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Make a List, Check It Twice
As a consultant and trainer, I use checklists to prevent embarrassing oversights. They’ve saved me more than once.
When I began giving presentations at conferences in the early 1990s, most speakers used plastic transparencies on an overhead projector for their visuals. Only a few speakers had begun using laptop computers with presentation software like PowerPoint.
In those early days, I once taught a full-day tutorial at a local conference. I packed up my boxes of transparencies and drove clear across town to the conference site. Near the middle of my talk, I noticed that I was running out of plastic faster than I was running out of time. Suddenly I realized that I had brought only two of the four boxes of transparencies I needed for this full-day tutorial. Uh-oh.
Fortunately, the man who was running the conference saved my bacon. I had sent him a PowerPoint file of my slides in advance, which he had loaded onto his laptop. After lunch, I was able to complete my presentation using his laptop in place of my missing transparencies. That was my first live PowerPoint experience and among my most awkward professional mistakes.
That was a close call. I learned my lesson, though. From then on I have always used a checklist to prepare for my speaking…
