Petra Wille: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. And so the easiest way is to get in front of really small and super friendly audiences. So that is, I think, the first starting point. And I don't know where that is. That could be your team, that's a super small audience, usually five to 10 people, or maybe you pine with your company of 80 people or 120 people, maybe the company all-hands is already something where you could actually speak. That was my first time and I had to speak in front of the whole company at a company all-hands around 90 people back at the time. And I only had to give a brief update on what we did the last two weeks and it was like five minutes on stage, but it freaked me out. So that's where I'm coming from and it really helped me to start small. Then product tanks, for example, this local product community meetups totally helped me because friendly human beings and not too many of them. So sometimes they're just 30 people attending and then you in the summer, not so many people are coming, so why not giving a talk there? So really start small and then grow the audience over time and always make sure, because that helped me a lot, to get feedback from strangers and peers if possible. Because the peers tend to give you the harsher critique, so to say, where the strangers are more polite, but they're not so familiar with the work you do or with the story that you want to tell so they can spot some gaps in your storytelling technique or something like that. So that is something that helped me a lot to always have this friendly soul in the front row, where I know I get some feedback from later on. Plus, then having complete strangers and there's always somebody coming up after the talk, right, so they could be your first person giving you some stranger feedback, so to say. What about if you're just about to give a talk and you're like, "Oh my god, I'm so nervous," do you find anything that helps you get over that?…

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