You Now Know the Dirty Little Secret of Presentation Skills

Let me tell you a little secret. Everybody is scared and uncomfortable when it comes to their presentation skills. Now, you're a beginner at presentation skills so you may think, well, of course, I have the right to be scared. What you might not realize is that so many people are scared uncomfortable nervous even when they've given thousands of presentations speeches media interviews. It's something that doesn't go away. For some people it will go away for you. After going through this course now most of what I do in my day job is give face to face workshops one on one group workshops with people to help them improve their presentation skills. And quite often people will start crying when they see themselves on video. Now, I typically say the same thing which is, hey, relax. WE'RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER. Nobody is 21 any more. Because they hate how they look and sound. I say nobody's 21. My hair's falling out I'm getting wrinkles and gray hair and just don't worry about it. I'll never forget one time it was in my New York City studio. I'm doing a training with a client public speaking in media training. She starts crying. So what's wrong? I ask. She'd just done her first presentation and then watched it. She said "T.J. I hate the way I look I hate the way I sound." It's awful. And then I was about to say when I normally do which is "relax Jennifer. It's not that bad. Nobody is 21 anymore." But then I realized I couldn't say that because she actually was 21. And she was a current Miss Universe. She didn't like the way she looked. She didn't like the way she said it. How could that be her thinking because she had never seen herself on video before. So it's disorienting. It doesn't matter how good you look how fall is your skin her teeth or anything else and very few of us are flawless. It's simply disorienting to human beings to watch themselves give presentations. So if you do practice your speech or you hear it or you hear a voice coming back on a voicemail if you're uncomfortable with that it's completely normal. You're in good company so don't think of yourself as sort of uniquely scare. It scares everyone. I remember the first time I gave a presentation I was very nervous. Fortunately you're here today and there's some technology tricks as we already talked about in the first lecture that will make it so much easier for you to get over being scared when it comes to your presentation skills. Let's hop right in with more.