2024W34: The Keynote Speech Has Been Delivered 🎉

This has been the wildest of times that was never supposed to be wild! I thought the past month would be my time to buckle down and work on some projects that needed behind-the-scenes love. It ended up being a month of scrambling to craft and practice a keynote talk, and to handle all of the media logistics behind it. Everything went great and I’m grateful I had this opportunity to step way way way way outside my comfort zone and G R O W .

Just in time for a much-needed change of pace is my BIRTHDAY, and I am laying low this week while enjoying lots of social celebration on the weekends bracketing my actual birthday, and through the end of the month.

Heads up that if you have ever thought about writing a nonfiction book and never got around to it — I will be hosting a write-along in November, in the spirit of the now-defunct National Nonfiction Writing Month. I have two co-hosts rounded up, and once we have a plan to announce, we will post on social media and you can join in. All this advance notice is for you to clear your calendar and gather all your ideas for your nonfiction project!

2024W33: Practicing a Keynote Speech

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!

2024W32: Writing a Keynote Speech

I mentioned last week that I’ve been in a program to learn how to build a keynote speaking part of my business. I finish the program in November, but I got an invitation to keynote next week, at the Keller Williams Young Professionals Advance event!

I’ve had two coaches weigh in on my talk-in-progress, and my third and final coaching call in preparation for this talk is tomorrow. So far, I’ve had some useful take-aways:

1. I’ve been public speaking at workshops for so long that my natural style is to speak at the strategic and tactical levels. It’s taking a lot of focus to stay broad and big-picture.

2. Stories bring a significant amount of value to keynotes. I’ve pressured myself to populate my talk with specific (and true, obviously) stories that are profound and meaningful, but you can also tell compelling stories about culture and society and ideas themselves.

3. I’ve never had to be so purposeful about humor. I think I’m pretty good at finding humor in the moment, rather spontaneously. But maybe only 5% of a keynote is spontaneous. You have to know you are hitting all your points in a specific time frame, so there isn’t a lot of riffing to be done. This is also strange and new and terrifying!

What is life, if not embracing the strange and new and terrifying?

I’m including a picture from the Pop Cats Austin show last weekend. I was so lucky my friend Lisa Teichner invited me! We had a great time.

2024W31: Exploring Different Aspects of My Voice

I’m finishing my third month of a seven month structured program to build part of my business that will offer keynote speaking. This is very different for me than workshop speaking, and it is requiring big stretches and great leaps of faith. 😅 My workshop approach and voice are pretty refined after 20+ years! Everything about workshops feels natural to me, from how I prepare to what I say, not to mention the heavy emphasis on strategy and tactics, with the ultimate goal of action.

Keynotes however? They exist on a different plane from workshops, and focus on the big picture. I’ve spoken in that big picture, visionary way for a few minutes at a time, usually during the facilitated sections of workshops, while responding to something that’s come up organically in conversation. It’s a big change to fill 45 minutes this way, all planned, totally uninterrupted. No questions the audience answers out loud, no verbal interaction.

I’m glad I have a few coaches to help guide me. It’s truly humbling to write a fairly complete outline of a talk and be encouraged to start over, haha. Not so much on content, but on style — I’m still processing everything through a very technical lens, and I guess I need to loosen up. Imagine!

Keynote Remote

Sometime soon, I’ll share more about Keynote on iPad, which in itself is just lovely and wonderful and incredibly productive — but what really blew me away recently was the addition of Keynote Remote on my iPhone to control the presentation.  I was in a training room where the only connection to an LCD projector was via wire in the back of the room, and as I was using my iPad, I couldn’t easily give the presentation from the back of the room.  I remembered the Keynote Remote app, and 99 cents later, I was scrolling through my iPad presentation from my iPhone.

Quick notes:

1. The iPhone and iPad worked perfectly in a test scenario at home, but in the training room, there were a few instances of dropped connections.  Not sure how that happened since both devices were on the same wi-fi network AND they were linked Bluetooth.  But I was able to pair them up again in a matter of seconds.
2. The Keynote Remote app is great because, in landscape mode, you can see both the slide you’re projecting and the next one.  That said, this app could do SO MUCH MORE than a few functions.  How about a blank option, a mouse, a pointer than you control by touching your fingertip to the projected slide on the iPhone?