{"id":2962,"date":"2015-02-12T09:34:18","date_gmt":"2015-02-12T09:34:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=2962"},"modified":"2015-02-12T10:31:41","modified_gmt":"2015-02-12T10:31:41","slug":"presentations-and-me-how-i-got-into-the-presentation-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/presentations-and-me-how-i-got-into-the-presentation-game\/","title":{"rendered":"Presentations and me – how I got into the presentation game"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Credit<\/a>

Credit Pixabay<\/p><\/div>\n

I didn’t start as a trainer and presenter. Oh no. Once upon a time I had a real<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n

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

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.<\/p>\n

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…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

…that was the time I got interested in looking at the communication of science…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

… and that was when I got interested in presentations, in particular.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/p>\n

    \n
  • people understood what they were saying; and then<\/li>\n
  • people acted on that information.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    So far, it’s been fun… better than working for a living, at least! ;)<\/p>\n

    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. :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1820,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2962","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\/2962","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=2962"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2962\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2983,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2962\/revisions\/2983"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}