Is My Idea Presentation Worthy?

Welcome back to the podcast. Oh, my goodness, it is September. The weather's starting to cool off here in Austin, Texas. And by that, I mean, I suggested we go out to patio for lunch with one of my friends. And they reminded me it was still 100 degrees at lunchtime. I was like, oh, what? I thought it was 70. It’s 90. That's totally fine. We're all fine, we're fine. Everything's good. But on the reel over here, things are going really well. We have so much coming up for you in the Allied fam. If you are not on our email list, it is time to get on there. You can just go to alliedindependenceonline.com sign up for some free lesson plans and you will be on our email list because we have a big surprise coming only to the email list in October.

Transcript of the Episode:

How many times do we have a strategy that's working for us? And we think nothing of it. We don't stop to celebrate it. And oftentimes we take it for granted. Think about it. Do you have something that your learner's are doing that is really cool? Something that eluded you or them just a few years ago. That's what I'm talking about. Those small things that we haven't even taken into consideration that they are really, really good. It could help other people. I know we all think of certain people as presenters, and we can name them. But I want you to know that you have a voice. So today, I'm going to go through the criteria that I look at for submitting my own presentation applications to other conferences, and what the symposium planning committee looks at when selecting presentations. We are going to look at what mistakes people make when figuring out if their idea is worthy of a presentation. What I look for when submitting my own presentation applications or call for papers. What does symposium planning committee looks for when we're selecting presentations, how to set up your presentation outline, so you can have a baller description.

But first we're gonna start off with a story. Let's take it all the way back to 2013. It was my first presentation and don't remind me. It’s almost been 10 years, we don’t need to go there. But it's fine. It's fine. I was literally barefoot, pregnant and wearing yoga pants. Oh, yeah. I mean, fair enough. It was a yoga presentation. But I wore yoga pants and flip-flops for the entire conference. I had applied with friends to present on yoga, and luckily they had already presented on yoga and were a ton of help throughout the whole process. I personally didn't feel like my voice had any value. I didn't view myself as a presenter, let alone an international presenter. But I knew that what we were doing and the results that we were seeing, were magical and hadn't been shared enough with the world yet.

So here I am, in what I will remember as the smelliest city in the world. 14 weeks pregnant, either sleeping or desperately trying to hold in my own vomit the whole time. And I was about to present so queasy with all of it right. And that was the moment that I learned that Mac computers don't automatically connect with an audio visual system of conference rooms. Once the panic subsided and we got things working, the presentation was amazing. I remember sitting at the back of the room, which is where I usually present from, with 30 plus people in the field of visual impairments about enter Shavasana relaxation as the calm of Oh, I did it rushed through me. I did it, I fulfilled my dream. Now that stepping stone led me down a path to where I am now. And I could not be more grateful for the whole process, the overcoming my fear of applying. And then, due to circumstances, I was in contact with their planning committee to find out how I could better my presentation application. And basically, that's how we got in. It wasn't automatically accepted. I really had to overcome some internal obstacles, whether they were actually in external obstacles or not, the internal obstacle of just having to ask for critiques and having to overcome my own self doubt was enough. Now, I love getting in front of crowds, hundreds, I don't care just bring on. I love being different in my presentation approach. I love the connection that I get when other people take just one tidbit of information that I say and use it. I love being silly. I love making jokes that nobody laughs to. I love more than anything, seeing the ripple effect of my efforts. Because this field isn't about me as a professional. It's not about you, either. It's about all of us. But if we continue to keep our best information inside of ourselves, simply because we're scared what other people will say, we won't see O&M grow into its fullest potential. You can only do that by sharing information.

Theodore Roosevelt has this passage called The Man in the Arena. And it says,

“It is not the critic who counts not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who airs who comes short, again and again. Because there is no effort without error, and shortcoming. But who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

Think about that for a second. How often do we hold ourselves back? Because we're so scared of the O&M police. We're so scared of what other people are going to think of us. Because internally, what if they're right? What if their criticisms about me are right? What if I'm not good enough? What if that isn't the best way to teach that skill? What if they know better? But here's the thing. Those what ifs only matter to us if we already secretly believe them. If someone were to walk up to you, right now, and said, Oh, that unicorn on your head is so ugly. Is that gonna matter? Probably not because you probably don't have a unicorn on your head. But if someone said, Oh, that teaching style that you taught me, it didn't work. How would that feel? A little stingy sometimes.

That's the part of us that we need to overcome. That's the part of us holding us back and holding our entire profession back. I don't care who you are going to go present with I don't know what step you're going to take in front of a crowd, be it an in service, be it an international presentation, be it a simple conversation, where you have a piece of information that could help somebody else If it is asked for by that person, and you don't share it, you are only hindering yourself, them, their students, your further learning and our profession as a whole. You don't have to feel like you are the expert in the room in order to join the conversation. Because all in all, that's all you're doing, you're joining the conversation. And just like, if you walked up to a group of your friends, and you just stood there, without talking to them without joining in, you wouldn't be a productive member of that conversation. The same is going on right now.

Going no presentations are a lot of work. I know that they are. And they know that you are already stressed out, you already have a lot to do. You already have so much on your plate. But hopefully by the end of this podcast, you will be able to break it down to figure out should I even present on this or should I not. And what's the best way for me just to format my outline and my presentation. And then you can take it chunk by chunk, and let the ideas come to you in the shower while you're on a walk, allow yourself the freedom and flexibility to start thinking about these things early enough in advance that you can put them all down. And in a later podcast, I might share how I actually set up my presentations, I might add it to the end of this. And then you just put it on a presentation.

Now putting it on the presentation is typically the hardest, or at least for me. So who are you going to listen to? Are you going to be guided by the man in the arena? Are you going to triumph and help your profession and increase the independence of people with visual impairments all around the world? It's totally up to you.

Common Mistakes Made when Preparing for a Presentation

Some of the mistakes when figuring out if your idea is worthy of a presentation, we’ve got three mistakes here, these are the biggest ones that I see all the time. And I can call them out because I've done each and every single one of them.

1. Thinking that people know what you know.

They don't. Nobody has your perspective. Not a single person has been through the experiences that you've been through to come up with the ideas that you can come up with. I used to have this thing where if I was in a meeting and I had this idea, I wouldn't share it because you know what? My brain would say, Oh, they already had that idea. They thought it wasn't good enough. That's why they're not sharing it. Like Okay, thanks brain. That's helpful. It will turn on constantly like, Oh, I hadn't thought about it that way Kass, thanks for sharing. Or at least your idea can then spark somebody else's ideas for their own thinking.

2. Thinking that data matters more than it does.

We love us some data we do. But dissertation data, and how many people filled out a survey doesn't solve problems. We'll get into that later.

3. Not getting buy in from the audience first.

Where them not understanding that what you see as an issue is an issue.

So if you're a really, really forward thinking person, and you walk out to this cliff, right? You might see this beautiful hotel, where you can have a bathtub on a terrace where the bathtub is on wheels and goes out on the terrace, you might be able to see stuff like that, in your mind. When you take other people who don't see that out to this terrace or this cliff. They may not see that, because they're just like, oh my god, we're on a cliff. Sometimes, we are so forward thinking that it's hard to get buy in from our community. That does not mean that your thoughts are bad. That does not mean that your idea is not worthy. So on all of those instances, I want you to ask yourself, have I been making that mistake? Have I been thinking that I know the same things that everybody else knows and no more. Have I been relying so much on data? That doesn't necessarily matter? And how have I been getting defeated because other people don't necessarily follow me or my ideas?

What I Look for in My Own Presentation

1. Transformation

How will their lives be changed? After attending? I'm not into giving fluff. I'm not into giving information or having people spend time with me, and then not walking away as a better person in some way, shape, or form or another. So if you're just thinking, I want to share ABC, start to think about it in a way of, I'm here as the servant, I am not the hero. Does your idea have an actual transformation? Now the transformation doesn't have to be huge. Remember, people are going to take one idea and run with it. It doesn't have to be life changing in an hour presentation. That's not a viable expectation. But can you course correct your audience just one little bit? Can you give them one idea, I'll share some of the transformations from some of the other presentations that I've done in the past. For independence with ease, the one that we just ran last summer, the transformation was for the participants to walk away with the five step plan for how to structure their students O&M success path. So that they the teacher could leave work on time. The five step path, each one of those parts, has a multitude of things to go in through it. We didn't have time for that in an hour, give a brief overview and I deep dive a little bit into some of them.

2. Differentiation

How is this different from what other people are doing? But I like to do here is to what's called niche or niche, niching down, I don't really know how to say it. It's basically how to be the expert in the room. If you want to be an expert. The way that I look at it is you have to combine two areas that you were super passionate about. By combining those two areas, that creates your expertise. It could be O&M, Yoga. It could be teaching students with visual impairments and the ECC. It could be children and CVI. It could be ECC and technology. I'm thinking of specific people here who have demonstrated an expertise. Think about our wonderful our favourite, in our planning committee we have a saying wwdd ‘What would Dona do?’ And we ask ourselves that we hold ourselves to the Donna's standard. What would Dona do? We all know Dona Sauerburger, which is amazing. We love her, love her. She has areas of expertise. She's taken O&M. She's taken street crossings, and working with people with deaf blindnes. But she doesn't talk about activity centres. She doesn't talk about playdough and O&M. She talks about specific things, by hyper focusing her attention. She's able to give us such detailed information that she can reach your life on a moment's notice, without her ever knowing about it. That's kind of what I'm talking about there. I think about Christine Roman, and I think about CVI Scotland, how they have focused on CVI. They each have done it in their own ways, by combining two areas. When you're looking at differentiation. What is it that you can narrow down your focus on your bigger focus? And then you have your more narrow focus a little bit deeper? Can you make your topic a little bit different? Can you make the way that you present a little bit different? How is this gonna be different for other people? Then what they've already seen before.

3. Passion

Like how much do you love this because if you just get up in In front of a group of people, whether you're actually standing up or you're sitting down, because you're presenting with a symposium. Your passion is gonna come off, like, your vibe attracts your tribe, right? You're just like bland and dull. really gonna, just not going to be super fun. Think about something that you just don't enjoy. Me? folding my laundry and putting it away. I’m not doing a presentation on that. Because I don't like it. That will be horrible. You don't want to sit down and do that with me. You don't want to. But O&M Yes. intersections. Yes. Things that light you up what lights you up.

That's what you want to look for. transformation, differentiation and passion. Know what the symposium looks for is a little bit different, mostly the same, we only have one presentation per slot. This year, we're going back to one presentation each time one room, and then we'll have the extra as bonus presentations. That way your attention isn't split. And we like having it that way so that you can go deeper into the conversations someone else. Actually Lil Deverell shared this with me about the symposium and how she liked it and what the conversations she was able to have on the breaks went deeper, because you bypass the whole Oh, what presentation did you go to? Oh, how was it? You go deeper straight into the heart of the presentation. You can dm your friends. You can like, get together. You can text with one another and say, Hey, I really love that. I really didn't know this existed, or you know, you could just stay with us in the room. And that's a lot of times when we talk about the strategies and whatnot.

So we are also looking at transformation and differentiation as well. We’re also looking at how applicable is this? And who does this serve? I think we've gone over this a little bit about what topics are presentation worthy. Your strategies or your case studies, things that solve a problem. Your personal view. If you have overcome the same challenges as your audience, or their students or clients. That's really valuable. Now just your presentation, or your personal view in and of itself. Like my personal view on this may or may not. But if you compare it with a strategy, if you compare it with something that actually works that they can take away, and they can actually do and use, you're golden.

At the symposium ourselves, we don't typically choose presentations that are heavy, heavy in the marketing. Simply because we have another place for those. And we want to make sure that we are using all of our time for actual strategies.

How to Set Up Your Presentation Outline

Okay, so the last little bit how to set up your presentation, outline and description. Like do you have like three or four sentences to really grab people's attention. So use it as such. In the symposium planning committee members are a little bit different in their headspace as the actual audience members. So for the symposium, this part doesn't matter as much big as we can tell what you're getting at. And because people don't have three or four or five options, so there isn't competition for your presentation time slot. If they're coming live, they'll probably be at your presentation.

When you're writing a description for another conference where they do have multiple presentations going on at the same time. One thing you don't want to do is just write this presentation is going to talk about these topics and then just basically re-list your objectives. Nope. Skip that. Throw it out of the way. Take that moment and think about think about this story. Okay. There's a man, the dog, and they're sitting on their porch and the dog is whimpering a little bit. Then a door salesman comes up to try to sell the man something and he says, Oh, your dog looks like he's in pain. Old man says Yep. The door salesman says well, Why doesn't your dog get up? And the old man says something to the effect because he's not in enough pain, right to actually get up at noon. What you want to do is to be able to motivate people to get up off of the little thorn or whatever that they are sitting on their pain point, if it's not really bothering them that much, they're probably gonna let it roll, just like we all do, right? We all have little things that are pain points, but we don't pay attention to them, until someone shows us, or can motivate us to say, hey, here, look at this, this is going to be a much better way, this will take away your pain point. And it'll be worth the challenge and the discomfort of choosing new activities or choosing a new way of thinking about this or holding cognitive dissonance. You have three or four sentences to say, look, you guys, this is amazing come to this presentation, we're going to solve this problem and this problem, this problem, and this is how we're going to do it. And you're going to walk away with a, b and c. Share with them what they're going to walk away with, instead of just what the objectives are.

Alright, feel like this podcast episode has been so lengthy. But here's what I want you to do with it. Take five minutes, write down a presentation topic, write down three supporting ideas. It could be just like objectives, right? It could be benchmarks step by step, it could be like umbrella term, where you have a, b and c little separately, and they don't build on one another. One main idea, three supporting topics.

And if you like it, presentation applications right now are open until September 17 of 2021. If you're listening to this later, presentation applications are probably closed. But we do open them up typically from June to September every year. So it is during the summertime, you do have to work for 10 minutes in the summer, but you get to be an international presenter, share your ideas with the world in a really supportive and amazing O&M community, and you get a CVREP category three credit that matters to you, as well as complimentary pass to symposium. And we pay you about a day's worth of work as a teacher, because I know for every hour of presentation that I do, it takes me eight hours to set it up. So we pay you about a day's worth of work for that. And if that is interesting to you, then come on over to orientationandmobilitysymposium.com. And you will find all of the rest of the information there. If you have any questions, please feel free to send me a DM on Instagram or Facebook @alliedindependence.

Alright, friends, I hope that what you got from this was that your presentation idea is worth. It’s worthy. You are worthy. And we need your voice. And I'm gonna say this explicitly. If you are in the LBGTQIA+ plus community, if your skin colour is people of global majority, we need you. We need all other people to see that there's diversity in this field, and that they can do all of these things that you are doing so wonderfully, just as long as you are. Sometimes we just need some more representation on screens. To see that we can do it too. Sometimes we just need to know what's possible for us. Now whether you are in the global majority of skin colour, or you're in the LBGTQIA+ community, or neither of those apply to you, I urge you to come submit your presentation application with us. I look forward to seeing it come through. And I look forward to getting up with you in my DMs. Always the best part of my day. I hope that you can use this to take us apart and I'll talk to you in a few weeks.

You know that feeling when you've been rushing around all day. Your kids need food your students need to be scheduled. It's five minutes before your next lesson, and you have no plans. Teaching during a pandemic has had many challenges. Wouldn't you agree? One of which being it takes so much longer to plan for a remote O&M lesson, then he did to plan for a face to face lesson. But that's not a problem anymore because my friend we have got you covered. Your Allied Independence community stepped up. And we've bundled together eight remote O&M lesson plans that can be taught virtually or distance all created by your community and customizable to your individual students unique needs in five minutes or less. You want ‘em? I know you do. All you have to do is go to Allied Independence online.com forward slash remote R E M O T E and grab your copy. Eight free O&M lesson plans so you can start spending your time doing what you do best and that my friend is teaching.