One of my more recent personal/career goals is to get better at public speaking. When the opportunity to submit a session for PEX came up I jumped at the opportunity and I’ll now be presenting and assisting with several sessions next week. I figured the only way to get better at public speaking and presenting is to throw myself in the fire and that is just what I did.
Then shortly thereafter I started thinking, why? Why am I doing this? No one told me I had to do this and now I’I already had a set of material that I just needed to think down a little bit, so the easy part was done I thought. Then I started thinking about standing up there in front of all those people. Or maybe even worse, standing up there to a poorly attended session with just a few people.
It was at this time I was happy to come across a blog article written by Duncan Epping who shared his thoughts on speaking at VMUGs. I also saw a review of Toastmasters by Mike Laverick, a group dedicated to getting better at public speaking. It is unfortunate but knowing others are suffering the same and/or having similar experiences is a great way to make myself feel better. Especially if those individuals are regularly doing this kind of stuff. Makes me think to myself again, why am I doing this?
While I haven’t even done the PEX presentation yet I’ve learned a lot more just in the realm of creating presentations and preparing. I’ve done several smaller VMUGs, book related stuff, Brownbags, etc, but I’d say this is the first time I’ve actually had people actively give me feedback about the presentation itself which I feel greatly helped in the effectiveness it will have on those attending. And a couple of things I’ve learned and recommend to those looking to present….
Learn More About PowerPoint
Being an engineer by trade, I’m still new to the other side of the house. I didn’t realize how much of a novice I was when it came to doing basic stuff in PowerPoint. It was pretty embarrassing some of the stuff I couldn’t figure out how to do, but I’ve never desired to be a PowerPoint expert. While I feel like I could show someone everything new I learned in 30 minutes, it took me seemingly forever to get to that point. A good lesson here in doing some prep work before getting too deep.
Less Is More
Further I struggled heavily with the content on my slide deck. The struggle was there was way too much. The original content was I condensed into the most important 70 or so. It was painful but week by week I’d remove a few more items and condense more and more to the point I got down to a more reasonable number, which some argue is still too many.
Even with the reduced ‘slide count’ the biggest problem with my slides is some of them just had way too much content to be relevant.Think outfield wall of a minor league baseball stadium. This is obviously extremely difficult to digest and awkward for you as the presenter. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
To put it in perspective this was deeper technical content that in its whole was over 100 slides. I was able to pick out the high points and reduce this, but even then there was way too much content per slide. It wasn’t until someone told me “your job is not to train” that the job of reducing the materials to a more digestible format made sense. And maybe your job is to train everyone in a session, but in many cases you are there to present a topic and leave the audience with something to walk away with.
And on to the presentation itself, I’ll defer my personal experiences and tips until a later time. Your thoughts?