Andy Weir
Engineering Leadership for Scaling Teams

Between “They Said Yes” and Walking on Stage

What preparing my first conference talk taught me about pressure, recovery, and not falling apart in public

The yes that causes the problem

I remember the moment clearly.

I’d applied to speak. They said yes.

I didn’t see the yes coming.

Up until that point, it had been a form. A title. A vague idea that Future Me would somehow deal with.

The acceptance email changed that.

I was on the hook to stand on a stage, in front of a room full of people I didn’t know, many of whom had paid good money to be there, and deliver something worth their time.

That’s when the questions started.

Can I actually do this? Or am I about to stand on a stage and prove that I can’t?

It wasn’t stage fright in the theatrical sense. It was something quieter and heavier. Responsibility. A sense that this wasn’t a safe, internal presentation to peers who wanted me to succeed. This was the general public. A real audience. No shared context. No goodwill buffer.

And sitting underneath it all was an older memory I’d rather not have revisited.

Years earlier, at university, I’d won a prize for my final-year project. As part of that, I was asked to give a talk at an open evening. I knew the material inside out. I’d spent a year living with it. I even did what I thought you were supposed to do at the time: I wrote out exactly what I was going to say, word for word.

Halfway through the presentation, I lost my place.

Not just in the notes. In myself. I couldn’t find the line. Couldn’t re-enter the sentence. Couldn’t read my own writing. After a few painful seconds, it was obvious I wasn’t coming back.

I abandoned the talk halfway through. That experience lodged itself firmly in my head.

That wasn’t nerves. It was a complete lack of a recovery path.

From that point on, any presentation I gave was held together with the loosest possible bullet points. Just enough to avoid that feeling ever happening again.

So when the conference acceptance landed years later, it wasn’t just this talk I was reacting to. It was the accumulation of all of that history, suddenly made relevant again.

This is the point where it’s easy to tell yourself a particular story.

That good speakers are confident.
That confidence comes first.
That if you’re good enough, this shouldn’t feel like this.

That story sounds convincing.
It’s also not how this actually works.

The wrong model

It’s a tempting belief, because it fits the version of speaking most of us have grown up watching.

We grow up with a particular model of “good speaking”: someone walks on stage, relaxed and assured, and delivers something polished and compelling. We don’t see the hours of preparation. We don’t see the discarded drafts, the rehearsals that went badly, or the safety nets quietly put in place. We just see the performance.

From the outside, it looks like confidence is the cause.

So when you don’t feel confident, it’s tempting to conclude you’re missing something fundamental. That maybe you’re not a natural. That maybe this whole thing was a mistake.

There’s a second, related trap that often shows up at the same time.

When people sit down to prepare their first conference talk, many default to the most familiar format they know: the lecture. An introduction. A neat outline. A logical progression of points. Slides that explain, rather than engage.

It’s the format most of us were trained in. Lectures work when you have days or weeks to build understanding. A conference gives you one shot.

The combination of these two ideas – confidence first and lecture mode – is what creates the real problem.

You’re trying to feel a certain way before you’ve built anything to support that feeling. And you’re relying on a format that gives you the least help when things wobble.

What that left me with was a lot of effort and not much reassurance.

Every wobble started to feel significant. Every bad run-through felt like proof that I’d been right to worry in the first place.

The turn

The mistake I was making was subtle.

I was treating confidence as a prerequisite. Something I needed to have before I could start preparing properly. As if the right emotional state would unlock everything else.

It took a while to see how backwards that was.

Confidence isn’t the input. It’s the by-product.

What I actually needed wasn’t to feel calmer, braver, or more assured. I needed to assume that nerves were inevitable and design around that reality. To stop asking, “How do I feel confident?” and start asking, “What happens when this goes a bit wrong – and what will pull me back?”

Instead of rehearsing for a perfect run-through, I started rehearsing for recovery. Instead of aiming to remember everything, I aimed to make it hard to get lost. Instead of hoping I’d rise to the occasion, I assumed I’d wobble – and built support into the talk itself.

Thinking about it that way didn’t make the fear go away. But it stopped dominating everything else.

Building for recovery, not perfection

I started worrying about something else: what happens if I lose my place? What happens if I dry up for a second?

I’d had enough experiences by then to know how fragile a “perfect” run can be. One small slip and suddenly everything feels harder than it needs to be.

I wasn’t trying to remember everything. I just wanted to know where I was if I got lost.

That mindset led to a series of decisions that all pointed in the same direction.

What started to matter wasn’t any single rehearsal, but how all the pieces worked together.

I needed to know the talk made sense from start to finish. To hear it enough that it felt familiar even when my attention dipped. To have clear places I could land if I lost my way. To practise in ways that took comfort away rather than adding polish. And to know the whole thing wouldn’t fall apart if the tech did.

I wrote a full script, not because I planned to memorise it word-for-word, but because I needed to know the talk worked end to end. That the language flowed. That the transitions made sense. That there were no dead ends, I’d only discover under pressure.

I recorded myself reading the whole thing out loud. My words, in my voice.

I listened to it in the car. I listened to it on walks. Not sitting down to “study” it – just letting it play in the background. After a while, the shape of the talk started to feel familiar, even when I wasn’t concentrating on it.

I also stopped thinking of it as one long thing. I split it into chunks I could recognise. If I dropped one bit, I wanted to know where I was and what came next without having to think too hard. Those chunks ended up on flashcards and later became my speaker notes.

Rehearsal changed, too.

I also stopped practising just to get through the talk cleanly.

Once I could get through it cleanly, I stopped practising like that.

I shuffled the cards so I couldn’t rely on the order. I turned the recording down so I couldn’t lean on the words. I rehearsed while walking, when my attention was split.

It wasn’t meant to match the real thing. I just wanted to know what happened when it stopped being comfortable.

Over time, I noticed something shift.

The nerves didn’t go away. But they stopped spiking in the same way. There were fewer moments where one small slip threatened to derail the whole thing.

It wasn’t that I suddenly cared less about the talk.

I just wasn’t one mistake away from panicking anymore.

I still knew things could go wrong. I just had a sense of what I’d do if they did.

That didn’t happen all at once.

The ladder

The first step was a four-minute lightning talk at a Tech Cornwall meetup – not to perform well, but to prove to myself I could get through it without crumbling.

Home crowd. People I already knew. Everyone willing me to succeed.

There were technical issues. I forgot bits. I was basically muddling through. I spent more time watching the clock than looking at anyone in the room, just trying not to run over or freeze.

I walked off stage thinking, well… that happened.

Not amazing. Not terrible. Just… done.

At the time, it felt underwhelming. Later, I realised that was kind of the point. It showed me I could stand up, talk in public, hit the end, and nothing terrible would happen – even when it wasn’t smooth.

The next step was a ten-minute lightning talk at LDX3 London.

A different league. Big venue. Big names. Proper stage. Dan North is giving the opening keynote on the same stage. I’d seen him speak loads of times. He’s brilliant. That’s a hard act to follow, even indirectly.

Just before I went on, my mouth went dry. The water bottles were out of reach. The comfort monitor was in a weird place. We had to resize my speaker notes at the last minute.

All my attention went into delivery.

I got through it, but it felt like I was a passenger in my own body. Autopilot. I know it landed because people told me it did – but my memory of the middle is fuzzy. I remember starting. I remember finishing. Everything else is a blur.

Years earlier, I did a handful of parachute jumps, the first two were like that. You’re following instructions. Your body is doing things faster than your brain. You’re reacting, not really aware.

On the third jump, I did what’s called an “awareness jump”.

The instructor told me beforehand: after you leave the plane, I’ll wave at you. Just wave back.

I remember exiting the aircraft, seeing him waving, and thinking, I can see him waving. I was present enough to notice what was happening, not just survive it.

That’s the closest analogy I have for what happened next.

The Agile on the Beach talk was forty-five minutes, with Q&A. A room I’d been in many times as an attendee. A talk I really wanted to get right.

This time, I was there.

I could see the audience properly. I noticed when people were nodding along, when someone drifted onto their phone, and when attention came back. I was aware of where I was on the stage. I was choosing when to pause. I wasn’t rushing to get to the next bit.

I wasn’t thinking, what comes next?

I knew where I was.

That’s the shift you only get once. The move from getting through it to being in the room while you’re doing it.

You don’t lose your nerves. You don’t suddenly feel fearless.

But you stop wondering whether you’ll make it to the end.

Nerves aren’t the problem

Just before my AOTB slot, I was pacing.

Up and down. Back and forth.

Burning off nervous energy, pacing like a caged tiger.

I wasn’t alone.

Another speaker was waiting for their slot too. They were doing exactly the same thing. Same pacing. Same restless energy.

We caught each other’s eye and laughed. No words needed.

What stuck with me was what happened next.

They went on stage, delivered a genuinely great talk, and later I found out they’d been asked back to keynote the following year.

That stuck with me.

Because everything about how they looked beforehand suggested nerves. A lot of them. And everything about the outcome suggested competence.

Those two things clearly weren’t opposites.

If anything, they seemed to coexist.

Up until then, I’d been treating nerves as a warning sign. As evidence that something wasn’t right. That maybe I wasn’t ready yet.

But standing there, watching someone visibly nervous go on to absolutely nail it, broke that link for me.

The nerves weren’t a signal of inability. They were a sign that the stakes mattered.

I still paced before my talk. I still felt the adrenaline. My hands didn’t suddenly stop fidgeting.

The difference was that I stopped arguing with it.

I wasn’t trying to calm myself down or “get into the right headspace”. I let the energy be there and trusted the work I’d already done.

That trust didn’t come from feeling confident.

It came from knowing I’d built something that would hold, even if I was buzzing with nerves when I walked on stage.

If you’re reading this with that same restless energy in your body – pacing, second-guessing, wondering if you’ve bitten off more than you can chew – that’s not a sign you shouldn’t be doing this.

It’s a sign you care.

What actually helped

I didn’t get through this by finding some hidden confidence switch.

Most of what helped came from trying to reduce how much I had to rely on how I felt on the day.

At some point, I realised I didn’t need to remember everything. I needed to make it hard to completely lose my place. So I stopped thinking in terms of a single flow and broke the talk into chunks I could recognise and recover from. If one bit went a bit sideways, I wanted to know where I was and what came next without panicking.

I ended up with a full script.

It wasn’t something I planned to recite.

I just wanted to read it start to finish without stumbling. Hearing it out loud, in my own voice, helped in a way I didn’t really think about at the time.

After a while, it started feeling familiar.

I also changed how I rehearsed.

Once I could get through it cleanly, I stopped practising like that. I shuffled the cards so I couldn’t rely on order. I turned the recording down. I rehearsed while walking, when my attention was split.

I wanted to see what happened when it stopped being comfortable.

I also got quite deliberate about where my attention went in the days leading up to the talk.

I didn’t watch other talks before mine.

I’d seen enough great speakers to know how quickly that comparison can get into your head, and I didn’t want that noise right before I went on.

One thing I hadn’t thought much about at first was the introduction.

Both times, the stage host read out the bio I’d submitted. And both times, they stumbled through it. Long sentences. Awkward phrasing. It took longer than it should have.

That was on me.

I’d written it to be read, not spoken. Once I rewrote it with that in mind, it stopped being an awkward handoff and started setting the tone for the rest of the talk.

And then there was redundancy.

Printed slides. Printed notes. Flashcards. Knowing I could still give the talk if the tech failed, the internet dropped, or something unexpected happened, took a surprising amount of pressure off everything else.

None of this made the nerves disappear.

What it did was reduce the number of ways a small wobble could turn into a complete derailment. I still had to walk on stage and do the thing – but I wasn’t one mistake away from falling apart.

You’re only a first-time speaker once

There’s a version of this experience you only get once.

The moment after the acceptance email, when it tips from an interesting idea to real responsibility. When you don’t yet know – really know – whether you can do this. When every rehearsal carries the quiet question: Is this actually going to hold up in the room?

That uncertainty doesn’t last forever. Eventually, proof replaces doubt – not because fear disappears, but because you’ve seen the system hold when it mattered.

It doesn’t disappear – but it’s no longer asking the same question.

That’s why I wanted to write this now, while I can still remember what it felt like to be on the near side of that line. When the nerves weren’t theoretical. When the preparation mattered because I didn’t yet have proof.

If you’re there now – somewhere between “they said yes” and I have to walk on stage – you’re not broken. You’re not behind. You’re not doing it wrong.

You’re just in the only phase where this feels like this.

And one day, not that far from now, you’ll realise you can’t quite remember what it felt like not to know.

That’s the part you only get once.

Where this came from

This article came out of preparing a talk about fixing broken systems by designing for reality, not optimism.

If you’re curious about the talk itself – the ideas behind it, and how they show up in delivery work – it’s here.

Beyond Just Try Harder | Insights

Discover three practical strategies to reduce bugs and improve software delivery – fast feedback, safer changes, and controlled delivery – from Andy Weir’s talk Beyond Just Try Harder at LDX3 and Agile on the Beach 2025.

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