I\u2019m a bit of a traditionalist (in some areas of my life at least). The main ways in which that really manifests tend to be to do with Christmas – but there are other ways. One of them is how I start training sessions… it\u2019s more often than not with a round robin of who they are why they\u2019re here what they want from the day.<\/p>\n
You know the kind of thing, I\u2019m sure.<\/p>\n
Obviously it\u2019s different for large groups but I find that works really well with smaller ones. Yesterday, like many, many other days, I did this and made a note of what the people in the room (nominated by their line managers) actually<\/strong> wanted (rather than what their bosses and the paperwork said they wanted). Each and every one of them told me they wanted to know \u201cHow do I do X, Y or Z?\u201d. There\u2019s nothing wrong with that, of course, except that it shows a remarkable passivity in terms of what\u2019s what.<\/p>\n No one<\/b> asked me (literally no one!) \u201cHow does my audience….?. It\u2019s not surprising, given that these are people who (almost by definition, as they want some training) are anxious about their abilities to stand up in front of an audience.<\/p>\n But it is just a bit sad.<\/p>\n It\u2019s sad because it shows very effectively, the mindset of novice\/nieve\/amateur presenters. As soon as you think about it, of course, it\u2019s not like that – or at least it shouldn\u2019t be.<\/p>\n It shouldn\u2019t<\/strong> be about you, the presenter, it should be about the audience. I got asked things like \u201cHow do I design a slide to tell my audience X, Y Z?\u201d but a better questions should have been things like \u201cHow does my audience best understand X, Y, Z on a slide?\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s almost<\/b> the same thing, it\u2019s almost<\/b> the same question… it\u2019s just a different mentality and perspective.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019m a bit of a traditionalist (in some areas of my life at least). The main ways in which that really manifests tend to be to do with Christmas – but there are other ways. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1611,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1331","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1331\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}