Back in 2018, I stopped accepting offers to speak at conferences and other professional development events. Since I was booked out for a year, it wasn’t until the end of 2019 that I finally cleared my calendar. By then, I was committed to not giving any more presentations.
People still invite me to keynote events, but I’m quite serious about retiring from speaking.
Why?
The Easy Answer: Travel Burnout
Yes, my first answer is always the typical “I’m tired of traveling” stuff. And, yes, after years of flying and renting a car every week, I was indeed done. But, the problem with this reason is that folks keep asking if I’m ready to speak at events again. Have I un-burned out from travel yet?
The Real Answer: Speaking Adds Work For Teachers
The bigger reason I don’t want to give any more talks is that even the most wonderful talk in the world puts more work in the hands of teachers.
If I give a talk about implementing Depth and Complexity, designing math lessons, or asking better questions, every teacher in the crowd will have to go home and implement everything on their own. And you’ll only have your memory, notes, and perhaps a PDF of my slides to go off of!
The jump from “I heard about this at a conference” to “I implemented this well in my classroom” is enormous.
Sure, people told me how much they loved my talks, but almost no one emailed me about how they used the ideas from my talk – even though I ended every talk asking people to please email me with feedback (with “ian@byrdseed.com” on the screen). I always reference this tweet as one of the few times I did get feedback.
Nowadays, with Byrdseed.TV, I know I’m taking work off of teachers’ plates because I get so much feedback showing students’ work. I keep a collection of Tweets here. Teachers actually use the ideas because those ideas are in a format that is actually easy to use: videos that you can just play for your class.
When I find myself thinking, “Should I prepare a talk about XYZ?” my answer is always, “No, I’ll just make five more lessons that build on XYZ and put them on Byrdseed.TV.”
So, a better reason for no longer speaking is that I am much happier taking work off of teachers’ plates than serving them up even more work.
The Scarier Answer: Starting To Speak Without Experience
I could end it on that happy note, but it’s worth pulling back the curtain a bit more.
If you’re a good speaker, it’s easy to sound great on stage talking about any topic. Good speakers are captivating and entertaining. They have charisma and well-rehearsed jokes. As a speaker, you learn what gets a good response and what falls flat.
But, if you follow up with an enjoyable speaker after their talk, you might discover that they’ve never even done the thing they spoke about!
The longer my speaking career grew, and the farther away my actual experience became, the more I needed to whip things up out of thin air. Conferences wanted me to give a keynote about This Year’s Trend, but I had no experience with This Year’s Trend. I was uncomfortable. I couldn’t keep giving the same five talks, but I didn’t want to become a charlatan.
So I quit!
And those are the three reasons I stopped speaking at events!
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