First of all, I'm not saying this will work for you, but it sure does for me.
Back to earlier this year, I started with some other people a local 'meetup' call aixTalks, which is a french meetup based in aix-en-provence, we took the idea from the humanTalks again it's in french, so basically it's 4 people talking about stuffs (mostly dev stuff) during 10 short minutes.
How did I got into this ?
Well, sadly I can't find the post that made me doing this, but surely it was on dev.to, saying you should improve your talking in public skill and back to 2 months ago mine was terrible, there is still a lot to improve but I'm definitely on the right path.
So here I am two months back, going to do my first talk 'ever', I always have trouble in speaking, always speaking too fast, family and friends that couldn't understand me, always have been a HUGE pressure to me. I have seen a Speech Therapist when I was 8 or 9 but even after that, having dyslexia, it is not something that you can get rid of easily.
Back to my first choice of talking, I always loved watching talk where the guy or girl try to show its point of view with a bit of sarcasm, so I went in with talking about what it really means when you're doing a yarn install or npm install, showing that how much Freddy mercury picture you could have stored instead of having your huge sized folder node_modules (for people speaking french it's all live on youtube)?
Stress no more
We are (or at least me) being told that speaking requires charisma, presence, self-confidence ... This is not all wrong, nevertheless to get started It's not like you need all of that, in fact what you only need is a subject that matters for you and you will be able to overcome everything !
That sound good, but what about real anti-stress ? There is only one good solution that works for me and its preparation, for a 10 minutes speech, It takes me 4 hours to write a text then another 2 hours to make the slides and then another 4h to look in a mirror and learn my speech, I'm learning it until it feels natural.
Do you remember being a kid at 10, learning poem ? That's it, this is all I am doing, but instead of having a class in front of me (which is not true because I was always turning myself around to look at the paper board) instead you're going to have people that enjoy what you do or at least they are not going to laugh at you when you're misspelling something.
Also don't forget that you're not the only one, everyone underestimates itself, so if you want to do something that scares you, just turn this part of your brain off, the other part are there to help you!
Does it feel good ?
Hell, yeah it does, for me it's like shouting out loud to every people that said to me: "man public speaking it's never going to be your thing".
That's all I wanted to share with you, maybe one day I will do something in English, but that's another story for another time.
nice thing to add: We went from 10 people to more than 130 peoples subscribing to our meeting in less than two months, AWESOME, yet we are already getting partners !
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