24.04 | Apr '24: Slow, but productive month...

This month had lots of ups and downs... We reached the hottest April days in Dutch history, while also having some code orange storms. At work, I had to handover a project I really came to love but this made time for another project which I love even more!

ToastMasters

This month I hosted the first two ToastMasters sessions together with some coworkers at my day job and it was great! The first session was mostly aimed at getting to understand the nerves, fears and expectations of the participants, but while we were discussing those, we smoothly rolled into some table topic discussions on how others handle the fears that were expressed. One of the coworkers will be presenting for the first time end of May and had a lot of questions to ask those that presented before and slowly but steadily one topic after the other was addressed. We did not manage to do any real practicing rounds this time, but we did agree on adding those to the agenda for the next session. All in all, I don't think this first sessions could have gone any better and all of us left the room feeling very fulfilled. Once I will write the articles to startup your own ToastMasters, I will definitely suggest this lightweight approach for the first session!

During the second session (this morning), all participants were there again and the actual practicing rounds started! We decided to recreate the stage (a mini version) as it will be during our event at the end of May and recorded all our rounds. This became really helpful in getting the actual experience, but standing in front of an audience of 6 people is off-course different than an audience of 250 people. After the rounds, the discussions were mostly about the experience of telling their stories and sharing constructive feedback among each other. For next time, we decided we will repeat this again, but practice the actual presentations that we have planned for the event. Since we have a few of the Meta Quest 3 VR glasses in the company, we are going to check out if we can use these to practice in a virtual room with a few 100 people. See if this will mimic the feeling a little bit. If it does, I will definitely make a blog or an article out of this, so stay tuned! :)

Writing the articles...

In the background I have collected some materials again as a preparation for the next articles, but I haven't created any of them yet. The only thing you might have noticed are some errors I removed from the existing articles and the header images for the "Power-Ups" have been updated. In short, little to no progress visible on the website this month.

Videos & Scripting...

As mentioned last month, hardware is available and I even settled on the locations that I will be using to shoot the video's. The first scripts have been created and I even did a first attempt at shooting a video, but I forgot to select the right microphone, making it sound very bad! On top of that, you could just see it was my first time... Nerves were jumping of the screen :)

I will practice a bit more and hope to have a couple of video's to upload somewhere in June or July.

Social Media Update...

No changes this month...

Instagram: @rebelsonstage
Facebook: @stagerebelscom
YouTube: @StageRebels

Conclusion

To me it felt like a very productive month, the most productive since I started. I feel like I am nearing the stage where I can start going out in public, but now that the time for recording the video's is coming closer, I also noticed some little jitters. Time to read my own eBook I guess ;)

May will start with a week of holidays in the UK, after which the majority of my time will be spent on the 2 presentations I need to prepare for our event. Next to this, we have the toastmasters and probably a few additional coworkers to coach as well. In between, I will try to give the recordings another go and maybe add an article or two, but May might be a very slow month when it comes to StageRebels.com ...

Header Image
Early April, while the weather was really nice, we went for a walk in the forrest when this butterfly landed in front of our feet... Couldn't resist taking a picture :)