As consultant, I have the opportunity to speak in public regularly: workshops, trainings or presentations. All of them require different kind of preparation, based on the content, the purpose and the audience. Regardless all the above, I need PREPARATION.

Some months ago, I was invited to give a presentation about a certain product. I was informed about the purpose and the audience, so I prepared the content accordingly. In the meantime, the expected audience decreased significantly, till point that I thought it would be cancelled.

They decided not to cancel, but I agreed with my colleague, to give a more personalized presentation and a Q&A session for the 2 inscribed attendees.Those were our customers. As you can imagine, my preparation-time also decreased.

D-DAY has come and to my surprise:

  • There were not 2, but 10 attendees.
  • There were not only customers, but also external people. Thus, no knowledge about the product.

I started to present and I saw uncertainty in some faces. I thought it was my accent, but no. It was the topic. They knew few -or nothing- about the product and my content required more than a basic level of knowledge.

At the end, I survived. I made some “parenthesis” of basic information to balance the knowledge in the audience, but the structure of my presentation it was not the ideal.

Honestly, I was not prepared for contingency.

Some insights here:

  • It doesn’t matter if only one person will attend to your presentation. THAT person deserves the same attention than 20 or 50.
  • Imagine that at least one person doesn’t know about your topic. What would you do to let her enjoy your presentation?
  • PRE-PA-RA-TION.

By the way, the picture above was in that presentation. I look more prepared than I really was 😉

 

Prepare yourself and have fun!

 

Kaqui…