Keynoting Dangerously
Adventures of a Technical Women
Over the past few years, I’ve delivered a number of keynotes in various venues around the world. Here I’ll reflect on this, but first, a short story.
Swimming or something like it
The August morning sun was already quite hot. Hot enough to make the concrete surrounding the municipal pool burn my 8 year old bare feet. The bright blue pool water sparkled but also smelled ominously over-chlorinated. The bored, muscular teenaged lifeguards lined the kids up by height — tallest kids first.
Being 8, I was a head or two taller than the rest of the class and was placed in the front of the line. The other kids were mostly 5 or 6 year olds. This morning it was time for the final swimming test, which consisted of a one-way swim across the deep end (10 feet) of the pool. Despite signing up, I had missed the entire summer of lessons due to an extended family trip, a fact to which the lifeguards seemed oblivious. So, I hadn’t yet swum in water over my head. The first lifeguard looked and me and said “Just jump in and swim across!”.
I looked around, my 8-year old brain calculated that since there were three lifeguards, there was a decent chance that if need be, one or more of them would act in enough time to save me from drowning. I looked each one of them directly in the eye, took a deep breath and…plunged in.
Sinking, I wondered where the bottom of the pool actually was.
Shortly, I realized it was not the goal to reach the bottom, so I started frantically moving my arms and kicking my legs. Unexpectedly, these rather random actions quickly propelled me up. My head popped out of the water and I took a grateful breath. There was a bit of cheering and encouragement from the sidelines “That’s it, now just go forward.”
So I leaned forward and kicked as hard as I could. Really I just waved my arms around and tried to keep my head out of water so that I could breathe. Eventually, I made it across the pool. The head lifeguard sighed and said, “Really, you should practice more…PASS.”
Since You Asked
A couple of years ago, while attending big vendor conference x, I said to my famous tech friend, “3 hours of keynotes and not a women on stage, that’s such BS.” He, being a taciturn Brit, just quietly murmured and nodded. Shortly after the conference, I got the following email:
“We invite you to keynote our conference this year.”
My initial reaction to this email was to wonder whether it was some kind of elaborate spam, since my entire keynoting history prior to this consisted of a single 5 minute talk in Durban, South Africa as part of a Microsoft TechEd Community Keynote. Also, this talk had been delivered 5 years prior. True, I had been speaking at technical conferences for a few years, but generally had to go through the arduous submission process for each session. And, I only got accepted about 50% of the time.
My 17 year old daughter looked pointedly at me and said astutely “Didn’t you complain about the lack of women keynoting to that famous guy last week?” So, I looked up both the conference and the location on Google because both were unfamiliar to me. When I reviewed the accomplishments of past keynoters at that conference, I again, felt like this was some kind of mistake. However, for whatever reason I now appeared to be at the head of this particular speaker line. I sent my acceptance email promptly.
How in the hell was I going to actually do this?
Today’s the Day
In the intervening months between when I accepted my first keynote and I delivered it, I wrote and rehearsed an original technical keynote based on work I was doing in the Cloud-based IoT space. Still, when I walked up to the podium at the QCon Conference in São Paulo, Brazil, I felt like my 8 year old self at the pool. I looked out into the audience at the three friends who had kindly agreed to be there for me, turned on my microphone and started speaking.
What followed were more invitations, more keynotes. I went to Australia, the UK, Lithuania, Germany and more. Startled by each invitation, I worked hard to ‘lean-forward’ a bit more each time I spoke. After delivering 13 technical keynotes in 7 countries, I’ve decided to pause, to reflect.
To this day, when I do laps in a pool, I ‘swim funny’. I can move forward in the water reliably, but I still keep my head out of the water for an usual amount of time while doing so. I’ve found that by swimming slowly, I can swim for a decent a amount of time. There are some types of swimming that are not comfortable for me — ocean swimming for example. I can do it, but I find it to be incredibly taxing.
Keynote speaking is, for me, a kind of ocean swimming.
Despite that, I can do it. I did do it. Will I do it again? I am not sure.
If I do attempt another round of keynoting at some future time, I can, perhaps, draw on genetics. I may have inherited the ability to think while underwater.
One day while he was in his 40s, my late father, who never learned to swim, fell over the back of his fishing boat. His large body fell rapidly to the murky bottom of the 10 foot deep lake. He ‘though about it’ as he sank. When he stopped sinking, he decided the best thing to do would be to ‘stand up and walk out’.
My mom heard my dad loudly swearing — starting when his head strangely popped out the water near the end of the dock, continuing as he stomped up the embankment and also while inside the lake house to change his soaked clothing.
If I start loudly swearing, I guess it means I will be keynoting again. Until then, I’ll stick to writing. What about you — do you keynote? Would you like to do so? What has been your experience?
