3 Takeaways From Google’s Women Developer Academy
I’m feeling so lucky to be a recent graduate of the Google Women Developer Academy! It makes so much sense to tackle the issue of representation of women at tech conferences by proactively encouraging existing women in tech to be the ones to appear at tech conferences. Well done Google for recognising the problem and for putting resources behind it to help fix it!
So I was one of these lucky people that was admitted into the academy. Over the course of 5 weeks we learnt about how to choose a topic to present, how to write and deliver your presentation and how to market yourself as a speaker. As well as this I met with Google Expert and experienced public speaker, Hel every week, who was invaluable at supporting me along the way.
I wanted to say a big thank you to Google for offering this free course but also to pay it forward by sharing with you some of my key takeaways from the course.
- It’s so important to push your comfort zone — even in a pandemic
- The Freytag Method is the answer to your problems
- Your experience is valuable and important
I couldn’t believe how much this course pushed me. I won’t lie, I had a complete breakdown mid-course. Luckily Hel was there with support and smiles!
I started out my career in sales and so I am fairly used to pitching and speaking to senior people whom I don’t know. It turned out that was not enough to get me past my initial imposter syndrome about speaking at a tech conference.
For me, I’m yet to go to a tech conference where I don’t find myself being asked if I have any swag to give away, what time the next talk is, directions to the loos… This might seem very innocent, but when this happens a handful of times at every single conference, you begin to wonder if you should really be there. However innocently it is that your peers assume you’re not a fellow delegate, it starts to burn every time you see that split second look on their face when they compute that you are in fact one of them. With these experiences in the back of mind, it made it really hard to feel able to not only attend the conference, let alone to get up on the stage and be confident that people would listen to me.
Hel really helped me to zone out these feelings and just do it. I’m yet to speak at an actual conference but I did get passed these feelings enough to write a talk (you can find it here ) and now I feel unstoppable! The course was really good at focussing not on the hurdles in your way, but on giving you tools to get past them. I find a lot of events aimed at women in tech focus so much on why it’s hard and less on how to do it anyway.
Which leads me onto my next point.
We were given loads of tools and techniques to support us on our journey of creating and delivering a tech presentation, but the one that really spoke to me was the Freytag method. I loved it in it’s timelessness and universality, and I love that it has given me a starting point with all my future tech talks.
For those of you unfamiliar with it, the Freytag Method structures any drama (tech talks included!) as a conflict of hero vs adversary. Think of this in any context, me (and my audience) against time, money, business frictions… You divide your “narrative” into five parts:
- Introduction — putting you and your talk into context
- Rising Action — the problem that you will be talking about, what are you aiming to solve?
- Climax — the turning point, what was the solution to your problem?
- Falling Action — suspense! How is that business friction still raising its metaphorical ugly head and how did you solve that?
- Conclusion — how is the protagonist (you) better off because of the solution you’ve just discussed?
This gave me a really clear starting point where I knew my topic, I just had to answer these questions about it. My talk slowly became much more of a dialogue of me preempting the audiences questions and answering them with my research and reasoning. And for me, starting was the hardest part so the Freytag method was really empowering for me.
Finally, once I had written my talk, the thing that was still holding me back was feeling like a fraud. I just didn’t believe that I was enough of an expert on anything to be able to get up on stage and talk about it.
The thing I take away with me from the Academy that I’d like to share with you now, is that if you are talking about your own experiences and opinions then by default you are the expert on your own experiences at least.
We learnt to engage the audience less with facts and more with feelings and that if you talk to them through the narrative of your own experience and anecdotes, then it is undeniably the truth because it’s your truth. And suddenly I felt like much less of a novice!
Before I go, here’s a couple more smaller tips I’d like to share:
- Use your introduction to settle your nerves. Allow yourself a little time to talk about something you’re really familiar with (you) while you breathe deep and get used to being on a stage.
- Use stories to engage your audience. I’m a person that loves to chat so it’s much easier for me to tell a good anecdote than it is to remember a list of points I want to tell you. And in fact, audiences engage much better with feelings from stories than they will remember your list of facts anyway.
- Your audience will only remember three things so make sure you regularly remind them what those 3 things should be.
- Trollers will troll regardless of what you actually say so it shouldn’t be a reason why you worry about what you say
- It’s super boring but practise loads. My desktop is currently covered in practise records of my talk but I can definitely say my 112th version is a huge improvement on the first!
I hope this is useful. Please get in touch if you want to talk about any of this or leave me a comment and I’d be happy to help.
