The real secret to giving a good presentation is for the presenter to be “up” and have a great deal of energy. Under the best of circumstances, this can be a challenge to do, if you’ve had a really bad day it can appear to be darn near impossible.
So what’s a presenter to do? Fran Capo is a motivational speaker / comedian who has had to face these types of situations. Ultimately it’s all mental – you’ve got to get yourself into the right frame of mind. Sounds easy doesn’t it? In reality if you don’t know how to do this, it can be quite hard.
Fran has a number of suggestions for how we can gather our wits about ourselves on the worst days of our lives and still deliver a knockout presentation:
- Breath Correctly: when things start to go bad for us we screw up our breathing – we take many short breaths. Realize this and stop, take a moment to focus on your breath, and take a few deep, long breaths. This will start to calm you down.
- Adjust Your Attitude: How you choose to view a situation is entirely up to you. No matter how bad the day has been so far, you are in control of how the rest of it turns out. Realizing this and forcing yourself to think positively is the key to making your presentation come off perfectly.
- Put It In A Box: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten bad news just before I was to go on and give a presentation. In order to prevent life’s little hand grenades from destroying your presentation, you need to learn to put your negative emotions in a box and slam it shut when you don’t have time to worry about them. However, be sure to open it later on and process your emotions when you have the time.
We can’t prevent life from handing us lemons before, during, or after our presentations. However, with a little care and some understanding of how we deal with bad news, the show can still go on.
Have you ever had to give a speech when you were having the worst day ever? How did you collect yourself to get ready? Was the speech a success or a disaster? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.