Technical Presentations with Clown Presence – Don Colliver

interesting.

I'm a longtime Toastmaster.

Toastmasters is great, not because necessary.

I don't want to look down on their curriculum or anything like that.

It's fine for what it is.

But here's the thing about Toastmasters.

It gives everybody an opportunity to speak every single meeting.

At least that's the goal, dependent upon the size of the club.

And it gives everybody feedback all the time.

You're always getting feedback.

And so I think low stakes opportunities to speak in low stakes is critical.

Like if you have one quarterly presentation and then everyone's like wringing their hands over it.

like every couple months, that's not low stakes and that you weren't

necessarily

going to get better.

You're just going to learn to hate presentations if that's the case.

Finding low stakes opportunities to speak.

And this is really important for, I think, because I deal a lot of with non-native speakers and folks who are dealing with serious anxiety, which is a very, very common thing, which I deal with as well.

Sometimes just positive feedback is critical.

Like a lot of us are used to performance reviews and it's just like, give me the hard stuff.

Tell me what, you know what I mean? But there's so much that we're dealing with.

That's a little bit softer than that.

When we're talking about standing up in front of a group and presenting, sometimes all you need is to hear positive feedback for a few presentations and Because I find that a lot of these like eye contact issues, filler word problems, really weird hand motions from nervousness.

That's just going to dissipate with some positive feedback without anybody having to point it out.

Just give them the opportunity, give them some positive feedback.