Conference confidence

In the last post I talked about my difficulties in selecting material for a 15 minute overview talk. Well, I'm back from the conference and can report that I managed to raise enough interesting points for people to ask good questions, and to come and seek me out after my talk for further conversation. And I only over-ran by 1 minute (whilst I realise this is bad manners, in the context of everyone else in the session I was a full 5 minutes relatively well behaved!!!). The interesting thing is that this is the first time I can remember people being so enthusiastic about coming and talking to me. Perhaps it's because I haven't been to an international conference for around 4 years (child-raising issues), or perhaps it's a different group of people at this particular conference now. I didn't advertise my new Professorial title at all in the talk so it's not that directly. I've also had a follow up email from someone I talked with requesting details of any publications we produce on a certain topic, and a request from another (admittedly someone I have collaborated with in the past) for a letter of support for a grant proposal. So why the difference?

I put it down to two things. I do think that I have a certain amount of additional confidence that derives from my recent promotion in the sense that I feel like "I'm a professor so I don't need to prove anything to you" Or, hopefully it could be that I am finally either talking on the right subject, or, since I have been talking about the same theme for several years, people have finally caught on to it.

However, outside of the formal session, I started to fall back into my old ways of self-doubt. I didn't know many people at this conference, and although not shy as such, I am not very good at networking, and have tended to be less than pro-active in the past. This time, I was only there for one evening and had no dinner plans. At the end of the session I was talking to someone I do know, when a colleague of his came up with dinner plans. Originally they didn't involve me, but the invitation was extended to me as I was standing there. I felt a bit like they felt they had to invite me. I contemplated staying in my hotel for room service, but in the end I went to meet them at a bar/restaurant. Of the 5 men there, I knew one reasonably well, one slightly, and didn't know the others at all. We had a good evening, topics covering work, but also funding in our 4 different country bases, politics in all 4 countries, and many other things. I came away glad that I went but concious that I had yet again contributed very little to the work discussions and this only fed my paranoia. Now I just have to figure out how to translate the confidence from the formal session to confidence in less formal, but still professionally focussed interactions.