{"id":292,"date":"2009-04-03T14:51:52","date_gmt":"2009-04-03T13:51:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elementally.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=292"},"modified":"2009-04-03T14:51:52","modified_gmt":"2009-04-03T13:51:52","slug":"sometimes-no-is-the-kindest-cut-of-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/sometimes-no-is-the-kindest-cut-of-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Sometimes &#8216;no&#8217; is the kindest cut of all&#8230;.."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Let me say something right from the start: I don&#8217;t believe people can learn public speaking or how to make presentations if they&#8217;re unduly anxious.  That&#8217;s why our courses always have a relaxed, supportive and informal atmosphere.  I like the whole &#8216;Consructives&#8217; thing at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.toastmasters.org\/\">Toastmasters<\/a>. Got that? Good.<\/p>\n<p>Thing is, having established an atmosphere like that, it&#8217;s perfectly acceptable to say &#8220;No, that wasn&#8217;t good enough&#8221;.  Obviously, you only say that if you genuinely<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>believe it;<\/li>\n<li>know what you&#8217;re talking about;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>and preferably<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>have a suggestion about how to improve things<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>but that doesn&#8217;t mean it&#8217;s not sometimes the right thing to say!<\/p>\n<p>I have been struck recently by how bland some feedback is when it comes to presentations and so on.  If I&#8217;ve made a pig&#8217;s ear of something it&#8217;s important I realise it&#8217;s a pig&#8217;s ear &#8211; otherwise how am I going to know it needs working on?  It&#8217;s all very well and good saying X was good, Y was great etc. but what if Z stinks?<\/p>\n<p>And while I&#8217;m ranting, why tell people their presentations was &#8216;good&#8217; if it was, frankly, only &#8216;adequate&#8217;?  To me, once we&#8217;ve established that I value your feedback and you&#8217;re not being spiteful, I absolutely need to know you&#8217;re going to tell me stuff I <em>need<\/em> to hear, not what I <em>want<\/em> to hear.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s an even worse thought &#8211; could it be that the mediocrity of most public speaking means that people <strong>genuinely<\/strong> think that presentations are &#8216;great&#8217; when the best that can objectively say of them is &#8216;they didn&#8217;t stink too badly&#8217;?  As I&#8217;ve said before, to be relatively good <a href=\"http:\/\/www.curved-vision.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/2006\/10\/15\/why-are-most-presentations-and-speeches-so-bad\/\">all you need to be<\/a> is not rubbish!  :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Let me say something right from the start: I don&#8217;t believe people can learn public speaking or how to make presentations if they&#8217;re unduly anxious. That&#8217;s why our courses always have a relaxed, supportive and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292","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=292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}