On a presentation gone awry

That was one nightmare of a Presentation. My second presentation in the day and it went worse than I expected. Top among the reasons being my lack of preparedness for a non-technical topic. Comparatively, the morning presentation, a technical one, went fine, went smooth. I was able to drive home my point, wrap up within the stipulated time and words flew spontaneously. The technical presentation in the morning having to do with work that I deal with daily, was probably one of the reasons I did well in it. It was well received.

But this second one, on the topic of Crowdsourcing, left so much to be desired. And now as I write this post, I am realizing that this is the first time in 5 years that I chose to speak on a topic not related to my line of work. And if memory serves me well, I have in fact never spoken publicly on non-technical matters during my Engineering days and after I started working. That should be a point to ponder.

Besides this, something else that went wrong was the lack of content, not on the topic as such, but in my preparation for the presentation. Eventually I was left searching for words to fit rightly against the pictures and the bullets in my average made presentation. There is a wealth of material everywhere on this topic as well as things that I know of, but, somehow I didn't do quite well in putting these things together, piecing together the thoughts. It's so much akin to me not being able to give 100% to the job at hand, these days. I blame it on the countless distractions in my mind.

Another perhaps less important reason for the bad show was the fact that I was presenting to an entirely remote audience without the ability to 'connect' to them visually. This definitely impairs your ability to get the kind of immediate feedback that you seek from your audience's expressions when presenting in front of people. Telephone, it seems doesn't do a good work conveying emotions - yawning, frowning, pulling hairs. But yes, this would have had lesser impact had I prepared well.

As mentioned in a primer on public speaking, it definitely requires preparing on the topic well ahead of time and rehearsing a few times, even for the seasoned speaker. And yes, I need more public speaking.