How do you give an AWESOME presentation?

With focus!

Here are the questions I always ask myself when developing a workshop or presentation.

I’ll be using my lesson plan for “Preventing and Recovering from Burnout” throughout this.

Audiences

Someone is considering whether to come to your talk. They want to know: “Is this for me? Will I get a lot out of it?”

Sometimes it’s hard to come up with who it’s for!! A lot of people get stuck at “it’s for everyone! everyone!”

People often conflate these two concepts:

Permission

Who are you allowing to come? (often: anyone can come! no restrictions)

Most enjoyment (more important here!!)

“Who would really enjoy this talk more than others?” or from their perspective: “How can I tell if I would enjoy this?”
I like to phrase these as questions from the audience member’s perspective (see example)
Sometimes it helps to ask yourself “who would NOT enjoy this as much? Who would complain?” — that can help you define your audience.

It helps you make sure your audience is well-defined, then you’re more likely

If your audience is less well-defined, you may end up with three audience segments, and you might:

cater to one mostly, leaving the other two less happy
cater to all of them equally, leaving everyone ~1/3 as happy as they would have been with a tailored talk

Your ideas might generally apply to the three audience segments — but by tailoring it to each audience segment separately (in a separate talk) they will all be much happier!

Tailored talks are stronger.

💡

EXAMPLE for “Preventing and Recovering from Burnout”

Target Audience: Are you burnt out lately, or have you been burnt out in the past?

Additional/Secondary Audience: Do you want to support others who are burnt out? (coworkers, employees, friends, family)

Relevance / Connections

“Burnout” for attendees

Attendees may share times they’ve experienced burnout, and how they’ve dealt with it.

“Burnout” for the facilitator, Casey.

He has experienced burnout many times himself, and also supported many people through burnout.

“Burnout” in the Environment.

These topics are very common in Tech lately: “burnout,” “toxic culture,” and “quiet quitting.”

Guiding Questions

What even IS burnout?
How do I know if I’m burnt out?
What can I do to recover from and prevent burnout?

Learning Objectives

Attendees will:

Understand burnout concepts

Burnout is common
The three components of burnout

Emotional exhaustion
Depersonalization
Reduced personal accomplishment

Burnout is gradual; your “amount of burnout” changes over time

Learn a shared vocabulary to use when discussing burnout (especially with other event attendees).
Identify several ways they can address burnout

Individual coping strategies

Awareness of thoughts/feelings
Countering “amygdala hijacking”
Developing/maintaining a support system

Changing the environment
Leaving the environment

Activities

discussion with a partner, or solo writing just yourself

Identifying Burnout. Think of a time when you felt burnt out at work.

Describe the experience.
For this experience, rank the three components by how strongly you experienced each of them (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, reduced personal accomplishment).