How my teacher helped me take away fear and improve my presentation skills
No matter how perfect and confident we feel when alone, this is never the same when confronted with live audiences. To overcome our fear and at the same time exhibit confidence and efficiency does not only require continuous practice and dedicated efforts but also involves techniques to make it more effective. A few of these will be discussed here.
Introduction
Any individual having a reserved life in the past will surely feel a lot of hesitation and fear and not so much confidence within when suddenly invited for a public speech. I was not an exception. In my Post Graduation course of specialization in marketing, I came across many presentations. These sometimes involved market or field surveys, preparing an analysis report, and finally, based on this, giving the floor presentation. In the whole process, giving the floor presentation was sometimes not up to the mark. The problem which I faced is being mentioned in the below points along with what different methods were suggested by the teacher. The possible below suggestions by the teacher which I came across did not happen at once, but this happened to be on different occasions. Few were while at the time of casual classroom discussions while others during performing presentations.
It would be important to mention that although life always brings learnings and as we were still in the initial stage of learning, for stepping into professional life, we were asked to give some more time.Point 1
I was not good at English and therefore I found it often difficult to use the proper word or synonym. I sometimes even got confused and forgot in the middle of the presentation what I was saying or what my next topic was.
What the teacher suggested to me
Be natural with your instinct by implementing the below methods. Point 2
On a few occasions, team members were also of different opinions on a similar topic.
What the teacher suggested to me.
Focus on your goals and assemble their thoughts to make that relevant to the presentation and do not forget to include this in the concluding part. The purpose was to bring it all together without conflicts. Point 3
We were faced with other limitations too. Those included the pronunciations skills and unable to cope up with the slightly good presentations by others. For professionals and experienced, this may seem effortless but for beginners, this may come out as nightmares as I personally have felt the same experience many times.
What the teacher suggested to me.Conclusion
We often have dealt with the problems while speaking to the public or while making an address to a formal meeting. These problems we face are in the form of fear and hesitation. In the scenario of indecisiveness, we create our own world and share the things within us and take decisions. We do not know but after some time the problems become bigger.
I still have fresh memories as if this happened only a few weeks back. I thank my teacher for sharing a view on how I can work on the shortcomings and at the same time be progressive. The points which the teacher had suggested to me were quite general and I did feel that I was doing most of them but after meeting with the teacher, I also got an understanding that those were not routine or regular. I started doing all those and after a few times, I could feel the difference.
It is my personal experience that each one of us is having an internal mechanism of consciousness connected with a switch but sometimes we need the right person to switch it on to be awakened and do the right things more effectively.
For those children who are good at their mother tongue, that should be used to understand the meanings in English so that in future it can be probed and expanded to understand in English itself. What the teacher of the author said is right. We have to be comfortable in learning anything and if that happens in mother tongue language, that would be more quick to grasp, understand and even represent in different way. One more good suggestion made by the author's teacher that when friends meet, there would be difference of opinion on topics and discussions to which we need not bother about their liking or not but observing keenly what others say, there is every chance of you taking the right decision on which topic of interest and concentrate on the same. For the sake of our goodness, do not make comparisons with others because that would degrade the very purpose of learning and one has to concentrate of gaining knowledge and not creating confrontation with others.