Even the most practiced speaker gets the jitters before giving a presentation; no one wants to look foolish. Pre-conference tricks and techniques help us relax, but it may take a round of applause, or a smile from someone in the audience for us to know we’re doing well. Presenting using a conference call helps with stage fright because we don’t have all those eyes on us. On the other hand, without seeing the audience, how do we know how we’re doing?
The post I read at SpeakingAboutPresenting.com is, on the surface, about recovering from face-to-face presentation disasters, but the main gist is discovering if you’re actually bombing or not. And though it’s for face-to-face, most of the post’s info is very helpful on a conference call.
For example point #1 is, “You can’t tell how a presentation went just by looking at people.” We’ve talked before about making assumptions on video conferences, but it’s not an issue with audio only. Heh, advantage conference calls! We can’t be mislead by apparent bored looks, or blank faces.
Audiences react differently because all audiences are different. A lot depends on who they are, their confidence level, how well they know each other, how well they know you, time of day, size of meal, color of room... okay, maybe not the last one, but you get my point.
So how exactly can we tell how we did? Feedback. By asking questions, we will know their feelings, how much they learned, and how we did. If we typically don’t get questions during the Q&A at the end, we try having mini-Q&As throughout the conference call. We can also ask for input and opinions from people on things we know they know, and get a sense of things from what they say. And afterwards, we can do follow-up emails, questionnaires, and/or polls.
And like the blog post said, it’s not the end of the world if we discover our presentation was boring. We simply adjust our material, adapt our style, and do it better next time!
