Ignite Talk Preparation: Final Week!

I give my Ignite Fitness Talk this Friday night at Fitbloggin 14! I am both stoked and terrified. Well, not terrified, but apprehensive.

My initial preparation was outlined in this blog post.

My preparation: My speech is informative- "How to Screw Your Shoes" so it is pretty easy to develop. The slides seemed to take care of themselves. I have very little text on each slide. I took care to find images that were not copyrighted. A few slides are clip art, as you will see, with some prettycrayon-like words added by me!

Practice: This can't be stressed enough. It's a five minute speech folks! You have plenty of time in the day to practice!

I used a written script to begin with. At first, it was a bit frustrating, as I would forget which slide was coming next, but as I practiced, I could remember where I was. I used the digital stopwatch app on my phone to time the presentation.

I recorded it a few times on my phone also. I seemed to do well until the last four or five slides, so I began focusing on those slides. I also knew I needed to slooow down my talking, as I start out a bit nervous.

Last tip was to video myself. I did this on my porch tonight, with the laptop set up. The speech went pretty well; I could see the slide show just in the corner on my eye. It also helped quite a bit to rehearse the speech, standing up (as opposed to sitting in my car at lunchtime.) I got much more animated, adding in my Italian (by marriage) hand gestures to the mix.

I will do a bit more rehearsing tomorrow, a few at lunch time, then a few after work, at home. I may try and rehearse one to two times on Friday, before I give the Ignite Talk, to just keep the slides clear in my head.

I hope to not look up at the slides too often! The Ignite Talk will be posted to the interwebs, so look for that next week!