Lessons Learned From Delivering A Presentation

Recently, I delivered a presentation at a conference attended by educators across the province. It was planned as an in-person session, and I arranged for a three-hour drive and one-night stay at a hotel for this conference. However, just a couple of days prior, I began to suspect that the sore throat I was developing was more than just hoarseness from teaching in the classroom. I was also starting to develop a cough. So I pulled out my old COVID test kit. Just my luck, I had COVID.

In the last thirty hours, I have had to notify everyone of my health status, while fighting off my worsening symptoms. At this rate, I knew my voice would be completely gone when I had to deliver my presentation. I initially thought I would simply deliver the presentation virtually using online conferencing. However, I feared that I would wake up on the morning of the conference without a voice and a worse headache than I had at the time. So I decided to pre-record my session.

There was a silver lining to this entire ordeal, I thought. I could edit out all of my mistakes and stitch together different sections of the presentation together, so that I didn't have to talk for over an hour straight. But once I started, my thoughts began to flow and I ended up doing an entire take of the presentation in one sitting.

Then, it was time to edit the recording. The presentation was already ten minutes over the session limit of seventy-five minutes. I had to cut down on entire sections to get it down. Also, I noticed several things, which I would not have noticed if I were to deliver my session in-person:

• I say "you know" a lot. I had heard from others that this was a thing for me, but I had paid no attention to it before. But listening to myself talk for over an hour with persistently recurring, "you know," was annoying and embarrassing to watch. It made my presentation seem silly and made me sound unqualified to deliver the session. Similarly, I noticed that I say "so" and "um" too many times as well.
• Using hand gestures seemed to help me, and it looked more personable/engaging on camera. At the start of the recording, I looked stiff. My hands were nowhere to be seen and I looked like a Korean news anchor, trying too hard to be professional. But later in the recording, as I got more comfortable and got more into the session, I started to use my hands to help communicate my thoughts. This truly helped.
• My slides were too text-heavy and the ideas were redundant. The presentation was uninteresting and dry. I was just blabbing on and on, trying to elaborate on the bullet points that were too long to begin with. Having entire sentences and paragraphs as bullet points on the slides clashed with my organic speech and messed me up from fluently presenting my ideas.

Those were some obvious criticisms I had of myself from this experience. There were certainly some things that went well too:

• Doing a pre-recording helped me to edit out all of the coughs and lost trains of thought. It also allowed me to cut down entire sections of the presentation so I could fit the recording within the seventy-five minute time limit. If I had not done a pre-recording, I could have easily been caught in the middle of my presentation and be forced to wrap up due to time.
• I was reminded of my natural strengths and weaknesses. As an introvert, I normally tend to rely on written communication, rather than spoken communication. Even after years of being a teacher, which is a very speaking-heavy job, I find that writing remains and triumphs as my forte. Perhaps I should have written a script to go off from, rather than using the slides. While it is good to work on improving oneself, sometimes, it is more effective to double-down on your natural strengths to become even better at those skills.
• It made me realize I am boring. Watching myself deliver the presentation was painfully uninteresting - and this is coming from someone who did the entire research and prepared this presentation! If I was in the room watching this recorded session at a conference, honestly, I would pack up my belongings and leave the room. This was a huge wake-up call. Why was I so boring? How do I make myself more interesting? Was my energy low from having COVID? Do I need to try to go do more fun things in my life, so that I could be more interesting? This is something I will need to keep thinking about. People say that today's economy is based on grabbing attention. If I am so boring, am I able to grab people's attention and become more successful? Probably not. But there is a market for calming content as well, because our world is so overstimulating.

All of these lessons helped me to gain a new understanding and a self-realization. Perhaps I need to find a place for myself where I am valued for my nature, rather than struggling to survive in an environment where I will sink to the bottom. I could create an ASMR channel. I could find other places that need calming energies. Healing and peaceful realms. Something for me to keep thinking about.