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If in doubt... don't.

With Simon Raybould of Curved Vision Â

If in doubt… don’t.

Simple, eh? If you’re not sure about whether you can give a presentation or not, don’t do it.

Well, not quite.

Obviously if we never did anything we weren’t 100% sure we could handle we’d never learn anything, so equally obviously I don’t mean you should take it too literally. What I really mean is that if you’re not sure about the content of a presentation you shouldn’t deliver that content - audiences know when you’re unsure or making it up. And even if it’s only short part of an otherwise brilliant delivery it’ll undermine the credibility of the rest of your time in the spotlight. Trust me on this!

In my experience as a trainer the problem arises most often when you’re asked to give someone else’s presentation: your boss emails you the slides and says “Everything you need is there - go and deliver it.” Well, there are plenty of techniques I can give you for doing that if you really have to, but my best bit of advice is: if you can get out of it, get out of it. The reason being that it takes time to become familiar with your material - and although having material prepared for you by someone else might sound like it saves you time, it doesn’t; simply because you’ve got to spend as much time getting to grips with it as if you’d researched it for yourself.

It sounds obvious when I say it now, doesn’t it, but you’d be surprised how often people forget this simple fact in the heat of the moment. (In fact the very thing had happened to one of the people on our public training day last week and I’ll put money on the fact that it’ll have happened to someone on next week’s course too.)

As always, comments and questions to me at sme@curved-vision.co.uk - I’d like to hear your horror stories of trying to deliver someone else’s content!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .