Practice makes presentations more palatable
The short answer is because today’s technology allows for easy and secure ways to get better at presentation speaking through communication training courses. Which can now be taken online.
But I prefer long answers so……
My favorite meal in all the world is Chicken Tikka Masala. Seriously.
When I travel abroad I test the local Indian restaurants looking for the perfect combinations of spices aromas and viscosity of sauce.
I once tried to make it myself from a cookbook. I found the mouthwatering recipe I was looking for, gathered the right ingredients and followed the instructions to the letter. After two full hours of preparation and creation, I presented it triumphantly to my family.
We ate out that night. It was so bad even the dog turned up it’s nose.
The lesson I learned was that the most important ingredient of all was missing. Practice! Oh, and a coach, or chef to give me pointers would have been nice too.
To be more precise, I needed practice, repetition and refinement of my culinary skills from family feedback. Great chefs are not born. They work very hard at it, they constantly practice and tweak their recipes until they work consistently every time.
The same is equally true for great speakers. The problem can be that as we prepare presentations we don’t have access to a “family” to provide truly helpful and objective presentation feedback.
Well, that used to be the case, but today websites like this one can help speakers all over the world prepare tasty, flavorful presentations by providing an online family to listen to and assess presentations in a totally safe and encouraging environment.
The way we coach clients online is to invite them into a secure online communication training conference room. The client sometimes records their performance and emails their PowerPoint slides beforehand but the whole thing can be totally live as long as they have a simple webcam pointing at them. We can even provide a camera.
We find it beneficial to have a small group of clients doing this at the same time because feedback from others in the same boat complements the pointers my colleague Michael Gardner and I might make.
The beauty of this simple recipe is that participants can be anywhere in the world and in any time zone. It’s also very economical to do. So if you have an important presentation coming up and would like to pass it by the ACT family, just belly up to the table and click here for more information.
While we’ve been doing this collectively for over 20 years in other venues our blog is quite new and so if you are one of the first 7 to respond we’ll give you an extraordinary discount in exchange for your feedback!
Meanwhile, although we know it is impossible to become truly skillful at anything just by reading a manual, I have just picked up this little book called “How to Play Golf”. This just might be the exception to the rule. It seems all you have to do is hit a small ball with a stick until it falls down a hole. Hmm. Now how difficult can that be? I’ll let you know.
Related posts:
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I got hungry just thinking about the Chicken Marsala! But what you say about practice is totally true. It would be so cool if we could learn how to do something like in that movie the Matrix, where Trinity learns to fly a helicopter just by having her “software” upgraded. Alas, the rest of us have to a.) figure it out on our own or b.) get someone who knows what they are doing to help. As you say technology has made the latter choice a true option.