Hate what you hear? Get ready to say something nice

Clients will know that I hate to leave the comfort of my basement lairclassroom, but I’ve been saying Yes to a lot of events this year, treating 2017 as my time to get to know more of the city I live in.
That means going to meetups, conferences, workshops, seminars. All the fun stuff that means you have to work extra-hard afterwards just to catch up.
Saying yes has helped with my objective of making business and creative connections with people in Nashville.
It’s also meant I’ve sat through some pretty horrible meetings, presentations, and events. I’ve spent plenty of time wondering if I’m at the wrong party.
But when I start thinking that way, when I think that anything less than the exact right place at the exact right moment is a failure, then I’m both miserable and less likely to leave the house next time.
So I’ve been doing my best to find the gold dust in any situation.
Sometimes I leave my basement dungeon classroom and train teachers. Since coming to the US, I’ve spent over 500 hours observing student teachers and thinking of things I can ask or say to help them get better.
One benefit is I get to steal their ideas and pretend I thought of them myself. Another is seeing people learning from mistakes, taking on feedback and getting better (and sometimes being fantastic).
Training teachers has made me better at giving feedback in America. Because for most student teachers, their first class is pretty damn bad, and yet letting them know the 100 things they got wrong?
Not the most constructive feedback on the table.

If you don’t want to make America cry, remember that America wants to say something nice to you, and she wants you to say something nice back.
America does not, as it turns out, run on Dunkin. It runs on compliments.
This isn’t about pretending they’re perfect — part of my responsibility is to let student teachers, or clients, know when I think they’re about to drive off a cliff.
And it isn’t about the feedback sandwich either (although yeah, you should do something like that). This is finding the positives even when someone has done a poor job. This is finding a twinkle of gold dust in a pile of…not-gold.
I’ve had my share of gold-mining moments at the conferences and meetings I’ve attended so far in 2017. In particular, a seminar I was excited about — building apps.
Turns out, the presentation was little more than a sales pitch for the company’s own platform.
It was also not a good pitch.
I like hearing about how companies are started, how they grow. I especially like it when they tell stories about the mistakes they’ve made along the way.
But this presentation was a stinker.
Sometimes, of course, because I do a lot of presenting but still have plenty to learn, I recognize something stinky that I’ve done myself, like the anecdote that seems hilarious and insightful until you try delivering it to a roomful of strangers.
And everyone has a bad day. Presenters and audience alike.
But this one was 99% stink.
- Not delivering what they advertised
- Not connecting with the audience — not giving them a reason to trust you or to listen
- Not knowing their audience, and then assuming they’re familiar with a region of the country or a business
- Using slides that no one can read, using video that no one can hear
- Speaking for much, much too long
I have plenty of practice taking notes of what’s going wrong as well as what’s going right, but on this occasion, everything was wrong. So I wrote that down.

What a test of my gold-mining abilities. The worst presentation I’d ever sat through, but I was determined to find the gold dust. Otherwise, it’s 75 minutes I don’t get back, and I feel like the stupid one for turning up in the first place.
One good thing, to make this worthwhile.
What are the odds someone can speak for over an hour without saying a single useful thing?
Okay, 63 minutes in, there it is.

Duly noted.
I’m glad I did, because when the presenter finally paused for breath, she asked the room, “Okay, I wanna hear from YOU. What are you THINKING? What have you LEARNED?”
Suddenly her energy was intense, because she thought her job was over. But the audience was asleep and no one had anything to say.
We chose that time to examine our shoes or stretch our neck muscles. She hadn’t engaged her audience once and we had forgotten how to talk.
Because I spend way too much time giving people eye contact these days, she stalked over and said, eyeing my name badge, “TEACHER Hamish, how about YOU?”
I checked my notes and threw back the one useful thing I’d heard in over an hour. A single speck of gold.
“My big take-away is that people don’t have to love coding to work in technology. Because there’s product ideation, testing, pitching, customer service. I think that’s both reassuring and exciting.”
And wow, did she look happy when I said that.
So am I proud of my bullshitting abilities?
Sure. But more significantly, the feedback was true, I do, sorry, I DO BELIEVE the tech industry is more than just someone writing lines of code.
And yeah, I didn’t tell her what I thought of her product or her presen pitchpitchentation skills.
You don’t have to tell someone about every single thing they do wrong. In fast, most of the time, that’s the last thing you should do.
While I don’t believe in encouraging bad behavior, I do believe in positive energy, and I definitely respect the Karmic Boomerang. So maybe the next time I have a bad day and it’s my presentation that stinks, someone in the audience will return the favor.
Teacher Hamish
Tried Working English?
