The Evening Before the Keynote

Conference weeks around the airport follow a pattern. Speakers and senior delegates arrive the afternoon before, check into a hotel near the venue, have a quick dinner and then spend the evening in their rooms, running through slides, adjusting a sentence here and there, and failing to sleep. It is an evening almost everyone who travels for work will recognise, and one where a session can help if it is placed with some care.

The problem with the evening

The trouble is not boredom. It is that the mind will not let go. Every fifteen minutes the laptop comes back out for one more look at the opening. The bed is comfortable, the room is quiet, and sleep still does not come until well past midnight, because the talk is running on a loop somewhere behind the eyes.

A session does not fix nerves. What it can do is give the body a reason to stop, and give the evening a clear point after which the rehearsal is over.

Placing it

The session belongs after the last rehearsal, not before it. Guests who book for seven and plan to rehearse afterwards generally regret it; the loosened, heavy feeling after a massage is not a state in which anyone wants to read slides. Book for half past eight or nine. Rehearse before dinner and once after. Then close the laptop, and let the session be the end of the working day.

Ninety minutes is the length that usually works. It gives enough time for the shoulders to come down from where they have been since the flight, and it leaves a gap before lights-out.

The conference week

Large conference weeks count as peak dates, as do a handful of other periods such as the Amsterdam Dance Event and the run from Christmas to New Year. For an airport hotel booking it makes no practical difference, because every airport booking already carries a deposit of half. What a conference week does change is availability. Hotels fill, therapists' evenings fill, and a session asked for on the evening itself during a large event is less likely to be possible than on an ordinary Tuesday.

If you know you are speaking, book when you book the hotel. Say which evening, which hotel, and roughly what time. The house agrees the journey time with you in the thread before anything is fixed, and you can then forget about it until the day.

In the room

Tell your therapist, if you like, that you have a talk in the morning. You do not have to. Some guests find it helps to say it out loud to someone who does not care about the slides. She will not ask about it, and the session will not be about it, but it can be a relief to have said it.

What the session includes is hers to decide, and she will explain it in the room.

After she leaves

Resist the laptop. This is the hardest part of the evening for a speaker. The talk will be the same at seven the next morning as it is at eleven at night, and a last look will not improve it. A glass of water, a warm shower if there was oil, the curtains closed properly, the alarm set, and bed.

Choosing a therapist

For an evening like this, some guests prefer to choose from the roster with care: the languages she speaks, the kind of session she describes in her profile, whether she keeps evenings free. Others simply ask who is free at the hour they want and choose from the names that come back. Either works. A Schiphol hotel massage on a conference evening is not an occasion that needs a particular person so much as a particular hour, and the hour is the thing to protect.

The next morning

Speakers who have tried this often report that they slept better than they expected, woke clearer, and ran through the opening once over breakfast rather than five times at midnight. That is the whole value of the evening: not a performance improvement, just a night that ended when it should have. The guide to the evening before a meeting sets out the timings in more detail, and the page on the night before a meeting covers the same ground from the room's side.