{"id":509,"date":"2010-01-05T13:20:06","date_gmt":"2010-01-05T12:20:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elementally.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=509"},"modified":"2010-01-05T13:20:06","modified_gmt":"2010-01-05T12:20:06","slug":"still-more-about-presenting-when-youre-ill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/still-more-about-presenting-when-youre-ill\/","title":{"rendered":"Still more about presenting when you&#8217;re ill"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This is turning into a bit of a series, isn&#8217;t it, although I didn&#8217;t mean it to when I started, with my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.curved-vision.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/2009\/12\/29\/speaking-when-youd-rather-be-in-bed\/\">first post on this topic<\/a>.  I&#8217;ve carried out the &#8216;experiment&#8217; with the sweets from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.curved-vision.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/2009\/12\/31\/more-about-bugs-presentations\/\">this post<\/a> a couple of times now and it seems to work, for me at least.<\/p>\n<p>So here are a few more semi-random tips.<\/p>\n<li>Breath in through your nose.  That&#8217;s generally good advice, &#8216;cos that&#8217;s what your nose is for after all, but it&#8217;s particularly important if you&#8217;re ill, or have travelled in the cold.  The reason is that the extra &#8216;piping&#8217; inside you warms that air that little bit more before it arrives in your lungs, getting it closer to the temperature of your body.  I can vouch for this one personally, as I&#8217;m still fighting a chest infection, sadly&#8230;.<\/li>\n<li>Tea (and coffee) will dry your throat out.  If you&#8217;ve got a dry cough or anything similar, try and avoid them.  On the other hand, there are drinks which will encourage your body to produce more fluids &#8211; milk, if you can drink it (I take mine in hot chocolate, which makes it so so so much easier to drink! :) ).  If you&#8217;ve got a flemmy cough, avoid these.  A little bit of common sense and self-medication can go a long, long way!<\/li>\n<li>Make a really serious effort to remember to breathe with your diaphragm &#8211; keeping your chest relaxed if you can. If you&#8217;ve got some kind of bug, it&#8217;ll inhibit your breathing in your upper chest quite a lot (potentially) so getting the power from the lower parts of your lungs makes more sense.<\/li>\n<li>Warm up!  You should always do this, of course, but if you&#8217;re not feeling 100% you may find you&#8217;ve &#8216;retreated into yourself&#8217; a little bit so that you are more inhibited and less expansive in your gestures and so on that you normally would be.  (For some people that&#8217;s a good thing, I know, I know!).  Onstage that can come over as a little less credible.  Get the blood flowing and get your face\/lips working <strong>before you start<\/strong>, not as you go along.<\/li>\n<p>I hope those help.  Don&#8217;t forget though, that my very first bit of advice is the best: if you can avoid making presentations when you&#8217;re ill, do so!  :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is turning into a bit of a series, isn&#8217;t it, although I didn&#8217;t mean it to when I started, with my first post on this topic. I&#8217;ve carried out the &#8216;experiment&#8217; with the sweets [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal-blog-related","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509","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=509"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}