Do you give presentations in work?

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Not everyone is comfortable talking to other people, I work with a guy who is an amazing techy but is the last person I would put in front of a crowd of people.

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Hmmm, hadn't even noticed. Maybe I'm just one hate away from a massacre. who knows . . . . . .

 

No, it's not a natural thing for most people, it takes a lot of confidence to be able to stand up in front of loads of people and just 'talk'

Watch some TED clips sometimes, a lot of these are done by people who have little experience of talking to crowds of people.

 

Before I started this role 18 months or so ago I didn't really do much if any presenting, never been my thing but partly as I've never really had the need to.

Since moving though I now present all the time, I'm just finishing a couple of days briefing about 20 pre sales techies on some stuff. I probably average 4 or 5 talks a week either in person or web conference to a wide mixture of people, could be technical people, could be C level.

Now I find I just get up there and do it, as I'm talking about stuff I'm supposedly an 'expert' on (debatable ;) ) and it's not in an assessment environment like school etc it just feels a lot more comfortable.

Still get a little nervous when doing something new for the first time, the other week had to give a talk to about 60 internal people about a topic I was given to talk about which was a bit anxious about. I'm sure it went well but always feel I can improve in some way.

Helps massively if you're talking about something you find interesting and enjoy, and also easier if you're not up there 'defending' a piece of work as such.

It definitely gets easier the more you do it, I haven't looked into it but a colleague mentioned there is some organisation that has local meetings/chapters in a lot of places that you can join to help with public speaking which may be useful, but it's just a case of building up confidence.

Pet hates for me at the moment, people asking me to do a talk but not giving me much info on what they want covering, so frustrating. Ranks up there with people saying 'can we have a demo' without saying what they actually want to see ;)