On Mission: A Motivational Speech

At this year’s CloudPassage Conference, I decided to continue the tradition of entering in the Ignite competition. This year’s topic was “One Team”, where we needed to share a personal story of experiencing success on a team and how that could be applied to help us in the security space.

This was a bit more challenging for me because I am generally a private person, but I looked at this as an opportunity to try out a motivational speech, and to do it well.

The result, while perhaps over-the-top and epic in proportions, was sincere and effective based on the personal responses from the audience afterward. I’ll need to blog separately on the process, but I learned that templates and other speech tools did not work well for this speech; I needed to build it up massively, mix the paints together, then separate them into new colors, and then sculpt away at it until removing one more word or element would diminish its effect.

As I mentioned last year, I enjoy making things “cool” and getting people excited about doing good, so I bent a few of the Ignite rules to increase its effect.  I was again honored to have won the competition, and I thought the video worth sharing.