All Staff Briefing – Survivor Speaker

I recently was honored to be asked to be the American Cancer Society staff survivor speaker at our National All Staff briefing in Atlanta, Georgia.  I worked with Laurie Entriken from our national office Talent Strategy team and shared my blog and experience with her before getting to work on putting together a presentation for Friday, December 3.  Steve took the time off from work to fly down and support me – which truly thrilled me as he had not been to our National Home Office.  I was so proud to share our organization with him on the trip.  🙂

It was a few reiterations, drafts and practices of the presentation in front of Steve that got me to the final.  I had not practiced a speech so much before the day as I am pretty good at “winging it” but it paid off.  🙂
  There was about 200 people there in the audience and another 200 across the country tuning in to the All Staff Briefing and my speech at the end of the program.  Cara – aka: BatGirl came to see me speak that morning, taking time off from work as well — (she is such a busy girl – it meant the world to have her there too!).

I felt pretty shaky, although listening to it now I can’t feel the shakiness like I could on stage.  My mouth was so dry and it got worse through the presentation so next time I am going to drink a ton of water to prepare…. 🙂  I didn’t have enough strength to open up that bottle of water, but that would have helped too.  : )

It has been great to look at all the pieces of my story that will make a difference to someone that will hear it and I think the marathon analogy was a good one.  I will also post my notes / speech  in a separate post for you to see as well.

Here is the presentation – enjoy!  Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think!  🙂

I want to share the photos that were displayed as well – it took me going through 35 favorites to get to the 10 final pics to share as part of the slide show.  I referred to them through my presentation so they will be posted with my notes from the presentation.