity and Enthusiasm, meet Mandatory Training. Mandatory Training these are my good friends .. er .. where have they gone?

- Paul Downey

CSS Systems for writing maintainable CSS

2008-09-28T17:20:14-05:00

I gave a talk this morning at BarCamp London 5 about CSS Systems, a new term that I am using to define a top-down approach to architecting a site's CSS.

A CSS System is a reusable set of content-oriented markup patterns and associated CSS created to express a site's individual design. It is the end result of a process that emphasizes up-front planning, loose coupling between CSS and markup, pre-empting browser bugs and overall robustness. It also incorporates a shared vocabulary for developers to communicate the intent of the code.

The talk elaborates on this concept, and also describes a number of tricks I use to preempt maintainability issues.

You can view just the slides on SlideShare, but as they might not make sense out of context you can download a PDF of the slides with notes for the complete experience.

A quote from John Resig

2008-09-27T21:41:19-05:00

Go Abnormal Psychology! You can't fake multiple personality disorder since each has a distinct brain impulse. A CAT scan will find you out.

- John Resig

A quote from Cennydd

2008-09-25T03:47:42-05:00

I hereby designae oday as 'inernaional alk like Cisco day'.

- Cennydd

A quote from Mark Ng

2008-09-25T03:26:07-05:00

http://www.cisco.com/ has had all of the t's removed from the source. Whoops :P

- Mark Ng

Meet the Faceblook

2008-09-24T18:15:09-05:00

Meet the Faceblook (via). An amusing reflection on facebook in real life

A quote from Snook

2008-09-24T13:59:27-05:00

I'm starting to see Twitter IDs in email footers. Just noting it, that is all.

- Snook

A quote from Natalie

2008-09-24T08:46:15-05:00

really impressed that firefox 3 remembers for a domain whether or not you increased the font size. So if you go back or open other pages.

- Natalie

A quote from Christian Heilmann

2008-09-24T07:33:15-05:00

Ascii no questions, Telex no lies.

- Christian Heilmann

A quote from MarsPhoenix

2008-09-24T07:22:36-05:00

I've always been inspired by this self-shot: http://twitpic.com/cy2t so I had to try my own (using arm camera)! Hi! http://twitpic.com/cy34

- MarsPhoenix

A quote from pixeldiva

2008-09-24T03:46:31-05:00

is amused that her accountants have Techno hold music rather than elevator music. Unexpected, and made me grin.

- pixeldiva

A quote from Andrew

2008-09-23T09:54:49-05:00

is feeling "XP/IE-docious".

- Andrew

A quote from lowflyingrocks

2008-09-23T07:13:36-05:00

Blimey, that was close.

- lowflyingrocks

A quote from lowflyingrocks

2008-09-23T07:10:05-05:00

2008 SA just passed the Earth at 8km/s, approximately nine hundred and thirteen thousand km away.

- lowflyingrocks

A quote from Paul Annett

2008-09-22T11:50:37-05:00

Overheard (wife & 2 year old): "What is it, Toby?" - "It's a conker." - "That's right, and what does a conker grow into?" - "A bandstand."

- Paul Annett

A quote from Aquarion

2008-09-22T08:54:32-05:00

Ticket ticket ticket ticket ticket ticket ticket MILESTONE, MILESTONE. Ticket ticket ticket ticket ticket ticket BUG! BUG! Oooh, it's a bug…

- Aquarion

A quote from Jason Cartwright

2008-09-22T06:54:33-05:00

browser testing. about to garrotte myself with mouse cable

- Jason Cartwright

A quote from Christian Heilmann

2008-09-22T06:19:13-05:00

@drewm would be even better if it preloaded the other page, this way it can delay too long. A lot of charities do that though.

- Christian Heilmann

A quote from Drew McLellan

2008-09-22T06:14:29-05:00

Smart design from ChildLine - Esc key quickly hides what you were looking at. http://www.childline.org.uk/

- Drew McLellan

A quote from Paul Downey

2008-09-22T05:35:42-05:00

beyond Yak shaving, sourcing grass seed to feed said Yaks

- Paul Downey

A quote from Gavin Starks

2008-09-21T15:19:20-05:00

stating the obvious, but if the arctic melts (entirely) in summer 2012, the ice core samples will be the only records left of its history.

- Gavin Starks