Maybe after the keynote on Wednesday, I’ll write up a full debrief of my total experience from receiving the invitation to speak to the giving the talk itself. Since my blog post last week, I had two more coaching sessions, made another recording of my practice, and have been doing final revisions and more practice since then.

Here are some thoughts, two days out:

I am so glad I kept a very light schedule in the week before the talk. Anything that could wait, I scheduled for next week.
This is more a function of this being my first keynote where I know what I’m supposed to be doing — as well as the compressed schedule of 1 month between the invite and the talk — but I would like to have finished writing the talk (95% there) so I could really throw myself into practice earlier. There was a very stressful week where the talk was still shifting and morphing (it was maybe 80% there in content and 60% in structure), and I had started practicing anyway to make sure that the words I had written sounded like words that would actually come out of my mouth. And I was worried I’d be remembering things that ultimately changed or got cut entirely.
It’s been helpful to exercise not once or twice a week, but every morning in these days leading up to the talk. When I don’t, I can lay awake at night drilling myself on the talk, and when I wake up and in the middle of the night and should go back to sleep, my brain immediately starts running through the intro. That’s exhausting, so being extra exhausted helps me sleep better and rest.
Memorizing content to fill 45 minutes is A LOT. It really does help to put the entire talk in an order that makes mental sense to transition through, but this can be really hard to do until you’ve practiced the talk! Now I wonder if there’s any way around that uncomfortable overlapping period between finishing the content / structure and throwing myself into practicing. Maybe that overlap time is essential in working out the final kinks.

Like everything else, more deconstruction on my process will have to wait till after the talk. Haha. Hope you have a great week!