Room 104 Sunday Mar. 08 - SCaLE 23x

In this session, David Duffet discusses the importance of communication skills for technical individuals who struggle to convey their expertise effectively in non-technical environments. He emphasizes that knowing technical content is insufficient for career advancement; one must also be able to identify and communicate relevant information to various audiences. Duffet introduces seven key power presenting protocols aimed at improving communication in presentations, meetings, and demos, focusing on strategies that ensure the audience can engage with the material effectively. He reflects on his experiences with technical teams, underlining the necessity for human connectivity and preparation to enhance presentation outcomes.

I'm not sure. >> Okay. >> I think you're expert. >> Okay, that's fine. I can be a selfarter. Thank you. >> Fantastic. Yeah. >> Yeah. Okay. That's great. Thank you. Hello there. Can you hear me? Okay. >> Well, great. Thank you very much for coming along. I'm really pleased to see you. My name is David Duffet. I came all the way from England. Well, in fact, I

didn't. I came all the way from Brazil, but I'm originally from England to be with you today. And I want to start by asking you a question. And that is thinking about your career and your life to date. Have you ever seen somebody, maybe it's a friend, maybe it's a family member, and their achievement in terms of their career doesn't really match their technical expertise because they're

technically all there, but they're just not making it to the positions that they should be in their career. In other words, they're not advancing to the level that their technical skills and abilities say that they should. Have you ever seen that in anybody in a friend? And and how does it make you feel for them? >> You feel ah we're coming to that. Yeah, [laughter] you stole

my next thing there. Um yeah, it's terrible, isn't it? You feel sorry for them. But I just want to change. So what's your name, sir? >> Derek. >> Derek. Derek. Derek. I'm just going to change one letter there. Have you ever been somebody that has not made their way to the point in their career that they should have done to date because you got the great technical

expertise. You know what you're talking about. You really know your stuff and yet you're perhaps not of a point in your career where you should be. In the geek world, it is all about knowing your stuff. You hear Ben really knows his stuff. Mark knows his stuff. Mayor is really switched on about the technology, but when it comes to interfacing with people who are not quite as

technical as you, let me let you into a secret. Knowing your stuff is not enough. Simply not enough. It's your ability to communicate the right part of your stuff. Not all of your stuff. Have you ever noticed that technical people like to tell you pretty much everything they know? But it's the ability to find the relevant part of your stuff to your audience. Whether that's the chief

financial officer who's going to make a purchase, whether it's the hiring manager that might be giving you a job, whether it's some people who you're hoping to draw into your open source project community, whoever it is, you need to find the relevant parts of your stuff. And then what's important is delivering it across to them in a way that's good for them to receive, to digest, and

to work with. That's the key that we're looking for. That's the big lesson here. Now, what I've got for us this morning is I just want to do a little bit of context setting around all of this. First of all, then I want to talk about the problem that technical people sometimes face when they're talking to le less technical people. And by the way, I'm going to

be using lots of examples mainly from presentations. However, everything I say equally applies to meetings, equally applies could even be one-to-one interactions. And I'll give you an example of this. I I I went to Bloomberg, you know Bloomberg, the financial uh information people. They flew me over to New York to help their geeks to speak because they've got a thing called Bloomberg Philanthropy and they like to

give back. And part of the way they wanted to give back is to have their geeks go to conferences just like this and speak about the open-source technologies they use in order to kind of give back. And after I'd finished speaking, somebody came up to me and said, you know, you've just talked about presentations, but I could equally apply everything you've said to my team meetings. And

that's when I came to understand that while I was so far talking about presentations, it's really another side of the communications coin. Presentations and communications are pretty much, you know, two sides of the same coin. The difference is, of course, that your everyday communication skills can affect your working relationships. And you can quite often find this where you've got a highly technical person perhaps in a pre-sales

capacity paired up with a salesperson and they go out on meetings together and very often this can lead to dysfunctional relationships because the technical person's communication skills are different to what that salespersons might be. So I want to talk about the problem and then here's what I've got for you. I've got seven power presenting protocols. They could equally be called seven principles of communication. And what they

will do is if you follow them from the ground up, you can build a knockout presentation. On the other hand, let's imagine that you've already got a presentation that you really like and you feel moderately happy with it. You can use the seven power presenting protocols as seven different camera angles or seven different microscopes to look at an existing presentation to enhance it and make it even

more effective. Feel free to take a seat, sir, if you'd like to. There's lots of spare seats over in the corner or different places. Um, and then we'll what we'll do, I'm going to take you through those protocols first and then what we'll do is we'll come back and we'll workshop some of them. So actually do some thinking about the individual protocols and how they might apply

either to a meeting or to a presentation or to a demo. How does that sound? Is that okay? Permission to carry on in that case. Let's do it. Right. Of course, first of all though, you know, maybe you've not all been in the room together. I don't know which other sessions you've been to at scale, but we'll have a little get to know you test with the

geometric test. Um, and all you have to do with the geometric test is simply pick a shape. That's it. You don't overthink it. Just go for the one that you like best and uh we'll go along. And so, has everybody got a shape in mind? Great. Okay. So, who are our triangles in the room? Just pop your hand up if you're a triangle. Have a good look

round at the triangles because these are the directed and ambitious people. It's the shape that says it, isn't it? know they've got a they've got a plan for how they're going to get to where they're going to get to. They are ambitious people. What about the square people? Don't be frightened to be a square person. Okay, square person, they're the detailed conscious people. You need square people

on your team because what they're going to do is they are going to color up right to the edges. They're the ones that are going to do the code review and make sure that everything works. They're the detailed conscious people. What about the circles? How many circles in the room? I was hoping we'd have at least one, sir. The circles are the people people. They are. Is

that right, sir? >> Couldn't couldn't be further from the truth. There's an exception to prove every rule. Generally speaking, the circles are the people people. And let's say there's a little gathering of you in a bar or somewhere and a new person comes up and there's not a seat for them. It's the circle that will go away and look for another chair. Maybe even give up their

seat so the new person can sit down. And what about the squiggly lines? Ah, now that's interesting, isn't it? Keep your hands up if you're a squiggly line. Did you ever hear of Asterisk? The open- source communications project. Mark Spencer, the creator of asterisk, is a squiggly line. So, keep your hands up if you're a squiggly line because actually this one breaks down. Generally, it's those people

with an unhealthy obsession. Keep your hands up though. Keep your hands up. >> Is it Taylor Swift? >> No. Tom Cruz. >> No. Or is it matching technical excellence along with human connectivity? Maybe it is that one. Maybe that's for the good news is that this presentation is for everybody. It covers all of those bases. By the way, the first time I properly met Mark Spencer in

a presentation scenario, I did this more than 20 years ago. He was a squiggly line and he never forgot about it. Okay, bit of background about me. I've been in training and telecoms for 20 odd years. Um, opensource. My open source connection is that I was the worldwide community director for the asterisk open source project for a period of seven years. I really loved it but that

brought me into contact with lots of other open-source communications projects like Kamat Ilio open sips free switch and so on. If you'd like to link in feel free to uh uh take a quick uh picture or uh scan that QR code. I always love to link in with people. I'm a bit of a people person. And when I was younger, I didn't really feel technical enough. I

was end up in these technical jobs. And it always worried me that I wasn't quite as technical as all the other technical people. And it turned out that as I got older and a bit more comfortable in my skin. The reason why my pendulum didn't swing all the way up on the tech side is because I'm a bit of a people person as well. I love people

and uh connecting with people. Okay. Now, here's the problem. If you think about every single presentation, and remember you can equally apply this to meetings and demos and things like that, but I'm going to use presentations a lot here. If you think about all the presentations that happen every day in the world, obviously statistically, most of them are going to be about average, aren't they? They're not

going to stand out. That's just a statistical fact. You can't argue with the fact that the majority of presentations are going to be about average. You know, that's just stats. Down at the low end, we've got this thing called BCP. BCP stands for buttock clenchingly poor. These are presentations that you've watched and afterwards you might find yourself walking around a little bit like this. Or if you've

been in a presentation, somebody gets out to leave and they're going, you think maybe they need to visit the bathroom. But what it is really is they've witnessed a buttock clenchingly poor presentation. And believe me, there are some given. I'm not accusing anybody here of doing that or even even at scale because I should explain that a geektogeeek presentation is a totally different thing to a geek

to a non-geeek. So GTG presentations, that's not what this is about. This is about geek to non-geeek kind of presentation skills. Over at the other end, [clears throat] we've got standing ovation. Great. These are presentations that you loved so much you just want to do whatever the person at the front was talking about. Whether that is change a working habit, buy a product, sign up for a

training class, join a community, whatever it is, their presentation was that good that you think I really want to do whatever it is they were asking me to. Now, here's the thing. When we think about that lower end of the market going from butterclenchingly poor to about average, sadly there is a disproportionate representation of our technical friends, of us, the geeks and the nerds. And it's not

that they don't know their stuff, is it? We already said that geeks definitely know their stuff. But we also said that knowing your stuff is not enough. So we need to move that along a little bit. Now, in the businessto business communications world, and I'm using this as a sort of a loose definition. This could be you wanting to recruit people into your open source community. This

could be you trying to sell people onto using your software. It could be you trying to get a job with somebody. Word and PowerPoint and open- source equivalents of these kind of things have been around for a long time. And so generally speaking, anybody with some basic IT skills can make something that looks reasonably good. You know, you can format something in a word processor. You can

create some slides. Of course, these days people are using gamma and all sorts of other AI tools to produce slides which I have my own opinions about. And of course, what that meant was the differentiator was the content. So you put your heart and soul into the content and it showed through. Of generative AI for the content. And so now, if you know how to use generative

AI and your reasonable uh prompt engineering, you can probably get the things that you'd like. There's a seat over there, sir, or a seat just there, wherever you'd like. Um, and so the playing field has once again been leveled in terms of what everybody can achieve. I would say this though. I would say if you outsource the thinking of putting together a presentation or or of anything,

you outsource the learning. You don't necessarily learn the lessons about it. But what I'm here to tell you is that in the peopleto-people world, it's still about human connectivity. So let's imagine that you're on the edge of a half a million dollar deal in the sales world. These days there's probably been a lot of demo automation software of your software as a service platform. There's been all

sorts of money spent on advertising. And so by the time a person meets a person, it's quite an expensive thing to have happened to actually get those two people together to talk about this one buying software from this one. A lot has happened. A lot of money has been spent. And so it's even more critical that the person representing your company or you wanting to get a

job, it's even more critical that your human to human connectivity skills are right up there. Okay. So what we want to do is uh background experience is really the the wrong title for this, but I want to ask you what you would like to achieve. I just put a few of these ideas up here like not having your ideas overlooked. um not being sidelined. Um and my

favorite one here is wouldn't it be great if through your credibility and visibility somebody said to you we'd like you to come and work for us here at Canonical here at OpenAI or whatever here at Fedora or we'd like you to come and work for us. And that happens to people that really happens especially to people that speak at conferences or do podcasts or those kind of

things that can really happen. What I want to tell you is that all of the above and more is 100% possible for the geek that can speak, the nerd that can be heard, the techie that can talk, and the engineer that can engage. Any other things on top of that that you think, yeah, I would like to achieve by honing by improving my communication on my presentation

skills. Any examples? Could I induce you with a chocolate? Would that help? Would that make a difference? I do have participation prizes with me. Go ahead, sir. >> Excellent point. In fact, that's such a good point, sir. I'm going to give you two chocolates. That's a really good point. And uh yeah, that actually that also came up in Bloomberg. I was talking to the HR manager at

the time. She's HR manager for more than 8,000 engineers. and she was saying that we've got these people that have come up through college and university when there have been lockdowns and things and they've not really spent a lot of time with other people. Then they end up in a remote working position. Then we make them into a leader because they're really good of the engineering side.

So we promote them and they've never had that level of interaction with people. They're not not really equipped. So yes, you're bang on. And I'm pleased to tell you that everything I'm going to cover in this equally applies to honing your leadership skills. In fact, leadership is another description uh for these things. Great. Okay. I want to ask, has this ever happened to you? You're watching something

exciting online and then all of a sudden that happens. That's not a fault, by the way. That's meant to happen in this presentation. Has that ever happened to you? It's probably happened to us all, hasn't it? And what is the problem? And I'd like you to shout out what you think the problem is and I will reward you with chocolates. Yes, sir. >> Bandwidth. >> Bandwidth is

Yeah. What about connection? Bandwidth. I think you did you say connection? I don't know. What? Who else? What? Oh, >> lack of connection. >> Yeah. Lack of connectivity. Did anybody else say any of that? I'm going to try to throw one right into the corner anyway. Whether you said anything or not, just to check my throwing powers. Whoa. By the way, I realize that America is a

very ligious environment and if anybody gets hurt by flying chocolate, I'd like to disclaim that of it of its early stage. >> Lack of interoperability. >> Lack of interoperability. Yeah. Well, mind you, if that was the case, Diego, I'm going to give you a chocolate anyway. If that was the case, you wouldn't have been watching it in the first place, would you? If it wasn't. But yeah,

I'm with you. Okay. Yes. Bad connection is what I think we can all agree. It might be the Wi-Fi. It might be the router. It might even be the far end's video server. But something is wrong, isn't it? A bad connection. Here's what I want to say to you. So many people step out in front of an audience without ever thinking about their connection with the audience.

And that connection is all important. That bandwidth, the bandwidth you have with the other people that you're going to be talking to is so important because number one, it allows your information to travel towards them. But it also allows any information they're going to give you to travel back to you. So you know whether they're bit skeptical about what you're saying, whether they're really enthusiastic, whether they've

got questions, all of that flows back through the bandwidth of that connection. So, can you see that investing in having the best possible connection with people before you start talking to them is probably going to set you apart from everybody else. So, often people come out and start speaking without establishing that connection. Now, maybe you're thinking, well, hang on a minute. You weren't able to do this

with us today, David. you know, because you didn't know we were going to be here. So, how could you establish any bandwidth with us? That's exactly why I started talking and giving some background information first because what I was doing was opening up that bandwidth. And do you remember that bit where I showed you the agenda and said, "Would that be okay?" And you all went, "Yes."

That was agreeing. That was a micro commitment. That was growing that bandwidth. Of course, there are plenty of times when you can talk to people before you ever present to them. Let's imagine that you're going to do a demo for a company and you've got the email address of the person that you're going to do the demo for and they're a representative of the company. You can

just whip them a quick email and say, "Look, I'm coming around a week on Tuesday to do a demo for you. I was thinking to cover A, B, and C, but you know, you be the judge. Is that going to be the right thing for you or do you want me to cover something else?" So you can have these conversations beforehand with people. Having this connectivity, establishing

it, growing it, maintaining it is the all important part of communication skills. So here's the stereotype I don't buy and I hope that you don't buy it uh as well. And that is that all technical people are introverts. Have you ever heard people say that? So it's usually said more by nontechnical people than it is by >> Oddly technical people. >> It's crazy, isn't it? I'm going

to give you a chocolate for that, sir. You deserve a chocolate for putting your head above the parapit and saying that. Yeah, I just don't buy that stereotype. Here's what I think. I think that technical people or people that have gone in a technical direction, maybe they were interested in electronics or software when they were younger, so they pumped their technical muscle. What side is it? Yeah,

it's this side. They pumped their technical muscle. Then they went to college or university and got into coding and and they pumped their technical muscle a little bit more. Then they got out into a technical job and they got some domain experience pumping this technical muscle. Then the company sent them on product updates and they pumped their technical muscle. And all of this has been at the

expense of their humanto human connection muscle. So it's not that they can't do it, it's that they've invested so much time and effort into this side at the expense of that side. And so my thesis is that all I have to do is balance that up. That's all I have to do. And the word I use for this is a word that myself and chat GPT created

one evening together. It's called Gclarity. And geeclarity is the ability to retain all of your technical prowess to build still be respected by your technical peers, but yet have the ability to make what you need to make clear to less technical people and therefore extend your sphere of influence, therefore sell more or recruit more people into your community or whatever it is. That's geek clarity. And here's

the great news that there's only one minimum system requirement. I don't know whether anybody in the room is old enough, but there was a time when you would go into a store before we downloaded everything. You go into a store if you wanted to buy an upgrade for your computer or some new software and it came in a box and you flick around the box and it

said minimum system requirement. Do you remember that? Pentium P2 and 256 meg of RAM or something. Well, here's the great news. The minimum system requirement for anybody in this room to be an absolute standout presenter and to achieve what they want to achieve in their career or in their project is desire. That's it. If you got strong enough desire, that is the minimum system requirement to actually

moving forwards with this. Are you wanting a picture there, Robert? I can keep it there for you for a minute if you'd like. Okie dokie. Right. What I've got then is these seven power presenting protocols. What I'm going to do with your permission is I'm going to kind of do a a little bit of a whistle stop tour through them first so you get all seven and

then I'm going to come back to the first one. We'll actually do a workshop because this has been set out for a bit of a workshop and I'll give you a Q QR code where you can access documents online. Is that how's that sounding? Is that going to be okay? The reason I want to go through all seven first is so you see the complete picture because

let's imagine that we workshopped the first two protocols and then we'd run out of time. You'd never get the complete picture. So I want to give you the complete picture first uh when we do that. Okay. So I've got a protocol called purpose very handily. They all begin with the letter P that makes them somewhat easier to remember. So there's the purpose, there's the plan, there's the

preferences. thinking about what your audience is going to like in terms of the way that they receive information. [snorts] There's practice because we should all be doing a little bit of practice. There's participation because nothing is worse than a one-way monologue type of presentation where people just sit there on the receiving end and they glaze over. We want some participation, don't we? Then there's the performance. actually

getting out there in front of everybody and doing something whether it's a demo, running a meeting, could even be a onetoone. And then there's postevent, what happens afterwards. Now, I just want to draw a very special line with my finger for you. It's an invisible line, but I'd like you to see it. The line is here after those first five protocols. And this is the reason why

this line, this invisible line is here is because sometimes you will hear technical people saying, "I'm scared of speaking in public." You will hear that sometimes. I don't believe them. Here's what I think. I think it's more a case. I'm not saying that it's 100% true, but I would say in 90% of the cases, it turns out that people are scared about being illprepared in front of

a group of people. That's more what it is. It's not that they're scared standing in front of people. It's that they don't want to look a fool because they're not properly prepared. Check out those first five protocols. They all happen before you get out in front of anybody. And you'll see this when I go through them. So, all of those five actually give the confidence that comes

from having clarity about what you're actually going to do. And that solves a lot of the problems. And then it's only these last two that are about actually delivering the presentation and then what happens afterwards. So that's the way the seven power presenting protocols works. Who likes that? >> Well done that man. You like it as well, sir. I think you like it too. Well done. Oh,

that bounced on the thing there. Okay, good. I'm glad I'm glad somebody in there in here likes this. Okay, so let's look at the purpose protocol and go to a little bit more detail. As I said, this is a bit of a whistle stop when there's actually at least an hour's workshop behind each of the protocols when you go deep into them. And I I will give

you just give you a little um what's the word I'm looking for? Advert, I guess that I do do this in company. I'll come in and do sales kickoffs and team off sites and things like that and go deep into these things for people that need it. But here's the purpose protocol. As far as I'm concerned, in any presentation, in any meeting, in any demo, there are

potentially three parties. There's the person that's going to deliver the presentation. We could call them the presenter. Could be the person running the meeting. Could be the person delivering the demo. There's the sponsor. That's the person that asked you to do the presentation. Okay? So, in this case here, my sponsor is Brryer outside. Brian was the one that asked me if I would do this. And then

there is the audience. The audience are the most important people obviously because you're there to serve them. That's the most important part. But when you come to establishing the purpose, there's uh there's some chairs over there. There's actually there's a chair the other side of that man with the green hat if you'd like miss. Um when it comes to establishing what's going to happen, it's all about

agreeing with these three groups. Now maybe there's not a sponsor. Maybe you thought I would like to deliver some thought leadership at a conference like scale because it might enhance my career and therefore there's not a sponsor. Nobody asked you to do it. You submitted a paper. In that case there is not a sponsor in this particular case and so it's just between you and the audience

and if it is a conference like scale you don't know who's going to show up. So start having to take some educated guesses or maybe get in touch with the organizers and say to Briner, Briner, we're here on the open source career day. What sort of people came on that last year? Can you know can you give me some insights? So we're gathering information and what we

want to do is lock down or don't know I don't like the phrase lockdown. Lock in the objectives, the desired outcomes of our presentation. Why would we do that? Well, it's exactly the same reason why we might set goals and it's called the reticular activating system. Has anybody ever heard of the reticular activating system? I'm going to give you a chocolate for hearing about the reticular activating

system. There's one for you. There's one for you. So, c could you just summarize it for me, please, sir? >> Exactly. What gets your attention? And you see the thing is in the world there's so much information coming at us that we have to subconsciously filter out stuff that we don't need. And what happens is the reticular activating system is responsible for doing that filtering for us.

So we only see the things that are important to us. Reason I put this picture up is I love a Jaguar car or as you say over here Jaguar. We we just call them Jags in England. I like Jags and so my reticular activating system is always looking out for Jags when I'm driving around. Recently I got the opportunity to buy this and I would never normally

buy a white car. Not my re not my thing. However, because it was the right price and it had the right level of engine and leather and all that sort of thing. I bought it and what happened was my reticular activating system accidentally started checking out all the white cars, not even the Jags. So I'm driving around and go, "Oh yeah, there's another white car. There's course.

Were there any more white cards now than there had been in the first place? No, I'm just noticing them more. This is the power of setting purpose. If you set the purpose of your presentation in terms of the desired outcomes, then they're top of mind and everything comes towards you and you filter out the stuff that doesn't matter and you get on with delivering the presentation that

you should. Is that making sense? Good. I'm going to give you a couple of chocolates there because you agreed that it was sort of making sense, which I'm very grateful for. Okay. Now, in order to do that, what we want is some kind of agreement. It does not need to be a long document. This could be three lines on an email. You're just talking about what you're

trying to achieve for the audience. Remember, it's always about the audience. It's always about the audience first, but it's also about you. And what I'm going to tell you is I believe there are three layers of outcome for a presentation or a meeting or a demo. The narrow one is what are we going to get out at the other end of this presentation? So, let's pretend I'm

going to deliver a presentation and it's about the new version of of some software version X. So I'm going to give you a presentation about version X and the outcomes that we decide on we agree on is that you will know the top five features and how to use them of software version X. Does that sound fair? Now behind the scenes outside of a narrow scope of

the presentation or demo or meeting the business objective, the wider macrolevel objective is actually the tech support manager asked me to run this training because he's really fed up of the amount of tech support calls he gets. And what he would like is better educated people out there so he doesn't get as many tech support calls. Okay. So we got the presentation objectives or the demo objectives

or whatever it is. We got the macrolevel objectives but then we've got your objective. What's your objective here? Now your objective is to further the needs of the company, satisfy your boss, the sponsor. But you could have a personal objective that says actually I would like to really show some leadership about AI in my company and I would like people to recognize that I've gone that extra

mile and delved into AI for this application. So there's three layers of potential outcomes that you're looking for for each and every presentation. There's a couple of seats there sir or seats over there. You're very welcome to have that. Now, on every single protocol, I've got an engineering term and two words to help lock them in. And so, when we think about purpose, what we're actually doing

is outcome engineering. We're engineering the outcome that we want from this presentation. And the two words that I've got here are define and align. So you're defining the outcomes that you want, but you need to align them with the sponsor if there is one and with the audience. How's that? Is that does that gel in the mind? Good. Okay. So that's it. That that's it for purpose.

We're going to come back and workshop it and I've got some worksheets online for for you to look at on your devices. That's purpose. And of course it's critical because it's like the rudder of the ship. This is another thing I said that people step out and make presentations without connecting with their audience. They also step out and make presentations without actually stepping back and thinking about

the Because you probably know this from your own experience or maybe you've seen other people do this. When technical people are asked to deliver a presentation, they don't think strategically about what are the outcomes, at least at a conscious level. They think, "Oh, I think Mary did a presentation similar to this a few days ago. If I just get her slides and just reorder them, change the

company logo on the front, hide that particular one, Bob's your uncle, Fann is your aunt, everything will be all right. So, they do slide engineering rather than outcome engineering. And what we've got to be about is outcome engineering, defining and aligning with everybody that's involved. Any questions on the purpose protocol before we move on to the plan protocol? >> Yes, Robert. Say that again, Robert. >> I

like it, Robert. I like it. Does anybody just want a chocolate for the sake of wanting a chocolate? Yes. So, okay. >> Ah, okay. Robert, could you say your comment in the >> comment? Okay, I'll say my comment again. You just don't want to get yourself into a tangent. That's why you want outcome engineering and you want to >> Absolutely. If you work in isolation, the chances

are you might go off in the wrong direction. But if you work with the sponsor and with the audience, you're going to get something. Oh, we got another comment there. So, >> go ahead. >> I I've been subject to this myself, but uh you think that the purpose of the presentation is to just deliver all the information you can about this. >> That's the trap that technical

people very often fall into, isn't it? And just go one further on that. You know, I was talking about the pairing of a salesperson and technical person. Here's what often happens. The salesperson phones the technical person on Sunday night, says, "Oh, I need you in a meeting on Monday morning. You know, I need you to do." And the technical person says, "Well, you know, what do you

need me to do?" Doesn't matter. Just do the same as you did last time. And so what happens is with zero briefing, they come in and then they fall into what they're comfortable with, which is all their tech stuff without real, you know, without knowing whether it's relevant. Now, some people might have advanced to asking some questions beforehand, and that's great. However, really, it would have been

better to do much more preparation, wouldn't it? You're quite right. I think you need a chocolate for that common. So, I'm giving you think I'm giving away these chocolates way too freely. I got another bag. I got another bag. I got more. >> Well, I have a >> Oh, can you wait for the microphone, please? >> I had a a team. Thank you. I had a team

where we had to regularly present the product roadmap to our sponsors and the team would always say the purpose of this presentation is to review the road map and no the purpose of the presentation was to get their approval for feature set for the next iteration. >> So that could lead to frustration, couldn't it? It was very hard to get them to understand that they needed to

reorient it towards the decision-making process of the audience rather than what they had been invested in up until that point, but they needed to cross the line to uh achieving approval. >> And and that was a constant source of friction. >> That's an excellent real life example. Here's the sad truth of the matter. You can walk in into any presentation, maybe even presentations around us today, and

if you just froze everybody and said, "Right, I'm going to take you out one by one in isolation and ask you what the purpose of this presentation is." Get a lot of different answers. And of course, the person at the front will probably give a different answer to the to the people sitting down as well. And so we need to be very very careful that that the

outcomes of a presentation should not be a closely guarded secret. You know they should be totally overt. Totally overt. So that if you ask anybody what's the purpose of this? They answer it should pretty much might be a different form of words but it should pretty much be what we're all looking to achieve. Okay. So that is purpose outcome engineering. We're defining the outcomes and aligning them

with the sponsor and with the audience. Okay. Now, uh we're going to come we're going to come back to workshopping it. We're going to move on to plan now. So, we've got the purpose. We know what we're trying to achieve and most importantly know we know that what we're trying to achieve aligns with the person that asked us to do the presentation or run the meeting or

conduct the demo and with the audience in in in other words when you show up in front of an audience let's pretend we got a ven diagram here. You want what the audience wants and what you're going to be delivering to be like that. Not like that or even like that. You want them totally aligned and no surprises scenario. So you're actually going to give them exactly

what they need. This is another thing that often people and especially technical people sometimes get involved in. They're too busy thinking about them themselves or what are they going to think of me? You know, are they going to think I look a bit silly? Is my voice going to be loud enough? Whereas if you totally change the v focus to serving all about giving them the value,

that changes the dynamic. Okay, planning. So what we need to do is we need to have a plan for a presentation that takes advantage of two very important factors. Number one, the human attention span because we can find data about the human attention span, how long people are prepared to give you their attention. But also the other thing is how do we file things away in people's

minds? How do we give them information that allows them to take it in and then recall it later rather than thinking, "Yeah, that's quite an interesting presentation, but I wasn't totally sure what it was about." What we need is some kind of framework. And here's the reason why we need a framework. Frameworks make the brain work. both for you as the presenter putting things together or the

person re running the meeting or the demo, but they also make everything easier for the people on the receiving end. And they're the most important people. Have you ever witnessed a presentation where the person at the front says, "I'm going to give you the three key things about this. Here's number one. Here's number two." And then they never tell you number three, and you're left, I was

waiting for number three. you know, it never got mentioned or I was making for sea or whatever. That happens sometimes. It's very annoying. I don't like to be prescriptive about any of this. I'm giving you a framework, not a formula or a recipe. I'm giving you a framework. But as an opener, if you've never thought about planning a presentation for maximum effectiveness with attention spans and recall,

then here's a ready reckoner. If you've got a 30 minute presentation, three minutes should be spent at the front end introducing it and around three minutes should be spent at the back end of it. Why? Why am I talking about the beginning and the ending of a presentation? >> Those are the most important parts. What have you had so far, sir? Chocolate wise. >> I'll just randomly

give you that one. That's a Snickers one just there. I'm going to give you a real life example of this. I was speaking at an event called Demo Fest in San Francisco um in February of last year. It's a very very glamorous event at a very nice venue at the convene venue in downtown San Francisco. The opening keynote was by Salesforce. The closing uh keynote was by

Open AI, you know, the chat GPT people. A you could tell a lot of money had been spent not only on this event but on the slide wear and everything and it was you know very nicely done. Yeah, feel free to take ah take okay fair enough. Um here's what happened at the end of the closing keynote by the open AI guy. He pretty much after he'd

done gone through the slides pretty much said this. That's it. Any questions? Now to your point sir, the beginning and the ending are the most important points. Just think about any experience you tend to remember the beginning and the ending. Think about your last job, not the one you're doing now, your last job. You remember your first day on the job and your last day on the

job. Don't necessarily re uh remember everything in between. Think about a movie you watched. You remember the beginning and the ending, not necessarily everything. You might remember some things. Yes, >> physical. >> Right. Yes. It that that happens in life in general. Beginnings and endings were incredibly important. So the point I want to make is despite open AI spending all of that money on slideware and been

of this presentation a finishing a presentation with that's it any questions is squandering the end of the presentation. The end of a presentation is what everybody remembers. So it should be your call to action your next steps your main point. Let me tell you what genuinely happened in this thing. 200 people. The Open AI guy said, "That's it. Any questions?" Guy puts his hand up and says,

"Yeah, I've been trying to interface with you over this API with this very obscure piece of software that I wrote." The Open AI guy falls right into it. And they have this conversation where 199 of us are bystanders and have no interest in the conversation at all. And they're having this little conversation. Terrible. So you should never ever ever finish a presentation on Q&A. Never. By all

means handle questions maybe as you're going through, maybe just before you finish, but never ever finish on a Q&A. Who can tell me for for a couple of chocolate prizes? Who can tell me why should you not finish on Q&A? Yes sir. >> Very much so. Yeah, for sure. You want to be in control and when you hand sorry when you hand over you know to everybody

for Q&A now you're not in control. So what could happen >> there could be no questions in which case that's a little bit embarrassing isn't it? How many of us have been in a presentation where this the the person says right that's it any questions? stony silence and then they have to use a phrase like this. Oh, I must have covered everything really well then. Awful, terrible,

wicked. No, much much better to say, okay, anybody, you know, what questions have you got before I finish because then you're going to deal with all the questions. Then control is going to come back to you and you're going to finish. I like to finish on what I call QS3. So, we've dealt with everybody's questions. I summarize all of the main points, give a call to action,

and then I finish with a powerful three because in the human mind, three is a magic number. So, I could say, "It's been a pleasure talking to you today. It's been a pleasure going through those seven power presenting protocols." But actually, the real pleasure will come when you put them to work and thus achieve all the rewards of being a geek that can speak. Boom. That's a

three ending. Pleasure. Pleasure. Pleasure. What were you going to say, sir? You already question what everyone >> exactly. You you're going to get a left field question or a bizarre question or an irrelevant question. You're quite right. So now if you take nothing else from this, never ever finish on Q&A. Okay. By the way, if you're wondering what intro means, we we need to be quick. If

you've got your pens handy, impact, grab people's attention at the beginning of a presentation with an impact statement. Maybe it's a fascinating fact, a staggering statistic, a thought-provoking question like, "Have you ever been somebody that wasn't making the progress that your technical skills and abilities said you should?" Then there's the need. Why do they need to listen to you? Why do you need to actively participate in

this meeting or take notice in this demo? Now, let's crystallize it with a title for the presentation or demo or meeting. Now, let's cover the range of things that we're going to talk about. And then lastly, we can either if it's a very technical presentation, give some very straightforward objectives that we're going to achieve. Or you can put a cheeky little dash through it and make it

a cue for question policy. If you've got any questions, ask them as we go along. I'd be happy to help you or if we if you got any questions just hold them to nearly the end because at nearly the end I'm going to give you an opportunity to you know ask any questions you want. Yes, Diego. >> You have any questions and then and then people start

to ask questions, many questions, and you run out of time and then you will not have time for your >> bang on the money, Diego. And so what we would do is we're monitoring the time and we come to this part and I say, "God, thank you so much for your participation." Turns out we've got time for two questions before I summarize. And so we manage it

that way. Or I say, goodness me, I've gone on a little bit longer than I anticipated. I'm sorry I can't answer any questions now. But after I've summarized and you know, we go into a break, I will be around. So if you want to come and talk to me, feel free. The point is that we need to manage it, don't we? We're responsible for it. That's what

I'm saying. Is that a satisfactory answer, Diego? Yeah. >> I'm going to give you another chocolate for being satisfied, Diego. [laughter] >> Here's your satisfaction chocolate. Well done that man. Okay, let's carry on. So, we talked about having a plan so we get things logically into people's minds. We need to deal with their attention spans, but also how to fit things into people's memory. And it turns

out that people need proof. Primacy and recency are just the long words for beginning and ending. So, you must fit in your most important information in the beginning and the ending. That's why when you watch the news, of course in America when you watch the news it's like adverts every 10 sort of like seconds really, isn't it? But generally speaking, when you watch the news there's the

headline information. They give you the stories and they give you a summary at the end, don't they? They're following that formula. Most important stuff at the beginning and the ending. Outside of that, there's three other things you can use. O is for overemphasis. So if there's a particular thing that you really want to labor like never ever finish on Q&A then you just overemphasize it and people

will lock into that. Then there's over for outstanding. Let me give you a quick example. Imagine if I'd been on a really nice uh road trip holiday driving up to Alaska, you know, through Canada, and I really wanted to show you all of my pictures. And it turns out I've got 50 pictures of my little driving holiday up through the northern states, through Canada, and into Alaska.

And most of these pictures that I show you are countryside scenes. There's amazing mountains and lakes, but one of them is quite a big moose riding a bicycle. That, my friends, would be outstanding. you'd remember that one because it stood out. So, how do we put that into presentations or meetings? We change it up. So, in other words, if I said, "Right now, let's have let's switch

gears and do a flip chart exercise." That's changing things and making it Or I could play in a video or you just need to change things up for them to be outstanding for people. And then the last one is familiarity. using what people already understand to help them understand new concepts. Now, I was in that pink shirt man's ham radio class yesterday, >> which which Yeah, thank

you. And he talked about Ohm's law, you know, the relationship between voltage, uh, current and resistance. >> Yeah, >> give yourself a >> Oh, brilliant. I'll give myself a chocolate for later and I'll give you a chocolate for suggestion. I get a chocolate. There we are. Now imagine if you were trying to teach that to people that have never ever come across this before, no idea. You

could say, "Do you have a garden?" And most people say, "Yeah, I've got a garden." Or, "At least I know of a garden." Have you ever come across a hose pipe that you use to water the plants? Yes. Have you noticed that when you step on the hose pipe, it impedes the flow of the water and it doesn't flow as much? So you could give give people

an analogy, something that's familiar with them already to help them into something new. So that's how you give your audience proof. You use primacy and recency, beginning and endings. Never ever ever ever ever finish with Q&A. You overemphasize some parts. You make some parts outstanding. And you use familiarity. And if you do that, what you're going to do is you're going to peak people's attention throughout the

presentation. People are always naturally more attentive at the beginning of a presentation and at the end. That's, you know, that's just the way it goes. You don't have to do anything to achieve that. That's just the way they are. However, you can use these other things to peak it. Listen, I want to give you some extra information here. Put your money away. I'm going to include this

in the ticket price. Okay? Imagine if you've been given a 40inut session to do. What if you broke it up into two 20 minute sessions? Now you got two beginnings and two endings. So you've got more prime time, haven't you? That's just a little freebie I'm giving you there to help people with their attention spans. Okay. What are we doing when we plan? We are attention engineering.

We're engineering the attention we're going to get from people and making sure it's right. What are we doing? We're plotting and slotting. We're plotting the map that's going to take us to the destination of our meeting or our presentation. and we're slotting strategic things in. Can you see that most people don't think about this stuff? They just do some slide engineering, don't they with no thought about

this sort of stuff? Listen, how far ahead if you're running a hundred yard dash, how far ahead do you have to be to be the winner of the hundred yard dash? An inch. Maybe it's half an inch. Now, can you imagine that most of your colleagues and everybody else you know don't think about any of this? If you start thinking about this and put it into action,

you're the inch in front. You don't have to be a mile in front. You can be the inch in front. That's plan. Okay, let's carry on. And now we're going to look at preferences. What I want you to imagine for preferences is that the kind people at scale, despite the rock bottom ticket price, have decided they're going to give everybody in this room a brand new coffee

machine. One of those beanto cup coffee machines. You know those sort of ones, quite a big unit. You put it on the counter, you connect the water and the electricity, you throw some beans in the top and it gives you high quality coffee. Okay, they've decided they're going to give you that. Now, there's going to be [snorts] three, at least three, but I'm just going to concentrate

on the top three groups of people in terms of the way they deal with this. Here's option A. Just log this for a minute. Option A is you rip it out of the box, taking no uh time at all to look at the instruction manual. That actually stays in the box. You rip it out of the box, you pull off all the plastic, you plug it in,

and start playing with it. Okay, that's A. Then there's B. B is you take a box cutter that you keep in a drawer for just such occasions. You very carefully open the box. You very carefully find the manual. You very carefully open the plastic bag that the manual comes in. Then you go and sit in your favorite chair and read the manual cover to cover. Okay, before

you go anywhere near the coffee machine. Option C is you sit in your comfortable chair and just leave the box over there still sealed. You hold your beard if you've got one. If you haven't got one, you don't have to hold it. And you think about your relationship with previous coffee machines and what you'd like to achieve, you know, in your new relationship with this new coffee

machine. Okay. So, how many A's have we got? People are going to rip it out of the box. Hand show of hands for a quite a few A's. I was expecting that. That's what we call action orientation. How many B's? Love to read the manual cover to cover. Good. I'm glad that we've got some B's in the room as well. And how many C's the people that

reflect? Well, at least one C. Okay. There's there's always at least one. And sir, if you wanted to use a flip chart to go through that exercise, I'd suggest that you probably work in HR. But [laughter] no, go ahead. >> Which one? >> I'm a D. >> What's which one's D? >> I open the box. I read the instruction partially selectively on what I want to read

and use and put it together. >> Okay. So now you're not a D, you're actually a B because you read the >> No, not >> but but not wholesale. Yeah. Here's what it looks like. It's what we call the learning cycle. I've boiled this down a little bit, but what happens is you like to take input before you act and reflect on whether you got the results

that you were looking for or you like to act before you reflect and then maybe grudgingly read a little bit of the manual because you weren't getting the coffee that you wanted out. Either way, all three of these things have to happen. But here's the point I want to make and have an extra chocolate for being an option D there. Here's the point I want to make.

Imagine if you were going to deliver a demo or a presentation and you thought, I'm actionorientated. I learn by doing. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to put the mouse in their hands and I'm going to get them doing and they'll learn best like that. Okay. But it turns out that actually your audience are all manual readers who prefer to get a lot of

input before they do anything. Can you see there'd be a contradiction there and that the learning or the taking in of the information would not be as effective as you want it to be. I think we can all see that. So it's what we need to do when we think about preferences is a think about our own preferences. How do I like to learn things best? Think

about that. By the way, just as a side point, it struck me that quite a lot of technical people don't really spend time thinking of self-awareness and asking themselves question about questions about themselves. And of course, really when you think about other people, it's good to think about yourself first so you can see if there's any contrasts. So think about the way I like to learn, then

think about the way that my audience or the other people in the meeting like to interact. and then make sure I don't accidentally foist my way onto them. Unless, of course, it turns out that their way is the same as my way, in which case everybody's happy. >> But how do you know before you >> That's a great question. I'm going to give you I'm going to

give you an extra chocolate for that. How do you know? >> What if you have a mixed group of multiple people? >> It's actually the same answer as as how that's my you. >> Yeah, I I'll tell you. So, same thing. If you don't know, option A is take an educated guess. So, for example, if if the boss said, "Actually, everybody you're talking to is an HR

professional tomorrow." They're probably more of the reflective types. If they said, "Uh, you're talking to a bunch of accountants," they're pretty cautious people. They probably want to learn some information first before they do anything. So, you can take an educated guess. But what happens if we've got a mix or we just genuinely don't know? We build something in for everybody. that we consciously think here's where I

do my actionorientated bit for the action people then just after lunch I'll do my input orientated bit for the input people and then actually very first thing before I do anything else I'll just run a quick flip chart session that's for reflective people so we can cater for these people it's good to know but if we don't we can work around that when we think about preferences

what we're doing is resonance engineering we're engineering resonance with the people that we're going to be interacting with. And I think you'll agree that if you've been in a session and you think, "Yeah, that really resonated for me. You know, I really understood what that person was trying to communicate and they communicated it in a way I could understand." You can see that that would be better

than the opposite. And what we're doing, the two words are tune and target. We're tuning the way we deliver the information. It's the same information. We haven't changed the information. We're tuning the way we offer that. and present that to people in order to give them maximum value. Was that a question sir? >> Action reflection of trio. >> Yes. >> I I was familiar with sort of

people thinking bottom up or top down, right? And depending if you talk to managers or technical people, you want to sort of approach information the other way. Um, do you see like how do these two models >> I I do actually on on the big workshop I do actually talk about bottom up and top down but that's more for planning. So when I'm doing the planning if

I was going from the top down I might think what are the three most important things about this subject then what are the three supporting points for these three things and I've done a top down. If I was doing bottom up, I'd get a load of post-its and I'd just brainstorm everything I could possibly think of about this particular subject on post-its and then I'd group them

together. That'd be the bottom up. So, I cover it in a kind of a different dimension, sir. >> I mean, came in here assuming that we'd be a mixed group, right? >> Yes. And and when I asked for a serve hands, that bore it out, didn't it? Yes. We got a few of everybody in here. But I mean and I mean is that the main thing you

mean about preferences? There's this learning style and not any other technical exactly. There's like a hundred different ways you could cut preferences. But I am just talking about the PE the way people receive and digest >> because I know when you mentioned the coffee thing and I I went for actionoriented. >> Um if it was a different kind of item that I hadn't seen something similar before,

I might have answered you differently. So I think that that may change not just with the people but with the subject right. >> Yes. Absolutely. And and as in with any kind of profile whether we're talking about MBTI Thomas profiling activist pragmatist reflector theorist whatever is it changes to do with the circumstances the subject matter even the way you feel on the day. The key thing is

having a level of awareness that thinks who am I talking to? What kind of things do they like in terms of the way that information is presented to them? So, it's just having a thought process rather than being 100% deterministic about the answer. Thank you. Okay, practice now is our next one. Practicing. And what we will do is we're just on about 11 o'clock. After we've done

practice, we'll take just a very quick five minute break. Bit of a leg stretch so I can buy my two beginnings and two endings. [snorts] and and we'll come. This is a gratuitous opportunity for me to show you pictures of my son. When my son was about 10 years old, he said, "I want to learn to play guitar." We bought him the cheapest, most horrible Fender Strat

copy and one of those really horrible little amps that kids have on their belts. Do you know the ones I mean? And we said, "There you go. Knock yourself out. Come back to us when you can play a tune." And if and oh, we gave him a learnyour yourself guitar book as well. And if you do do it, we will pay for you to have proper guitar

lessons. And he did. Here's the point I want to make. This is him at um an open mic night at a local pub looking very sweaty and self-conscious. Okay, here's him still looking quite sweaty and self-conscious. Here's him looking sweaty and somewhat more confident until you see he now plays South by Southwest Glastonbury. Uh he, if you're old enough to remember a Detroit band called Electric Six,

he tours with Electric Six. What point I'm trying to make is he pushed through. And if you want to get good at being a communicator and a presenter, you need to push through. You need to go through the parts where you feel a little bit sweaty and self-conscious. More than that, you need to find opportunities to present even where they don't exist. And here, I'm going to

give you some gold here. This is gold. Put your money away, sir. I'm also including this in the ticket price. And it's what I call, it's a Duffet trademark. It's what I call the art of the unsolicited So, what you do is you actively look for opportunities to make presentations where they don't exist. So, let's say you're at work and you notice that team B doesn't really

properly understand what you do in team A. And you say to your boss, "I've noticed that team B don't seem to properly understand what we do." And your boss goes, "Yeah, it's been like that for years. It causes no end of grief. There's always problems." You say, "Well, look, why don't I do a presentation? Let's have a lunch and learn. You buy some pizzas. I'll do a

little presentation about the workings of our team to help people understand it a bit better." You've now created an opportunity for you to deliver a presentation in a low stakes environment where you can genuinely add some value. Is that going to do your reputation, your visibility, your credibility any harm? >> Exactly. Sorry. >> Should build it up, shouldn't it? >> Unless you >> Yeah, that that would

be Yeah. Yeah. We don't want to We don't want to do that, sir. We don't want to do that. I'm going to give you a chocolate to make sure you don't do it. Don't go back to work and do that. Don't say anything bad. Okay. The thing about practice is the more you do it, the better you get. It's a bit like riding a bike, isn't it?

Or any skill. And so push yourself if you really want to build your visibility and build your credibility and build your bandwidth with other people, whether those are your colleagues, your clients, your customers. Then go out of your way to make presentations. suggest an extra presentation for your customers. The more presenting you do, the better you will get at it. Okay? And when you practice, here's what

you're doing. You're engineering reliability. Reliability engineering is what it's all about. And the two words here are you're rehearsing and you're refining. Because here's what practice is not. Practice is not going through a totally finished product. Practice is part of the process of creating the perfect presentation. I'll tell you what else practice is not. And this is a trap that most geeks fall into. Not going to

ask for a show of hands. Practice is not whipping through your slides the night before, the flight before, or if it's a Zoom call, the 10 minutes before the actual presentation, and looking at those slides and going, "Yeah, I'll say this when that slide comes up. And when this fifth slide comes up, I must remember, oh, here's a post-it to remind me." So, that is not practicing.

Practicing is out loud, actually speaking through the presentation or even the meeting. going through the sections of a meeting to win a couple of pre-break chocolates. What advantages are there to practicing out loud? Who can tell me? Yes, sir. >> Brilliant example. Especially if you're in a multie environment like a conference where there's times to be kept to. Yeah, you're going to know what the timings are.

Yes. Well done, sir. Who else? Yes, sir. >> Speaking of >> Yes. Let me just dive into that a little bit. If you just do it in your head, there's going to be words and phrases that when you actually say them in real life come out much more clunky. Maybe you trip over them and you'll never find that out until the day if you don't practice out

loud. >> And that that really sucks. [laughter] >> Any presentation that's worth giving or meeting that's worth running or demo that's worth doing is worth doing badly until you can do it well. And the badly is the practicing part and the well is in front of your target audience. So who are you going to practice to? Well, ideally colleagues that know the technical side as well as

everything else. They can give you feedback on the content and the style. Then there's friends and family that might not be able to help you out with the content, but they can certainly help you out with the style. What happens if you got no friends, no family, and no colleagues, and you want to practice your >> Stream on Twitch. [laughter] >> You could do a live stream

or you could record yourself. That's right. Everybody's got a phone that's got at least a voice recorder, if not a video recorder. And so, you would want to do that. Okay, let's take just literally a fiveinut break. Now, I'm really enjoying this. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if you're enjoying it half as much as I am, I'm enjoying it twice as much

as you because that's that's mathematics. Can I see you back here in precisely five minutes, that's 11:13, where we'll finish off the protocols and workshop a couple. How about that? How are you doing, sir? >> Chris, good to meet you. >> I'm curious, uh, when you were making your example of Alaska, >> of the which >> of Alaska. Yes. in this picture. Um, did you know the

odds uh you would that you would have someone who had done that in your audience today? >> Have you done that? >> Riding a bike. >> Uh, drove out to Alaska, lived in >> All the way from California. >> Did you go on the Alcan Highway? >> That is amazing, isn't it? >> Yeah, I have done it. >> And what's more, I would love to do it

again cuz it's so special, isn't it? >> It's a crazy drive. >> Yeah. So, so much scenery >> and also not seeing other people, you You can drive for miles, can't you? >> Well, yeah. I mean, that was good. And I did it with a pregnant wife um all the way [snorts] up through there. It was in the middle of winter. >> Well, congrat. >> I'm surprised

you could get through. >> Uh it was rough, >> right? >> But well done. Have a chocolate. Have a new chocolate. >> Thank you. >> Many congratulations. That's brilliant. >> Yeah. Thank you for letting me know. >> Yes, sir. >> Chris, very pleased to meet you. I just wanted to say I'm going to catch I really want to catch the second half of your talk. I really

enjoyed everything. Looking forward to >> That's great. Just come this way for a >> I usually give those out at the end. >> Oh, thank you so much. >> That's a free copy for you. Okay. >> All right. Yes, sir. >> I was just going to throw in the comment. The comment I made about insulting the other team. >> Sort of a joke, but I think technical

people sometimes don't realize when they're doing that. >> Self-awareness, >> isn't it? >> Yeah. They they may be boosting up themselves or or some technical concept or perspective that's important to them and they end up >> being perceived at least as someone else down. I I saw exactly this play out, not even in a work setting, in an out of work setting where a load of people

had gathered for a conference and we all went out for ice cream and the most technical guy managed to really annoy somebody just as we were walking to get ice cream. Not that he didn't want to. >> Just by being him. >> Cuz he wasn't really thinking. >> Agreed. Did you get a shot? >> So, did you actually manage to sit through the whole thing? >> No.

And I I'll tell you for why. Um I'm already I already passed the test many many years ago. Okay. and I'm in England, so that you know the American test, but I thought I'm going to come in and just sort of do a refresher. >> But but thank you. I appreciate it. >> Okay. And thank you for the study guide. I downloaded the study guide >> which

I've got. >> You know, I' I've got thousands of download over the years and it's it's >> like what I do, right? >> Yeah. Yeah. It's a pretty, you know, it covers things very straightforwardly, doesn't it? >> It's no. >> Yes. Yeah, indeed. Thank you. >> [snorts] >> Okay, two minutes to go before we kick back off. >> Yeah, I hope so. That's right. Hello. >> Hi.

Okay, if you like to take your seats, please. We will resume coming back for some more prime time. So just before we parted ways, we were thinking about practice and really you need to practice just as much as you need to. But let me ask you a question for a first after the break chocolate and from a new bag. Which parts of the presentation or or the

meeting or the demo should you practice most? Perfect. The Diego says the initial part, the first part. Who else can tell me something? >> Sorry. >> The ending. Exactly. The beginning and the ending of your presentation or your demo or your meeting are the most important parts. So, practice those more than everything else. Best to practice the whole jolly thing, but practice the beginning and the ending

even more. When do you think nerves are most likely to affect you? The beginning. Two chocolates for you. Do you want do you want a mix? Or tell you what, I have all three. There you go. All three. Yeah. The beginning. And so, why wouldn't we practice that the absolute most so that even if we're a little bit scared, a little bit on edge, we can almost

go on autopilot and get those first few lines out as we start to feel comfortable. Now, we're coming on to the next protocol. Or can anybody remember what the next protocol is after practice? >> Participation. Chocolate for you, sir. And did you notice how he's winning a chocolate for participation? Talking about participation. It's a little bit meta, isn't it? In fact, we'll give you the fruit and

the chocolate. >> Presentation about presentation. >> That's meta as well, isn't it? Very meta. Um, if you combine lots of practice at the beginning with participation, so you can come out and say, "Look, my name's David Duffet. I'm here to talk to you about presentations and most importantly, the bandwidth that you have with your audience. How many people have recently seen a presentation? You get a bit

of participation going and can you see that that kind of shifts the energy a bit and you can feel a little bit more relaxed because then I can say, "Oh, you saw a presentation recently. Tell me a bit more about it." in a non-threatening way. Let's get on to participation because there's lots to say about that before we get on to workshopping at least one maybe two

of these protocols. So, participation is the very next one. There you go. Participation. Now, participation is absolutely critical for this very reason. This is a super important equation for you to write down. Involvement equals love being told what to do? None of us really like being told what to do. Sometimes we might like a bit of guidance. Here's the thing. People hate having stuff thrown at them.

They don't like being talked at. They prefer to be talked with. in a conversation. So the more you can make your meeting, your demo or your presentation like a dialogue, like an interaction, the better it's going to be. And you need to work hard to make sure that bandwidth is so broad that people feel totally relaxed about contributing. If you're running a meeting or a presentation or

a demo and people are a little bit scared about getting involved, you've failed because you've not made it easy for them to participate. I'll give you a real life example. This is from a long long long long long long time ago. Over here in the US, there's a technology that Motorola have called Iden. It's an old technology now, but it was a technology where you got a

thing that looked like a cellular phone, and it was a cellular phone, but it also got pushed to talk as well. That was Motorola Iden. Um, in the UK I worked for a company called Dolphin Telecom. We were introducing that in the UK. And we had to learn about Tetra technology. That's so it's not GSM, it's called Tetra. And so we employed a very expensive firm of

consultants to come and run some Tetra training. The guy came in, he knew exactly what he was talking about, but he was hopeless at creating the right environment. On the third day of three days worth of training, one of the guys just about found it within himself to go, "Oh, can I ask a question, please? What about this?" It's because the guy had not made it open.

And so, we had not got the maximum value from that training because people didn't feel, you know, you've probably come across the kind of trainer or the kind of person that runs a meeting that makes it feel like they're doing you a favor by listening to you. That's not what it's about, is it? We need to open things up with participation. So we need to involve people

to the absolute max and as a meta example here of some participation about participation in a presentation about presentations. What forms what means and modes of participation can you tell me about that you've either used or seen used by other people and you liked it? How can we involve people? >> Surveys. >> Surveys. Yeah, I like that one. You've probably seen these days that there's software like

menty meter and there's various other ones where people can actually do things on their cell phones that shows up on the screen in a presentation, you know, like live voting and stuff like that or contributing ideas. Yes. So, surveys. Yes, sir. >> Yeah. Games or activities or in our case, we'll be doing a little bit of workshopping before too long uh and looking at them. Yes. >>

Throwing candies. >> Throwing candies. That's a meta of a meta of a meta of a meta of a meta of a meta example. That particular one. Yeah. Throw throwing candies. What else? explain or show how to do something as a part of it. >> Yes. Now, you've actually hit on a very interesting one, sir. Sometimes you might be making a presentation and there might be somebody in

the audience who knows a lot more about you do than than you do about the technology. And of course, that person could be annoying. They could be putting their hands up all the time just proving that they know a lot more than you. However, if I was to say, David, you know, you appear to know a lot about, I don't know, subject X. Listen, would you mind

if I come to you in about I think about 10 minutes time for you to kind of share some of your expertise. Would that be okay? David says, "Yes." Now, you've made him a friend, haven't you, and an ally um and you've diffused a situation that could have gone negatively. And so you want to encourage participation but in the nicest possible way. You want to encourage it

in a positive constructive way and you will occasionally get people that over participate and you need techn uh sorry not technology you need strategies for dealing with that. So here's a few that I brainstormed by myself ahead of time. questions. Asking questions is one way. And that's both asking questions as a teaching tool and dealing with questions that come your way as well. Both. We can use

both. Then there's the show of hands. You know, how many people have witnessed a terrible presentation kind of thing. One that's not on here, and again, put your money away because I'm going to include this in the ticket price as well. The scale question. Um, I don't know why, but I feel the need, Eric, to give you some sweets there. Yeah. A scale question. Now, at the

beginning of a presentation, people haven't loosened up just yet. So, here's what you're not going to do. You're not going to go, David, tell me about the time you installed Ubuntu and things went wrong. Give me the top 10 things about it. You're not going to make somebody speak at length about that. And by the way, did you know that Ubuntu is an ancient African word? Did

you know that its meaning is I can't be bothered to configure Debian in the in in the native language there. Um yeah, what you don't what you don't want to force people into a long dialogue right because they're you know everybody's a bit nervous. They're not sure what it's all about. So a great way is a show of hands or a scale question. Scale of 1 to

10, you know, uh how good was the last presentation that you saw? And you know I I go over here and you say seven. Okay, because it's an easy answer, isn't it? Giving a number is an easy answer, but it's a lead in. What's your name, >> Brian. >> Brian. So, say, "Oh, Brian, a seven." What would have made it a 10? >> They got to the

point. >> There you go. And so, can you see that it was an easy in and then we could get a little bit more dialogue going without kind of throwing the spotlight on Brian in an uncomfortable way. So, we need to manage the participation that we're using strategically. storytelling. Let me tell you, I'm not going to tell you a story. That would have been very cliche, wouldn't

it? To tell you a story about storytelling. But I would like to say this that the main brilliance of is that you're not telling people anything other than a story. And they will draw their own conclusions. And it doesn't matter whether you're trying to sell a product, a service, an idea, a concept. Anything that people tell themselves is so much more important than anything that you could

say. So the top thing you can do in any meeting or presentation is to get people to tell themselves something because they'll believe that so much more than you. The next best thing is to have somebody else in the audience tell it. That's why people love these kind of user group stroke, user group meetings where person A comes along and says, "Yes, I've been using this product

for 10 years. It's never let us down because it's not the person at the front telling everybody how good the software is. It's another member of the audience." But storytelling, the whole point is engineering a story so that people tell themselves what you want them to learn. That is the point of a story. Okay. Then we got sharing experiences. And we were just talking about that, weren't

we? and somebody knows a lot and you can harness their energy and get them involved. We've also got taking part in demos. I think that came up uh near the back there. Expert contributions, group discussions, turn to your partner and talk about the last time you saw a terrible presentation kind of thing. Uh breakout sessions, surveys, we had gamification, making things fun. By the way, Demo Fest

um that one I did in San Francisco where Salesforce were the openers and Open AI was the key uh was the closing keynote. They gify everything and all participants have an app on their phone have to vote on the speakers and they can win baseball bats and drinks cups, you know, Yeti mugs and all that sort of thing. And I was very pleased when I got voted

top speaker. I was quite excited about it. And then I was talking to somebody and they said, "Hang on a minute. You're a guy that speaks about speaking. if you'd have come anywhere less than top, you know. So, that took the wind out of my sales quite fiercely. Okay, quizzes, case studies, and so on. Okay, that's participation. And what we're doing there is we're interaction engineering. We're

engineering situations where people can become part of it because if they become part of it, they're involved. And if they're involved, they are committed to the outcomes that are good for everybody. This is not manipulation. Manipulation would be where you're trying to achieve an end that's no good for everybody. But you want the best for everybody and you're going to engage and energize people to do that.

Okay, last couple of protocols before we do a little bit of workshopping. So performance, that's actually stepping out in front of people. That's when you get there and you come and start talking to people. Okay, notice that those first five protocols prepared you. They gave you the confidence that comes from the clarity of having a purpose so you know what you're trying to achieve and you've agreed

it with everybody concerned, the plan to do it in a way that's going to suit people's recall and their attention spans. But now you've actually got to come out and do that. Let me give you three P's about your voice. pitch, pace, pronunciation, and perhaps the most important one of all, I said three, but I'm going to give you four. Pauses. Because the great thing about pauses

is they allow people to mentally catch up. If people have been chatting with their neighbor or discussing some exciting project and you've paused, they start looking around. If they've been doing their emails, it gives them a point to catch up. Pauses are great things as well. Pitch, pace, pronunciation, pauses. And listen, the more you do it, the better you can get at it. Now, I realize in

the US, most people learn to drive in an automatic car. Is that correct? Okay. In the UK, you can learn in an automatic, but if you do, you're not allowed to drive a stick. And so, generally speaking, everybody learns on a stick and then they can drive a matic, an automatic as well. And here's what happens when you're learning to drive on a stick. You're driving along

and the instructor says, "Actually, you know, the engine's, you know, going a bit too fast now. You need to change gears." So, you go to change gear, foot on the clutch, and what happens is you do a little micro swerve. You don't leave the road or anything, but you do this little microscope because you can't concentrate on everything, you know, on the steering and the clutch and

and so after a while that gets to become second nature. And so it is with running meetings, delivering demos, presentations, the more you do it, the more you can get to a point where you can listen to yourself. You can say, "Am I going too with my pace? Am I going too slow? Have I been using pauses? Have I been using pitch? Here's the thing with pitch.

If you make your pitch go higher deliberately, that gets people excited. Yeah. You wouldn't believe what the guy had to say. If you want to reassure them that this change that you're making in the company is actually going to be for their own good. Everything's going to be fine. In fact, you're going to get some extra share options as a result. You slowed things down. You bring

the pitch down and everything feels a bit safer. So, you can use these things. And what I'm saying is the more you do it, the more you can be conscious of doing it and doing it deliberately with intent to give the message. Let me just say one thing about pace though. People tend to think that speaking too fast is a sin in a And I'm here to

tell you that assuming everybody uses the same language, so we're not talking about lots of people with English as a second language or whichever language. Let's imagine it's all English and everybody understands English. Speaking fast will not denigrate the understanding. Do you know how we know that? Because people listen to their voicemails, their audible books at 1.5, 1.75, maybe two times. It doesn't do that. But here's

why it is a little bit of a sin. When you speak too fast, you're subconsciously giving a message that says, "I want to get this out of the way because I don't really want to be here. That's why I'm motoring through it. And so it's actually that message that's the bad message. It's not it's not the the kind of baseline uh pace of the presentation. So couple

of more things with your body. It's your posture. Okay? You know, if you come out and you say, "Oh, I'd like to talk to you about the latest flavor of Linux." Or, you know, it's not, you know, it doesn't generate enthusiasm, does it? By the way, enthusiasm. Attitudes are infectious. When you think about the word enthusiasm, think about the last four letters, I ASM. Does anybody know

what that stands for? For two chocolates? >> I'm not really there with you, sir, but I'm gonna give you a chocolate anyway. [laughter] What? In fact, I'm gonna give you two. It stands for I am sold myself. I am sold myself. Because if you're to do a good job of running a meeting, delivering a presentation, doing a demo, you need to be sold yourself. You know, if

your boss tells you to go and do something and you're not you're not totally bought in, you're going to do a terrible job, aren't you? In fact, I would go so far as to say if you're in a situation where you have a boss that tells you to do presentations and you can't find it within yourself to be enthusiastic, you should say to your boss, "Listen, I

really want to help, but in this instance, I really don't think I'm the right person to do this because I, you know, I just don't understand the technology properly as it is, and I can't generate the level of enthusiasm that I really think is needed. So, can you go with Mary down the corridor on this occasion or whatever, you know?" And I I think that's a genuine

good thing to do for the benefit of everybody. Or option two, if you've got enough runup to generate some enthusiasm and you can do that genuinely, then go with that. Okay, that's performance. Let's move along. We're impact engineering when we're thinking about our performance. And what we're doing is we're projecting with our voice. Projection is another P, by the way, isn't it? Projecting with our voice and

connecting with our audience. Project and connect. Okay. And then the very last one, the very last one in our collection of seven power presenting protocols is postevent. Have you ever heard salespeople say the fortune is in the follow-up? You ever heard that phrase? They do say it. And here's the reason why they say it. Because when a salesperson has a meeting, when they leave, if they do

nothing afterwards, the likelihood is the sale is not going to get made. They need to follow up, don't they? A fortune is in the follow-up. And you'll hear salespeople comparing notes saying, "Yeah, I thought that deal had totally died because, you know, I'd not heard for this many months." And then I followed up and they said, "Oh, we've been meaning to get in touch with you, but

we just hadn't. Here's your order." You know, the fortune is in the follow. And it's the same with presentations. Whenever you do a presentation or run a meeting or deliver a demo, you need to think about what's going to happen afterwards. Here's what I'm on a one-man mission to destroy. It's the driveby. Notice this is not a drive by shooting because he's not got a gun. It's

a PowerPoint clicker. This is a drive by This is where people show up and throw up. This is where people just arrive with no briefing, no thought. They go through their setpiece presentation and boom, they're gone and you never hear from them again. That's a driveby. And you've lost an opportunity when you do that because there's so much that can happen in a follow-up. If you do

a proper follow-up and of course if you've done the purpose protocol at the beginning, you've now got like a little audit trail to go back and say, did we achieve those objectives for presentation? Did we achieve the objectives that the sponsor had? Did the audience get everything they wanted? And maybe the answer is actually some other people in the organization need the same presentation. Maybe it's there

was a bit of information missing from that presentation. People loved it, but there's a couple of critical items that need to be covered. Can that be circulated on email or do we need to get everybody together again? We just need to know what to do next, how to follow up. If you've been speaking at a conference like scale, you might want to say, did you solicit feedback?

And if you did, what was the feedback on my particular session so that I can make it better next time around? So, we want to stamp out the drive by presentation for sure. And the way we do that is by going back to the purpose protocol and just making sure we've achieved what we wanted to. And what we're doing when we do that is we're momentum We're

keeping things going. We're not letting all the good work we did in that meeting, in that presentation, in that demo go to waste. And what the two words there are reinforce and multiply. Any questions on the post event protocol before we continue? >> Multiply. The multiply is taking what you did and multiplying the effectiveness of it. Because if you just left it, the chance you've probably done

some good. But if you follow up with seeing if people want extra information, whether they want to know something that might even have been outside the scope of the presentation you did, then you're going to multiply it. In any way uh of life and in any situation, especially sales, the best role you can possibly have to other people is being their trusted adviser. Because when you're their

trusted adviser, they come to you for advice. Maybe they buy things from you as well. Maybe you're just buddies. But the way you come to become the way you become a trusted adviser is by helping them with things that might even be outside of what you were there to do for them. Okay? So there are the seven power presenting protocols that you've met. Purpose, plan, preferences, practice,

All those five happen before you get up in front of people or before the meeting starts. Then we had performance when you actually deliver it. And then we had postevent. Now do you remember this? This is what we started with. This is where we got a connection I want to let you It's not It's not even a secret. It's just a way of looking things. That bandwidth

that I was talking about because it is all about the bandwidth. We actually have a name for it, don't we? In human circles is called raor. Okay, it's your raor with people. Have you noticed that the friends you've got the most raor with, you can say anything to them. It doesn't matter. the people you have the least raor with. You have to be a bit careful of

what you say. Okay. So the bandwidth I'm talking about it is all about the bandwidth. It's raor with your audience. Now we were looking at those seven power presenting protocols. Watch this. This is the most exciting part of everything. In fact, I like it so much I'm going to sit next to you and watch it. Thank you. Watch very carefully. Oh, how about that? Okay, because Rapour

was built through this entire process. Now, can you imagine that if the boss came into the I don't know, let's say it's the kernel coding team in Canonicle and said, "Listen, you're going to be amazed. I've got this drama teacher that's going to come in and do three days of rapport building with you. What do you think those software engineers would say? Yeah, they they'd suddenly remember

standups and different meetings they had got that would prevent them from coming. They wouldn't warm to it. Okay. But if somebody said, "Listen, we've got an engineer coming in, a chartered engineer who's developed a framework of seven power presenting protocols and if you follow them, you can't help but make a brilliant presentation. actually behind the scenes secondary agenda. We've learned raor building because ra is the glue

that holds this all together. If you want to think about each of the seven power presenting protocols as the component of a rocket engine, raor is the fuel that drives it. And when you first got in touch with the people in the purpose protocol to tell them what you were thinking to do and to ask their advice and to iterate through that process until they were happy,

you opened up that bandwidth. You created some rapport. When you planned it with their attention span and their recall in mind, you were growing that rapport. Even though you weren't directly communicating with them, when you thought about their learning preferences or the way that they like to participate, you were growing it further. When you practiced with them in mind, you were widening that bandwidth. You were growing

that rapport. When you considered before you even met them, you considered what forms of participation would be best to use because you went out of your way to think about it. You did it with intent. Again, you were amplifying that rapport. And so when you got out in front of them with performance, you were n well not 90, you were 70% of the way there already because

you'd got communication with them. And then with the postevent, it uh just sealed the deal there. Okay. So in summary, and what we're going to do, uh if if you need to go, you can, but if you'd like to stay, well, I've got some work some worksheets to actually look at each of the individual protocols. We won't get through them all, but I'll give you access to

the first six at least. Your visibility and credibility need a high bandwidth channel and that's what this entire uh session has been about is growing rapor with people because in so doing your visibility your credibility will be amplified. You don't need to be a mile ahead as we were just saying you only need to be an inch ahead to succeed. And listen, honestly, how many people do

you know that consider these things when they come to make a presentation or come to run a meeting? I would suggest that you probably know some people that might consider one or two of these things, but maybe they don't actually do it. You know, you've got if you want extraordinary results, you have to involve yourself in extraordinary activities. And most people never even think about this stuff.

So you can significantly enhance your chances of getting the next job that you want, getting the promotion that you want, uh selling the thing you need, recruiting people in your community by doing this. In fact, I'll give you a Anybody been for a job interview that involved a presentation? That happens, doesn't it? You know, they say, "We'd like you to give a presentation. Here's a bit of

a duffet Even if they don't ask for one, give them one anyway. So this is doesn't matter whether it's a zoom interview or an in real life interview. At a convenient point, you can say, "Listen, I've been thinking about, you know, how I might contribute to the company and what my skills and abilities will bring to the to the organization, especially in the role that you've identified

that you needed filling. And I've prepared a fivem minute presentation. Would you like to see it?" By the way, if you say that, make sure you've got the presentation [laughter] just just in case they say yes. But if they say yes, great. You've now got five minutes air time to talk about why you're the solution to their problem. If they say no, because there's not time, you're

still the person that's going to stand out. And if you have done one, so if you've been asked to do one, let's pretend it's a Zoom these days, okay? You've done the screen share. You've done the presentation. You go, "Oh, while I've got the screen share, I'd actually done another little presentation." You know, you asked me to talk you through the software, but I've done another one

about how I might contribute to your team. It'll only take five minutes. Would you like to see it? Can you see? That's about being an inch in front, isn't it? Might not be a mile in front. It's going to make the difference for you. So the other thing I want to leave you with uh in terms of this sort kind of set piece thing is you never

ever learn something quite as well as when you teach it. It's true, isn't And to teach something you don't have to be at the end of the syllabus. You just have to be in front of the people that you're teaching. And so what I would encourage you to do to lock this stuff in is to actually use it and teach it to other people because it will

really help them. Now if you want to go deeper, I don't do weddings, funerals or bar mitzvah anymore. That was just getting too busy. Um, but I do uh do incompany training and off-sites and conferences and sales kickoffs where I can either do something like this, maybe a shorter version of it, or if the perception is that people are just not thinking about the purpose protocol enough,

we can go deeper into the purpose protocol. I've got a little survey there for you if you would like to um take a a uh scan of that um or take a picture of it for use later. That's going to ask you a few questions. Um it's also going to be a vehicle for you to get hold of a slides if you'd like the slides uh so

you can have those forever to keep. Has everybody got that? Got that that wants to get that? because I want to then go Okay. How? Right. Let me give you yet another QR code. This This is one of those conferences that's full of QR codes, Right. This QR code will actually get you through to six worksheets. There's a worksheet for each of the first six protocols. The

one that's missing is the postevent protocol. oh, sorry. I wonder if it'll stay there. Yes. So, this should get you uh into a Google folder with six worksheets. The first worksheet is the purpose protocol. And so, I don't want to keep you here against your will. You're free to go if you'd like, but if you'd like to workshop these things, then we'll do the purpose protocol first

and we'll talk through that so you can actually see how it would work in real life. So you can access it on your laptop, your desktop. Now, how many can somebody do a quick count of the number of people in this room, please? In fact, you sir, since you're stood up, can you do a about 30? Would you be really pleased to hear that I have at

least 30 copies of my book with me that I'm going to give away for nothing? That's great news, isn't it? A freebie. >> [applause] >> So, okay, at this point you're free to go, but if you'd like to stay, uh, I would love to go through this workshop of the first protocol with you. You should find that you've got six sheets when you go into that folder.

The first one is all about the purpose and it it points you to the different things to consider when you're thinking about the purpose of a given presentation. because now we're in like a free form time and there's just 15 minutes left. I'd like to thank you for your attention. I'd like to thank you for, you know, spending the time and learning this stuff. And I'm just

going to repeat myself because it's been a pleasure to go through these seven power presenting protocols. It's been a real pleasure to give you these seven bandwidth boosters, the real pleasure will come for you if you put this stuff to work. and then you'll genuinely reap the rewards of being the nerd that gets heard. Thank you very much. [applause] So, if you are workshopping and you want

to come and see me and talk about it, that's great. If you'd just like to get a book and rattle off, then I can do that as well. >> Q&A. Oh, there's one for you, miss. >> You're very welcome. >> Very, very happy. >> Oh, thank you. >> Good. >> Uh, I can after after we've dealt with with everybody. >> Ah, you want [laughter] >> Thanks. You're

welcome. >> Miss, would you like a book? >> You're welcome. Thank you. >> Follow up for an autograph as well. you're very welcome. You already got one. You got you got yours ahead of time, Diego, didn't you? >> Thank you so much. >> Did you get one, miss? >> Yeah, I got it. >> Oh, okay. Good. Good. Good. Okay. Yeah. >> go run and check out of

my hotel, but >> you got a book. Yeah. Good. >> You got one for me and my brother again. >> Yeah. Yeah. Good to see you. Nice to see you again, Mark. All the best. Yes. Okay. >> I got a flight to >> Ah, fair enough. Lovely to see you, Diego. Did Did we say we'll see each other in Chicago or No, >> we'll see. >> Soon.

>> Hope so. Yeah. Take care. All the best. >> Thank you. What's your name, miss? >> Julie. I need to cut down the word count there, don't I? >> Robert, >> maybe I can my friend like >> Oh, I see. Robert going for the double dip, are we? [laughter] >> Don't know what I do. >> Jeffrey. >> Jeffrey. With a J or a >> No, I'm Robert.

>> Is that J E F R E Y? >> R. >> Okay. I've only met one person. Every single other is R E Y. >> R E Y. No, he's R E Y. >> There we are. >> There's your book. >> You're welcome. Oh, yeah. We can. >> We're all up for selfies. >> right here for both books because we like books so much now. >> And

then let me take my hat off because the problem is is if I'm doing here, I'll just drop my hat on the floor. Don't worry about it. >> Done. Okay. Thank you so much. >> Great. >> Yeah, sure. What's your name, sir? >> J. >> Just near Oxford, sir. >> Yeah, we had a fun time. I I went to Derby for >> bit up north. >> I

just shall take this off. Is it going to be like oneonone Hi, >> how are you doing? >> Very well. How did your workshop go? >> Yes, very well. Thank you. >> I'm Kevin. >> Kevin. >> Pleased to meet you. >> Nice to meet you as well. And the next >> Yeah. We're just going to use the last five or 10 minutes on a little baby workshop

here, but we will be off by 12. >> No worries. No worries. Okay, if you've got the worksheet in front of you and you would like to look at the first section Albert >> really enjoyed it. Uh I'm even considering um so my company we have uh monthly or weekly presentation where we kind of we have two people kind of go through the slide decks that you

know we give to our >> I think this would be a good pivot or a good opportunity to present the You just have you come in. >> Oh, teach. >> Teach by doing. >> Yes, exactly. >> That's for That's for Julie there, isn't >> Thank you so much, David. >> You're very welcome. Okay. >> Okay, we are running out of time. My apologies, but if you've got

that document up, then what you'll see is in the first section, it talks about the objectives that you're trying to achieve. And so can you just read out the first section, Derek? >> This part? >> Who is delivering this presentation? Are you the best person to be doing this? What is your role here? Your relevant experience and what unique perspective or credibility do you want to bring

to the topic? >> Brilliant. Yes. Okay. So in doing that, what you're analyzing is whether indeed you are the best person and if you are, what objectives you're looking to achieve in terms of getting an outcome I can see we are very close to time, so I'll need to wrap this up. When you look through the worksheets, what you're going to find is the first three have

gaps for you to fill. The next three have gaps for you to fill, but they have golden nuggets of information for you in there as well to steer you in those final three protocols. You got my LinkedIn. If you do this in isolation and you come across things you want to talk about, I'm all I'm all ears. But I'd better wrap up now. So, thank you Let

me see. Oh, check. Check. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Okay, I'm going to have to put this check one, two. >> Testing. >> Okay, it's ready. That's good. He had his mic all the way to his [laughter] what the hell. What's that? figure it out. >> We'll figure it out. Okay. So, this is or we use that mic. Which one is better? >> Okay. Perfect. And this is

good. Okay. >> This is the front part. How do you do this? Those are supposed to be like glasses. >> What you're going to do is that you're going to go under like this, right? And you're going to go over and it's supposed to hug up like this. >> Yeah. But >> I see. I see. >> You know, you can also just do the different. >> Okay.

Yeah. >> Let's see. I just don't want my hair to be messed up. It shouldn't be this hard, isn't it? Or what about this? >> One second. >> Oh, maybe it is inside like like this. You want to clip it to >> clip it to what you already have. >> Yes, that would be better actually. >> You got it. Just want to make sure I don't miss

any recording. You want to check if it's working. >> Test. Test. >> Is it good? So, if you can help me with distributing this booklets, that would be super helpful. >> No, not yet. But let's let's just distribute this booklets to everybody. And also if you can put these on each table some like randomly. Sorry, I have the honor of introducing Psychiatrist specializers cultural culture. Perfect. Extras

we can just pop it in here in case anybody wants. >> Thank you guys. >> And we'll get the video on once she start. Yeah, we are ready to go. Huh? >> Oh, okay. Do I just Okay. >> This happens, huh? Okay, here we go. And we do. >> Perfect. Oh, yes, of course. I would love to. >> Hi everyone. I'm Shayla Star. I have the honor

of introducing Miss Kevin Dewir as she is a keynote speaker and industrial and organizational psychologist. Please welcome her to the stage as she talks about fast code and fragile closure. Well, it does seem a little intriguing, isn't it? But first of all, how are we doing today? It's a lunch hour. Did everybody eat? >> Okay, I see yes. No. Is anybody hangry that I should be aware

of? Okay. All right. So, we are safe. All right. So, my today's presentation is about try teaching a goldfish to bark. Where I'm coming from is you're the tech people, right? You have the skill set to pay attention to detail, to be technical, to deliver perfection. But sometimes in corporate world as I see you're often judged on the other qualities and I'm sure many of us can

relate how we are judged versus what we internally have as our strengths. So today I'm going to talk about how you can bridge that misalignment and how you can align yourself to be more successful. And if you don't do that there are some concrete cost attached to that. So let's talk about it. All right. Who am I? I currently am working as an experience manager um in

Ernstston Young. But my work today has nothing to do with my employer. I am also founder of TGL advisory. That's my firm. I put together all my experience across three continents. I have worked in Singapore for a wealth management firm. I have worked in Australia for wealth management. So I have always been with finance and currently I am with EY which is close enough [laughter] but the

difference is I have been inclined facing and right now I deliver a lot of uh backdoor like skill set enhancement understanding where you are at and where the team wants to go. But as I mentioned, my today's work has nothing to do with my employer. This is separate to what I do in EY. It's hard to beat your own drum sometimes, you know. So guys, just opening

up the floor right now. What do misalignment is in your mind right now? What do you think? any volunteers that can raise hand and kind of brainstorm as where we are headed. >> Yes, let me give you the microphone because I'm advised that we got to speak in microphone. Hello. Yep, it's working. Thank you. All right. So gentlemen over here, sorry if you don't mind introducing you

first so I have a bit of context who you >> Uh I'm Derek. So um in what context do you mean by misalignment as far as um my brain is tied um as far as I'm trying to say you know versus trying to over give specifications for things like you know you're talking to this group of people but your knowledge just kind of appear and you're talking

like to this level. Is that your is that what you mean or >> this one is direct more individual basis. >> Okay. It also applies to companies. But this is take this as a map for your own >> For example, if I just put it out there, what are your key strengths? Say you're good with people, you like to mentor people, and you like to also deliver

perfection. But say your leader or the team that you're working with wants something else. They want fast delivery. They do not want things that are naturally coming strength to you. So that's a misalignment. So that is a judging you for a skill set which is not your strength. It's a misalignment in a way that you always feel frustrated for why am I stuck? Do you feel that

sometimes like you feel I'm doing everything by the book. I'm doing everything correct. Where is the gap? What is that I'm not doing right? And you often ask that question to yourself. I want everybody in this room to pause and understand it's not your fault. Take a step back and try to understand this framework so that you don't blame yourself saying I don't know how to bark.

Well, you are not meant to bark. You are a goldfish. That's the misalignment I'm referring to Derek. Okay, let's let's jump into what it is and what we are covering today. This is a reality of today's world. So numbers don't lie. The talent strategies that we see in corporate America doesn't match with what objectives the business want to achieve. So if the business is headed towards innovation,

the talent strategies often reward completely So misalignment between even where your talent strategies lie. Second, employees feel misaligned with team goals. So if you are working in a team, you often feel disconnected where everybody's headed and you just feel am I supposed to be the ship following the crowd or where am I going? It kind of creates confusion. And the last bit is increase of mis you

know how we have the performance appraisal like you form you fill out the questionnaire most of the firms have that and misalignment has increased substantially and this is the Gallup uh research that I'm referring to. So these numbers reflect clear and precise that there is misalignment in the system and this I want to highlight because I want you to understand the systematic problem versus your own problem.

I don't want you to take ownership of oh maybe something is wrong with me. No. Okay. What are we going to learn today? We are going to understand what misalignment is is as as I said very briefly to Derek what misalignment I'm referring to. Secondly, we are going to understand why does it happen? Nobody wants to fall behind. Not even the organization. Everybody has the right intent.

Then what is it that cause misalignment? navigate shifting expectations without losing the momentum. When you when you feel the goalpost keep on going far away the moment you reach one. That's what I'm talking about. You got to align yourself so that you don't feel you're chasing something all the time. Align your work with the system actually rewards. This is crucial guys. You don't want to waste your

energy in something that doesn't reward. like you can do 100 push-ups in the gym, but if you're not getting the results, what's the point? Uh leave one action. So, I'm going to give you very concrete framework, a concrete action that you can take home to reflect on yourself. Okay. So, there are three aspects of the alignment gap that I'm going to refer in my framework. The first

is individual strengths. The second is the organization expectations and both of them how are they designed to create the gap for you. Okay. So there are four real causes of misalignment. The first is the communication breakdown and we're going to tackle each one of them to understand the misalignment gap. system agility, organizational design and then your personal values which are not aligned. Okay, I love this quote

because it says the biggest problem is the illusion that the communication has taken place. This not only stands in our professional but also personal life. So when you are talking to someone right a classic example just now I explained what misalignment is but it's good that Derek clarified what do you actually mean by this sometimes you think your intent is going to land exactly where people should

understand what you're saying but not all the time it happens you always feel that is this something that is right wrong and that's created the gap. Leaders always assume that the message is clear. That's where the misalignment is caused. Employees interpret by their own values. Now remember values are driven by culture, your life experience and a lot more than the professional setup that you are in. If

you are coming from certain culture, your value system will interpret completely different to somebody who is eastern western for example. So it really matters when you are communicating to a larger group. You have to have the clarity and understanding of different cultures and uh different communication style. And I'm going to drill this a little bit about communication because guys this is the foundation of any misalignment. Once

we understand communication all the other pieces will fall in place. So I really want to drill into the communication style to understand what are the different communication styles and how they can be interpreted in different ways. And these four communication styles we very much have in this room right now. I want you to just take a moment and understand these four communication styles. First is the direct

style which is get me X on X date. You know no explanation and just very personality A type alpha. And it also feels sometimes abrupt, sometimes aggressive, sometimes I'm not sure what this person actually means. The second one is analytical. I am assuming that a lot of you in the room today may have this style because you are more into details, technical. You understand numbers. You understand

how the X went to the Y and how the deliverable is achieved. You understand that language. If somebody like me who's very relational and come and talk to you, oh, so how are you feeling? You might just say, Kev, now get to the point. Where is the number? So that could be the misalignment. Relational is very empathydriven. They always ask you how you are. They always go

deeper. They're more empathy driven and they're more, okay, tell me about your family and what happened to your dog last weekend. They would cover each and everything about you as a person. And the last one is visionary style. It could be very big picture leader that comes and flamboyant and like where's the achievement we are planning and you know that sort of things that you think okay

I get it but how so that's like a visionary style of communication. Each one of them talks really different. If you are one talking to another, I want you guys to first understand what your own style is. Just take a moment and think where in this four back boxes you fit. Do you f and you know it it may not be 100% all the time. Sometimes you

may have to diverge depending on the situation. you know you're you're giving somebody uh bonus is a different direction than somebody is letting go of your company right so you cannot always be one way or other but you will see majority of your style falls under one box and you will also notice we're going to observe right now how that misalignment can actually translate to misunderstanding each

other I'm going to pick volunteers from this different communication style and request them to come here and have a dialogue on a scenario that I'm going to provide. Now, is there any volunteers who really like to do this otherwise? Okay, great. Yes, I'm watching you. I see the smile there. So, you are on my radar. What's your name? I'm Kevin. Nice to meet you. And what's your

name? >> Ben. >> Ben. Nice to meet you. Why don't you take the stage here? >> Hi Ben. >> So take a scenario. What what do you do for work? >> Oh, I'm a student at >> student. Perfect. >> And I'm a product manager. >> Oh, perfect alignment, isn't it? Okay. Say you have America in your team and you're going to guide her how you want to

achieve a goal that is just delivered to you by your boss. Okay, go for it. Ben, >> we need the dashboard by next week. >> Oh, we need microphone guys. >> Coming right up. >> [laughter] >> Oh, perfect. Perfect. Guys, thank you. >> We need to wait test. Okay. We need the >> Can you break down what the dashboard needs? >> It needs charts to show how

people are using the product. >> Do you have feedback from the people who are using this product? >> They said that there's no dashboard and they need a dashboard because otherwise they don't know how people are using the product. How are they supposed to improve the product if they don't see how people are using it? >> On that case, >> I guess we're gonna I guess we're

going to have to whiteboard this out to see what we should put on the dashboard together and then show them like, okay, this is what we have on the dashboard and then improve from there. >> Okay, guys, that's good. >> Was I supposed to be difficult or was I >> yourself? Your yourself. >> Well, that that's like how I am. Okay. Okay, guys. Well, give it a

big applause for I want you to stay here. I want you to stay here. And guys, I want you to know what style is America. >> Tell me. [laughter] >> Ben is a clear direct. Yes. [laughter] There's no two ways about it. America has a mix of empathy plus analytical. She said let's do whiteboard let's get into the details. So she understands Ben only when certain things

are driven into details and Ben is like we need dashboard like well thank you. Thank you both of you. So now you get the point how different can really make difference. Well, try this at home. I I do this with my husband all the time and I'm like, I don't know what she's talking about. And he's like, get to the logic point. I don't have logic. I

have so much emotions. But that's how like different styles work. And we need to acknowledge ourselves first. Guys, the reason I'm putting this out here is awareness is the step forward for you to align. If you don't have awareness, you're walking in a dark spot. You got to be aware of yourself first. I say this a lot of times. You cannot change the system. You cannot change

the person you're dealing with. It's impossible to change someone else. But you can take ownership of how you perceive things and how you can navigate. Take ownership of your own style. At the same time, be aware of others style so you don't bump heads. If you talk to Ben and you say, "Okay, dashboard, dashboard, dashboard. I hear dashboard. Dashboard. what is it? And somebody like America is

like, "Okay, guys, I get your dashboard. Let's draw what do you need?" And gets to the detail. And that's how you clarify. If you just nod your head and say, "Ben, you got it." And you just like, "What on earth? I did that will put you in a position, America, that will lead to the perception that you're not performing." While it's not the performance issue, it's not

about your capability to perform. It's about the understanding of So please understand that once you perceive the information, you got to understand your own style and somebody else that is communicating with you. We just saw and this is purely analytical and relational. somebody focusing on whiteboard like America and somebody who's very rel relational empathy driven they might not hear each other they're just talking Spanish and German

okay second one is agility intelligence is the ability to adapt to okay so if you're working in a company and you were expected to work at a speed or you got to pivot quickly to the leadership's um decision or you got to make the dashboard for Ben quickly continuous change quick decision making what employees experience is confusion work that becomes irrelevant you often lose purpose in these

situations guys you feel you're running to catch your own tail and it's never going to be caught. So you do feel underrecognized. You do feel your efforts are not going at the right place and you do feel confused. If you're experiencing any of that, it's So there are few things that you should be aware about is goals move faster than execution. I have seen this in lot

of teamwork project management where the leadership quickly pivot to different goals and you're not made aware about it. So you're still feeling deep down that you need to deliver on the old priorities. You feel that whatever you have connected your work, your effort, your time is now gone in the trash. So you feel that you're not fast enough to move with what expected and you don't actually

align mentally to the goals that the organization want you to run Teams feel different goals all the time like different teams have different goals for the larger values. So you've got to understand what the organization wants and you need to align each team to the larger goals and roles evolve faster than the expectations. So individual feel that you're performing well but leadership when you're coming to on

the table for performance review you often feel oh I didn't expect this I was supposed to get a plus and now I'm at C where did I go wrong so the roles evolve faster than what leadership is expecting you to do and the last one is the success m metrics that change so again guys this go back to the communication piece If the success for your leader

means X, chase the X. Don't be stuck on Y. If Y is your strength and somebody wants X, align yourself as quickly as you can. Otherwise, you're you're never going to feel that you're rewarded. So this is an example of shift to the new project immediately and the the person is so so so so into fixing making it perfect. Um I I just want to pause here

and maybe ask you guys have you faced anything like this at your work? Have you felt that the keep moving? I see a lot of smiles. Yes, please. I'll if you can give the microphone. Thank you. >> Um yeah, I just want to say yes, I do relate to that and um moving to more management. Um when things do come up, it's uh I always try to

be really aware of how much whiplash I'm creating, but it's it's a lot of times it's hard hard to avoid. But yeah, it's definitely very frustrating for um when when I'm working on a pro when me or my engineers are working on a project and uh they they're in that zone and then um they have whiplash. Yeah. >> May I know your name, please? Thank you. >>

I'm Arand. >> Aren and where what uh when you say you and your engineers, what is the work that you do? >> I um work for a nonprofit and part of the work that we do is to create an open- source election software. Um, and I I helped to start it and then as we've brought on more and more volunteers, I've moved to kind of be managing

volunteers to help work on it together. So, I'm kind of learning it as I go. and and and thank you for sharing that because it does validate a lot of people thinking am I the one the issue where the issue is and you're managing a bunch of team which are engineers and they think they are not able to pivot as quickly as you would like them to

pivot because you're getting instruction from the higher management. So thank you for sharing that. >> Absolutely. Thank you. Anybody else want to share the reflection on how they feel misaligned particularly when the goalpost moves? Okay, we have a gentleman here. >> Hey, uh my name is Mark. I'm owner of a small software company. We do communications. So, it's kind of like jack-of- all trades problem where we

started a new company and we've brought on new customers and they want certain things and our existing customers want certain things. My staff wants certain things because I run engineering, I manage the help desk, I, you know, I'm also in involved in sales engineering. So, there's just a big mismatch of priorities between do we make our dealers happy, do we make our customers happy, do we make

our staff happy? Yeah, thank you for sharing that Mark and it's a competing priorities because all three groups have different personalities. Sales have a different expectations your people who does the work are very different in terms of their objectives and it's a real challenge in real world and I'll share with you next if we don't align everybody in the same box what are the costs that companies

face. So thank you for sharing Mark. Okay, this one is a good transition to culture eat strategy for breakfast. So if your culture is not aligned, go make 100 strategies. Do whatever on earth you can. Your strategy will not have an impact on the people. the culture is the most important thing you should be focusing on. now how do you kind of measure what the culture is

and how do you say okay well I really want people to have collaboration and I really want people to understand to work with their teams cross collaboration with different is that the that is the culture you are aiming for and your matrix if you pick up the matrix bonus okay sell to the five dealers for example to Mark's point or achieve 100 sales else that matrix is

not aligned with what the organization wants for their own cultural visibility. So if your company is giving you a dialogue on we want our values to be recognized in one direction it could be anything innovation does that translate to the actual show me the money baby uh is that translating to your paycheck is that translating to your promotion is that translating to the reward that you're expecting

from your employer if the answer is no put the pen down put the pen down and ask them Why? This is not the time you're going to waste all your effort and energy for something that's not going to be rewarded. And I see this in a lot of times where you hear leadership talking about one thing, but what actually get you paid is completely different. So this

is the time you take a step back and realize, okay, my firm is talking to me in this language, but I'm getting rewarded for something else. Let me talk to my leader because when I'm sitting down on my performance review, I don't want to hear, "Oh, you're not eligible for bonus this year. I'm sorry. You better be getting in front of it because it's your money. It's

your promotion. It's your life. If you don't take in charge, Ben, you're going to suffer. So, it's everybody in this room is going to suffer if you don't take charge of that. Don't walk in the opposite direction to where you're getting rewarded." And many companies does that. Many companies does this. But your responsibility as I mentioned to you, you need to take ownership. You just can't play

the blame game. Look, we are in corporate America. You go anywhere in the world, corporations are corporations. Understand that they will run in a certain way. I do not like blame game at all. I take ownership and I run with it. And that's how you're going to progress in life. And if you are somebody who's having a business of your own, this is a reflection for the

business. If you want to grow in this age where people matter so much with everything that's changing in the world, you got to be very careful where your culture and where you're rewarding your employees. So, um, be careful of that one. Okay. System design. I don't know how many people know about the bankruptcy that this company has filed. This was a huge deal back then the company

failed because the way they structure the company is to Mark's point created conflicting priorities. Each group was set up for their own success. You do not succeed in that environment. Sales fantastic. Well, but sales do not talk to the engineers. What's the point? Everybody is leading their own individual group. If you're not aligned to a single goal, you are going to fail as a company. And that

was a classic example. They could not survive the competition and they have to file for bankruptcy. So this is a time where you actually take a step back and frame your company. You spend so much energy with building the product, building the company. Why is this not important? Because this might very well be the reason for failure. People are the highest asset in any organization. And if

you don't get that right, sooner or later it will cost you. Okay, this is my favorite. I must agree because I have worked on it personally so many times [laughter] and I'm still work in progress. I I love that quote by the way. like uh if you ask fish to climb a tree, I'm sure fish will be not very capable. But you and and this goes back

to the goldfish quote that I'm trying to cover throughout my presentation is guys go back to your inner anchor. I have uh designed this framework and if you just uh take the first okay so this one here the inner anchor intent if you open your work I I'll give you the workbook oh we need two over there Of Of course. Yes, you can actually take this one.

I had few which had a very small font so I had to redo it but I have some extra but really small font like if somebody has magnifier glass. [laughter] Um but the workbook has three sections and these are psychometric driven questions meaning um so I have done industrial organization course in Harvard which allows me to drive psychometric uh questions. It it is more of a cognition

to understand yourself and also understand the system. So the booklet has those questions for you to reflect and understand what am I good with? What are my strengths? And then the next one, what is the system rewarding you? What is it that is actually getting rewarded? And you will see the gap. I'm speaking too fast because uh this booklet does require a little bit of reflection and

I'm not sure if we have enough time for us to reflect right now. But I really want you to take this booklet home. Spend some time with yourself. And this is the other hack, guys. You've got to book time to think. If you keep going run run, it's going to be a disaster. For you to be aligned with your own self first before, forget about systems, environment,

etc., etc. You got to be aligned with your own self. And how you do that? Have a big rock moment in the calendar. You all must have heard big rocks, small rocks, how you time manage your calendar. Big rock is time for you to connect with yourself. And this is one key component of my framework which is you have to be aligned to your strengths and the

way you do is is through the booklet that I have shared. So what could be the gap? Well, there are four misalignment and ideally you would like ideally be very honest where are you in your life in your professional life in that four buckets. The idea is to move towards high strength high system fit. The reason is if you have high strength but the system is well

not quite fit has a very low expectation then that's a misfit. You're underelling yourself. If you have 10 strengths and the system only expects you to utilize three of those. Don't you think that's underelling So try to see where you are here at the moment and understand where you are and we are going to draw a map as how you can take this framework into action which

I'm going to share next and then how you can slowly move towards The the bottom one is low strength which you know you have say two strengths. The ask is also two strengths. Well that will make you very bored very soon. And then compensation is you have two of the strengths where the leadership is asking you 10 strengths. That's complete compensation. You're always running running running behind

something that is not your So let me ask you this question. Uh may I know your name? >> Daniel. Okay. Uh what are you naturally good at it? Like what are you good when you do something? You feel oh that wasn't an effort at all. That felt very natural. But people around you like your friend, a boss that you might be close to, a team leader say,

Daniel, how do you do this? >> What is it for you? >> I don't know if I could quantify that. >> Yeah, it can be intangible. I get it. let me ask you a separate question. What do you think makes you happy? succeeding. >> Yes. In terms of success means various things for other a lot of people. >> Exactly. It I I I don't know how I

would express it. Um completing something um uh uh achieving goals, assisting others. >> There you go. There you go. That's clearly your strength. You want to see something to completion. That will make you very satisfied. You want to and if you're running behind Ben's project which is creating dashboard and he comes up with something else tomorrow it might throw you off. It might throw you off like

guys I need to complete this project. This is your strength perfection to completion. And the second one you have mentioned is you achieve your goals which is also similar to completion. You have goals and you want to achieve them. You do not want to go here, there, wander off. So if those are given clarity to you, Daniel, your goals are XYZ. Okay? >> And then if I

give you that direction, you will work better versus you know, okay, I have a goal today, tomorrow B goal and it it won't be a Daniel strength. Helping others is one thing that you mention. If you are in a team very individual focused and it's me me that will throw you off because the way you interpret success is if you uplift others. The way you uplift others

is through team collaboration, mentoring, assisting on problems that they cannot resolve in various other factors. You will feel job satisfaction when you assist someone else. But if that part is missing in your professional life, Daniel, I bet you will feel you're missing the purpose at workplace. >> Do you feel where I'm going at? >> Kind of. Sort of. >> So strengths are like not always like very

obvious, right? Like strengths are not like I'm good at this, this, this. And it takes a lot for somebody to speak out that loud because we're also very modest and we don't recognize our strengths often. But strengths should be communicated clearly. And I want you to take this from today's presentation Daniel is be very clear where your strengths are. Forget about external that could be step two

and we can cross that in six 12 months but very clear on where your strengths are. So you're aligned with yourself on the strengths. >> I'm also a little confused about how you're defining alignment and >> So if your strength is collaboration, which is clearly it is if you're in a team which say Daniel do not worry about the the gentleman next to you, worry about your

own work and worry about your that is a misalignment. >> Because then you are focusing on only yourself, not helping others. first take a step back, understand what you're truly good at. And truly good at means naturally feels good. Naturally feels that I don't need to make an effort on this. I feel that this is and when you reach there, I promise you Daniel, you will feel

work is your And everybody doesn't get at the right time, at the right speed, but you can intentionally plan to be there. And I'm going to share with you how. >> Of course. >> Okay. So, this one is what we were technical thinking. the environment is rewarding for speed kind of a very misaligned um for Daniel it might be he might take time to think while Mark

wants Daniel to speak up in the meetings and that's how he will promote you because if you don't speak up for him you don't have executive power to step up in your role but what you truly value is uplifting your friend or your colleague. So that's where the misalignment happens. This one is a research done by Google who's also one of the sponsor for this conference and

I really like to highlight this research. It brings it. It was called project oxygen the engineers who were strongest in deep technical thinking, independent problem solving and more of analytical mindset. They were performing very poorly when they were put in an environment which expected collaboration, mentorship, the same individual put plugged out of that team and put in somewhere where you know you talk the same language. Guess

what? They become a performer. So you see this research clearly outlines it's not you who has the problem. It's the system rewarding something else. So I don't want you to feel that I'm not getting rewarded because the misalignment is the reason you're not performing at your best. Okay, I love this because I do this for myself a million times. Uh today's 8th March, right? Just take a

step back and think you're one year time traveling 2027 you take no action about your misalignment. You're like, uh, good good workshop, but who really cares? I'm going to go my way and do my own thing. Well, uh, you can do that. You can get frustrated, but there's more cost to it. It's going to be super expensive. This is based on 100,000 salary on an You end

up missing out on bonus and that kind of equates to quite a lot. If you see those figures are not small based on 100,000. I have seen this in my corporate experience that you do miss out promotion, you do miss out bonus not because you are a low performer because you cannot be aligned to systems Well, this is only individual cost talk. I'm not even bringing up

the company cost because that would be another workshop. And I'm just compounding. I love figures. So I just compounded it to five years. And you know, money is only money. What can money do? I have a four-year toddler at home. And I always worry about her education, her upbringing, and am I going to provide her the best of the college, etc., etc. I'm sure you all have

your own family and personal aspiration that good money can do for you. So it's not just money. Money is translating to your freedom to take vacation four times a year to go places, right? So you are having an impact on all those things by being misaligned. So please take ownership. And I just wanted to highlight the the cost because before we talk about action, you should understand

the cost of not acting. This is the first uh framework which is communication awareness. Self assessment. Try to ask yourself these questions. End of the meeting. Ask what are my key takeaways? Am I aligned to the communication style? Am I adjusting my communication style to different audiences? So the first pillar is your communication. What we have gone through the styles how Ben and America can talk completely

different language. You got to be aware of what America is thinking while Ben is talking. And then summarize important conversations. Clarification. Clarification. Clarification. And I have learned this very hard way. Writing is your friend. Just write in an email, Ben, we discussed da da da. That will substract all the ambiguity from the subject because it's written. It's a it's a document you can refer. If you want

to just take some actions, I would say writing is the first. Summarizing is one but just writing is very crucial guys. Okay. Ownership as I said you take ownership. You don't blame your boss the system how you have not been treated fair. We are not a crybaby here. We take ownership of our life. And how you do it is assess what are your key priorities right now.

And it can change, you know, as your family grows, as things change, it can change and you can navigate once it's changed. But what matters to you right now and what matters to your manager right now? Talk to your manager. He's not going to bite you. Just talk to him. What what are your priorities? You know, we never talked about we always talk about my performance, but

let me hear your story. Put yourself in his shoes. Try to understand what are his big rocks. If you make them look good, I bet they're going to be supportive to And then reconfirm what projects need extension, what direction, what balls, what are his challenges and how you can be a value ad. So you are not being inauthentic. I'm not asking you to be inauthentic, but you

are stepping in his shoes to understand somebody's perspective. This is system awareness. What are the behaviors you actually get rewarded? Observe the behaviors. Say Sam is talking loud or being flamboyant on the conference call. Oh, you know, uh maybe Sam is the person to go. So, does your perception of being the most loud in the meeting equates to the most capable? Catch that. Catch what's being rewarded

in the company that you currently work And if you are a leader, you have to make sure that incentives support certain goals which are beneficial for the organization like collaboration, shared goals and again communication piece falls very crucial Personal alignment. This is this is where you spend a lot of time with the workbook. Understand where your where your role is aligned and slowly try to make small

progress around where your accountability is and where where your reflection is. I would even go down to the extent that if you are complete polar opposite guys you got to be serious about it and you need to understand if you cannot make changes you better change the role that you're in. It might not happen tomorrow but you have to find something that aligns with your strength. It

cannot be a total disaster total mismatch. It can be plus minus because you can never find an ideal situation. That's not going to happen. But you can align yourself periodically to understand yourself and where you are headed. And this one is huge because it ties with everything that we have discussed. Accountability is huge guys. It's in every direction in life. If you want to succeed, be accountable

to your own self. And if you are poor with accountability, pull up a friend and say, "I want you to become my accountability buddy." And set up a 15inut call every week either for yourself reflection time or with the person that you trust is going to pull you up and say, "Oh, we discussed this, but you haven't done anything until now." Somebody who can knock at your

door and give you a gentle nudge. So this is the framework we I I have addressed to address the causes and um it's also on the website um TGL advisory but this is pretty much the entire framework. I want you to take one key message from this workshop and put it in your workbook. There's a section where it says keynotes take one small action from this workshop

and understand where you can implement and that to next week I'm not I really feel like you should take ownership and do it things starting next week this is not a rocket science it's reflection it's a safe place and take one portion from the framework and where you're going to implement I also offer a follow-up complimentary session depending on your individual goal. If you finish the feedback

and please be honest with feedback, this is very valuable to me and it fits with my core strengths and values. So I appreciate everybody that is here today and uh I hope this workshop has been useful for you. That's all. Thank you guys. [applause] I was scared somebody might call me. >> Oh yes, talk about taxing. That's not happening with me. Thank you. Nice to meet you.

I always I'm always doing something, you know, it's always like and then >> Yeah. Yeah. But I think there is a way you can approach it and uh what I will do I'll just fill out the feedback and what's your name? I'll follow up with you Mira just to understand >> QR code isn't working. talk about that. >> Hi, Mr. How are you? >> Hi, I'm >>

If the QR code doesn't work, >> I took a picture of that. >> So, uh I I dragged this young man into your presentation. >> Yeah. Thank you. >> And it was it was really really good advice. I feel like you know sometimes like you find the right network of people and then they just take you to the thing that you just need to hear and it's

like it just takes everything full circle. >> It was just like wow. I just I feel like this talk was like directly for me. So >> Oh, really? >> I it it I think it gave me a lot of closure in regards to like things in my past with my professional career and like looking forward. So I just wanted to say I really appreciate it. >> Thank

you Hassan. >> Yeah. Thank you for saying this. >> Yeah. Because like so for a little bit of background, I was talking with John because I'm doing some career counseling. I actually um worked for about like four or five years like in the analytics and like BI industry. >> Okay. So I did that. Um and then I basically through that time I kind of started out as

like a rotation program member and built up but kind of like along the line of your presentation you were talking about like misalignment. >> You were talking about like styles and >> aligning yourself with like your management and like with your corporation to kind of move forward on onto projected path. Long story short, um I felt within that career I I kind of got to a point

where the there was like a lot of emphasis on high performance. This was like the heat of co so within our BI team um while I kind of function at the level of like a lowle like developer and engineer a lot of it was like you had to build t-shaped skills you have to have an understanding of a technical breath that was like outside of your team.

Yeah, >> we had a lot of like shifts and downsizing and it got to a point where uh basically I wasn't meeting up with the pace of my team and basically I was on a VIP. >> And it was just really tough and stressful because I feel like it was kind of like that time where it was like >> a little bit of like a cognitive like

fog like I couldn't like really meet halfway with like my management and really kind of understand what their goals and metrics were and I felt like it was kind of a slump within my career. I was like, "Okay, like is this what I want to continue doing?" >> But then I also kind of like back like I made the decision ultimately like I I wanted to quit

and just kind of like realign and figure out what's next. But now looking back at that experience and hearing about like management styles, understanding, you know, where you are on like those tiers that you discussed, I was just like, >> I mean, it's not like would a could a should have, but it's like now that I can take this information and move forward with it, like it

gave me a lot of like understanding and closure like >> maybe not things I could have done better, but things like >> understanding like different perspectives and maybe what I could have done better as a as a high performer. >> I just wanted to really thank you for >> Thank you, Hassan. Appreciate it. And why don't you just uh take the feedback and I'll touch base with

you just to see where you are at and I would love to be I can invest uh some time with you to see how you can grow in your future. >> Yeah, I would. Yeah, I'd absolutely take you up on that. I appreciate it. >> Um so yeah, just put the feedback in and it will have a place where I can talk. >> Oh, you're >> of

course so I can touch base with you. >> Yeah. Yeah. But I'm gonna definitely take some time to like reflect, look at the workshop because I came in about 15 20 minutes later. But yeah, I just wanted to like >> and I can run the details with you that we have gone through as well. >> Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. So if I go on the website, it'd

be okay. >> Yes. Yes. It will give you the feedback and it has the email address. That's how >> Okay. Perfect. All right. Well, thank >> Thank you. Thanks for sharing. >> Hi, my name is Kim. I signed up for uh career consultation. >> Um with you if you have some time today. >> Yeah. But I'll let you you know probably some folks want to greet you

but I love to catch up with you after >> for sure. I would love to do that. >> I'll I'll wait for you. >> Okay. Okay. Sounds good. >> Interesting interesting things to think about. I think my problem is I I have and my current role meets a lot of those strengths. My manager likes me. His manager likes me. The people I deal with are I'm mostly

analytical. People most I deal with are generally give me direct communications and requests and I request specifications and they don't give them to me and there are new projects every day. And they all need to be >> Well, I I can't uh I can't tell the CTO. >> But But it's not just them. It's But they If it's multiple groups within the company, I'm a network and

security for the company's IT. So various groups come to come to us come to me to do things and they all have to get done. All right. Thank you. >> Hi, I'm Christian. >> Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, too. I just want to say it was a great >> And I really appreciate you putting the the numbers of like what aignment can >> I

need to work on this. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think I I've been Um you'll feel this like just letting the misalignment kind of go on but seeing like the number of like on average. >> So I just wanted to say like I really appreciate the workshop I have been in the same situation where you know I don't get enough realize money. >> Sure you get frustrated have

a glass of bread but it's also money. Yeah, I think um yeah, I I totally appreciate it. Do you feel like I I've had this issue where it'll also kind of build up if you stay like you mission next cycle comes like well you didn't get last year so right Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. Do you feel like I feel like I don't know and I had to

step out briefly but you mention how tackling this but not leaving your job. >> The same issue. >> also Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. I really appreciate it. It was great meeting you again. >> Great to meet you as well. >> Of course. I was trying to scan the QR code. It wasn't working. >> I got that wrong in a tech conference. >> If you can

go to my website. >> Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Kim, let me grab my stuff and talk. I love that AI. yeah, I think I hard and your QR code. So I have >> Yeah. So maybe >> this reminds me Brother, So it's kind of very >> There's somebody I think Um yeah, we go to the front desk. Hello. Ah, I found the mic. That's what that noise

was. I stepped on it earlier. I got the mic to work. It's very exciting. I think it's a little broken. So, if I knock it off, then I'll never get it back on again. And I'll just hold Welcome everyone. I'm so excited to see so many people here. I know it is a Sunday afternoon. The conference is almost over. We're a little tired. So, I'm going to

try something a little different that I haven't done with this workshop before. So, how many people like to play like board games or casual games, video games, anything with friends? We all like to play games. Good. Okay. So, I want you to think of this afternoon as not like a workshop where we're going to learn coding or something. Just think of it as like, hey, we're just

going to like hang out. We're going to make some new friends. Maybe you like went to a board game uh store and you were like, "Hey, let's just play a game with some friends this afternoon." So, that's kind of what I want you to feel coming in and just like relax. Don't stress. There's no way to get this wrong, right? We're just here to like have have

some fun, make some friends, that sort of thing. Okay. Uh Okay. So, as you come in, I'm excited we have tables because I want you to be able to write something down. Um, if you don't have like pen or paper or a laptop, you just use a phone. It won't be that much. So, if you just like as you're you're coming in, if you can just grab

something to write with, that would be great. Yeah, today's going to be very interactive. I hope you realize that coming to a talk about networking. We're going to do a lot of networking today. I'm just gonna, you know, I know it's a little late. You've probably talked to a lot of people already, but if you haven't, now's your now's your chance to meet up with some people,

maybe make some after conference uh activities. Okay, so let's get started. Okay, I know you probably thought like this is going to be the one talk that has nothing to do with AI, but like I just have to do just like a little bit and then we'll get past it and then it'll be all talking no AI stuff, right? Um because you probably heard a lot about

AI. It's just like the thing everyone talks about. But let's talk about the way it affects us as people who are both looking for jobs and people who are hiring managers. Basically, AI has made networking more critical than ever because it's so hard to tell what is real digitally because it's so easy for AI to make stuff up, right? And there's always been ways of making stuff

up and fuzzing your resume and, you know, fuzzing yourself at the interview, but now it's just even easier, right? And hiring managers are getting a thousand resumes and 900 of them are from AI and they're like, what is real? Like, how do they find your real resume at the bottom of the pile? And that's where networking can help you show you're a real person. even having a

quick conversation, the relief knowing that you're an actual person instead of like a fake resume, that's going to help you so much when you're looking for work. And then on the opposite side, if you're a hiring manager, you know, you get that relief of knowing this is this is a real person, right? Um we're actually, you know, as a hiring manager, you're actually dealing with other things,

including scams, right? We've had people that were fake on video calls that weren't even real people. We have people who are trying to get jobs to steal information and aren't actually going to work there, right? So, there's all sorts of like things that you wouldn't expect that are changing the landscape of of of finding jobs and hiring. So, maybe you want to leave the job market altogether.

Maybe you're like, I want to use AI to create my own company. Right? It used to be that when you had an idea, you had to do like all smoke and mirrors, right? You like create mockups and you're like, "Yeah, this is kind of how it would look if I got it together." And that sort of thing. And it made it a little harder. Now with AI,

it's so much easier to actually make something and have it ready. But, you know, that's you can't just make one company. As much as a lot of people think that you can just make a company with a bunch of AI agents and no other people, you can't. You still need funding. you still need things like that. You know, it just makes it easier. So, with networking, you

can go and talk to people and have those conversations about, hey, I'm starting this company. Hey, I have this idea. Maybe you're looking for partners. Maybe you're just like looking to run ideas past people. That's all things that you can do with networking when you're not looking for work or not looking to hire people. Actually, the best time to network is when you don't need anything. That's

the absolute best time because that's when you can just make friends and talk to people without that that like pressure and desperation where you might accidentally say things that you shouldn't say because you really need something right now, right? So if you're not looking for work right now or you're not looking for something, think about how much easier it'll be in the future if you lay the

groundwork today. So, um, all done with AI. I promise that's it. That's my only slide on it, except for like all the slides that I made with AI, but like we'll just pretend that I didn't do that. Like, you've probably seen that in every presentation, right? It just makes our lives so much easier. Uh, okay. So, let's start with the most basic part of networking. We're going

to do our first little exercise. So, I want you to greet someone near you. But wait, before you do that, um, I want you to think about your introduction. How do you say hi to people, right? I mean, after the hello, you know, you're at an event like this, people expect you to say something like, "Hi, I'm Michelle. I do this or I'm, you know, you they're

going to ask you those type of things, right? So, hi, my name is Michelle. I'm a senior software engineer at Netflix." That's that's pretty boring, right? Like, it doesn't give you any room to talk. Like, yeah, it's like, you know, I get the bonus of working at a cool company that most people have heard of, but you know, not my entire career was like that. I worked

at companies that no one had ever heard of that were not cool. So, you know, how do you do an introduction that actually starts a conversation as opposed to just telling them something about you? Because everything you do is an opportunity to start a conversation. So, you want to say something a little more interesting, right? So, even in that first 30 seconds. So, let's try this again.

Hi, I'm Michelle. I work at Netflix and I'm an engineer. I help build tools for the VFX and animation artists who work on the Netflix originals. That's a little more interesting, right? It didn't take that much more time. It conveyed basically the same amount of information, but I just added a little bit at the end so that people have something to kind of grab on to. They're

like, "Oh, that's interesting. What kind of tools?" Right? Like I don't give so much that I'm, you know, kind of preaching at them, but enough that like there's something more there. And the way that structure is, if you didn't hear it, it's basically like, you know, I do this and but this is who I help. these are my stakeholders, right? By having that structure, it helps have

it be a little more interesting. Here's the here's the people you help. Here's the people you do things for. It gives it it gives it that like a little bit of pizzazz, right? So now you have that that gives you that conversation instead of just just going right to like that small talk which is the most awkward of conversations. Okay. So, first exercise, I want you to

spend a couple minutes writing your introduction, and then we're going to say some hi to people. So, if you came in late, just like grab pen and paper, uh your phone, laptop, whatever. We're we're writing down our how do you say hi to people? How do you introduce yourself in the framework of I do this, here's the people I help, you know, just like something interesting about

your work so you're not just, you know, you're not just a thing, but here's a thing that you do. >> So, whenever you're ready and you have your introduction, just like look up, look around you, wait till just the person near you is done writing, and then I want you to try it out whenever you're whenever you're ready. Oh my god. Come on in. >> I'm just

curious. I was just curious to help you guys. >> We're just doing some networking. So, just take take a seat. Say hi. We're just doing introductions right now. So, I'm going to stop them in a minute and go back to the talk. Oh, >> well, I just want to look at the I was a speaker or volunteer and I've been talking for hours. So, I'm done >>

All right. Well, just relax then. >> Have a good one. That's very big. everyone has a chance to do an introduction, whenever you're ready, we're gonna keep going. >> Is this working? >> Hello everyone. Has everyone had a chance to do the introduction? >> I'm gonna I'm you're going to talk to them even more later. I promise. I just wanted to get that introduction out of >>

Actually, the introduction seems to have gone great because I had to make everyone be quiet and that's actually much harder than getting everyone to talk. So, I'm really excited that so far it's going well. Also, I forgot to put up the slide, but I feel like you all you all figured that out. So, what I would like now is someone to volunteer and tell me what their

introduction was and how that conversation, like that quick little intro went. Does someone want to share their introduction? Go ahead. >> Thank you so much. Oh, is there more? >> Yeah, tell me. I first I want to thank you for for sharing that. That was excellent. It was basically exactly what I said, you know, adding a little more to the conversation. I don't know why I'm waving

with this. Uh tell me tell me how it went. Like how did they did it feel better having a little more information in the beginning? >> It did. I didn't exactly see it that way. But I did mention I was from LA. >> Awesome. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Um, does anyone else want to share their introduction and how that conversation went? Go

ahead. And we I think we have a mic. I don't know if it works, but you're all if you want to just be loud, that also works. >> First, I said, "Howdy. I'm really right now." >> now I don't have to project. >> Um, and then Deja introduced herself as someone who is running a blog specifically for um, new users and experienced users alike. And um, I

got to mention that I'm a student at Orange Coast College. And um something that's been hard for me to connect with other like Linux users and other like open- source devs is this like talk of lingo and how hard it is to bridge the gap of um like this like language barrier. Um and that was something we were able to connect over and um it was really

nice. It was a good conversation. >> That's awesome. Thank you. You're going to get to talk to her even more. So I'm really glad you have something to talk about. So thank you so much for sharing. I really appreciate that. Um good. It sounds like things have were going well. You were you were having conversation. You're having follow-up conversation. So, thank you both for sharing. I really

appreciate it. Thank you, person who brought the mic back. Uh I guess we'll just keep it up here and then anyone wants to grab it because we're going to be sharing a lot. So, let's go to the next slide. Okay. So, let's talk about goals. So, now that we're like warmed up, you know, whenever you go to a a networking event, you should have some sort of

goal. We we heard that from our new friend over here who talked about kind of their goal is kind of learning more about the language and talking to people. But, you know, I want you to think about what your goal could possibly be for, you know, it's a little late in the conference to start a fresh goal, but like maybe think about what your goal was for

the conference or, you know, maybe for this event, right? Like what is your goal to talking to people today, right? What is it you want to achieve? And I put a ton of them up there as like ideas of like things that might be possibly goals, right? Like um let's see, what did I put up there? [sighs] Yeah, making a new friend, job referral, practicing with interview

help, right? Practicing is the best. Someone has their hand up. What's up? >> Will your slides be available on the website? >> Uh I can put them up at some point. >> Yeah. Um Yeah. So you have new ideas, things like that. So, I really wanted you to think about like outside the box as well and not just like, you know, not just making a friend or

referral. Those are like the first things that come to mind. But like sometimes I've gone to a networking event to see if I could find podcast to be a guest on cuz I just like want attention, right? Or writing a guest article, things like that. Things that include branding that I think is a little outside the box, but something that you can find by talking talking to

other people. So okay. So just remember that like your goal if you can think of it as like an exchange and not just asking another person for something that is also very helpful, right? Like things I put up there that are helpful for people. Being a guest on a podcast is great because people who host podcasts are always looking for guests, right? Um, if other people are

looking for jobs, you can help each other be, you know, accountability buddies or you can help each other with um the looking over each other's resumes or interview practice or anything like that, right? So, it shouldn't, you know, you might have a goal that's like really important to you, right? A lot of people are looking for work right now and I'm not going to discount how difficult

the market is right now. But if there's ways that people can help you that aren't just giving you a job referral and asking someone for a job. Go ahead. >> Yeah, it's going to get like really uncomfortable. And I have a whole slide about stuff you should not say, and we'll definitely get to that, but I just want to kind of give you an idea of of

of setting goals for events. And anytime you go to an event or a conference, you should try to set some sort of goal. anytime you're gonna like talk to people or learn things because it really gives you a sense of like you know you've achieved it right I just want to talk about one goal to not do um a goal shouldn't be to talk to five people

right that might seem like a difficult goal and it might seem like something you want to achieve but it's basically the same as saying I want to do five commits today right like what is that actually achieving like you could have five commits to the documentation that don't mean anything, right? You could add bugs and then remove bugs, right? It doesn't it doesn't doesn't mean anything. And

talking to five people doesn't mean anything if you're not having some sort of connection or trying to find some way to like improve your career or make friends or just improve. You know, I talk about career, but a lot of it is about community, right? A lot of the things that networking brings me is just having someone to complain with, right? having someone to do a project

with, having someone to like just walk through a problem with, right? And just trying to figure out, hey, have have you solved this before? Like, oh, you haven't? Well, at least I can talk about it with someone, right? So, you know, kind of bringing that to the table as well with networking and not just thinking about as like just talking to people, but about building connections cuz

if you talk to five people and then never talk to them again, like that was a nice interaction, but then that's it, right? Like then that doesn't bring you anything whether it's in your career or in, you know, building your community of So, uh let's do a few minutes. We're going to do our next exercise. as you see where I'm just going to keep making you do

stuff. Um, so this one is going to be writing your goal. It could either be for the conference overall if you like had a goal for the conference, for this event or for the next networking event you go to, you could just say like I I don't know which one I'm going to go to next, but the next time I have a chance to talk to people,

you know, this is my next goal, right? Okay, get >> What do you think? Hey everyone, let's wrap it up. Who's ready for more slides? I need something louder than this apparently. Hey everybody. >> So my favorite part about that exercise is that I didn't expect anyone to be talking. Like it was supposed to be that you were like writing down your goal. But then well clearly

everyone did the exact same thing. So that like wasn't clear on my part. But like I love it because you all clearly want to keep talking to each other. Like you loved your introduction. You're like ah I didn't get to talk to people more. I want to keep talking. So I love that. So that was that was different than I expected but but better. Right. Okay. So,

who wants to share their goal? Who has who who has written down a goal for themselves? I mean, you you all shared with each other. Okay, great. Go on. >> My goal for this conference was to network. >> Awesome. Thank you. Uh, what do you mean new talent? >> I do a Awesome. Awesome. That sounds That's great. You're like offering and asking at the same time. That's

always an excellent an excellent goal. Thank you. Anyone else want to share their goal? Thank you. Did you find anything? >> Notific. >> Okay. Okay. That's a good conversation to talk about with people, too, like what trends they're seeing. Anything interesting? Um, thank you. I And one more in the back. Red Hat. I don't know what my goals are That's that's that is a different way to

do it, but a great way to do it. So, wait, did you did you figure out your goal by the end? >> What was your goal? find the opport. >> Awesome. Thank you. Yeah, when I was like I was at my first job, it was in such a weird place. It was like a pipeline support engineer. I didn't even know what jobs were available to coders. So,

I would go to networking events and just ask people about their jobs and like what they actually did all day. So I could even figure out like what I needed to learn or like what was interesting. And what I learned most from that is that like every job is both interesting and like incredibly boring after a little while. So just like you got to find ways to

keep it to keep it exciting. But that's that's definitely a great goal and one that's good to have when you're like not looking for work yet, but like trying to figure out like what is my next steps? What are people actually doing? as opposed to like you know the you see job descriptions online but what are the interesting things that people are doing outside of that just

like dry job description. I think I had one more over here. Did you want to do one more? >> Sure. My goals were to learn more about AI but also to meet people especially people from LA and to spread the word about my open source project. >> Awesome. Sounds great. Thank you. >> Yeah. You want to tell us a project? Maybe we can get everyone else in

here involved in it. >> It's an open source election project called better voting.com featuring voting methods like star voting. Okay. What's next? See if I remember. Oh yeah. I don't know why I have another one for this. Oh, and my goal, which uh is my shameless plug, and I'm going to I should have left this up here longer, but I'll just like slowly explain what it is.

Um, I'm working on a book. It's a senior software career guide. So, my goal for coming today, and my goal for all the conferences I'll be at the next year or two is to get people interested in this. It's basically a a combination of technical and professional skills that you need to become a senior, right? The jump from mid to senior is a lot more than the

jump from junior to mid. And there's also a lot of variety, right? There's full stack, there's s sur, uh there's designers and project managers. So depending what you want as your senior level, it can be a terminal position. So, I want people to be able to make it there and have a great time while you're there and not feel overwhelmed that you need like 40 new skills.

So, uh I hope I've talked slowly enough about this that you were able to get the QR code and be like, "Yes, I definitely want to buy this book and pre-order it." And if I get at least like one sale today, I'll be really really excited. So, that's really all I need. It's not It's not Okay, so let's talk about finding events. Obviously, you made it to

a conference. You know about these. This is a great one because it's such a, you know, community-led conference because everyone here is very cool. But let's talk about if you're like, I really want to do a lot more networking than I'm doing. I don't want to just once a year go to scale. I want to see who else is in the neighborhood. You know, I always start

on Meetup Eventbrite. Just like what is in the neighborhood? go to coffee shops, see what's posted on the board. And the reason Meetup's a really great place to start is that they often have it either like once a month or once every couple of weeks or once a quarter. And that's such a great way to meet people in such a casual way. Making friends, you know, the

way you do it is by seeing the same people and having casual interactions with them over and over again, right? So meetups are the best way to actually build deep connections because you'll see the same people like maybe you'll have a five minute conversation each time but like slowly you'll be like oh yeah I remember you oh yeah what did you think of the talk we just

went to oh yeah that was interesting and you know the best another great thing about it is if you miss one it's not a big deal because there's another one coming right up right so it's just such a it's an easy way to if you're not used to networking and just kind of like maybe you're new to the area, maybe just moved. It's a great way to

find local, you know, local meetups. So, um, let's talk about conferences a little bit. Obviously, you already made it here, but if you didn't know about some other ways of going to conferences, I like to share it just because some of this people don't always know about, right? So, um, if you paid your way today, uh, companies sometimes sponsor it. It usually comes out of the education

budget. So, and it's not something they always tell you about. So I when I join companies I always like ask about it and then like I ask again in six months because like things might have changed right they might have changed the budget. So just just keep it keep up with it. Ask your manager every once in a while like hey do we have any sort of

education budget and that can at least pay part way or hopefully the entire thing especially if it's a local conference just the ticket or even if you want to travel somewhere it can pay for you know the flights and everything. >> What's up sponsors >> sponsors for your conference or sponsors to sponsor you. >> So like running an event, >> you know, that's really tough because you

have to align goals, right? And a lot of sponsors to events are companies who are looking to hire people or companies looking to raise their, you know, their brand, right? So in the market today, it's a little more difficult to find companies like that, but that's that's the best way to kind of align yourself with that. or if there's a school or a nonpr I'll you one

second I do see you so you don't like keep your hand up um if there's like um a school or a library where you can have something that really doesn't cost you a lot of money to be there um and you can with schools and colleges there are clubs that you could align with you just partner with and be like oh hey I want to do an

event and I saw there's like a computer science club can we do something together I want to do like a you know an open-source you know, event and have, you know, people from the community come in and talk to the students, but also this, you know, just a place to have it, right? And just think about what is like the cheapest possible way for you to do

an event. I found is easier than finding sponsors who will pay for event based on my like decades of working with like nonprofits, it's like super tough to find sponsor. So, and especially in this market. So, that's why I kind of recommend that looking for outside of the box ideas on that. It sounds like you had an idea. So or a question. >> Um, and any company

that still has a Devril team, that means they have some money for marketing. So, that's another way of aligning like uh interests, right? Okay. So, let's talk about like going to conferences. So, I talked about company sponsorship. You know, if you can volunteer and get a free ticket, especially if you're just local and just want to get into it. There's a lot of volunteer opportunities. Sometimes there's

scholarships, especially if you're, you know, in an underrepresented group in tech. That is a way, you know, a lot of big conferences will will sponsor your entire trip to the conference. And then doing what I'm doing right now. Speaking gets you free tickets. Sometimes you get paid, very rarely. Uh, but it will get you free flights, free hotels. Um, it's just like a fun way for me

to like see the world and also get to like hang out with people. My favorite thing to do is go to a country where I don't speak the language and like make people I've met at the conference take me places so that I can like order food and stuff like that. It's really it's really convenient for me. Uh, so that's how I I get to meet people

and you know I do a whole talk about speaking but if you want to know more about it, we can we can definitely talk about it. That's something I really love to get more people into because I feel like everyone has a story to tell. Even if it's, you know, something technical that you think everyone already knows or something different like, you know, you're going to tell

it differently than someone else, right? Like, so get up there, you know, give it a shot, right? Okay. And then here's one of my other tricks that I do is that when I go to one event, one of my like icebreaker questions is to ask people what other events they've gone to. like um especially when I was new to an area and I was like I didn't

know what events were in Los Angeles. I was like, I would just go to like the first event and talk to people and say, "Hey, tell me what you've gone to." And I started building this like giant list in Google notes of other events and then, you know, it builds exponentially, right? Cuz every event you go to, you learn about other events and, you know, some events

will shut down and it's like super sad, but there's always going to be new ones that pop up cuz I think we really thirst for community. And I really saw that as, you know, people were starting to get out of the house after the pandemic. It was like these events were like packed. And in LA, I don't know if if you're from here, you'll know that people

do not like going to things in the evenings because it's so hard, right? Like it'll take two hours to get anywhere and you'll be like, "Well, I could just go home and watch a video on YouTube." So, I have been shocked at the size of people at events. So, you know, there are going to be more people there than you expect, I think, because we really crave

community and it's important to us. Okay, so I want to talk about the Pac-Man rule. Before I get there, I want to talk about like right at the beginning of event because a lot of events aren't like this where you're like sitting down and chatting with people. They are you walk into the door and you see a room full of people and they're already all talking, right?

It's very rare that I've I've been to event and like it's just like I get there and like one person is only there. Maybe because I'm late to everything, but like you know, usually everyone is talking and that can be very intimidating, right? You're like, how do I break into this conversation when people are already, you know, doing that? So, uh, one thing I want to help

you help others is the Pac-Man rule. And let's see if I can play this video because it explains it better than me. I didn't invent this. Someone else did it. I love it. If I can't play it, I'll just explain it. Oh, there we go. Perfect. So you don't need audio. I think you can figure this out. You see the difference there? So one of them there's

like a closed space and one of them there's an open space, right? So keeping your spaces open when you have a circle is just super helpful, right? So like if you have a table, try to try to keep one chair open. If you're around a, you know, table, try to like a round table, try to keep something else. So I want you to like that'll help the

next person who's trying to come in, right? So say you are the person coming in. You look for some Pac-Man's maybe people haven't learned that rule yet. So you know there's not a lot of spaces like how do you figure out which group to talk to? See if I have another slide. I think this is so hard to do. It's like backwards. Oh no, back. Okay. Yes,

I knew I had another slide about this cuz I want to be like super specific on this because it could be like really hard when you haven't done this. And you know, the way I learned how to do this was trial and error. I've been going to events for for many many years and a lot of this is just like looking around and watching how like more

extroverted people were talking and I was like, "Oh, I'll just watch them." Right? So, if you're walking in, just look around and try to make eye contact with people because people will feel you looking at them and they'll like turn around a little bit or like look around and just see if you can make eye contact. If you make eye contact, smile and then if they don't

smile back like don't join that group like they don't want to talk to you. That is very weird and like almost never happens. This literally only happened to me once. I went to this conference and no one wanted to talk to me and I could I still haven't figured out why. literally could I could not break into any conversation. But that is one out of like a

hundred of events that I've been to. Mostly I like look people in the eye, smile, and I walk over and I say hi, right? And then I have these two tips for for talking to people. So it could be, you know, a large group or it could be a single person, right? So if it's a large group, I walk up to them, they're already having a conversation,

so it's kind of it's a little hard to break in. Um, so I just like wait for the person to like finish their sentence and then I say, "Hi, I'm Michelle. Sorry to interrupt. What were you talking about?" And the reason I do that is that I want them to keep talking so I can feel like I'm just kind of easing into the group, right? And what

they'll usually say is something like, "Oh, we were just introducing ourselves. Oh, oh, we were talking about how um how cool this open source project is, or we're talking about this, right?" And then you could just like drop right into the conversation without that like even that initial like like small talk, right? So you can just go right into whatever like interesting topic they have and it

feels like less that you're you know you feel less rude, right? When you're we're doing that and I I get uncomfortable if I'm rude. So I just want to be as polite as possible so people feel like I didn't interrupt whatever you know they were already talking about. Especially if it was something really interesting and it's hard to get to something interesting at a networking event, you

don't want to like pull that back. You want to keep that interesting conversation going. Okay, so that is for like a group, right? And sometimes it's easier to just like walk up to a single person because they're not talking to anyone yet, right? And like especially someone's kind of like hanging on the edges and they're not sure how to jump in, you can walk up to them

and say hi. And that's when I kind of do that introduction that we just talked about, right? because you know not talking to anyone yet but like you know they're in the room right so they want to talk to you the big thing I want you to get out of this is to know that like people are here to talk to you right they're not here to

just like hang out the edges they they all have their own goals every single one of you write down a goal there's something different they have something interesting to talk about and you have something in common like all of you love tech or you wouldn't be here like maybe like love hate sometimes right but like, you know, you're at least working in it, so you you you

at least tolerate it, right? So, you at least want to either talk about it or complain about it, whatever you want to do. You know, this person near you has some of that knowledge. So, you that's an easy way of breaking in and talking to them, right? It gives you that that edge, right? It's very different to do it in like a post office where you have

nothing in common with that person except for like how long the line is, right? So, just think about how like to give you that confidence to break into a conversation, remember that people want you to do that. Like they are they want to meet more people. So, they're hoping that you interrupt them. They're hoping that you come up and talk to them while they're playing on their

phone. And um so people who are coming in and standing, there's some seats like over here. You don't you can interrupt me. It's fine. You can walk over and join some seats because we're going to do like exercises. Plus, like why stand when there are seats? Like I wish I had a seat. want or you can stand in the corner. I'm not I'm not judging. I just

want to make sure that you have the opportunity to do So, I have a couple more that I forgot that I want to share that are really good. So, especially if you're at an event like this where there are talks, you can ask about there's a couple. It's one, what brought you here today? And that's a great way for people to share their goal. Um, I ask

how do you like the event so far and then I also ask like you know now that you have one you can ask more about their goal or you can ask about like very specific things like hey I just went to this talk about this and it was super interesting like did you go to the talk did you find that interesting or stuff like that um yeah

I feel like any tips are good even if I remember a minute later. Okay, so you're in the conversation. You're talking. I want to talk about these. These are I'm calling them conversation derails. Basically, here's all the things you don't want to say and have led to me just being like, "Oh, I need to get a new drink when I'm like clearly holding a full drink, right?"

But like you'll never see that person again, so it's fine. Um, but like these are things that have happened to me over the years that have led to bad connections. So, I want you to learn to not do this. And if you do do this, think about it. Just be like self-aware and be like, "Oh, let me try this." Right? And I'll talk about like what I

do so you can know that like I'm not perfect and I've been trying to work on this. So, the first two I call the interview therapy. Um, so interview is when you talk the entire time and just like the other person is responding. Like if you feel like you are on a host of your own podcast and you're just asking questions, that can get like really uncomfortable.

Like I find it very uncomfortable to be on the other side of it where someone just a is constantly asking me questions and I feel like I'm getting like peppered with questions and I'm like, "Oh, but I like I never get a chance to actually like, you know, ask them questions because they're just asking me questions." It it feels very uncomfortable, very one-sided. And then the other

side of that is what I call the therapy is when you just talk nonstop and don't let the other person get a word in edgewise. I once had someone talk to me for like 15 minutes and they never figured out my name because they never asked and then they like got up and left and I was like what what was that conversation like? I learned about their

family. I learned about where they live. I learned about like their husband was like running for state senate and I was like what? You don't know my name? like what is happening here? It was very strange and like all this personal information and I was like yeah sometimes people don't get out of I I she had like four kids so I assumed that like she didn't get

out of the house much and was just like really excited to talk to an adult. So I like tried to give some grace but like we're not building a connection if like I'm always talking or the other person is always talking. Go ahead. >> You otherwise it's awkward, right? You can't if you don't ask right away, you can never ask ever again and you have to find

them on LinkedIn and memorize it from there. Like um that reminds me of if you meet someone like so say you go to a meetup and then you go to the meetup a month later and you've forgotten someone's name, don't ask them again. Just pretend. Like if someone comes up to you and says hi and acts like they know you, just go with it. Just see how

it goes. Like eventually you'll probably remember like you'll remember like a day later and be like, "Oh yes, we talked about cyber security 3 months ago. Oh now I remember who this person is or like you can look them up on LinkedIn later." Um wherever it goes, especially if they don't ask to connect that means that you probably know them. So that's something that I happens to

me all the time cuz I'll meet someone and literally like a year later they'll come up and say hi again and I'll just be like, "Yes, I definitely remember who you are." Because like that's a better conversation. If people think you forgot them, they'll be like upset about it. So, I just I just roll with it. It's just it's just more fun that way. Um, okay. What's

next? Okay. Yes, no questions, right? These are ones that like can kind of bring a conversation to a standstill. Like, I'm going to go back to that that question I had before. Okay. Did you enjoy the keynote? Yes. No. That's like it doesn't give you a lot to work with. Instead, you could be something like, "Ah, I felt so inspired by that keynote." You know, was there

anything about it in particular that resonated with you? like I really like this part. What did you like? Right? And then that's giving them room to ask to like give something like a little more interesting than like just did you do this yes or no. Like think about if your question you're going to ask or yes or no. By the way, I forget if I have this

on a further slide, but you know the whole point about this is you can prepare for these events. You can have like a list of questions in your back pocket that are like here's my five favorite things I like to talk about at networking events. I this is what I do all the time and people get like you know one of the reasons you get nervous is

the improvisational aspect of it right like think about if you've ever seen an improv show and you think like wow that seems so hard right and the reason you find networking hard is probably very similar it seems very improvisational but if you start to build a list of things in your head that you're going to talk about and you know don't you know go try to go

through them like it's a podcast interview but try to like keep them in the back of your mind as things that you can talk about if you're like, "Oh, I can't think of a topic. Oh, this." You know, and just have something ready to go. It's it's very helpful, you know, for for events and in general, just to have it ready to go. Uh other ones are

one-way questions. So, sometimes people will ask me questions that they don't want to answer, and I'm like, "Why did you ask me the question?" Because in conversations, it's most likely if I ask you a question, you'll ask it back to me, right? So if I ask, "What's your favorite open source project?" and you tell me and then we talk about it, they'll probably be like, "Oh, but

what's your favorite open source project?" If I be like, "No, I don't I don't like open source." Like that's that's weird, right? Like like So like if you have a question and you don't want to answer it, like don't ask other people. Like that's that's like, you know, like there's something you you don't want to talk about. And speaking about things you don't want to talk about,

do not talk about politics or anything personal. I think sometimes people make assumptions based on their geographic area or the type of people they think go to events. They'll be like, "Oh, this person probably agrees with my politics or probably agrees with the things that I'm thinking." But like, they're not your friends yet. like maybe after like five conversations with them over the course of six months,

you can talk about your opinions on you know highly political things, but if you're like just going to talk to someone like do not it's just it's just very uncomfortable or like you know asking personal questions, right? Like I don't want to talk about you know things about my life with you. I I just met you. Like it I've had people like ask me these personal questions,

especially when they do like it often comes with that like interview style where they'll just like slowly ask you more and more personal questions and you be like h I got to get out of this scenario cuz I I all my answers are like ah I don't know I don't know I don't know I got to go by you know like it's just it gets really uncomfortable

and you might be thinking to yourself like what personal questions people will be asking like don't go down that rabbit hole. just like don't don't ask those personal questions. Like stick to topics you feel like comfortable with. We you know tech is such a broad area. There's so much you can be talking about. Like all I want to talk about are my like favorite food delivery robots

that like live in my neighborhood and visit me and I just think they're the coolest things in the world. And like look, that's a topic that I can talk about very easy. And I can be asked like oh do you you know I found a park near me where the 30 robots sit and wait for food deliveries and I think that's creepy but I still want my

food delivery by the robots. you know, like it's it's there's stuff to talk about cuz there's things that are interesting that you kind of fall in the wheelhouse of things, you know, people around here are interested in talking about, right? Um, and then finally, I kind of brought this up a little bit before, but like don't ask for a favor, right? I've had people I've been like,

"Hi, I'm Michelle. I work at Netflix." And I do my little intro and then they say, "Oh, great. Can you give me a referral to a job in Netflix?" And I'll be like, "Why would I do that?" And also, "Oh, I got to I got to get a new drink, right? Like, I really got to get out of here. It's just it's just like really uncomfortable. Like

you don't know them. Like think to yourself like would I ask this person to give me a ride? Like would I feel comfortable in their car? If the answer is no, then you can't ask them for a job referral. Like you don't you don't know them. They don't know you, right? You know, I don't know. Maybe if this person like hasn't given job referrals before, they don't

realize that it comes with a cost, right? Like if I refer someone and they're bad, people will be like, I think you have bad judgment. Like maybe you're bad. Like let's take a look at this. Like the worst thing that happened to me once is this guy that I met at an event, he told my boss at a job interview that I was recommending him. Got the

job and then my boss was like, "This person is terrible. Why did you recommend them?" And I was like, "I didn't. They lied to you." And then it was like let's fire Like that was crazy, right? Like that's the level of that you should think is like the level of like confidence it takes to ask for a favor of someone you just met, right? Like if it

seems insane when I'm explaining it, it is insane to do that. So, um don't don't ask for favors immediately. Wait until you become friends and then ask them for a ride to airport and then they'll give you an Uber gift card cuz nobody gives rides to airports in LA. That's crazy. They definitely could have done that, but you know, if someone's bad at their job, they'll probably

also need to lie to get the job. that's probably what happened. I just thought that was a funny story. It like rarely happens. more often people come up to me and ask me for favors and I just walk away because, you know, I know that's not going to be a good conversation. And I understand that, you know, there's a level of desperation to it. Like I have

been in, you know, everyone's been in the shoes of looking for work and being like, I'm never going to find a job again. I'm going to run out of money. I'm not going to be able to pay my employer. Like it's just like, oh, I met someone that has a cool job. I really need to talk to them and I really need to get there. But like

it's not going to work. So, and that's the reason why, you know, I do these networking events is I I I do a lot of coaching as well. And I really want people to do networking before they need it, right? Before they're looking for work. Because when I'm looking for work, I can ask a dozen people if their companies are hiring because they will recommend me because

they're people I've known for years, right? They're people they're people I've worked with or met at events and seen over and over again. And you can ask those people for favors. When people say go to your network, they're not saying go to new people you've never met. They're saying go to people you already have a relationship with who can actually know whether you're good at your job

or not, right? Like they're not people who who you just met. So just think about that when you're having these conversations. Boy, did I talk a lot. I bet you're ready to talk some It's your turn. Um, so this is a good stopping point. I probably should have stopped like two slides ago, but like now you have a bunch of stuff to talk about. So, I'm going

to give you a nice long break because we still have a good 30 minutes and I don't have a ton more slides. So, 5 10 minutes. Let's talk to each other. Keep in mind the conversation derails your introduction, all that other stuff. And then we're going to learn, we're going to do a little bit more. And yeah, we'll do some more practice after that. Hallelujah. ladies and

Hey, what's up Well, you just joined a like a two a pair like you have three of you talking. >> What? >> You can have three of you talking. Is >> Yeah. Because I'm seeing some groups that are like four people talking and but you know it makes it easier. Yeah. see I don't you see any Odd pairs. Oh, there's there's three over there. I think there's

three in the back left. See that group? Highlight. >> Hello. Hello. All right, I'll just keep using this one. Let's wrap it up. I gave you a solid 10 minutes. I bet that didn't feel like 10 minutes, right? I bet they were promise you'll get a little more time to this battery died. Awesome. Does this one work? >> Okay, great. The battery died on the other one,

so I'm just going to use this Let's wrap it up. I'm gonna do a little more. I promise you'll get to tell more a little after this. It's not working. People want to keep talking. They're just love networking. >> No, it's like red now. Like it the battery looks like Yeah, I don't know if you are qu Oh, yeah. Let's do the clapping thing. Yeah, clap. Thank

you. Great idea. I forgot that I could do stuff that we use at school. Thank you very much. You love networking and I am so excited for you. So, you know, we talked about how being at a conference is great because there's always topics to talk about which you, you know, are just know cuz you just wouldn't stop talking and it was great. But I want to

give you something that you can use everywhere. I'm going to tell you how I invented it. So, I love to travel and I like going on group tours cuz I'm afraid of doing anything by myself and you meet a lot of people and people ask, you know, the same questions. But one thing I learned is that when you're outside of America, the question like, "What do you

do?" is weird. People don't like hearing that question or answering that question. And I was like, well, that's the only question I have. So, I don't know how I'm going to have a conversation with So, I developed this question over time out of all those events is like having a memorable question, right? Um, I talked about having a list of questions to go, but I also have

my like one ready to go question that is like I can use everywhere and it works really well. I'm going to tell you my question and try not to steal it cuz then no one want to answer it anymore, but you can. It's really not a big deal. Um, but it makes it so you don't have to improv everything, right? Okay. So, my question is I'll go

to someone and I'll say I'll say hi. will start talking and I'll ask where they're from. You know, the nice easy question and they'll tell me where they're from. And it doesn't matter whether they're from all the way, you know, they're from Australia or they live like two blocks over from me. I ask the same question which is if I was in your neighborhood for a day,

what should I eat? And I love that question because, you know, it's it's easy for everyone, right? Everyone has an opinion on which neighborhood restaurants are the best ones, right? So, and I really want to know the answer, right? Like I have a list of restaurants to go to when I travel. So, it's really helpful for me. So, it should be a question that you are both

interested in and it's really easy for someone to answer. Um, so some good categories are like sports, food, travel, you know, just really easy uh questions, but it shouldn't be like weather, you know, it shouldn't be that small talk. It should be something that can kind of inspire a little bit of a conversation and a back and forth, right? And if people like ask, you know, ask

it right back at you, you should have the answer of like what that question is. And my answer is always tacos, by the way. So when everyone comes to LA, that's the one. And I refuse to like take any other better answers. Um, but yeah, so I want you to think about what your like unique question could be and just like have it ready to go for

your next event. Let's see if I have another slide on this. Oh no, it's something else. Okay, I'll leave this one up. So I pro I'm going to I'm going to clarify this so you know this is a quiet this is a quiet personal time. So this is journaling time. So just think about what your unique question could be. Maybe it's one that you've used before, but

something that's not not about what you do. Think about your interest, right? Like what are you interested in? What could you talk about? So like if food isn't on the table, like I'll talk about TV. I'll talk about movies. You know, just something that's like easy for you, something you like you'd like to hear the answer to and is something everyone has an answer to. So, it's

not like specific to a certain place, right? You know, if I was asking about sports, I'd be like, "Hey, do you go to any games? What's like your favorite, you know, sport to go to in your team or something like that?" See, I don't even know a sport. So, I ask, "What's your favorite sport?" Like, that's a, you know, sentence that people ask. Um, yeah, I'll give

you like a couple more minutes because we only have 20 minutes left. I can't believe how fast this went. Hey everyone. Uh, since I hear people talking, I assume everyone has finished their quiet time journaling. I like that I said this was a quiet like exercise and people just talked quieter, which is hilarious. Y'all just love to talk. Uh, I mean, it just shows how much fun

you're having, so I like it. Um, okay. Does anyone want to share their unique question before we do like wrap up? >> Right here in the middle. I like that question. People always ask me that question because my sister is named Rochelle and we all think it's funny my mom couldn't think of a more interesting name than both giving us the exact same name. Reminder, my name

is Michelle and her name is Rochelle. That is the same name. Um, does anyone else want to share want to share their go? I'm going to see if I can get someone who I just I haven't heard from before. That's why I haven't called on people. All right. All the way >> That is interesting. That's a good That's a good breaker. Uh thank you so much both

of you for sharing. I really appreciate that. So for people that couldn't come with a question, now you have something you can seal. Uh but like ask around. Maybe you'll hear some interesting questions. You could also put multiple questions in your bank Okay, let's talk about ending the conversation, right? Because at some point you have to stop talking. I mean, it doesn't seem like this group will

ever stop talking, but at some point you will have to stop talking. Um, you don't want conversations to go on too long cuz eventually, even like the best conversations where you're really connecting with people, it can get like if it goes on too long, it it can start to get like awkward and then you're like, "Oh, I missed the opportunity for this being a good conversation." and

then it ends with like I don't know if I want to talk to them anymore kind of petered out right so try to like you know think about only a few minutes for each person especially in events like this where there's lots of people to talk to and just like when you're like feeling it and just like think about like oh maybe I should wrap this up

now and some people have a lot of trouble with that right especially if the other person is actually someone you're not connecting to and you've heard me talk about how I'll just say I need a new drink when I don't but like you can just walk away. I give you permission. If someone won't stop talking and you're like, "This is never going to be a good connection.

I don't want to talk to this person anymore." You can just walk away, right? You don't have to ask to connect. You don't have to do anything. You can just say, "Um, this is a great conversation." Even if it wasn't, but like I'm going to just go do a little more mingling, right? Like the easiest thing. You don't have to you don't have to lie. You just

you just walk away into the sunset and never talk to them ever Um, I've seen a lot of people get like stuck at events talking to the same person and I'm like, you can you can talk to other people. Um, so I talked about connecting, right? Like the easiest way to end a conversation is say like, hey, I'm going to walk around a little bit, but can

I connect with you on LinkedIn and can I can I follow up with you on LinkedIn? Right? Like if you had a good conversation and you're thinking like, I want to talk to this person some more. I wouldn't ask them at the first conversation because I feel like that's that's a lot of pressure. But connect with them on LinkedIn. that's the best place to do it or

wherever you like to whatever social media you like. I just happen to use LinkedIn. Um, and ask them on that. Say like, "Hey, we had a great conversation. Can you know I can we go out for coffee and talk some more?" Right? The numbers are not good, right? Like most people like never respond ever again or they say, "Yeah, definitely." And then like never organize it or

even if it's like a like, "Hey, let's do a virtual call. Here's myuler. Put, you know, 20 minutes on whenever you have a chance. We'll have a chat." Right? Again, some most people don't, but the people who do are the ones who really want to keep talking to you, right? Like, so people self- select whether it's good bit of conversation. I'm just telling you the numbers are

low so you don't feel bad about yourself. Like I've had whole conferences, I talked to 30 people and like one of them, you know, wants to get coffee with me afterwards. I feel like that's a success because I've at least connected with one person, right? So, it's all about like a numbers game for that. You know, you got to think of it similar to like job hunting

where, you know, if you just don't hear from people, you don't hear from people. It wasn't you, it was them. It really was them. You know, it wasn't you. You just didn't have a connection, right? Or they're busy or anything else. So, it's not a big deal. Um, let's see. Uh, that's everything I think on that. So, I usually do a demo here, but we only have

12 minutes left, so I'm going to skip it. I usually do a thing where I bring someone up and do some some networking, right? But I feel like I don't do that. I feel like you all are ready to just stop listening to me and talk to each other. So, I'm going to I'm going to just kind of wrap up and let you do that. But, I'm

going to do one more thing before I let you do that because I feel like if I let you keep talking, I'll never be able to get your attention ever again. So, I'm just going to do this wrap up. So, raise your hand if you've gotten something useful out of this talk. Awesome. Okay, everyone who raise your hand and everyone who didn't, if you just take a

second, scan the QR code, take out your phone, you know, go to the link if you don't trust the QR code, this exact same thing, and just like take two minutes and fill out that survey, and then after that, and you'll get a gift at the end. I honestly forget what I put up here because I set it up a month ago, but it's something cool. I

think it's like an excerpt from the book or like a worksheet, something interesting that I knew that people liked. Like I said, I do a lot of coaching, so I share a lot of I make a lot of my own worksheets, especially for the book. So, there's stuff that people, you know, I know like. So, whenever you're done, just, you know, put your phones down, look up

so that I know you're ready. So, it'll be about 2 minutes and then, um, I will finish this I was like, there's no way I'm going to be able to fill 90 minutes. Incorrect. right, it looks like most people are are finishing up. So, while you do that, you finish up. Um, so this is the part where I answer any questions. Uh, I put a summary of

everything we learned today. Okay, so if you like already forgot what was in the first slides, now here's your summary. Um, if you have any more questions, I will be around for a little longer at the conference, which ends in like an hour. Uh, but you can always find me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to answer questions. Like I said, I do personal coaching and I have that

book coming out. So that's what I'll spend all my time doing. So yes, any questions before I let you just talk to people and hang shocked. Go ahead. >> Um, I went to a event at this nonprofit that is now shut called Write Speak Code and its goal was to get under represented people in tech writing blog posts, speaking at conferences, and contributing to open source code.

Uh so I went to that workshop and they helped me figure out ideas and how to write CFPs which are call for papers what most conferences do and I started applying and it took months and months and months and lots of different ideas and I started speaking and you know kind of snowballs right once you start doing it and yeah and now I'm working on the book

so when the book's done I'm going to be speaking at lots of conferences as my I make my own book tour because they don't give you book tours for technical books. for small publishing houses. So, I'm inventing my own. >> No, no, no. I said for small for small publishing. I I am publishing at a real publisher. It's packed, by the way. You'll see it if you

go look at the book, but um I'm saying that they don't do you don't do book tours unless you're famous and writing selling 40 million books, right? So, I'm inventing my own. That was my joke didn't land. [applause] Thank you. I think we had one more >> Um, in terms of networking, me personally, I find that it identity based events are the most comfortable for me. like,

you know, I I'll go to like women focused events, but they'll be like, you know, race-based events or queer and tech or things like that. Um, I always recommend them because, you know, if you are not in the majority, it can feel like you never see anyone who looks like you. So, those events I really like, but then, you know, I'll go to an event like this,

which is more just like general tech, and you'll meet people you'll never expect. So, you know, it really depends. It really depends how open people are. You know, it it really depends also what you like and the type of community it is. I don't write a lot of Python anymore. I used to write a lot, but I still like going to like the Python conferences cuz I

found the people there really nice. I know uh there's Pi Beach here and I think Pyon is in um Long Beach this year. I think I was talking to someone yesterday about that. So, that's a great one to go to. But yeah, the things that you like and are interested in, it's just good to go to conferences that match that. And if you go to a conference

like I did one time where no one wants to talk to you, just like, you know, move on and go to the next one, right? Like just don't take it personally. You know, if you go in for 15 minutes and you're uncomfortable and you don't like it, you know, go to another one, right? There's there's always more opportunities. Awesome. Thank Thank you very much, everyone. Um, you

don't have to clap again. It's okay. If anyone has more questions, I'll be around. But enjoy enjoy talking to each other. Thank you for your time. Go talk to someone you haven't talked to yet. Don't stay at your table. I forgot to say that.