Feeding My Inner Approval Whore

Got my EMS Today speaker evaluations this morning, and as always, I felt a wee bit of trepidation before opening the envelope. Fear of rejection is a powerful thing.

I need not have worried.

Overall, I averaged 4.8 out of a possible 5 points for all my sessions, and as usual, the written comments provided the most valuable feedback. Among the things I learned, and will use to tweak my presentations accordingly:

• Less gun stuff, more trauma in my Wound Ballistics lecture. I had already added more trauma photos, but a number of participants expressed a desire for more material on treatment. So, the next time I give that one, there will be fewer slides on muzzle energy and Newtonian physics, and more stuff on patching holes.
• More treatment discussion in the Dirty Dozen lecture, which covers the twelve most common types of chest trauma. Actually, I may just need to tweak the description of that lecture, since most of the treatment is BLS, which I thought I covered adequately. The subtitle of the lecture, however, is "Beyond the Basics of Thoracic Trauma," and while I went beyond the basics in assessment, I didn't offer them enough ALS treatment information – sometimes a hard balance to strike when you're writing for both EMT's and paramedics.
• In my EMS Blogging 101 lecture, less technical stuff and more caveats about posting etiquette or avoiding the perils and pitfalls of social media. That was the only lecture I hadn't given before, and it showed. I've got some polishing to do on that one. I can prattle about about most things for hours, but my nervousness shows when I'm talking about myself.
• More stuff on setting up a sepsis alert program in my Sepsis: The Silent Killer lecture. I'd do that, but I'd rather defer to the guy that was setting up an award-winning sepsis alert program before I ever conceived this lecture – T. Ryan Mayfield. He'd be a far better resource than I, and you can bet I'll be seeking his guidance when I try to get a similar program implemented by The Borg.

There are also other things I learned, or were reminded of, which I will not use to tweak my presentations:

• Haters gonna hate, son. They're going to find fault with whatever you do. and nothing you do will ever satisfy them. Harsh criticism always hurts, but when every comment of "dry, boring'" or "this guy is an arrogant prick" is outnumbered 50:1 by "wonderful speaker, bring him back every year!" the haters are easier to ignore.
• Not everyone gets my sense of humor. It's the nature of comedy that someone is always offended. I made sure to keep my language clean (sometimes a problem for me), and keep the twisted jokes to a minimum, but I still raised the hackles of a vocal few. They'll just have to avoid my lectures in the future, I suppose, because I'll offend 5 to entertain and educate 500 all day long, with a smile on my face and a song raunchy limerick in my heart. I am who I am. Trying to please everyone only results in me pleasing no one.
• Apparently, using our President's middle name and referring to him as "Gun Salesman of the Year, three years running!" constitutes political proselytizing and makes my entire wound ballistics lecture a blatant shill for gun rights and the Second Amendment. I proclaimed my biases at the beginning of the lecture – "I'm an unapologetic gun nut and Second Amendment advocate" – and I also took care to keep from preaching to my audience – "What this lecture is NOT, is a treatise on gun rights" – but apparently, two people felt that anything I said that challenged their assumptions about firearms trauma was simply the rantings of a gun nut, and totally invalid. I think I'd rather listen to the dozens of other commenters that found the session educational.

If any of you attended my presentations at any conference this year, and can think of things I need to improve, or things I need to keep doing, chime in with your comments.

I'm all about self improvement here. 😉

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