On Friday morning I woke up with the thought: “Today I will be giving my first ever presentations at a conference.” From that point on I found myself surprisingly nervous, despite trying to remind myself that I give talks in lecture theatres and teach groups of students and lecturers all the time. Before that I’d managed to not let myself think about this first, but come the day of the event I guess I could no longer ignore the fact.
It was quite difficult sitting through the day’s keynote speech but I made myself concentrate (and distracted myself taking notes) on Neil McClellands’s speech. He is the chairman of the UK’s National Literacy Trust, and talked about his work with libraries (and other organisations) “to build a literate nation”. (I won’t go into detail on his speech here, I am going to blog the details of keynotes and presentations on the blog the conf blog.)
About fifteen minutes before my session was due to begin I went to the presentation room and made sure I knew where the microphone was on the podium, looked at the speakers’ seating and made sure the AV guy had my PowerPoint. At this point the other two speakers were there too, doing the same thing, and it made me feel a bit better that they were nervous too.
Once the room filled things happened very quickly. The chair of my session stumbled over my surname, despite having asked me the correct way to say it beforehand (I felt bad, I shouldn’t have told her the correct, tongue-twisting-for-English-speakers way of saying it).
I started off by thanking everyone for coming and admitted that I’d had a recurring nightmare all week that I’d be speaking to an empty room. I wasn’t making this up - I guess my subconscious had been nervous about the talks all week - but I was too superstitious to mention it here in case I jinxed myself in some way… I don’t know if you’re supposed to start off a talk by admitting to fears but it relaxed me a bit and people laughed so I guess it didn’t do too much harm.
Both talks went reasonably well, I think. It was a little tough having to just start the second presentation almost immediately after doing the first, but I managed. I kept to time and covered what I wanted to say (although I could have quite happily gone on and on and on, especially talking about blogging, which I love), and even had a few people ask questions after each talk.
The Uber Boss sat through both my talks and I saw quite a few other people I knew in the audience as well, which I actually found reassuring. Afterwards, having people come up to say they’d enjoyed listening to me was both gratifying and slightly embarrassing - thanks for all your kind words 
*That photo of the room is a bit of a cheat - it wasn’t taken on the day of my talks, but it is of the same room I presented in.
And of course it has been great to catch up with colleagues I haven’t seen in a while, and meeting new people has been lovely too. I’ve been trying to make it a point of at least saying hello to anyone I sit next to especially if I don’t know them.
