Presenting is a craft and partly a gift. Yet you can learn it, present yourself. However, Ilse has suffered for years that she slammed during a presentation. She started nervously every time with abdominal pain, diarrhea and other complaints. Slamming on a presentation? It can pass! Present yourself? You can learn it!
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We have developed something new in my department and the management would like a presentation to be informed about the content. It soon becomes apparent that I can take care of an important part of the presentation (!).
When I first started working as a career counselor, I had to explain in secondary schools about the annual school progress tests that the 8th grades took. Mass parents' evenings were usually held in the auditorium for this purpose. And, a not insignificant detail, as an 'external' (not employed by the school) you always became scheduled at the end of such an evening.
It used to be the case that I got nervous when I had to present myself in front of more than five people. An average of sixty parents came to a parents' evening if you had two groups of eight.
I never had to put the dates of such presentations in my agenda because I always got chronic diarrhea a week in advance. That lasted until the parents' evening itself. Fortunately, I was able to tell my story without leaving odors behind. In theory at least; because on the night itself I always had other problems. It turns out that presenting yourself is not that easy.
What was the next big bump in the road? Right, the infamous microphone. I could repeat my story at home in a captivating form, but when I was presented with a microphone I immediately shut down and my voice resembled that of a dying person in a movie. For a long time it has been like this:if you don't want me to say anything, put a microphone in front of me! It doesn't even matter if it's on or not!
After a few failures, I learned to overcome my problems with presentations by immediately supplying the audience with thirty A-4 sheets so they could read along. With a bit of luck, a few would talk out loud and then it would be less noticeable that almost nothing came out of my throat!
I was also very insecure about my clothes in those days. When people looked at me – and for some reason that often happens when you present something – I always immediately thought that maybe they were looking at me because my fly was open. Or because I was wearing something wrong, or a hundred other things. Of course, that didn't increase the festivity either and makes presenting yourself almost impossible.
The advantage of being involved at the end of a parent's evening was of course that people would clap anyway (for the evening as a whole, but I didn't know that yet) and that you can almost immediately receive flowers, a book voucher and/or a got a wet kiss from a raunchy director. That boosted my self-confidence just enough to come back the following year.
The eighth grade testing lapsed for me when I got other work and with that the annual torments ended. I didn't even think about it anymore, until a few years ago I spontaneously decided to present something at a party. I was excited to start the first line when someone suddenly held a microphone in front of me.
It went so fast that I didn't have time to close and the presentation went flawlessly! I didn't know what was happening to me and it was almost as disenchanting not knowing how something can be solved as not knowing what causes something! In any case, I was happy with it and thought it had been a fluke. However, there were soon more situations where I had to speak into a microphone in front of large groups of people and it continued to go well. After three times I decided that I was spontaneously cured of my microphone phobia and I had a party inside.
Tomorrow I will speak in front of fifteen people. I haven't had diarrhea and I'm not sure if there are microphones. I'm looking forward to it!
