linkedin live episode 4 - opening doors with public speaking

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

What's going on podcast listeners? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for listening to guidance counselor 2.0. I really hope that you enjoy this episode. I wanted to, of course, remind you to please rate, review, and subscribe to this podcast. It would mean the absolute world to me. So take some time out right now. Put this thing on pause. Go rate and review it and come back to listen. If you need to reach me, shoot me an email, tailor-d at Vaco.com. If you want to join my texting community, I am doing a ton of sharing of general career advice, job tips, etc. Shoot me a text 615-235-5650.

As always, if you want to follow me on social media, I'm doing a ton on Twitter at TDS&T-D-E-S-S-E-Y-N. Connecting me on like Ben. And again, I hope you enjoy this podcast episode and thank you again for listening. It means the absolute world to me. Michael is joining us. I'm going to let Michael introduce himself in a second. Michael is hailing from the great city of Cincinnati. But definitely comment, post, Fort Worth, Texas, Hosewag. What's going on, man? Glad you are here. Fort Worth, Texas. I have a LinkedIn user. Hey, guys, good morning. Good morning, LinkedIn user. I don't see your name. Sorry. We'll let it trickle another minute or two that we'll get rocking and rolling.

Share it with your friends. Retweet, repost. This will be well worth your 15 minutes of your morning. Oh, we got one like on Facebook. That's probably my mom. Hi, my mom. Hi, Taylor's mom. Thanks for watching. Yeah. Oh, we got a few more. Hey, again, thanks for tuning in. Please leave a comment where you're at. Let me know on a Monday morning. Thanks for tuning in. All right, sweet. We're going to start it. We're getting some more viewers and more watchers. Watch it. We're getting more watchers. I think that's the technical term. All right. So thank you to the guys counselor 2.0 live edition. We're going to live on this Monday morning.

And I have the unique opportunity to have Michael Richardson on. And so I know for y'all who are watching, you're like, hey, Taylor, remember when you first started this series, you're like, I'm just going to go. What's up, Louisiana brand and Smith. What's going on, man? We got Louisiana. Nice. LSU crushed our game cocks two weeks ago. So what I'm doing now is I'm starting to have pretty cool people that I meet. And so I'm just having them on for 15 minutes, just kind of having a chit chat. So Michael, without further ado, introduce yourself. Tell the people what you do, who you are. And oh, by the way, we got somebody from Nigeria to it.

Wow. What's going on sweet. So Michael, give the give the viewers a little background about you. I'm Michael Richardson. I am a senior software developer at Kroger. I'm a tech clip on the SEO team. I love working at Kroger. It's fantastic. I also do a lot of developer community work in Cincinnati. So I run a lead organizer for momentum developer conference and also these instances that need software craftsmanship meet up. So those are my two primary things. And then I also host a weekly informal chat, which Taylor was kind enough to join this past Thursday. And I called T and tech with Michael. And I've been really enjoyed that.

So you did like like T's tech time. T like we should have capitalized on all the all the T's. But we can do that next time. So what's going on we got it from India again Nigeria, Louisiana, Texas. This is awesome. Thank you all for tuning in. So I'm having Michael on because I think for the most part, again, people can argue this, but I think when you think of developers. You think of the developer who like you slide pizza under a door. You never talk to you have terrible social skills and just tinker around in our nerds all day. And so I'm always, I'm always incredibly fascinated by individuals who have grown their community.

I'm who have grown their name in the market. And Michael, I think you've done a good job of that. So Michael, I guess they're starting to dive into to what led you first off, what led you to because there may be some people watching this. or like, you know what, I want to develop a community. I want to develop a network. But I'm scared or I don't know how. So talk about maybe getting over some some initial fear. Sure. And how you started to kind of chip away at the networking building. Sure. So there's a lot of different layers there. When I first started doing talk for development, I started going to meet ups.

I found that to be really valuable starting to network with people. And then I went to my first developer conference and that was just an incredible experience. It was like life changing in a way. What was the first developer conference you went to? I'm curious. It was a stir track and that would have been 20, 13, 2014, 2015. It was more in there. You know, that I probably should know that off hand. Anyway, I was just super impressed. And I knew that I wanted to be a part of that. That I someday I wanted to speak at a conference. And I knew that I was a long way away.

Because I had only been doing full time development for about a year at that point. Hey, Michael, what made that conference life changing you? It was, wow, you know, that was a well. But it just got me so interested and excited about what was possible and how, you know, it was a thousand to two thousand geeks who love software development coming together to talk about that. And for me, particularly as an extrovert, that was just so cool. It was one of the best, you know, things that ever done. Because you just feel like you're surrounded by a thousand friends. You all share something in common.

But I was also super impressed with the caliber of the speakers. And I remember thinking, that's going to mean me someday. I want that. And, you know, from that point on I kind of started to set that in motion. That's awesome. And so, yeah, so talk to me about, I mean, because so, so there's no public speaking background with you at all. Not really. No, no before before I got into software development. You know, I had actually done some acting. So in title schools, I was in musicals. And I actually did a couple plays, a little community theater around here. That was kind of funny because my daughter was mostly interested.

And then I kind of, there's not a lot of men that usually do a community theater. So I kind of got one of the big roles. That was, that's awesome. That's awesome. It was fun. But anyway, so I started out by just submitting a talk, knowing almost certainly that it wouldn't get accepted. And I remember telling myself and telling others like, look, I don't care. I'm not, they're not almost certainly they're not going to accept this talk. But I have to have a first submission. Like, and this might as well be it. The sooner I do that first submission, the sooner I get started on that path.

And that's, you know, now that I think about it, really led me to today where, you know, I've spoken to several conferences this year. And, you know, then we can, we'll get into the, the, actually organizing part here in just a minute. But yes, I love the, the speaking part of it. And it's just been long game all the time, you know, building my network, making connections with speakers, making connections with organizers. And, you know, just always doing a step further trying to, to keep myself out of the comfort zone. So I'm always trying something new that I haven't done before. And so talk, so talk to me about maybe some, I guess some opportunities that have opened up with what's speaking, right?

Because the whole point is, is like, you know, for me doing these LinkedIn lives, going on, you know, obviously, you know, going on opportunities like tech, t, t time, tech T, you know, has opened doors for me, has, has allowed me to meet critical people like yourself. Like, what are some, some things that have, that has happened to you because of your speaking opportunities? So, gosh, just the amazing people I've gotten to interact with. And then the, the things that I've learned from them as a result and the opportunity to reach out to them when I have questions, you know, so just even, let's take a little example of you, Taylor, like, just, you know, I saw you on Twitter on, on LinkedIn, you know, you were putting out some great content.

You were really engaging with people and I thought, I got to get to know this guy. I need to connect with him. And so, you know, by making that effort and putting out that, that, that connection request and then getting the chance to talk to you now, I, I, I worlds opened up more. I've learned more about recruiting. I've learned more about how to make myself more valuable in the job market, that kind of thing. That's awesome. So, so, I'm not going to talk about putting together a conference too. I was in love with getting to transition that. Yeah. I would love to. So, I, you know, I have always, like I said, I've always loved conferences since my very first one.

And, I got to Kroger and, you know, I was like, telling some people, hey, we should sponsor these conferences, we should sponsor these conferences, which definitely get our name out there. I think Kroger's an amazing place to work, but sometimes, you know, you got to get that, that marketing, right? You got to get the name out there. Yeah. And, they're like, oh, that's cool. That's cool. But also, there's this guy. I mean, he's a manager here and he's starting a conference and I'm like, well, I got to be a part of that. I got to figure out what's going on there. So, that was Dominic, Kitroli.

And he worked with a manager at Kroger at the time. And he was starting this conference called momentum. And so I jumped on and, you know, at first year, I was kind of, it was in partnership with the circuit and the circuit, which is a nonprofit in Cincinnati, but circuit did a lot of the back behind the scenes work and then Dominic and I did a lot of the work organizing speakers and stuff like that. But I was really kind of Dominic's right hand man for a lot of that. And then he decided to move out to Portland and so we're going to momentum over to me.

And Dominic, he's had, we were recruiting for some of the stuff. Audio, are they? Yeah. Yeah. I think that they're going to be right. Yeah. And he had a company called kickstand. Yeah. And I, so that just, you know, it was an opportunity and I just jumped in and then further opportunities have opened up from there. And that's what I've really discovered, you know, both with the meet up and with the conference is first just taking advantage of the small opportunity that's there, you know, making the most of it. And so as I do that more opportunities open up to do more things and bigger things.

Absolutely. So, so got a question about hostway. How did you choose a topic to present? I guess talk through for those, for those individuals who are watching are like man, Michael, this sounds great. Would love to speak out of conference. How do I even pick a topic? What would you recommend? I have some thoughts too. A couple things. So first of all, you want to choose something you're passionate about, obviously. You want to choose. You know, something that you think people will be interested in and is applicable to the actual conference. So like you may love collecting Funko Pops, right? Like I know people who love those things.

You could potentially give a whole talk about how you know, you know, know which ones are exactly. Yeah, exactly. But if you're on a developer conference that might not really through grass flow, or not as a retention. So when I did, I was running the co-op program at my former company, a sure X at the time. And I thought, well, you know, I think there's an opportunity to talk about how to make your co-op program great. I know a lot of companies, they, you know, kind of stick their interns with the co-ops in the corner and say, oh, I just work on these things. And we did ours a little differently.

We embedded our co-ops with our teams and really made them part of our process. And we set up four of our mentorship and all of these things. And I thought that that could be really valuable to other attendees. And that was how I chose my first topic to submit. That would never got accepted because there were some other more experience speakers that were doing similar topics. That's okay. But it gave me validation. Okay. That topic was cool. So I can continue working on that. So the first topic that got accepted was one about incorporating functional programming into your object or any programming. And that was something that I always been interested in.

And I thought that other people would enjoy as well. That's awesome. Yeah. So a few things, Hossway, on kind of how do you choose a topic. So I've had the opportunity to, you know, there's some engineers and I feel really blessed when engineers reach out to me to ask about conference speakers. I'm like, I don't, I'm just, I'm like a posture syndrome to the max. I think, I think, I think there's three things. I think there's three buckets that you can look like lump into talks into. So the first thing is incredibly technical. Right. So it really appeals to the developers that are there. Right.

Implementing functional, logical oriented, right. Like very granular, very specific. And I think there, I mean, there are people that could, that breakdowns certain topics like very minuscule for 30, 40 comments at conferences. And it goes over very well. So I think that's the first thing. If you want to go super technical, do that. I think the next thing is, is you can go super high level technical and appeal more towards managers and beginners. Right. So managers, a lot of man, and you can't be from wrong, but a lot of managers go to these conferences to kind of pick up, learn, kind of see what's happening in the market.

So they just want really small bits to bring back to their team to maybe kind of learn. And then you have a lot of junior devs there who are just wanting to kind of pick up something. So very technical is first. Second is like super high level. And then a third one is more people skills. Right. So that's becoming really hot now. Everyone's talking. That's why I don't get accepted anywhere anymore. Because everyone's doing people skills. And so, but I'll tell you this too, Hoseway. So those are my three buckets. What's the way I'll tell you this as well. The one conference talk that I came up with a year ago had been rejected about, you know, seven, eight times.

Now it's starting to get traction. And that's how social media can land your dream job. It's really kind of breaking down LinkedIn and hacking LinkedIn and Twitter. And so again, like I submitted, I had to submit that talk over a year and put out content around that talk on all platforms. To really kind of, you know, get some momentum. So yeah, that's kind of my thoughts on on speaking topic. So Michael, as we wrap up here again, thank you. For obviously attending guidance counselor 2.0, the live edition. Any final words of wisdom for for individuals watching wanting to get into public speaking. Some encouragement you can leave individuals, something tangible you can leave leave individuals as they go on their Monday.

Sure, so I guess the most important thing I can say is it's you're playing a long game. Don't expect to have you have, you know, amazing wins right ahead right away. You may. That would and that's great if you do, but stick stick with it. You know, I submitted half a dozen conference talks before I ever got one accepted. And you know, just kept kept processing every year, getting a little better every every time getting a little better at my process getting help and get my name out there a little bit more. You know, and that's been super helpful for me. Just realizing I'm in this for the long game.

I want to make sure that I'm connecting with people making those connections because you know, that's been and so speaking has connected with organizers, checking your speakers. It's been just this whole network effect, which has been really fantastic. And don't be afraid to get rejected. Yeah, exactly. Yes, stick with it. Don't be afraid to get rejected. The worst they can say is now. And you know, if they accept you now, the responsibilities on them like, Oh, they accepted you. Yeah, exactly exactly you. Yeah, Michael, thanks for hanging. Thanks for hanging. Thanks for having me. And I'm sure we'll catch up soon. Okay. Sounds great. Take care.

All right. See you, man. Thanks for everybody.