“Working it” column published in the Career Moves section of The Evening Echo on 31/03/2008
Day-dreaming at work again? Not focussed on what you’re doing? Join the club! Apparently though, day-dreaming can be a useful tool in helping you to excel in the workplace – especially when it comes to delivering a killer presentation.
Presentation skills are something that, sooner or later, most office- or corporate-based employees will need to develop at some point in their career. If you’ve had to deliver a presentation already, then you don’t need me to tell you how nerve racking it can be to get up in front of your peers and deliver a knowledgeable, entertaining and informative performance. Because that’s what an effective presentation is, essentially: a performance, and one that all too often falls flat.
But Janet Howd, a professional singer, actress and presentation coach, maintains that we can all harness the energizing power of day-dreams to help us deliver more compelling presentations. Writing in Management-Issues, Janet explains that, once we’ve done our research and know our subject matter, rehearsing the presentation in our minds can pay real dividends.
“As soon as your knowledge is in place, envisage a sparkier, more fluent, more assured, more attractive you,” she suggests. “Once you’ve got that vibrant persona in mind, visualize this new self giving the presentation you’ve been working on to a group of close friends who are all rooting for you.
“As you develop your message, stay well within this comfort zone. If you find yourself lost for words just follow Shakespeare’s example and invent some! As soon as you have finished this imaginary performance, write down or dictate as much as you can remember of what you said. Don’t think about anything else until you have written those first impressions down.”
Once that’s done, she goes on to suggest that you make notes of your mannerisms and intonation in your imaginary performance, how and when you used equipment an props, and how you engaged with your audience. Then, by analysing your notes you should be able to distil the salient elements into a template or “script” you can use for your presentation proper.
To cover all the bases, and make sure you have everything under control, Janet suggests that you make another foray into your imagination, this time putting yourself through a worst-case-scenario presentation. In this nightmare experience from hell you may have lost your notes, your laptop crashes, and the projector’s on the blink; suddenly you’re at a loss for words in front of an openly hostile audience. How do you cope with these setbacks, what do you do, how do you feel?
“Once you’ve analysed that hellish vision and incorporated any useful data from it into the real presentation, you are far les likely to be thrown off course during the real performance,” says Janet. “It also makes it unlikely that members of your audience will choose to visualize themselves anywhere but in your presence.”
Which is all good – and of course there’s another benefit: the next time your boss catches you daydreaming at your desk, you can, with a straight face, tell him or her that you’re actually hard at work on your next presentation.
