I recently did a session for an organisation whose brief was to help the voluntary sector in our part of the country become more professional and organised. The day was, obviously, about making a presentation to potential funders and had a “Dragon’s Den” format for the afternoon.<\/p>\n
Take-up wasn’t good, sadly. They’d organised the day on the grounds that this was what people wanted and needed, because they were anxious about it – because pitching for funding is a critical part of any<\/strong> project. It turned out that people were so<\/strong> anxious about being bad at public speaking they were too anxious to even try it in a training environment. What’s more, people tended to come alone, rather than in pairs – the benefit of moral support being out-weighed by the shame of being seen to be a bad public speaker by a colleague!<\/p>\n So, so sad!<\/p>\n How did it come to this?<\/p>\n Well let’s not get too despondent. The people we’re talking about care very much about what they do – otherwise they’d not be doing it. That’s great: I’d rather work with people who cared than people who wanted to talk for the sake of it. And – at risk of sounding patronising, please forgive me – we’re not talking about professionally trained speakers or high-powered business men or women. We’re talking about real people, with real jobs. Working really hard.<\/p>\n …and if public speaking, making a presentation, isn’t part of their everyday working life they’re not going to have found the time to get a series of successful presentations under their belts. Each and every presentation is going to feel like the first time. And I don’t know about you, but my first time wasn’t good.<\/p>\n So what’s to be done?\u00c2\u00a0 Well, I’d welcome your ideas!\u00c2\u00a0 All I can think of is to continue to offer great training that’s not intimidating, that’s not stressful and that is a load of fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently did a session for an organisation whose brief was to help the voluntary sector in our part of the country become more professional and organised. The day was, obviously, about making a presentation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-personal-blog-related"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/131\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}