Overcome yourself, and accept your fear.
I believe everyone has been seen things like: “5 Ways to Improve your Presentation Skills”. Articles like that always contain general ideas on Presentation Skills. They seem to make sense, but sometimes the information is not helpful at all. Like, someone may say: “Just practice it.”, but how to practice it, what are the tips for that?
So for this post, I am going to elect a helpful tip, and explore more on them.
A post called “20 Ways to Improve Your Presentation Skills” by Larry Kim, who is the CEO of MobileMonkey and the founder of WordStream. After I read through this post, I think Mr. Kim was actually finding helpful tips from his own experience.
One of the tips is “Remember That Most Audiences are Sympathetic” (Kim, 2016), and he wrote: “One of the hardest fears to shake when speaking in public is that the audience is secretly waiting to laugh at your missteps or mistakes. Fortunately, this isn’t the case in the vast majority of presentations.” (Kim, 2016).
So what he was writing is audiences are not waiting to see your mistakes, they want to see you succeed. When you say, “I’m really nervous right now. I don’t like speaking in front of people.”, remind yourself that “the audience gets it and actually wants to see you nail it” (Kim, 2016).
Keep that in mind, the audience likes to see people fight with themselves rather than surrender and give it up. In addition, another tip is related to the former one is “Don’t fight the Fear” (Kim, 2016).
The fear is not always bad, sometimes those jitters can help you get through your presentation. Mr. Kim was trying to say that fear also can be positive. Once you accept your fear, the nervous energy becomes positive enthusiasm.
In sum, don’t think your audience is the one who judges your mistakes and pushes you to make mistakes. They also want to see positive things, like you overcome your fear.
References:
Kim, L. (2016, October 19). 20 Ways to Improve Your Presentation Skills. [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://medium.com/the-mission/20-ways-to-improve-your-presentation-skills-f6d008b9c7e2
