Presentations and me – how I got into the presentation game

Credit Pixabay

I didn’t start as a trainer and presenter. Oh no. Once upon a time I had a real job – I was a researcher at a university. My PhD looked at the environmental causes of childhood leukaemias and I then spent over 24 years in research. Overall, I loved it.

At times, of course, I hated it, like when I’m up at two o’clock in a Sunday morning and still don’t understand why the damned data won’t fit the model… but that’s the same for any job, I guess.

And then there were the contracts I worked on and the people we did the research for. We only took contracts that we felt were socially worthwhile – lots of them for central government, to help them better do what they needed to do. For example, a lot of my time was spent drawing maps to help better target support to deprived households. But after about 20 years I realised that I was tending to work on the same sorts of issues again and re-inventing the wheel.

I realised people often didn’t need more research on a topic, they just needed to act on the research that had already been done, so…

The data was different but the issues were the same. Nothing had changed – not because people didn’t know what they needed to do to make the world a better place, but because they simply hadn’t acted on that information.

…that was the time I got interested in looking at the communication of science…

Alongside that were the conferences, where I’d sit and listen to the most brilliant research-minds in the country (and the world explain) their results. Or rather, fail to explain their results. I often came out of a session with no more understanding of an issue than I’d started with – and it wasn’t because I’m stupid. (I’ve got a PhD and a mother that say differently, although my wife and children aren’t too sure!) It was because the presentations were, frankly, sometimes awful.

… and that was when I got interested in presentations, in particular.

The rest is history. For personal reasons I felt the need to move on from research and I simply put two and two together, deciding to train people in how better to make presentations – so that

• people understood what they were saying; and then
• people acted on that information.

So far, it’s been fun… better than working for a living, at least! ;)

There are simple, scientifically researched principles to both of those things: all presenters have to do is stick to them. Unlike a lot of my original research, it’s not rocket science. :)