Seven Tips for Professionals Presenting at Conferences

Photo by Natasha Hall on Unsplash

It’s almost conference season again! Perhaps you are pushing yourself to get out of your comfort zone with public speaking. Maybe you feel passionate about an idea you want to share with colleagues. Are you feeling ready to be seen as a subject expert in your field? Speaking at conferences can serve as a lead magnet for opportunities to provide additional consultation, invitations to present at other conferences and trainings, or result in requests to collaborate, such as writing a book or creating a paid training course. Therefore it is seen as a lucrative next step in your career if you are ready for it!

So what do you need to know to make a quality conference presentation? As someone who has completed dozens of professional speaking opportunities and presentations over the past six years, here are some tips to share that will leave you feeling invigorated at the end of your talk and will inspire people to connect with you after!

#1 Have Clear Learning Objectives

In order to get your talk or training topic approved by a conference, you’ll need to have clear learning objectives. What will people gain from your talk? What can they walk away with and implement right away? What is the gift you are giving that makes your talk worthwhile to attend? Conference organizers are looking for talks of value to their target audience and want something that stands out.

#2 Take Your Audience on a Journey

A quality talk is about taking audience members on a journey. The best talks are full of story, charisma, energy, and fun anecdotes that participants will remember long after the talk is finished. What are the key points you are trying to make and what’s the golden threat that ties them all together in a seamless fashion? Does it feel like there’s a beginning, middle, and end to your talk? Is there imagery that audience members can embrace?

#3 Limit your Slides

I know, I know, slides help us feel like we are prepared and giving tons of quality content to our audience. Yet we know that slides can be overwhelming and distracting if there is too much to them. The current advice of public speaking experts is to limit your slides to 23 words or less. And to limit the amount of slides overall. Better yet, use images rather than words to prompt you to remember what you wanted to talk about. It will keep people focused on what you say rather than reading slide after slide.

#4 Embrace Acronyms

In addition to stories, folks love acronyms or clever ways to remember your content. What can you offer that is unique to your topic? Not only will this have audience members recalling your ideas and sharing it easily with others, the creative content you develop becomes your intellectual property to copyright and use in social media, workbooks, and more!

#4 Pick a Power Pose

Your talk has been accepted and you are getting ready to go out there and engage your audience. Pick a power pose to ground yourself and boost your confidence. In my experience, not only does this help you drop into your body instead of your head where all your anxiety lives, it helps you regain deeper belly breath. Being able to breathe deeply helps you sound confident and project your voice to audience members at the back of the room with ease.

#5 Find the Happy Person

It’s all too easy to focus on the grumpy person in the room at your talk and attempt to win them over. How can you miss them, they are frowning, have their arms crossed, or look bored in your presence. Don’t fall into this trap! Instead, find the happy, enthusiastic person in the room and continue to talk to them with enthusiasm. The happy person is the one smiling, nodding in agreement, and seems interested in what you have to say. By focusing on them, you will keep your positive energy up, rather than having it be depleted by the skeptical folks in the room.

#6 End with a Call to Action

As your talk begins to wrap up, be sure to end on an empowering note by encouraging your audience members to do something meaningful with the information you just presented. Perhaps your call to action is to have them share what they learned with one colleague. Or to try this new skill with a client this week. Or to download your handout so they have all the resources they need handy. By ending with a call to action, your talk ends on a high note, rather than the typical Q&A that can deflate your energy and cause people to want to leave early.

#7 Start and End on Time

A true indicator of a prepared professional is to respect the time and space you’ve been allotted by conference organizers. To start or end late is a sign of disrespect to audience members who may need the break between presentations, or could negatively impact the professional who comes after you who needs to set up for their talk in the space. Time your talk accordingly for questions while holding a boundary of ending on time. Folks who have additional questions will most likely approach you after to keep the conversation going if need be.

So there you have it! Seven tips to get you started on your professional conference journey! If you find yourself wanting additional support when crafting your talk, consider a professional consultation with a public speaking coach or colleague who has demonstrated success in these spaces. I am happy to be a resource to you for this purpose. If you are ready to craft an impactful, energizing conference presentation, I invite you to schedule a professional consultation with me here.

What You Need to Know When Offering CEs to Counselors

I want to offer Continued Education Credits (CEs) to mental health counselors. What are my options?

It’s a question I’ve received more often lately by Colorado professionals. I’ll preface my answer by sharing that each State and designation (LPC, PsyD, LCSW, etc.) is different. Please do the research for your state and designation or consider credentialing at the National level. When approached with this inquiry by the community, I ask the following questions to better understand their goals:

Why Offer CEs as a Professional?

Perhaps you have the goal of creating secondary income streams. Maybe you feel passionately about the content you’ve created. Whatever the reason, CEs allow professionals to enhance their leadership and public speaking skills, not to mention open doors to new opportunities, including paid speaking gigs, podcast interviews to enhance exposure to your brand and services, program partnerships, and project collaboration!

What is Your Content Area?

The first thing to consider is your content. Is your training content specific to mental health competencies like group work, clinical supervision, or a theory or modality? If so, you may be eligible to apply for a national CE provider designation.

If your content is more closely connected to business aspects such as marketing, private practice growth, and secondary income streams, these areas are still valuable to share with the community, but cannot be branded as CE opportunities due to them not meeting the traditional definition of continued education credits.

Do You Want to Offer In-Person or Online Events?

This is a logistics question that will help narrow down your application options. Some organizations are only approved to do live or in-person events. Others have permission to offer webinars and on-demand content. Consider what is most important to you. Do you like the feeling of being in front of others speaking? Would you rather develop an on-demand course people can take at their own pace? Take some time to consider the possibilities before answering the remaining questions below.

What is Your Mental Health Background?

It’s easiest to apply to offer CEs through your own professional affiliation, such as through NBCC (counselors), NASW (social workers), APA (psychologists), NAADAC (addiction professionals), etc. Visit their website to learn more about their application process.

Who is Your Audience?

Is your hope to serve fellow mental health professionals in your state? Or reach further? In Colorado, CEs can be developed for counseling professionals statewide with the following structure in mind:

A. A sign-in sheet recording participants in attendance

B. Provide a certificate of attendance/participation that outlines the following:

            I. Title of Event

II. Contact information for the Faciliator including Name, Credentials, Address, and Phone

            III. Duration of the event in CEs, with one CE equal to one contact hour

            IV. Identifying if the event was live (in-person) or virtual

In other words, Colorado is pretty easy for folks to offer CEs. Other states may not embrace this same structure in having their own rules and parameters of what can be branded as CEs, so be careful to confirm what’s allowed based on where your audience is located. This also becomes important in marketing your course or content accurately.

What’s Your Timeline?

Many people are motivated to develop and launch a CE opportunity in a matter of weeks. That may be possible for Colorado, but for offering CEs in other states and/or at a national level, be prepared for the process to take six months to a year!

For example, to become an Approved Continued Education Provider (ACEP) through the National Board of Certified Counselors (NBCC)—which means offering CEs for counselors nationwide—the application requires several examples of the workshop or training already being offered, with sign-up sheets and evaluations from participants submitted with your application. This means that for many, test driving your content with a local audience to get the feedback you need to apply is necessary.

What if You Don’t Have the Time or Bandwidth for this Process but Still Want to Offer CEs?

Consider partnering with an established CE provider who has permission to develop coursework with partners in the community. This usually means bigger organizations like community mental health agencies, treatment centers, mental health hospitals, conferences, and training centers.

I’d like to personally give a shout out to the following organizations that provided a professional platform for my workshops before I became an ACEP Provider, who made the process easy to reach fellow clinicians around quality content:

A. Harmony Foundation, Inc.

B. Sandstone Care

C. Continued.com

D. Highlands Behavioral Health

Organizations are always looking for additional speakers or presenters to offer new CE content. By researching organizations in your area that offer CEs, you can pitch your idea to them and work to get on their CE event schedule.

So there you have it! Although there may be some lingering questions about offering CEs, these elements are worth reflecting upon when identifying your ideal path for trainings or workshops offered to the mental health professional community at large. I encourage you to continue to track the requirements in your state and designation for ongoing changes and prepare for the long haul when starting the application process. I can assure you it will be worth the effort if you feel passionately about your content being connected to more professionals!