My Slow Rise Up the Presenting Confidence Ladder…
Giving speeches and presentations has been a roller coaster experience for me throughout my short life.
I recall 6th grade when each student had to memorize a poem and recite it in front of the entire class the 1st Friday of each month. One time in particular I was reciting my poem and my best friend was making faces at me, trying to get me to laugh. It worked and I’m sure I came off as an absolutely crazy person to anyone who didn’t realize what was going on. It was embarrassing.
The first meaningful presentation of my life came in 8th grade. Every year the 8th grade class picked a topic about the civil war and did a presentation in front of the entire 7th and 8th grade class. I was still relatively new to the school and at an age where I’d rather have my fingernails plucked out than not be liked, so I was a bit nervous.
I recall a conversation I had with one of my friends, Nick, just before we went to present. The previous day at football practice Nick’s voice had cracked while hiking the ball and we were talking about how much it would suck if his voice were to crack during his presentation. Suck it would, Nick. Suck it would.
Fast-forward an hour and it is my voice that’s cracking while presenting, not Nicks. I still remember looking out at the smirks of people I didn’t know, their faces glowing from the PowerPoint projector, and being absolutely humiliated. I hadn’t had any signs of my voice cracking before I went up there and within a few lines it was completely shattered and made the Liberty Bell look brand spankin new.
I actually received an A on that presentation but it didn’t make up for the torture I received following that. Kids are mean.
Right before I went into high school my family moved again and I found out that I was required to take a speech class at my new school. I had a bad track record of giving speeches up to that point and couldn’t stand the idea of humiliating myself in front of another group of people I didn’t know, so I pushed the freshmen laden class all the way to my senior year.
When I finally took the course one of our first assignments was to give a speech teaching the class how to do something. Most kids picked something like crocheting, playing tennis, or how to bake a cake. I thought that every speech I had seen was dreadfully boring so I decided to do something a little outside the box and did a speech on ‘how to be awesome.’ While your eye rolls hurt, I completely understand.
I didn’t do any research and I didn’t practice. I was a senior about to graduate and I was in a class with a bunch of freshman whose opinions and feelings frankly didn’t mean a thing to me. I went up there and I winged it.
My feelings toward speeches and public speaking in general changed from that point forward. I went up to present on how to be awesome and had this little spiel in my head that was essentially a ‘be yourself; do what you do’ monologue. But that isn’t what I ended up doing. What my ‘speech’ ended up being was more of a conversation.
I don’t mean that the audience had a dialogue and literally spoke back to me, but I found myself speaking like a human being to another human being. I told stories and I was genuine. I addressed how ridiculous it was that me, some guy they didn’t know, was going to teach them ‘how to be awesome.’ I used universal scenarios and fears that face most high schoolers as examples to help me make my points and it worked.
I sat down afterward feeling like it was good enough for an A rather than just a B+ but apparently I’d done better than I realized. After class I had people coming up telling me how inspiring I had been. They were freshman and their opinions had meant nothing when I’d first gone up, but I have to say that it felt good to hear. My teacher even encouraged me to go out for the debate team but I had no interest in that at the time. I was just happy that I’d passed.
Going into college I had no problem giving speeches or presentations. I actually enjoyed it because I knew I was better at it than most. What helped me, I think, was that I always looked at it from the point of view of the audience, which wasn’t too hard since for 34/35 of presentations given in class I was the audience. I made sure to avoid saying things that I thought would make them cringe and did what I could to hold the attention on myself rather than the carved letters in their desktops. For the most part I think I did a pretty good job and if nothing else I was confident anytime I’d go up to speak, which went a long way.
..And My Quick Fall Back Down
But recently something changed; I graduated and entered the ‘real world.’
Last week my internship with an ad agency for the summer came to a close. The other interns and I had worked hard all summer developing a campaign for our client and were ready to wrap the summer up by pitching it. Unfortunately, that pitch didn’t go, uh, exactly as I had planned.
There were a few things about this presentation that had me worried that I never had to face before.
First of all, this pitch I was giving wasn’t in front of high school freshmen or uninterested college colleagues. It was in front of a group of people whom I respected and whose opinions meant a lot to me. It wasn’t for some letter to be digitally stamped next to my name. It was to pass along an insightful idea that we really believed could help this business grow. These realities set in with me weeks in advance and the nerves grew more and more as the day approached.
There were a couple of other red flags that were bothering me as the date approached. I’d been given the opening segment of our presentation which would include the reveal of our big idea and was to be done before the slideshow actually began. I wouldn’t have any bullets or slides to work with. Since I had the big idea reveal, I also wanted to have a good build up to it right out of the gate so it could have as strong an impact as possible. I was putting a lot of unnecessary pressure on myself to set the tone for our group and do well since I was starting us off.
No worries, though. I just decided that I was going to practice for this presentation more than any before it to minimize my chances of messing up. The more I’d practice, the more comfortable I’d feel, and the more comfortable I’d feel, the better I would be able to perform.
So practice I did. I started by rambling about what I wanted to say out loud to myself and taking notes of the parts I liked most. I read through what I had a few times, cut out some repetitions, and took out parts that didn’t add anything. Then I began to practice reciting it, nailing the exact wording I wanted for key parts, and working on sounding natural and conversational.
I probably recited this bad boy thirty times to myself before I went up to do the real deal. I was finishing it within a five second span every time I went through it and wasn’t missing a beat.
Yet, for some reason I still didn’t feel that confident when I went up to give it. The nerves that I usually shake loose once I start speaking were clinging to me and weren’t going anywhere. No big problem, though. I actually started it off strong and as far as I was concerned that was all I needed to carry me through.
But then something…well something happened. It’s hard to pinpoint but somewhere along the line I missed a key point that I had wanted to make and when I realized I had missed it, it was all I could think about. My mouth kept going and the words kept coming until I came to a point where I was supposed to transition, but my mind was still elsewhere. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say next.
It’s impossible to describe the feeling that struck me in the moment that I realized I didn’t know my next talking point but I think it was comparable to drowning. I was extremely aware of the silence surrounding me and before I knew it I was past the point of playing this off as a natural pause. I was going through my brain a million miles a second thinking as quickly as I could, grabbing for anything, anything to start talking about to stop the maddening silence, but I came back with nothing but air every single time.
I decided to address that I’d lost my place to help relieve some of the building uncomfortableness and asked for a quick second to re-gather my thoughts. Only my thoughts wouldn’t re-gather. My allotted second came and went and I still had nothing. Why on Earth couldn’t I remember where I was or what came next?
Eventually one of my teammates stepped in for me and began talking to help stop what felt like oceans of water flooding into our ship of a presentation. I can’t thank her enough for it. The second she began talking I remembered where I was at and once she finished I resumed where I had left off. I finished the rest of the presentation strong but the whole time I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened.
What Went Wrong
When we had finished our presentation upper management of the agency and the client we had pitched to gave us some comments and critiques on how we’d done. Understandably my loss for words that I had hoped we could somehow pretend never happened was a focal point.
Everyone commended me on how I had handled the situation, saying that I seemed to remain calm (HA, if only they knew) and bounced back from it well. But there was a consensus that I had piled too much on my plate and that I shouldn’t have made my part at the beginning so long. They also suggested that I should have done a different part, maybe something I knew more about so this wouldn’t have happened.
While I completely respect what they had to say and agree that I may have piled too much on myself at the beginning, I don’t think those were the problems. I knew the content as well as anybody. I had been at every single one of our group’s meetings and had been a key contributor to our campaigns overall theme. Knowledge wasn’t the problem.
Now having had a week to reflect on it I’m almost certain that the problem was that I completely disregarded what had made my first good speech back in high school so strong, and that was conversation.
I had practiced my presentation so much, was so concerned with making specific points in a specific order that I had really restricted myself. Rather than constructing my presentation in a circle so that if a piece were to fall out the rest was still connected, I had built it in a straight line. If one piece came out, the rest was completely severed off and I had nowhere to go.
Sure, I had made the presentation feel natural with how I spoke and the fluctuations in my voice I used, but truthfully there was nothing organic about it at all which is important to any conversation. I over practiced, over analyzed, and over thought it as a whole.
I should have kept the points of my section in my head limited to 4 or 5 rather than 13 or 14 in order to keep it broad and malleable. I also should have forced myself to do the presentation differently each time I practiced it rather than the exact same. No two conversations are ever alike and neither should two presentations.
In the end I had known the campaign inside and out and I had known what I wanted to say to the client. I should have just gone up and said it rather than reciting it.
While the wound’s still fresh and the embarrassment is unparalleled by any other in my life to this point (except for maybe peeing my pants during P.E. in kindergarten, but that’s for a different time) I can only be thankful it happened now, during an internship, rather than somewhere down the line when pitching for a multi-million dollar account.
This mistake now may have saved my career somewhere down the road. I was confident as a presenter, which is good, but I had forgotten what makes a good presentation. I didn’t put any thought into how I was preparing and it cost me.
I may have learned more while floundering during that pitch than I did doing maybe anything else at the agency, and believe me when I say I learned a lot during my time there. I know how I need to approach these things in the future and am more confident now, having completely bombed, than I ever was beforehand.
Key Take Away
Know what makes your presentations great and make sure that element is added each time you present. For me, it’s making it feel less like a presentation and more like a conversation.
-Brian
Struggling Copywriter 