Public speaking as a shy introvert
Despite being quite social, I’m a shy introvert at heart. But I’ve given quite a few talks, to both smaller meetups and larger conferences. It was nerve wracking at first, and it was nerve wracking in the middle, and it’s nerve wracking now.
Introverted at school
In school, I’d never want to speak in front of the class. If I knew the answer to something, I’d whisper it to whoever was sitting near me so they could answer instead. I grew up in Wales, where performing and singing is a big part of the culture.
Once a year, Wales has the largest cultural festival in Europe - the Eisteddfod. It’s a celebration of Welsh culture, composed of many competitions and ceremonies. The competitions are poetry, music of all kinds, and traditional dancing. The most prestigious competition is for the awdl, a type of long poem, and the winner gets a chair after being crowned by the chief druid.
Welsh schools continue this tradition, holding their own Eisteddfod, and taking part in the national kids version. Each school has 4 houses, typically named after poets, musicians, or mountains. The houses compete through song, poetry and dance.
As an extremely shy kid, I have some memories of my entries. Every year, each house would sing collectively as a choir on stage, but that wasn’t too unusual since we did similar singing every day. But I remember singing Sosban Fach1 with the final line being “and their shirts hanging out” (but in Welsh), at which point I’d untuck my shirt.
On reflection, there’s a few elements why this was manageable despite my shyness:
Everyone took part.
In some cases, I was on the stage with many peers.
I had “props” to help focus my mind (the humour provided by untucking of the shirt).
Refusing to speak
During the last 2 years of high school (6th form), our teacher informed us we’d have to give a talk to the rest of the school year (about 300 kids) about some topic. A combination of disliking my fellow students (generally bullies) and shyness meant I did not want to do it at all. Being a somewhat stubborn teenager, who had recently been diving into human rights, I put together a letter stating that the children’s human rights principles would be infringed if I were made to present. Slightly over the top, but it worked. On the other hand though, during Computing and Maths, I had no problem answering or teaching the classes. These were both subjects I knew well, and as was pretty good at.
The differences here were:
Presenting to a large group where I didn’t have psychological safety with the audience was scary.
Presenting to smaller groups, who I knew well, on a topic I knew well, gave me safety and confidence.
University, and psychological safety
In the first year of university, I remained pretty shy and unwilling to talk to people. In fact, I wore my hood up every time I was in the public in the university town, only taking it down alone. When course representatives were chosen, I took my hood down for the first time, with a speech I had prepared. It went well, and despite not knowing the people in the room that well, I was confident that I could be a good representative, which meant I could be confident in my speech. I was part of the data journalism group, with a relatively small number of participants and everyone presenting to each other. Psychological safety in this group was high, along with confidence in my knowledge.
When I started lecturing, it was with my close friends and co-founders. Again, psychological safety and knowledge were high, though I would often choose to do things in the background. University also had a few mandatory presentations, such as the viva and thesis defence. Here I learnt a useful skill: if I didn’t know something well enough to present, I could talk about something I did know, and discuss the topic in relation to my knowledge.
Many people hold speakers in reverence. People think since speakers have decided to speak about a topic, they must be a person with deep or new insights into a problem space. In my experience, that’s often not the case, and if it were, it wouldn’t be enough time to delve into the details. Speakers should focus on what they do know, and the story they want to tell.
Speaking at meetups
My first public talk to a completely unknown audience was at the first Elm meetup, in London. I had become very active in the Elm community by this point, and had a bunch of neat things to show off. Prior to the event, I talked to as many tech people 1-to-1 as I could to show off a demo2 and get their feedback. Their feedback gave me insights into which parts people considered interesting or novel. The night before the talk, I stayed with a few friends in an AirBnB. I’d walk back and forth in the hallway while reciting my whole talk, starting from scratch any time my friends made suggestions. This helped me keep my time tight, and gave me confidence in the early part of the talk where nerves can be most off-putting.
The talk itself went very well, and I discovered that if you speak about topics people are interested in, you’ll get a lot of new connections that can really open the way for collaboration. Often at meetups, you’ll see groups of people who came together and not talk to people they’re unfamiliar with. But if you’re a speaker, it gives people something to talk to you about, so they reach out. It’s super useful when you’re trying to solve new problems, or build a community.
Some lessons I learnt from that:
Writing a talk should be iterative, building on each section, to tell the story you want to tell.
Honest feedback from people you trust can help you refine your talk.
Getting your message across in a concise, clear way, while keeping to time limits, takes practice.
Meetups become better networking opportunities if you are the speaker.
Once I got that energy, and saw how it could do great things for a community, I gave a similar talk in several different meetups. The goal was to get people excited about Elm, while also putting all the people who were excited about Elm in one room. I don’t remember how many meetups I gave that talk in, but it was 10+. Any time I’d be in a new place, I’d look around to see what meetups were happening, and if there wasn’t an Elm one, I’d help to set it up.
Self-presentation mode
Mentally, I found that I’d go into “presenter” or “host” mode. The sense of shyness and awkwardness would be overridden by a much stronger sense of wanting to make sure the event went well. In psychology, this is known as self-presentation. The concept is that in situations where someone wants others to perceive them in a different way from their true personality, they present different elements of their personality. This is a very normal thing, and everyone does it: imagine going through an interview, or meeting the head of state. You probably wouldn’t want the interviewer or prime minister to think you’re shy or awkward. The only problem is when the self-presentation personality completely hides your true personality, and it feels like you must constantly keep a facade up. For this reason, I think it’s valuable to be open and honest about your flaws.
Meeting new people can be tiring and draining for an introvert, and meeting people once isn’t enough to build a community or network - meetups have to be followed up with discussions, and links. I’d typically try to speak at or host one meetup per month, anything more than that isn’t too sustainable. As I’ve become more familiar with my own timing, and my storytelling, it’s become a lot less work to prep for a talk. But early on, it required a lot of mental energy.
It often ends up like this for me, most of the time spent giving a talk is being anxious about it, then recovering energy:
I gave a few more talks after settling in Norway, mostly at meetups, a few at conferences. But I found a new format that worked well for me: digital talks. When I’m not standing in front of a bunch of strangers with a microphone and all eyes on me, I find it so much easier to be comfortable. So I’ve done a bunch of talks like that, to both small and large audiences. My best received talk was done this way, while I was suffering badly from altitude sickness at 3am. Maybe the lack of oxygen made me more coherent, I don’t know. But I suspect the digital format had a large role to play.
Since my youth, I’ve definitely gotten better at telling the strange stories from my life. Understanding what makes a compelling story applies to talking about tech, too.
Why should the audience care?
What can the audience learn?
Is there a call-to-action?
How can learning or problem solving continue after the talk is done?
What do I, as a speaker, get out of it?
Speaking to an audience is the most direct way of getting a captive audience for your ideas. Getting people to read posts, books, or discussions is difficult. But with a talk, the audience is generally going to pay attention since they’ve (maybe) paid money to be there and they’ve taken the day off of work.
The connection between the audience and the speaker is powerful, and people will want to talk to you about your presentation, and remember who you are. If you’re announcing a project and want collaborators, or to spread the word, giving a talk is often a crucial step.
Basically, it’s great for networking, and announcements.
What can I do to support introverted speakers?
In Schibsted, I started a weekly developer talk session between a few teams, where the focus was on low-key talks on interesting topics. This gave people a place to practice speaking in a comfortable environment before speaking in a larger audience. The trick is to ensure that there’s enough psychological trust between the audience and the speaker, and the easiest way to do this is to start small. The audience could be colleagues where everyone knows each other already.
Offering a way for speakers to present digitally rather than on stage can be very helpful for stage fright. Practice sessions, with good clear feedback, can be invaluable.
A fun practice is “slideshow karaoke”, where slidedecks from random talks are combined, then you take turns presenting them, having never seen them before. The first slide might be a picture of a horse, the next a picture of a church, the next a pie chart, etc. It forces you to think on your feet and come up with the story you want to tell. I’ve heard improv is good for this, too.
Alternatives to speaking
Speaking isn’t the only way of conveying ideas, knowledge, or thoughts.
Writing blog posts.
Taking part in community discussions.
Join unconferences, or even meetups, as a participant.
Talking to people.
Publishing a book.
Podcasts or videocasts.
When to avoid giving a talk
If it’s going to cause too much mental distress for you, don’t feel obliged to sign up to talk. If you’d like to try it out, start in a smaller venue, with an audience you’re familiar with. Be honest with yourself. Stressing yourself out and causing mental health problems is not worth the benefits of speaking, though I do recommend everyone try it at least once in their career.
Summary
To pull that all together in one place:
Psychological safety, and comfort with the audience, is very important for introverted speakers.
Confidence in a topic can help a speaker convey their message.
Be prepared, take time to practice, and learn your own timings and rhythms.
Seek advice from trusted peers.
Be aware of the mental cost both in preparing for a talk, and regaining energy after.
Talks aren’t the only way of conveying a message.
Talks given digitally can be better for some introverts.
If you want to make friends with a Cymro/Cyrmaes for life, randomly start singing Sosban Fach and get them to join in.
It was a demo of server <> client tracing of the event loop, so that debugging sessions could step through every interaction a client might’ve made, to reproduce exactly what a user did. A nice side effect of that was to have multiple devices have perfect synchronisation through running the messages on each client.