Steve Reed’s Rootstech 2017 Presenation: “Journaling Principles That Work”

Check out the full video of my presentation at Rootstech titled Journaling Principles That Work.

I’m posting this here having not had the chance to actually watch the whole thing, I’ve only seen the first 2o minutes or so, but since I was there I think it is safe to post ;-)

I had presented this before at a the Family Roots Expo in St. George back in 2016 so while it was my second time giving the presentation, the crowd was substantially larger and it was being streamed live to thousands of people. Was I nervous? Well, yeah a little bit, mostly because I’m not a polished or experienced speaker at all and I’m not saying that out of humility, I make a number of mistakes that are probably common among novices. Experience and practice are key and I haven’t had much and I think it shows. My experience is mostly church talks so this presentation is only the second time I have stood in front of a crowd to present something in this context.

I get stuck a few times because I wasn’t working from a memorized speech, I did practice a little but I have a difficult time memorizing. Admittedly, I would have liked to have had more time to really distill and polish my thoughts to make them flow better.

What carried me through it was the fact that I am passionate about the topic of journaling. So what you see here in the video is just me in raw form, it’s not an act, I’m just up there talking about something I love and I hope that is communicated in some way.

As for the title, a co-worker and I decided on it long before any of this presentation was developed. I’m probably going to make some tweaks and go with a different name as I’m going to be doing this presentation at other events this year. At the time, I did have an idea of what I wanted the presentation to be and based it on this blog article I wrote for the JRNL blog about 8 months ago.