A Guide for Speaking at WordPress Events

BobWP: Michelle, how are you doing today?

Michelle: I’m good, Bob. How are you?

BobWP: I’m doing good. It’s always… I’m glad when we can get a chance to chat on a podcast. We tried to catch up at an occasional word camp, and we’ll be able to do that again soon, so that’ll be good.

Michelle: Yes, less than a month.

BobWP: Yeah. Well, I know that a lot of people know who you are, but I always like to at least have guests give kind of a quick intro because there are always a few people that wander in and don’t quite have-

Michelle: I never assume everybody knows who I am, so it’s all good.

BobWP: Right.

Michelle: So I am the Director of Community Engagement at StellarWP, which is the software division of Liquid Web. So we have plugins and themes like Kadence and GiveWP, Restrict Content Pro. I’m never going to remember all of them at one time. IconicWP, Orderable, the Events Calendar. GiveWP if I didn’t already say that one and LearnDash and iThemes. I think I got them.

BobWP: Yeah. Cool. All righty.

Michelle: I’ll still be employed tomorrow. But I also do a bunch of other stuff in the community. I got a few podcasts. I volunteer a lot for the Open Source project and also work at Post Status, so people may have seen my name there.

BobWP: Yeah. So yeah, you keep busy. You’re like me, you get your fingers in different places and stuff, but.

Michelle: Absolutely.

BobWP: So anyway, Friday show. So what’s on your mind?

Michelle: Well, I launched a little project that I think you know about because Do the Woo is a sponsor of WPSpeakers.com, and so it has been two and a half weeks since I launched it. I did that silly little thing where you start building a website on Monday and you actually soft launch it on Wednesday, which is just ridiculous of course. But it happened to me during the Atarim Summit when I was talking to people about it. Oh, I’m working on this project, what do you think? And people started signing up and then people started sharing it on social, and now it has been two and a half weeks, and we have 233 speakers in a database called WPSpeakers.com. And my goal with it is that, hey if you’re looking for a speaker for… Especially for meetups, right? Sometimes it’s really hard to rally the troops to have one more person locally speak about something every month, especially during the pandemic, our numbers dwindled a little bit.

A lot of meetups stopped altogether for a while, and you sometimes just exhaust your resources for a little bit, and people just want to hear or learn something that’s outside of your group’s knowledge base. So for example, nobody in my Rochester, New York meetup was really well versed on AI. And so I’ve had two months in a row, people come in and teach about different ways you can use AI with your WordPress business. And so I was able to get in an outside speaker for that. And of course, we do have local speakers as well, and we always save time for whatever people are doing, but sometimes you just need fresh voices, or on your stage or at your event. And I know as having been not only a Meetup organizer, but WordCamp organizer, WordPress organizer helped a little bit with the Atarim Summit, things like that, that sometimes you just need a list of people.
You can kind of go down and go, wow, this person knows something that none of us know, and I haven’t met this person before. This person might be a great speaker at my event. And so WPSpeakers helps you do that. And hey, you and I are both podcasters. If you’re looking for a subject matter expert on something, it’s a great place to tap into as well. Or if you want somebody to contribute to an article on your blog… I mean, it says WPSpeakers, but it doesn’t have to be just for speakers. It can be for people who can help out in multiple areas.

And the whole idea was that even as well-connected as I am in the WordPress community, I don’t know everybody. I couldn’t possibly know everybody and I don’t necessarily know somebody who’s an expert in X, Y, or Z. And so if I had a list of those people I could reach out to, wouldn’t that be awesome? And then, well, how am I going to build that list? I want people to opt into it. What better way than a WordPress website? And so the reason I could build it so quickly is I did use Kadence and I used one of the templates so that I could be like swap out these pictures, add these functions, look, it’s a website. And there it is.

So in WordPress, I know there are a lot of people that are like, “If you didn’t build it from the development side of it and do your own coding, did you really build a WordPress website?” Yes. Yes, you did. Absolutely. Do I call myself a developer? Nope. But I do call myself a web designer because I’m able to do those kinds of things. So yeah, that’s what it’s all about. So getting speakers in there and getting everybody in there and being able to find and connect to speakers.

BobWP: Right. And speaking of Kadence, I did the same thing with BobWP.com. I wanted to do something a little bit more, make it kind of a hub. And one weekend I was doing… Oh, I know. My story was I was going to do it using blocks in navy and I got in there and I thought, “Man, what this… As much as I’d like to say I’m going to do this, this is not working.”
So I put Kadence in, grabbed one of the templates, tweaked it, and it was like over the weekend I had my site ready and I could just put it out and not worry about it. It was like… Yeah. So anyway. But yeah, this is cool because it’s truly like you said, we both know a lot of people, and I know through this podcast, maybe this is one of the reasons I do this podcast is how many people I’ve had come on talk with other hosts and stuff, but I don’t know them.

I’m meeting them for the first time. Sometimes people think we know everybody well we don’t, everybody doesn’t know us. So it’s nice to have a resource like that. And it is much more versatile than just thinking of meetups and WordCamps. I mean, there are a lot of people that you could use it for. In fact, it’s almost like, I want to say, a little WordPress bio for some of these people because also you can, like you said, see what they’re interested in these days, maybe currently what they’re doing and stuff.

So yeah, it’s really cool. I’d love to just see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people on that. And so what do you think or what is your advice? Some people might be thinking, “I don’t really ‘consider myself a speaker’, but I kind of want to get into it, and I don’t know if I should submit this because it might put me on the spot or something.” What would you say to somebody if they asked you about that?

Michelle:
Well, I’ve had actually two people do that exact same thing. So both people, I’ve been sending the link out, “Hey, I’d love to have you in the speaker database.” And two separate people said to me, “Oh, I’ve never spoken before.” And my response was, “Do you want to? Do you want to speak?” And both of them said, “Yeah, sure.” I said, “Then this is your way to start doing that.” So nothing in being in the speaker database says that you have to already have spoken. If you consider yourself a subject matter expert on anything and you’d like the opportunity to be found, you can join the database as well. Is there a guarantee that you’re going to always be contacted? Of course not. There’s 233 people in there already. So depending on your region, what languages you speak, what time zone you’re in, those might have some effect on whether or not somebody reaches out to you.
But every single person in the database, they have a page of their own. So it’s kind of like you said. And actually what’s really cool is their headshot shows up as the featured image. So when you share it, your smiling face goes out on social as well. But you have a contact form on that page so that if somebody does want to reach out to you, they fill out that contact form and you’ll get an email. And so far, I can see from the dashboard side of things that people are starting to use the database not only to put themselves into it, but to reach out to subject matter experts as well, which is pretty cool.

BobWP:
Yeah, that is cool. Do you feel like us as a community need to be a little bit more… I mean, I shouldn’t even ask you this because I know the answer, but a little bit more proactive to get, again, more diversity. I mean, I deal with it on this podcast. I’m sure you’ve dealt with it in many different avenues and different ways where you want to work at it. And sometimes it goes really smoothly. Other times you get in this leg of a bunch of White dudes or whatever, and you’re like, “Oh my God,” you’re visually seeing it or something. And sure, what do you think we can do as individuals?
And we can do it as a community, we can do that, but where are the opportunities as individuals to amplify that a bit then? Don’t just say, “Oh, that’s cool,” say, “Oh, really. Let’s talk about that a bit.” Do you think there can be more done individually, or do you think we need to do more as a mass?

Michelle: So I’m just going to go ahead and say both, of course. So if you are in charge of a project like your own podcast and you want to see more diversity, and the first thing is to look at where you are and how far you’ve come and see, do a little bit of self-analysis, is there an issue? Do I need to have some more diversity in this? Is it 85% men and 15% women? Is it 70% White and only 30% ethnically diverse? Have I had people with disabilities on my show. Have I had divergent people on my show? There are a lot more things that make us diverse than just the color of our skin and the gender that we portray, and how we prefer to be called. But when you look at some of those things, you can absolutely do a little self-analysis.

And I mean, I do that all the time. So I have podcasts and my biggest podcast, WPCoffeeTalk, and I look back over that and I think, “Am I getting a good representation of the global community here?” If I was doing a Rochester-based podcast and it was all for Rochesterians, I wouldn’t necessarily look at things in the exact same way. I would look at what my local demographic is made up of, and I would think about what that looks like as far as making sure that I have representation of the people who live in my area and make sure that if I was… I don’t know. I’m trying to think off of the top of my head, but there are different ways that you can be more inclusive. And so in my opinion, you should always look for ways to include more people rather than less.

You will, as in marketing, always appeal to a wider audience if you yourself have shown that you include members of that audience in your podcast or in your project. One of the things that we say about stages and things like that is people want to come to events and people want to watch things on television, and people want to listen to podcasts when they can see or hear themselves there via somebody else that looks like or sounds like them. So if there is an event and it’s 90% men and 10% women, do you think those 10% women feel tokenized, or do you think they feel like honored to be included in the men? I have news for you. It’s not the honor. We do feel tokenized. And so you have to be careful when you are seeking diversity and inclusion that you’re doing it for the right reasons, that you’re not just going, “Oh, there’s a Black face that person will do.”

I want to make sure that I have more black faces on my community or Brown faces. And so we can’t work from a standpoint of pure tokenization. It needs to be truly representative. That’s what under-representation… We have underrepresented in tech is another one of my projects where you can reach out to people who are in underrepresented groups. We’ve vetted them and they’ve answered questions that show us who they are. And so you can reach out to that group. You can look through WPSpeakers.com and find people who are located in different regions.

You can make sure that you’re talking and you’re including people who speak other languages if you want to. I mean, it’s going to be hard for me to do a podcast in Spanish because I don’t speak Spanish. But if you’re looking for Spanish speakers, there are people who have registered German and Spanish and all the… I can’t even remember all the different languages now in WPSpeakers.com. So I think some internal reflection is necessary. We tend as humans to gravitate towards people who look and sound like us. But if we are creating a product or an event for our bigger community, we need to make sure that we’re looking outside of people who look and sound like us, I guess is what I’m trying to say.

BobWP: What is that little push and this is for that person that really does not have that confidence out there? I mean, they want to do it, and people have suggested it to them and they think, “Yeah, it would be really cool to speak at a WordCamp or speak at a meetup or be on a podcast.” But there’s that confidence level that they maybe are very nervous or they do not feel that they have the given talent to do it. When you’ve met somebody like that, what do you say to them?

Michelle: I think it comes down to a couple of things. So there has to be a desire, first of all. So if you are absolutely terrified of public speaking and you have no desire to do public speaking, then that’s not the person that you want to ask to do something and pressuring people I think is really difficult too. So you could be like, “Oh, you’d be really good.” And then the person says yes, and then they feel pressured, and now their anxiety is up. We have to be careful about those kinds of things for sure.

But what I think is really good for people who think they want might want to do something like that is to encourage them to do something small first. So if the first thing, if you are terrified of public speaking, then applying to speak at WordCampUS is probably not the first thing that you should do. Look at your local meetup, talk about this, see if there are ways to contribute there. I worked with a woman a couple of years ago as a coach who knows her stuff. She’s awesome. But when she first started coming to our meetup, she was too… Her anxiety about speaking in front of other people was so great that she didn’t even want to raise her hand and ask a question, and she would message me questions afterwards.

And so I started working with her to, not just for her business, but kind of gain some confidence and that kind of thing. And she spoke at two WordCamps. She doesn’t want to make a habit of it, but she pushed herself to be able to do that and found people accepting and excited about the things that she was doing. And so it gave her the confidence to do other things within her business. So join a women’s networking group, for example, and not feel like she has to sit in the back. And so those kinds of things, if you do push yourself, if you’re comfortable, if you have even the tiniest little smidge of wanting to push outside your comfort zone, I should say, then I encourage you to find ways to do that. Take the baby steps. Talk at your local meetup. Or even just sit down and talk to somebody one-on-one that you’d like to learn more from and start to work that way.

There is… I think it was Jerry Seinfeld, the comedian, that said, more people are afraid of public speaking than dying, which means that most people would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy. And so if public speaking just absolutely terrifies you to your core, you are not alone. And even people who get up and speak at multiple events every year online, in person, some of those people still get knots in their stomach right before they take the stage. I used to be that way. I’m not that way anymore because I’ve just kind of done it enough that I don’t get nervous, but I only get nervous for tech if I’m doing an online presentation. What if my internet goes down in the middle of this? Right? But that doesn’t make me a bad speaker. That makes me not have reliable internet or whatever.

But you can’t control everything. Sometimes mistakes happen. I tell people before they come onto any of my podcasts that if you inadvertently swear it’s okay. I’m not going to be like, “Ah, I can’t publish it now,” because we’re not making content for children in some of these podcasts. And truthfully, most children have heard those words at home before anyway, so we’re not indoctrinating them.

But I think there are ways to… If you are seeking ways to be out in the community more and do public speaking more start small, build from there. There are people who coach, there are people who mentor. So if you’re looking for some of those, don’t be afraid to even post publicly that I’m looking for a coach to help with X, Y, Z. I’m looking for a mentor for whatever it is. And even just a one-on-one, ask somebody, “Hey, will you look over this talk description before I submit it,” and have somebody else’s eyes on it. Those are always good things when you’re first getting ready and getting started and doing those kinds of things. So I say go for it. If you want to, do it. If you don’t want to, don’t be afraid to say no and don’t feel bad about it if it’s not something that’s in your wheelhouse.

BobWP: Yeah. Yeah. I wrote a post or I did something recently where I was talking about over 30 years ago or over 35 years ago when we first started our business, I remember going to a Chamber of Commerce breakfast and having to go around and introduce yourself, just a quick standup. And that was when I was first into business and having to network and do all that stuff. I would just almost get nauseous waiting for my turn. It was just like… I was so nervous. I told myself, “I got to keep at this,” and I did it and did it and stuff.
And you’re right. I mean, I’m speaking coming up at WordCamp in Lisbon, Portugal, and I haven’t spoke for several years, and I just kind of stepped back and let you know other people do it, and I just felt I’d done enough of it.

But even then I’m thinking, “Wow, it’s been a while.” So you get that little, I even get a little bit of a twinge like, “Wow, you got to get up there and actually speak again.”
But you’re right about the stepping stones and using different things. I mean, the podcast is a perfect example. We have a lot of developers that come in here that never have been on a podcast, never spoke publicly, and I always know if I have somebody to be on they say, “Whoa, no.” I mean, I can tell. It’s like, “No, this isn’t going to happen.” So I don’t push it. I just say, “Hey, I get it. That’s good.”

Michelle: Exactly.

BobWP: If they say, “Well, I’ve never been on, I’m kind of nervous.” I talk to them a little bit, and it’s surprising how many people actually do get on and end up at the end. In fact, almost all of them at the end say, “Wow, that was fun. I enjoyed that.”

Michelle: That was fun. That was easier than I thought.

BobWP: Yeah. And whatever they go on and do, if they do other speaking and stuff, but they’ve been given the opportunity and they realize… And it’s a lot different speaking into a microphone and talking to a few people and having a conversation and standing in front of a group. But it can be just that little piece that helps you get a little bit more relaxed and know that you do have something to say, and people are interested in hearing you.

Michelle: Exactly. And then I always tell people when they’re nervous to come on a podcast with me. I’m like, “You know how we just had that conversation last week where it was just you and me on the screen? That’s exactly what it’s going to be like except I’m going to press record.” So you don’t have to be nervous.

And I think part of it is if you can relate to the podcaster at a personal level, if you know them, even if you know them socially through groups where you’re not close friends or anything, if you can trust that person, if you know enough about them, you listen to their podcast, you can trust that they’re not going to get you out and suddenly they become yellow journalists. Aha!

BobWP: Yeah. Really.

Michelle: Where were you on the night of, right? None of us are out for blood.

BobWP: Yeah. Yeah. No kidding. Yeah. Put them on the spot.

Michelle: It’s all good. It’s all good.

BobWP: So anyway, yeah, your site, I love that idea.

Michelle: Thank you.

BobWP: It’s great. There has got to be some little something we can do. Something to make it a special little… I don’t know, get more people to know about it and stuff because I think it is a great opportunity, and if people can look at it as, “Hey, this is what”… I’m putting my name in the hat here, type of thing. And they can always turn something down if somebody says it kind of weirds them out or whatever.

But if they have that little bit of inkling of being somewhere and talking about something. A lot of these meetups are smaller groups now, and you may be sitting around a table of 10 to 15 people, and often those can be as much of a conversation as a presentation. You can just get in there and have an actual back-and-forth with people rather than feeling like you’re on the spot having to give all the information.

Michelle: And here’s the tip that I don’t always tell speakers is you don’t have to have a PowerPoint. You can just get up and talk.

I’ve done so many talks. I mean, I do a lot with PowerPoint because… Especially at WordCamps where people want to be able to take a picture and remember things. Of course, I have PowerPoints and things like that, but I’ve given some talks, especially online talks, so online WordCamps and things and meetups over the last couple of years during the pandemic, I just winged it. I just sat there and looked at the camera and just talked about what I wanted to talk about. I had my notes on screen so that I could reflect and make sure I didn’t miss anything. But it doesn’t have to be… Especially WordCamps meetups, it feels formal, but it’s really a relaxed environment. And I think the thing that people don’t realize is everybody wants you to win. Nobody comes and sits in your talk because they want to pull a gotcha and tell you.

And that’s where the imposter syndrome for a lot of speakers comes in. Very first time I ever gave a… I’m not nervous person for public speaking as a general rule because I’ve done it a lot in my life. But the first time I gave a talk at a WordCamp, I was like, “Everybody is going to know I’m not a coder. I’m not a developer. And they’re going to be like, ‘That’s not true.’”

And instead, the opposite happened. So I get up, I gave my talk, I stepped over to the Happiness Bar, and I had people lined up to continue asking me questions. Not a single person stood up and said, “That’s not true. Where did you learn this from?” Because realistically, if people are walking into the room that you are speaking in, they want to learn something and they think you’re the person who can teach it to them because you have said, “I understand this information and I’m going to share it.”

So people are generally in a very positive attitude because they want to learn from you and they want to see you win. They want you to get to the end and be like, “Yeah, that was an awesome talk.” And so I’d love to say that every single one of my talks has always been phenomenal, but some of them have been hit and miss over the years, and that’s okay.

So even if one person learned something and took away something from it, I think that’s good. And I know that anybody who has a desire to speak has the ability to also portray information and relay information that somebody in the room can learn from. And so if you have the ability to share information that will edify other people’s work or life, then go for it. If you have that desire, then find a way to do it.

BobWP: Exactly. And I’ve told a few people… I might have even shared this story some other time on the podcast, but what you’re talking about, I was at a WordCamp, and somebody I know actually in this space, I’m not going to name names or anything, but he was sitting on the floor kind of up against the wall. He was just really quiet looking down.

So I sat down next to him and asked how things were going, he was going to speak, but he said, “Bob, I am so nervous. People are going to just… It’s going to be horrible.” And he was so stressed out, and so we just talked. I mean, I can’t be a cheerleader or make him feel better, but I said, “Just go in there, talk about what, people are very forgiving in this community. They understand. And if you have to pause a moment and think about things, do it.”

Anyway, so we just talked a bit. And of course, he had to go in there and afterward… I didn’t get a chance to go in and watch him. But towards the end, I went over there and he was finishing up, and this seemed to be going really good. And he came out and I said hi to him, and I wasn’t going to press him like, “How’s this going?” But I saw somebody come out that I knew, and she was actually a tech professor at the University of Washington, and she’d been in there. So I knew her enough, and I just walked up to her. I said, “Oh, I missed that session. How was it?” And she said, “Well, the guy was a little nervous,” but she said, “Boy, he had some really cool stuff to share.” She said, “It was really good, this guy, I hope he keeps doing this,” and stuff.

And I didn’t even prompt it. I just thought she would be a good person to get some feedback. So I went and told him that later. I just said, “I just want you to know somebody I know, and this is a professor. This is somebody. This isn’t… And this is what she said.” And it just kind of gave him a smile. And he did go on to do other stuff. But it was one of those things that, yeah, it is a forgiving community, just take a deep breath and somehow you’ll get through it and then it might just click with you, and before you know it, you’re doing it all the time.

Michelle: Well, I will also share that I did create a page on WPSpeakers.com for speaker resources. So if you’re thinking about speaking and you’re looking for some resources, I will continue to add them as I find them. There’s a whole page of resources there that can help you get started.

And I will also say that when you’re told that you have 30 minutes or 45 minutes to talk and you think, how am I going to fill 30 minutes? It goes by much faster than you think it does. And you better be careful because you’ll end up not being able to say all the things that you wanted to say. Practice, practice, practice.

BobWP: Yep, yep, yep, yep. Been there, done that. All righty. Well, Michelle, it was great having you on the Friday show, just talking about it.

Michelle: Yeah, thanks for having me.

BobWP: If anybody out there ever is kind of hesitant, well you know the site to go to get your name in there. And also if you’re hesitant, reach out to either one of us if you have questions about it or anything. We’re here for you. So again, thank you very much, Michelle.

Michelle: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.