– by a person who kinda suck at presentations.
Greetings netlings (cause earthlings).
I’ve been loitering in the working world for slightly over 2.5 years now and have been at my current job for about 1.5 years JEEZ! Out of school and whether you like it or not, presentations / public speaking are inevitable. I would rate my presentation skills a 3 out of 10 cause:
1. I don’t have a very loud and clear voice, I tend to babble,
2. I am a rather awkward person, and
3. The sentences that I form in my mind doesn’t always come out as is verbally, if you get what I mean.
You must be wondering then, how am I gonna write this post if I say I suck. Well this would basically be pointers & takeaways I have for myself from recent presentation experiences.
Prepare Your Own Presentation Materials
I had a couple of presentations at work recently and I found that I presented better with materials I prepared compared with when I presented something prepared by my team mate. Even though I read thru and understood the slides prepared by my team mate, I did not have that fluid thought process flow during the actual presentation. And I sucked terribly at it.
Whether in solo presentations or group work presentations, I personally prefer to be the one organizing the slides and layout if I were to be (one of) the presenter. This is so that you know what content goes where and when. You kinda know what to expect from your slides. I also generally enjoy preparing slides cause I am sometimes quite particular with formatting.
I remembered that last time in school, if there’s a group work with presentation, the person who compiles the information and prepares the presentation materials somehow always manages to escape presenting – work allocation apparently.
Target One Person in the Audience to Focus On / Be Your Listener
For 1 of my smaller scale presentations at work, it was to present our progress, findings and results to our Lean trainer. The audience was maybe around plus minus about 30 pax. I’m thinking back now that during those presentations, I was not nervous nor scared.
My reasoning is that I had 1 target person to present to, which is our trainer. It kinda made me unaware of the other people present and that I am having a conversation with said target person.
However, during another larger scale presentation for work, for a group of approx. 50 pax where several members of the floor were strangers to me (the same one that I did not prepare the presentation materials), I was so scared. We were suppose to present it to everyone present to introduce / update them on our project.
Without knowing where to look at during the presentation, I was in full auto-pilot mode and skimmed thru the whole presentation. I believe that if I had “defined” a person to present to directly, I would probably have presented much better as it would feel like I’m talking to someone and that person is actually listening.
Fake Confidence
This is something I learnt from WC but have yet to master.
So basically even if you’re anxious and worried, try not to show it! I guess this pointer is mainly for those who already know their content well but afraid of presentations. Cause if you’re not familiar with the content, it would be more difficult to fake it. Unless you’re really good at bs-ing. Haha.
Sometimes when you pretend, it could almost be real.
Anyway, presentation is an area I don’t think I was ever good at. But I really do wanna get better at it, or at least decent. So now whenever I get the chance to, I reluctantly force myself to go for it (whether I like it or not), and erm try my best to fake it.
