Wherever you are in the office hierarchy, presentations are the new tea-making. From briefings and staff seminars, to meetings and conferences, few of us can escape doing a visualisation exercise to pretend we’re an amoeba devoid of self-consciousness. The checklist below attempts to show that there is more light at the end of the tunnel - even if it is just your Powerpoint going on the blink as usual.
1. Be confident: tell yourself that we’re all born presenters deep down. How many times, after all, have you held colleagues spellbound with your theory of what a jar of Vaseline is doing in the sales manager’s office? As for after-work social events, it’s no surprise that you’ve been described as the next Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown. It’s now just a matter of transferring these essential skills to Quality System ISO900.
2. Think of it as an ideal opportunity for you to practice your new one-person Virginia Woolf stream-of-consciousness show. But remember there should be a beginning, middle and an end to your speech. If not, advise audiences about a long-haul ahead and issue them with some thrombosis socks and a 1991 Goldie Hawn movie.
3. Check out your venue. Is it so small that you can see everyone’s rude drawings of you, or medium-sized in which case you have to imagine them? Or will it be a Wembley Stadium size, where your pores will be live on a five hundred foot plasma screen.
4. If you’re still feeling nervous just imagine the members of your audience completely nude. After all, that’s what they’re probably doing to you right now.
5. Finally ask yourself what can possibly go wrong. Always expect any pictures to appear the wrong way up and for burning acetates to offer a startlingly authentic 1967 Pink Floyd psychedelic light show experience. Expect sad audience members to go hysterical: after all they know there’s not exactly going to be a lot to laugh at after this. Unless of course your Powerpoint then breaks down too and you end up having to do all the frolicking pie charts and funny voices yourself. But at least most of your audience will be asleep by this point.
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