Confidence can be very visible.
I’ve been working hard (honestly) recently on our new Confidence Tricks course (face to face training in feeling confident and acting it when you’re not) so it’s not surprising that confidence has been on my mind – specifically the confidence to make presentations. Thinking about it more, and talking to colleges around here lead to one of my more contentious tweets:
If you don’t have confidence to make presentation ask what UR afraid of. Is it presenting or is it discovering you don’t know your subject!?
I’ve thought about it since and I’m beginning to have more subtle feelings about it but heck, given the 140 character limit of twitter it works for me! :)
What I’m getting at is that all too often wanna-be presenters (or more often wanna-not-but-have-to-be presenters) seem to think that there’s a Holy Grail to making presentations and use ‘research’ about the techniques (for which read ‘dicking about instead of getting down to it) as a way of putting off the hard part of actually figuring out what they’re going to say. The number of times people ask me to help them design a presentation before they’ve got the content sorted out never ceases to amaze me.
For the record, it goes like this:
- Figure out what you’re going to say.
- Then figure out how you’re going to say it.
Sure, there are exceptions to that rule but they’re so few and far between they’re about as likely as the people who genuinely do drive better after three glasses of wine or pints of beer.
It does not go:
- Figure out what the template/structure of a perfect presentation is.
- Fill that shape with data.
If it did, life would be easier for us all, frankly.
And I contend that for the vast majority of people the reason they go for the latter option is that figuring out what they’re going to say is bloody hard work. It involves looking at the intersection of what you know and what the audience wants to know about and thinking very hard. Very hard. It’s the grown up equivalent of the kid who spends more time working out a revision timetable (and colouring it in, of course!) than in actually getting their head down and working at the revision.
And when this would-be presenter stands up to speak, the chickens come home to roost – in the sense that deep down at the bottom of them they know they don’t really know what they’re talking about. They’re afraid of looking stupid and rationalise it as a fear of presenting when it’s actually a fear of people seeing what they’re really like. They’re afraid of questions because they may not know the answers, not because they fear being asked questions. They’re afraid of standing up and being looked at in all their finery because, at the back of their minds, is the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes.
Do me a favour – do yourself a favour – figure out what you want to say, and if it’s worth saying, before you figure out how to say it.
