Conference Angst
In a scant week and a half, I am going to be speaking at the Trust Birth Conference in Redondo Beach, CA.
I‘ve never even been to a birth conference before. I’ve heard a lot about them, heard people talk about what they saw and what impacted them. So I’m kind of flying blind in terms of trying to gauge my audience. I’m having to go on faith that what got me the invite was whipping out my impromptu soapbox about women, especially digital native women, reclaiming their voices through the use of multimedia. Apparently it was a strong enough statement that it got Carla Hartley of the AAMI to go ahead and put me in for the Sunday general session. Woah.
I‘m worried, a little, because I’m talking geek to birthy types, and I’ve had some spectacularly bad luck with that before. You don’t tend to realize how steeped in your paradigm you are, until you try to communicate outside of it, and end up with people looking at you like you’re from Mars. I’m going to be floating the talk around to some folks this week, to get feedback from both the birthy and the geeky sides of the fence.
My talk has been spinning in my head for months, but I’m still only about 3/4 of the way to having it written.
There are many, many presentation styles, and I’m currently quite enamored of the one going around the geekerati circles, that involves pictures at rapid speed, but not a single word or bullet point on any slide. I’m still stressing about whether or not my audience is actually going to engage with that or not. But in the meantime… that’s enough blogging. I have a speech to write…
You’re going to do fabulous! Wish I could be there. But, Redondo Beach isn’t that far from us. You going to have extra time at all to socialize while you’re here?
Yay! You’ll rock them, geek or birthy-type
You must be thrilled to be listed among these luminaries: http://www.trustbirthconference.com/speakers.html. And what a great bio: http://www.trustbirthconference.com/hudson.html - but no mention of baby #3?
BTW, a mainstream friend of mine had a safe good birth ~a month ago - all because the medstablishment didn’t realize the baby was breech and had a knot in his cord until he came out - I was doing my little happy dance for her!
yikes! You MUST come and visit while you’re down here!
You’ll do great! I’ve never known you to be less than both thought-provoking and entertaining.
If you get a chance, try running through your speech in front a your friends a few times.