I recently gave a presentation at the Kentucky Day of .Net community conference. Throughout the preparation for the presentation, I had almost completely made up my mind that it would be the last public presentation that I would ever give. It took a lot of time to put the deck together and I never felt like the demo got my idea across.
So it comes to Thursday night before the Saturday conference and I'm awake at 12:30 am. For those of you who don't know me personally, being awake that late on a "school" night just doesn't fly for me. I'm doing a mock presentation on my finished deck and the nerves hit. I felt like I was going through my high school days of insecurity. I had a very real fear of giving the entire discussion with my fly open. So the nerves calmed down after some sleep only to resume about 20 minutes before my presentation began but in 10 fold. I realized that I forgot my note cards at home. I quickly text my loving wonderful wife and she texts me about 20 text messages of the cards verbatim. This was amazing. Thank you, sweetie! As time got closer the presentation, my hands were shaking, I'm pretty sure that I had sweaty pits. Yes I know: "eww, Grosse!". I get to my presentation room about 30 seconds before I am scheduled to start so I'm stressing out about that. I was pretty close to vomiting because of my nerves.
I shakily switch on the deck and take my position in front of the room and the entire congregation (7 people) are looking at me and then it hit...confidence. I didn't expect this. I fully expected to nervously make my way through the presentation and there was a flood of confidence. I didn't have to picture the crowd in their underwear...and let's be honest, that is disgusting at a tech conference. I didn't have to take a shot of vodka before I started. There were no performance enhancing drugs. It just all came together and flowed.
By no means did I give a perfect presentation. Things were rough at times but that was because of lack of skill not nerves. There was a rush of adrenalin. It was a pretty positive experience at the time. I apologize for the graphic nature of this post. My hope is that people who are hesitant to give presentations, take that step and overcome their fear. I did and it worked.
The end result is that the entire preparation time absolutely sucked, but the presentation was awesome. I'm going to attempt to present again and if the preparation time improves, I may make it a habit.