Playing calm

Some of you may remember I had the golden opportunity to give a short talk at a conference recently, and that said golden opportunity scared the bejeezus out of me.

Happily, I got bucketsful of good advice from my labmates, my GradAdvisor, and from you-all. So, although my tummy was clenched in sheer terror from the second I woke up to the end of my talk, I did what I needed to: I spoke slowly, and pitched my voice low. Ignore. Panicky. Terror.

Afterwards, I was showered with compliments, many of which (especially from grad students and postdocs) included a line like, "And you were so calm!"

You can fool all of the people some of the time....

I think I made a couple of mistakes, though. The first was that I was so damn relieved when the talk was over that my brain totally switched off....right about as I got the first question, which was on an aspect of my work that is outside my turf. I gabbled senselessly for a while. Ugh.

The other is that when people later told me how calm I seemed, I promptly informed them that in fact I had been shaky with fear, but covered it really well. Although this probably won me some points with people who were impressed I could fake it, in retrospect I should know better than to play the whole "deflect compliments" game. Shoulda just smiled and said, "Thank you!"

Overall, though, it was a terrific experience and I think I will be much more relaxed in the future when I give talks--having plunged in at the deep end I'm less afraid of the sharks (mixed metaphor?) I got plenty of feedback on experiments, good questions, and even the occasional discussion about collaboration out of it. Huzzah.

But I was totally nervous.