Presentation Delivery : Don't Cry Over Spilt Milk - TJ Walker Video
Everyone makes mistakes. Given a long enough time line you are going to be standing up in front of a sea of faces, and you are going to make a horrible, humiliating mistake and wish that the ground would swallow you up. It's a perk of the job when it comes to giving presentations.
But while mistakes are an unavoidable part of what you do as presenters and public speakers, the way you handle the situation is far more under your control. There is no use in crying over spilt milk, and nobody is going to thank you for losing it, just because you did something wrong. In today's video tutorial speaking expert TJ Walker tells you exactly how you can minimize the impact of your mistakes, and rise quickly above them in the heat of the moment.
As TJ Walker says:
''Everybody makes mistakes - great speakers, awful speakers, everyone in between - but there's a difference in how they react to their own mistakes. Most of us, we make a mistake, we grimace, we do something like that. Sweat appears on our forehead.
If we're standing up in front of a bunch of people - colleagues, professionals - we're a little nervous anyway, we forget what we're going to say and we think 'oh my God, everybody's looking at me, staring at me, laughing at me'. If we're in a media interview our eyes shoot up 'oh God I forgot what the stat was, I forgot what the facts were'.
We panic.
''
So what should you do to get out of that rabbit in the headlights feeling?
TJ Walker explains that:
''It's not that people even notice the mistake we make, it's our reaction to our mistake. That's where people get this feeling in the pit of their stomach - 'uh oh, TJ's not doing too well, he's on a high wire, he's going to fall, he's going to tumble away. That's what you want to avoid.''
The key to overcoming your mistakes isn't to expect perfection from yourself, but on the contrary to cut yourself a little slack. TJ Walker notes:
''You're going to make mistakes, but don't beat yourself up - don't grimace, don't look up, don't look like you're upset with yourself. Great speakers don't make less mistakes, they simply cover it more, and they realize that the way people hear words is not the same way that they read them.
When you read words and you see bad spelling, it jumps out at you. If you see bad grammar, it jumps out at you. But let me tell you a little secret - most people when they speak, I don't care how smart they are, how well educated they are, if you took a transcript of words coming out of their mouth, you'd be appalled.
''
Speaking is an imperfect art, and while it pays to rehearse and then rehearse some more, beating yourself up over mistakes only makes them stand out all the more.
posted by
Michael Pick
on Tuesday, March 6 2007
Saturday, December 1 2007
URL of this article:
http://masterview.ikonosnewmedia.com/2007/03/06/presentation_delivery_dont_cry.htm
