An American Adventure - My ATD Stori-fy

An American Adventure - My ATD Stori-fy

So the last two weeks have been great. The first week of my American adventure was spent at the ATD Conference in Orlando. This was the perhaps the biggest L&D show on the planet with over 10K attendees, 400 sessions and 300 speakers. The sheer scale was incredible and I had the great honour of speaking at the conference on a subject close to my heart. Learning Communities. To say I was nervous was an understatement, I've presented at smaller conferences and networking events and free seminars at the CIPD show etc but this was on a different scale and I'll be honest - I was terrified.

For anyone who has presenting you will appreciate it is hard and is still I believe one of the biggest fears for many people. Even with a backgound in training and being relatively used to speaking in front a group of people this was still next level stuff for me.

Managing your fear & anxiety is key and I believe that a way to do this is to prepare well. Fail to Prepare then Prepare to Fail. This is a mantra I've used time and time again. Know your content, know your slides, know your key messages and practice. Practice in the mirror (hairbrush optional), record yourself and listen to the recording. What ever you do to prepare will help and give you confidence that you know what your doing and you can plan for every eventuality. I had one hour so knew that I had to keep tabs on my timing to cover everything and make sure there was time for questions and a little crowd interaction. 

I always try and make my presentations fun and interactive - I don't take myself too seriously and rely heavily on story telling to bring across key messages. The story here was the development and growth of the DPG Community and what I've learned along the way in creating a social and collaborative space. I truly believe what we have here offers something different to the traditional way of learning and can provide a great deal of additional learning and enhance the overall experience of learning. I'm still a dancing nut.

One of the things I really enjoy doing as well is scheduling Tweets during my talks. I love Twitter and conferences and events can tap in to the 'backchannel' to capture what people share and tweet about during the conference sessions and exhibition. They can help capture the essence of a session and provide a measure of engagement. What I'm interested in is how we can blend face to face sessions with the backchannel and create resources that can be used as recaps and support aids that help people after the sessions so they refer back to them and get something tangible and useful from the session.

I've pulled the tweets together with images and videos I've used and created a Storify of the session and wanted to share it to give you some insight to the talk and also to give you some ideas about created resources from any training you may being doing or just a way to capture things that you're talking about.

I'd love to hear about any ways you've brought your presentations to life or what you think of the Storify :)

PS. the second week in the US was spent with my sister who lives in Minnesota - I got to meet my new 12 weeks niece for the first time. It was (as the Americans would say) - AWESOME!

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  • I enjoyed the Storify account Mike. It gives a real feel for the fear at the start, the flow as you got going and the flush of success as your session blossomed :)

    Well done on a successful presentation, your preparation clearly paid off. You were very brave to get the audience so involved!

    How you found time for the tweets during the session I don't know. You were well supported by fuschiablue and a few others which is great, well done to them all, for being there for you.
    Sorry I wasn't around when it was all happening. I'd have loved to have joined in!
  • "Fail to prepare, prepare to fail" - also known as the 5 Ps ( or if you're an engineer the 6 Ps).

    Proper preparation prevents ( engineers' p goes here) poor performance.

    :)
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