Welcome back to Community & Code.
I'm your host, Chris Reynolds.
My guest today has an origin story that
starts with,
I wasn't trying to do this and ends
with six hundred people across fifty
countries.
Jill Binder is a public speaking coach for
tech folks based in Vancouver, BC.
And before that,
she spent five years as the founder and
lead of the WordPress Diversity Speaker
Training Initiative,
a program she built inside the WordPress
community to get more underrepresented
voices onto conference stages.
We talk about how the diversity training
initiative got its start and how it became
a global program.
And we talk about speaking and speaker
selection in general,
like why blind speaker selection doesn't
necessarily solve the problem you think it
does and oftentimes introduces new issues.
For anyone who's ever thought,
I don't have anything worth saying,
Jill would disagree with you.
Let's get into it.
Welcome to Community & Code,
the podcast where we talk to the human
beings behind the commits.
I am here today with Jill Binder.
Jill has been active in the open source
and particularly the WordPress community
for a very long time,
doing all sorts of stuff,
but most recently, diversity stuff,
but also sort of just helping people
speak better at things and doing and
representing underrepresented groups.
And I am thrilled to have you on.
Welcome, Jill.
Tell us about yourself.
Hi, Chris.
Thanks so much for that intro.
And thanks so much for having me on
the show.
This is so fun.
For five years,
I was the founder and lead of the
hashtag WP diversity speaker training
group in the WordPress community space.
And I did that till twenty twenty three.
early, something like that.
And after taking a break,
I'm now doing public speaking and
confidence coaching for all voices in
tech.
Public speaking is just such a
transformative thing,
but I know so much about diversity and
I still incorporate it in all the work
that I do now.
And I'm happy to chat about
any of those topics.
And just in case we do talk a
lot about the diversity part,
I just want to say a little thing
that I like to say before having those
conversations,
which is I'm a white woman in Canada.
I can't possibly know everything that
you're all going through.
i also tend to be socially awkward and
um terms change but also i trip over
words and sometimes accidentally say
things that um are not great and i
want people i want everybody to know that
i try very very very hard to say
the right things i don't always get it
right um my heart is in the right
place and i uh i want to do
right and if any if i say anything
out there that bothers anybody and if you
have some bandwidth to spend on me,
please reach out and chat with me about
it.
I appreciate that a lot.
We met in person recently at WordCamp
Canada, and I went to your talk.
I've known who you are for a long
time,
a lot of that being the WP Diversity
work that you were doing.
But I think that your name was floating
around even before that,
just in the round.
So I was excited to go to your
talk,
and then you gave a very similar sort
of introduction.
And I just like framing...
everything from a foundation like just
like from the get-go like I just I
just feel like that's just I don't know
it helps me contextualize the space that I
occupy in the world and the space that
I hope to occupy in the world but
also like I'm a white man living in
America and I have a whole lot of
things that go along with that baggage
right and right
I love that word, baggage.
That's awesome.
Yeah, yeah.
There's much to be had.
There's a lot of things that go along
with that,
and there's a lot of things that go
along with just not having been in the
place to experience many things that
people who don't look like me or occupy
the same physical spaces that I do
or don't have access to those physical
spaces.
It's really grounding to start from the
get-go with that thing.
Glad to have you on,
glad to have you talking about that stuff.
Why don't we start off, I guess,
with the talk that you gave at WordCamp
Canada,
since that is what brought us together.
For anyone who was not there,
which is probably a lot of people were
not at WordCamp Canada,
What was your talk about and what brought
you to that specific topic?
Ooh, yeah.
Well, so the title,
my fancy long title that I workshopped for
a very long time was From Canada to
the World,
Ten Lessons from Working with Fifty
Countries.
And I came to that topic because the
WordCamp Canada team came to me asking if
I would give a diversity-related talk.
and I haven't officially been in the
diversity space for a bit.
I needed to take a break and I
thought, well,
what would be fun for current Jill?
What would I love to talk about?
So I did a little slight angle on
it and instead of talking directly about
diversity,
I talked about what it was like to
take a little workshop that a few of
us created in Vancouver for public
speaking for our underrepresented voices
And what happens when I was asked to
scale that to all over the world,
at the time, pre-COVID,
there were eight hundred cities with
meetups.
And I was asked to try to reach
all of them with that work.
In the end,
I was able to reach fifty countries over
five years,
which is an incredible feat and was a
lot of work to do.
And so the talk was the little things
that I learned, you know,
the little and a lot of it was
tangentially diversity related because
that was my lens the whole time.
The whole time I was doing these workshops
for underrepresented groups.
So there's a little bit of cultural stuff,
a little bit of like.
Working with women in Latin America and
language issues, speaking with, you know,
India and Japan and the parts that people
really resonated with in this talk were
interesting.
talking about what diversity means in
places like the Philippines and the black
culture in Africa,
and then how the black culture in Africa
was different from the black culture in
America, because in Africa, let's say,
and in the Philippines,
the men of color are over-represent,
what I like to say,
the well-represented folks of the regions.
And, um,
and then they are asked to come speak
on the global stages because they're
underrepresented because, you know,
in tech, we typically have, uh,
I like to say straight, cis, young,
white men, um, not,
not necessarily always cis,
not necessarily always straight, but, um,
uh,
Not necessarily young,
but just kind of as a global,
just to give a snapshot of when I
started.
If you ask ChatGPT what a tech worker
looks like, you would probably get...
Probably get that.
And so then they're asked to speak on
these global stages,
and it feels very disorienting to come
from a culture where...
one is well represented and then walk into
a space where they're underrepresented and
it's dizzying and it's disorienting.
So talking about that, whereas in America,
Black men of America are very
underrepresented and very,
and this was the most personal part of
my whole talk and the one that people
resonated with the most and appreciated
the most.
It was basically,
they live in a culture of,
and
Again, I'm a white woman in America,
in Canada,
trying to talk about black men in America,
but I have, from my experiences,
and also I've checked this with people to
make sure it was correct,
there's a culture of fear because they
don't know who to trust,
they don't know who they can open up
to.
My workshops were a very vulnerable space,
digging into why we're afraid of public
speaking and starting to use our voices.
is a is a big deal and they
didn't know if they could trust me um
and all kinds of issues came up out
of that and I had to apologize a
bunch of times and I gave a whole
script for how to apologize sincerely um
etc so it was those kinds of things
that uh were unexpected and constant it
was there was always things coming up
which is part of why I developed that
script
with the help of some fellow diversity
experts because things were coming up and
people were leaving upset,
especially in twenty twenty when diversity
became a bigger issue.
When the George Floyd incident happened
and it became top of everybody's minds,
people were more sensitive at the time.
absolutely understandably.
But then tanking it out on me,
the white woman in Canada,
who's trying to do well in the world.
And so making sure people knew them coming
from a good place made a really big
difference in people's experiences,
because I care more about
them than anybody being angry with me um
but that's yeah so that's that's a little
bit about that speech and a few of
the highlights and the little bit about
that yeah i
As I was listening to you,
I remember in the before times,
before COVID, well, once upon a time,
there was a really good traveling
conference called AlterConf.
And AlterConf was specifically by and for
predominantly underrepresented groups in
tech.
And I went to one in Portland.
And so there is like a lot of
female speakers,
a lot of trans and non-binary speakers and
all sorts of things.
And basically the stories were the common
theme was this is what it's like to
exist as myself in a space that is
dominated by cis straight white men,
basically.
Yeah, yeah.
And it was heavy and it was it
was amazing.
It was really,
really eye opening for me as a cis
white man in tech.
And it made me really want to be
part of whatever a solution or an answer
or a response to that
pain that discomfort uh was um and uh
I think I can't remember who it might
have been uh it might have been Andrew
Norcross who at at loopconf one year gave
a talk that I went to in which
he said use your powers of privilege for
good um and I was like
Yeah, yeah, I can do that.
I can't be the... Like, I can...
I can try,
I can try to be more visible.
I can try to be represent, like,
you know, like be the representation,
like use my voice as much as I
can in the spaces that I have access
to, to raise awareness or whatever.
Like I,
that is the thing that I can do.
Um, and then, so,
so what I was thinking about as you're,
as you're talking is I gave a talk
at Open West, uh, I guess it was,
had to have been like,
or something or .
Um,
In response to all of these ideas,
things floating in my brain called being a
better ally.
And it was basically what it was.
What was ironic at the time was one
of the things I was taught, I mean,
like I was also very self-aware that I'm
a male speaker talking about allyship at a
tech conference with an audience of
primarily male attendees and speakers.
And I also noticed,
and I told the organizers that I was
going to do this when I did it,
that the speaker selection also tended
very heavily white male.
And I'm like, look,
I'm going to call you out on this
because it's obvious and it's topical to
my thing.
It's not because I think you're doing a
bad job.
it's because this is an evidence that this
is an issue, right?
And one of the things,
like their process for selecting speakers
was it was a blind speaker selection
process,
which to me also just underlines why blind
speaker selection is not always the best
way of doing, like it feels egalitarian,
but the result you get is just gonna
reinforce those things.
I don't know if I would give that
talk like this year.
And I didn't even think about like how
things have changed over time.
But in hearing you were working on that
through that time,
what things have you observed change in
sort of like, I don't know, feeling,
sentiment,
vulnerability over like over that period
of time, like sort of post-COVID?
Oh, yeah.
Big, big question.
Good question.
Took a lot of time to get there.
I had to ramp up.
And if we can come back later to
the thing about why blind selection,
like people don't know why blind selection
doesn't work,
I would love to chat more about that.
But let me answer this question.
So...
There were two sides to what changed from
what I could observe.
One, which was amazing,
was more people cared.
In the before times,
I was alone a lot trying to do
this work.
I had a bit of help here and
there.
And then when that happened,
people suddenly cared.
And I got a lot more volunteers involved.
for my initiative, which was amazing,
and a lot more people caring about it,
and a lot more people wanting to
contribute opinions and ideas,
which was also amazing.
Although I was a bit burned out and
had a hard time wrangling the ideas and
contributions, and...
Me now,
who has rested up and is well-resourced,
I know how I would handle that now.
But in the past, it was a lot.
And then from the side of the people
who are underrepresented,
I'm partially underrepresented myself.
So I'm partially speaking myself.
I'm female.
I'm neurodivergent.
I have some physical issues.
uh, not quite disabilities,
but not quite full abilities either.
I'm currently walking with walking sticks
to be able to walk.
Um, for example,
so I can't do stairs and things like
that.
Um, uh,
But from the people at the time,
people were very understandably on high
alert all the time.
Everybody was in a little bit of a
trauma state.
The hardest time for me was that time
I had people being very upset with me
over things that they may or may not
have been upset about other times,
or maybe it would always bother them,
but maybe they wouldn't have spoken up as
much.
And so I had long conversations of people
being upset with me.
And I did my best to listen,
hold space when needed, apologize.
And I learned a lot about apologizing,
which is something I talked about in the
speech.
And mostly it was letting people feel
heard.
Um, one of my diversity, uh,
peers pointed out that people were just
upset at the system.
And at that time I was representing the
system and I was an outlet to, uh,
um, talk to,
and I'm very glad that I was, um,
I just,
my nervous system was also shot and it
was hard at the time.
Um, but, uh,
After I started...
So that's when I developed the script.
And then I didn't have people have those
long, angry,
upset conversations with me anymore after
that.
If anybody had anything to say,
they came to me gently with corrections,
which didn't happen much after I started
saying that script.
And again,
it's not about me and my experience.
It was really...
the important thing to me was helping
people.
I cared more about other people and their
experiences.
It's not about me having a hard time.
I don't want people to come to a
workshop that is
In the pre-times,
it was very transformative for people and
would absolutely change their lives.
I don't want them to come to an
amazing experience and have a terrible
time.
But because everybody was on high alert,
there were more terrible times.
One of the things that I...
Didn't know.
Yeah.
So there were little things that happened
as well.
Like I mentioned in my speech about the
color of the skin on the posters in
India when we had when we were holding
workshops specifically for India.
And it wasn't just India.
There were other regions as well.
But I just gave one example story.
And that story was basically,
we had the people of the region pick
the poster and pick the person.
And it was a light-skinned person.
And everybody in India seemed fine with
it.
But people in other parts of the world
were very triggered and very upset by it
being a light-skinned person.
Yeah.
Yeah, well, there's whole... I mean,
there's...
there's I don't know how many hundreds of
years of history to explain why in India
that is the one that gets picked versus
an option with darker skin.
There's, I mean,
We have a cultural framework in the United
States that is based on a very particular
history and like where our biases and
cultural,
like things that we identify with or think
is normal or whatever comes from,
like they have a very similar,
but different, like, I mean, it's, yes,
there's, there's a whole,
a whole host of things that could be
said about, about that sort of stuff.
Um, for sure.
Um, what, um,
What brought you into this sort of
diversity or even just speaking type work?
What was the thing that brought you into
that to begin with?
Yes, good.
I love this story.
So I was never a diversity person.
It just sort of happened.
I wrote an article a couple years into
it called How I Became an Accidental
Activist in Vancouver.
So I was one of the main WordCamp
co-organizers from a
And for people who don't know what
WordCamp is,
I'm assuming a lot of people listening to
your show know.
But just in case,
it is basically our one to two day
conference.
Most cities around the world will have a
one to two day conference done by and
for the community.
And it's all WordPress topics.
anything tangentially related to WordPress
can be talked about at these events.
And we had close to, I think,
fifty-six applications and only seven were
from women.
And in the end,
we only had four out of twenty-eight
speakers who were women at our event.
And when I say women,
I mean people who identify as women
somewhere all of the time.
And we were not happy about that.
And the audience was not happy about that.
They talked to us privately about it.
And they also called us out publicly.
They wrote blog posts about it.
Absolutely understandably,
we did our best.
We accepted six and then two dropped out
for family emergencies.
And then in the end,
it was the small,
And so I was chatting with people about
this issue.
I went to WordCamp US to ask other
meetup organizers,
how do you get more women and other
underrepresented?
And I also, while I'm here,
I'll define when I say underrepresented
and diversity, I mean gender, caste,
class, physical ability, sexuality, race,
ethnicity,
uh, et cetera, age.
That's something that when I forget to say
age,
I always have people coming up to me
asking about the age thing.
Absolutely.
Age also.
Um, and so I, I, we,
there was this meetup brunch and I asked
all of them,
how do you get more people asking,
you know, applying to speak?
And they're like, you got seven.
We got zero.
Yeah.
So then I learned this was a bigger
issue all around.
And I started doing more effort.
I started asking people directly instead
of just waiting for people to show up.
And I got the same two answers over
and over, which is,
what would I even talk about?
And I'm not an expert in anything.
And I learned.
So those were the two big things.
I chatted with some people and somebody
gave me an idea to tackle the topic
question with doing a brainstorming
session.
And from there,
a group of women and I created our
five hour workshop,
which is the foundation for what I've been
doing ever since.
and in this workshop we first cover
imposter syndrome the myths of who it is
person speaking up on stage especially um
uh the well-represented people in a
community when they know a little bit
about something will be like yeah i can
apply for that job or i can talk
on that topic and the rest of us
when we only know a little bit we're
like well i don't know enough
But we actually know the same amount.
So helping people reframe that,
helping people do more story-based talks.
When we started developing this workshop,
WordPress community got a wind that we
were doing this and they asked can we
get people to do more story-based
workshops.
People will walk away from a day of
conference talks
after a whole bunch of how-to talks,
won't remember the details,
but stories are engaging,
people remember them.
And so I've been really honing in over
the years how to help people create great
stories.
And so then Make WordPress said, great,
you've had these amazing results.
Other cities started running their own
versions of it.
And they asked,
could I lead a team to make it
not just women,
all diversity and all around the world.
And that is, that is how that began.
It started with our own local little
problem in Vancouver.
We developed a solution that worked and,
uh, and, oh yeah.
And we,
we started running that workshop for
ourselves.
And in the next year we had
three times the number of applications
from people who identify as women,
and it was a developer edition,
so that's an even bigger deal.
And then we had fully fifty percent
representation in our next few WordCamps
as well.
That's how that all started.
Yeah.
Yeah, well,
that overlaps with the thing that we
pinned earlier with speaker selection and
the blind speaker selection.
I was involved in WordCamp Salt Lake City
for many, many, many years.
I was a co-organizer for two years,
and then I was lead organizer for two
years.
So I basically was running it and running
to a greater or lesser extent for
essentially four years.
And we had, I mean,
the exact same problem.
We have, like,
the applications come in and for a long
time it was like, well,
we're just going to run with what we
get, right?
Like, that's what you do.
When I was not satisfied with that answer,
I...
I think it was actually,
I think it was probably like a similar
conversation because I think that might
have been about the same time as there
is a WordCamp San Francisco.
It was before WordCamp US was a thing.
There was a WordCamp San Francisco where
there was an open, well,
it was an invite community summit.
And I happened to be invited because I
was part of the docs team at the
time.
So I got to go to the community
summit,
which meant that I got to have
conversations with other people that are
WordCamp organizers, which wasn't,
you know,
ostensibly the reason I was there.
And I asked that question and the answer
that I got was, well,
have you tried asking?
Like, wow, I can ask people questions.
which then so the next year i went
to when i when we were organizing was
like okay i'm gonna like pick a bunch
of people that i think would would uh
bring value to the people that come to
our event uh that are maybe not local
but people that i know that i have
at least some like six degrees of kevin
bacon connection to um yeah yeah that and
just just ask just ask would you like
to come to salt lake city to give
a presentation i don't really care what
you want to talk about we can talk
about whatever you want just
I'd love to have you here."
Weirdly,
when you ask people if they want to
speak at your event,
a lot of them say yes.
That's awesome.
I love that you did that.
Yeah,
and we were able to course correct that.
I think the first year when I did
that, we had, I think,
about fifty percent.
I mean,
if you're considering a gender binary as
the rubric by which you're organizing
who's on what side of the line,
we had about fifty percent.
And that continued.
And that was, yeah.
And it goes to the point,
and because I had that experience,
that was why I was not super enthusiastic
about the blind speaker selection of this
one event that I was speaking at.
Because I felt like I knew what a
solution could be.
And, like, I get it.
Like, I understand, like, it seems fair.
But I think that you can do that
and also do the other thing, too.
And then get better results.
Yeah.
I think I want to speak a little
bit about why it matters that there's
representation and also a little bit more
about the blind selection.
Yeah.
Um, so, um, you know,
when I first started in this work,
there was a lot of talk out there
of, um, it should be based on talent.
It should be a good mix of topics.
Um, it shouldn't be who's speaking.
The representation shouldn't matter.
And, um,
I argue,
after learning a lot about this over the
years, different perspectives,
people with different history,
people with unique viewpoints because of
having different representation,
the representation of what I mentioned
before in all the different forms.
It makes for a more interesting
conference.
It does so many things.
It makes for a more interesting
conference.
It helps the audience feel included and
represented because if people are as lucky
to have the kind of audiences that we
had,
we had a big mix in our audience,
but not on stage before I started this
work.
Um,
it boosts ticket sales because a lot of
people will look for,
is there a mix of speakers?
Um, and since.
Twenty-twenty ish.
Um, maybe even a bit before,
but especially after people will boycott,
people will say this is all young, young,
middle-aged white men.
I will not go.
And so it's important even just to...
To be a better event and for people
to agree that it's a better event.
I guess that's one way of saying it.
Then blind selection,
what happens with that?
There's a few things that happens.
One is if the people haven't been on
the speaker circuit,
they may not write as good of a
speaker application.
Application is the title and the
description.
And in a blind selection,
that's the only thing that people read.
And people of other countries and
cultures, ethnicities,
all the different things might not write
English well and get unselected.
Now, in my work, I say,
I tell people, you know, make sure,
you know,
it's sad that people don't get selected
based on how it is written,
but that is the reality.
Get somebody to help you write it
properly.
And now there's all kinds of tools to
help people with their grammar.
um uh and um blind selection does remove
the names so you're so they are less
likely to pick the popular people but the
fact is we can often recognize oh this
is a talk from this person i'd want
this person there um and um and and
also you know
even if all the talks are truly anonymous,
you can't tell who the popular people are
and, um, all written at the same quality,
you still just want a mix of voice.
It's for all the reasons I said before,
it's a better conference when there's a
mix of voices.
Right.
I remember back there, you know,
I haven't been on Twitter and probably
well since Elon bought it,
but
Um, once upon a time I was, and,
um,
I think it was Anil Dash who at
some point decided that because he had
gotten so big on Twitter and he has
so many followers that he was going to
intentionally stop, uh, like reposting,
um,
things by male users and just repost
things by, you know, female or non-binary,
like things that,
because so much of the
this discourse and dialogue was already
from like the male perspective even if the
content was exactly the same he was going
to retweet the thing that was posted by
somebody who is female um because just to
elevate those voices and because and and
because like the yeah the topic title
could be exactly the same thing
But the perspective that comes behind it,
the lived experience that goes into the
ideas is going to be by default different.
Yeah.
And something to add on that,
it is to our benefit to hear more
lived experiences.
There's all kinds of things that we're
blind to from our own lived experience
that are things that our users experience
and we need to know that they're
experiencing that.
Hearing the different perspectives opens
our eyes to more things as well as
people's different experiences often bring
cool innovations to things.
For example, back in the wartime, a long,
long time ago, they started creating,
what was it?
I think it was creating audiobooks for
their veterans who couldn't read.
And now podcasts are a thing.
It was created originally for a certain
segment, which became something that...
changed, you know,
made things better for everyone.
And so, you know,
there's all kinds of innovations that can
happen when we when we're problem solving
for somebody in particular,
and then it can become something cool and
mainstream for everybody.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, I think, you know,
when I was in high school,
we had books on tape and whatever,
but that was like,
was it books on tape yes yeah yeah
but like books on tape like to start
you think about like well obviously if you
can't read a book because you are vision
impaired then that is the the thing that
but like yeah i i you process information
differently by listening to a book being
read to you than than you do by
reading it with your eyeballs too and like
you know there's so many reasons why you
would choose to do the one thing over
the other thing and and like you can
read a lot more books if you listen
to them when you're doing like making
dinner like yeah um all sorts of sort
of accidental uh serendipitous uh effects
of of things that that started out being
for like us sort of like for us
accessibility sort of purposes yeah
So talk about now you do sort of
coaching for public speaking.
Obviously that came out of your work from
the WP Diversity thing,
but talk about how that sort of evolved
and what made you want to sort of
focus in that.
Yeah.
So when I came back from my self-funded
recovery sabbatical,
I was looking at what can I do.
And I still had some corporate clients on
the side.
Starting in twenty twenty,
I had a couple of companies hire me
to just do one on one coaching with
their employees just to help them be
better on stage.
And I still had those clients.
And when I came back to work,
I really loved it a lot.
And it still makes such a big difference.
Like, you know, it...
The diversity work is so meaningful,
but I've found so much meaning in helping
all voices because it's basically if
somebody has a good experience on say a
podcast or on stage,
it helps them level up to their next
self.
People get so much confidence.
People get career, um, uh,
It helps their careers.
I'll talk more about that in a second.
Some people step into leadership roles
after speaking.
My whole stepping into being the founder
and lead of the WP Diversity Training
Initiative was right after I did a public
speaking talk on how it was going with
our workshop in Vancouver.
That was at WordCamp Seattle.
I've had so many stories,
but there's one in particular that I
witnessed that means so much to me.
One of the people who went through our
workshop in Vancouver got spotted by a
local agency.
They sought her out.
They said,
we need her specifically after seeing
their talk.
her talk and got her on board.
She soon became their senior developer and
then their team lead.
And she was their first and only woman
developer for a bunch of years.
And then she brought some other women
developers on board as well.
And I've also,
in my own experience and seeing it happen
for so many people, people get job offers,
people who are entrepreneurs get gigs.
Before doing this public speaking coaching
and before the diversity initiative,
I was a web developer.
And every time I got on stage,
no matter how good or bad I was
that day,
I inevitably got people's attention.
people asking to hire me to create their
websites for them.
It's just this visibility thing that makes
a huge difference for people.
And so the combination of the fact that
I ran this workshop literally a hundred
times over five years,
reached six hundred people in fifty
countries but also I have done a lot
of public speaking myself before that so
I'm just very good at it I started
off as a performance poet for I was
kind of tangentially in the slam scene for
almost ten years and that's where I really
learned how to do public speaking and then
in the work world I started giving a
lot of talks when I was a
other kinds of coaches and then when I
was doing web development and then I
started speaking of meetups and word camps
when I got into the WordPress space and
I just I'm a very anxiety filled person
and I've learned how to calm my own
nerves and I'm able to help people calm
their nerves and
I have kind of a small presence in
regular life, but on stage,
I have a big stage presence and I'm
able to teach people how to do that
as well,
no matter how small and introverted they
are in regular life.
And it's not about being something that
we're not.
It's about using our own.
And if we're having a,
if I'm very quiet and I have a
quiet energy, lean into that,
be quiet and
Which is, I think,
what I did at my keynote.
I'm not even sure.
I'm usually feeling quiet.
So I lean into that and it gives
me this presence.
So because of all of that,
that's now what I'm doing.
And yeah.
I'm, I don't know,
I love it so much.
I'm doing one-on-one coaching with people
when they have a talk coming up and
I'm also aiming to do some cohorts where,
you know,
I gave these five-hour workshops where it
was just a crash course quickly and I
would love to do like one module at
a time,
one month at a time and really dig
into it together and get people from,
I don't know,
I could never give a talk to giving
a standout talk that they're so proud of
and everybody really loves.
So that's the current thing.
Yeah, that's a good current thing to have.
I've had a couple people on before who
are either in DevRel or they're in tech
spaces who come from similar backgrounds
where, you know, they...
had to sort of force themselves to do
public speaking,
and they did so because they thought it
would just help them in general or because
it would help them professionally or
whatever,
and now they do it a lot and
they really enjoy it.
What are the sorts of things that you
would
recommend or suggest to folks that are
that are on the cusp but need a
little bit of a nudge to to to
do to go to a meetup and and
do like talk or you know give a
presentation for their employer or like or
get up on stage like whatever what's
what's the sort of like key thing that
you think that uh that you would suggest
to to get people over a little over
that hump
That's a good question.
And it depends a little bit on where
that hump is.
You know, I would start by asking,
is it feeling like they don't know enough
and don't belong on stage?
They don't know what their topic is.
They're too nervous.
They don't know how to write a title
and description.
I actually have a little self-diagnostic
tool.
Am I allowed to mention a little thing
on my website?
Yeah.
Speaktechconfidently.com slash blueprint.
I lay out the ten steps for what
it takes to get on stage and have
people self-diagnose what's their
confidence level with each stage.
So some of the stages that I just
mentioned.
so for the two most common ones well
for the three most common ones that I
hear a lot is what would I talk
about and so there's little exercises we
can do but as a quick example the
best talks are what we're already doing
every day in our tech life so a
little quick prompt could be think about
the last three things that you learned at
work and then
some one of those could be a great
topic or or a great one is like
mistakes you've made everybody has
mistakes they've made in tech and that
that's a really good story-based talk like
here's the mistakes i made so that i
you know learn from me so you don't
make the same mistakes um if it is
feeling like they don't belong on stage a
little thing i mentioned before um
we tend to self-select ourselves out
feeling like I only know a little bit,
but actually we know the same amount as
the people who are getting up on stage.
Um, but I like to say, because I'm,
I love helping people.
Well,
so there's a bunch of different kinds of
talks,
but I do lean towards the story-based
talk.
Although I let people choose there's how
to talks, story-based case studies,
panels, workshops, et cetera.
Um,
But the great thing about story-based
talks is we are always an expert in
our own experience.
Nobody can argue with our life experience.
So that's one way to get over that
hurdle.
And then for nerves,
the two big tips are practice, practice,
practice, practice.
If one can,
before getting up on a big stage,
get up on little related stages first.
Or even just talking to friends and
family, just practice.
And breathing.
Breathing is this overlooked thing.
We breathe, but do we?
When we get nervous,
our breath and energy gets high and we...
We're breathing from here and here and our
voice goes up and our body gets tense.
And if we bring that,
slow the breathing down,
breathe through our belly,
take a few deep breaths.
I recommend breathing in the weeks and
days leading up to it because some of
us are in a heightened state.
All that time,
but then also on the day of,
do deep breathing before.
And then there's often a wait period
before we're called up on stage.
Great time to do more breathing.
And when we get on stage before talking,
I recommend doing deep breathing.
There's a difference between somebody who
walks up onto stage and then starts
talking, hi, my name is Jill.
I'm here to talk about blah, blah, blah.
versus get up on stage take take a
moment take a breath and then on one
of the out breaths start talking which
also gives us a fuller voice hi everyone
my name is Jill I'm so happy to
be here with you today
Preferably a better start line than that.
I like to coach people to have an
interesting hook before starting to tell
people who they are.
Have like a really interesting question
that is the through line of the whole
talk.
But yeah,
those are some little tips to get people
started on some of those things.
Breathing is so good.
So I do aerial arts stuff.
I've been going to classes for about a
year and pole.
Cool.
And our instructors are constantly saying,
and remember to breathe.
For very similar but slightly different
reasons.
But, like, yeah,
you're doing a thing that's really hard
and you're pulling yourself up and then
you forget to breathe.
You actually need to breathe.
Breathing makes it better.
Breathing makes it more successful.
Breathing helps you not tense up.
Breathing helps you not get injuries.
Breathing is really good.
Breathing is good.
Yeah.
And that actually reminds me of another
thing, which is, you know,
sometimes we start speeding up in a talk.
And so deciding ahead of time some spots
that we're going to stop and take a
breath,
especially between sections is a really
good time.
Or sometimes we have this moment where we
blank.
So I have this little story.
When I was in grade school,
I was doing pretty well at the public
speaking,
but there was this one time that I
blanked.
did not know what my next line was,
ran out of the room crying,
and then refused to do public speaking
until I was an adult and really wanted
to do my poetry on stage,
until I had a really good reason to
push past it.
But I just lived in fear for so
long.
And now, with what I know now,
when we blank, stop, take a few breaths,
oxygenate the brain.
Maybe even another thing I talk to people
about is feeling in their heart,
maybe even putting a hand there.
their heart and that it our heart is
like the second brain that will remind us
what we are there to talk about and
overcome situations like like tough
questions in the Q&A time and so the
breathing and and the heart thing will
help people get over the humps of stuff
in the middle of the things that happen
when we're on stage
Yeah.
Well, I'll have to think about that.
Remember that.
Well, thank you so much, Joe,
for coming on.
I love talking about this stuff.
I love to have you on.
I was so happy that we got to
meet in person a few months ago.
For anyone who's maybe looking for you or
what you do on the internet,
where can they find you?
Ooh, great question.
I am...
jill binder all one word on linkedin
mastodon still on x um uh facebook but
except on facebook it's jill binder
consulting um those are the business
social medias and my website is speak tech
confidently.com and that little um
the self-diagnostic tool that I mentioned
to figure out where somebody is stuck so
they know where to even start or also
just to know like how does one do
a talk or how does one do their
next talk and make it better um the
ten steps to that it's that was
speaktechconfidently.com slash blueprint
and thanks for letting me mention those
things free some free stuff
For sure.
Absolutely.
Well, thanks again for coming on.
Thank you,
everybody who might be watching or
listening to this in the future.
And we'll see you on the internet.
Thank you, Chris.
This was a pleasure.
Thank you.