...I'd rather die

[Aelia Jusa]

Sorry to hear it didn't go great, Jorath! But, you know, you're always your own worst critic - probably most of the things you noticed as glaring embarrassments the others didn't think were that bad or didn't notice at all [img]smile.gif[/img]

I'm not a fan of public speaking; I get very nervous and tend to speak very fast and push my hair behind my ear a lot (which looks weird when it's in a ponytail ). But with practice you do get better and I feel like I'm more confident now than I was 5 years ago. At the end of last year I had to do a 25 minute presentation of my thesis results to a conference - a real conference of people who do research in the area, which was extremely scary considering they were not only going to be judging me on my presentation skills but also on the validity of my research. It turned out to be quite good though, but what I said about being our own worst critics was true - I could see lots of things that were crap about it, but afterwards one of the listeners said I did 'fabulous' so there you go.

What I find is most useful is to have basically everything you want to say, in point form, on your slides. That doesn't equate to the most dynamic presentation, because obviously people who can put general points on their slides and then expand them without notes seem more knowledgeable and confident, but I find it is the easiest and most comfortable way to do it. As others have said, memorising is not the way to go, and reading a prepared speech is very stilted. If you're basically making sentences out of notes in point form from your slides, your presentation is easy to follow, you feel confident that you're not going to forget anything or get confused, and then you can expand on small points to make it a bit more interesting.

[Davros]

The good thing Jorath is that it gets easier with practice [img]smile.gif[/img] . I have never failed to get some form of nervousness heading into a presentation or speech, but it dies within the first minute or two of the launch.

Aelia mentioned her thesis presentation, and I remember sitting back 10 years ago waiting to give mine. We had a class of 50 odd with the speeches staggered over 2 days, and I was going 2nd last (man I hate going way towards the end of these things). I noticed two distinct goups forming in the speakers, and at least 85% of the speakers were falling into one of the 2 categories. The type 1 speakers were those who could get up and rattle of a sharp presentation with confidence and precision. They were great at doing what they had control of - and then they basically fell apart in the defence stage when the Professors pose all the challenging questions.

The type 2 people were the complete opposite. The voices wavered, the had nervous habits, the hands shook a little and they struggled with the first portion of the exercise. In question time though, this group generally excelled and did a far better job of answering the challenges than did the first group.

If I wasn't nervous enough, I followed the "Frank Spencer" of all speeches. This poor fellow managed to trip over his props, ended up with the overhead projector screen crashing down on him, went to point out things on his overheads with the worst trembling hand I have ever seen. He was an example of everything I was hoping I wouldn't do [img]smile.gif[/img] .

As I said at the start - the only way to make things easier on yourself in the long run is to put yourself in that position again and start to get used to it. The one thing you must not do is hide away after a disaster. There are so many opportunities where you might get asked to give a speech in future that the more you try and hide from it, the worse it will be the next time it catches up with you.

And remember :

Fear is the mind killer - the little demon within. I will face my fear and allow it to pass over and through me. Only I will remain.