A few weeks ago I was asked to give a presentation on “Entrepreneurship and iOS Development” for a college class on Swift at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. I didn’t want to turn down this opportunity to mold some minds so I said “yes” without really thinking too much.

As I thought about it some more, I realized I was starting to regret my decision. My insecurities about my stutter started to show and I instantly wanted to back down. Speaking isn’t my thing. Public speaking really isn’t my thing. A lot of my worst experiences as a stutterer have come from public speaking. The last thing I wanted to do was embarrass myself in a front of a group of college students by not being able to talk about the thing I am supposedly an “expert” in.

What was I to do?!

Playing To My Strengths

Duh. It’s pretty obvious that “playing to your strengths” is usually in one’s own best interest. I was, however, starting off a pretty big disadvantage being that I have a stutter and I signed myself up to do a public speaking gig.

My stutter usually comes out the worst in a few types scenarios. The worst type of scenario being ones where I have something rehearsed I have to say — and a presentations falls exactly in the category. As a stutterer, I have words that I “know” that I usually fail on. Those words are automatically thrown out of my vocabulary. After rehearsing what I’m about to say, I start to think about other words that I could fail which means I also have to throw those words out of my vocabulary. At the end I’m pretty much left with a vocabulary of zero words with a vision of me just standing up in the front of a crowd with nothing to say.

This is of course almost never the case for me but this is what constantly plays through my head. The amount of anxiety this causes is unreal.

So What Are My Strengths?

I like to think that one of my strengths is the ability to find “fun” in any situation. While needing to make the presentation fun, I also needed a way to get out of the mindset of the “rehearsed” presentation. So how could I combine these two? After a little bit of thinking I had an idea…

The “Choose your own adventure” Presentation

I am giving this presentation to a bunch of college students: I want them to be engaged, I don’t want them falling asleep on me, and I needed to not have a “rehearsed” presentation. I decided on making the presentation a “Choose your own adventure” presentation — similar to the books that I read when I was a kid

I started off the presentation with the two normal introduction slides and then BAM, hit them with the choices that my presentation all offered. Each path was linked to a point in my presentation for that section. After each section, there was slide that said “Your adventure has ended — click here to start over”.