Anirudh is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about presentations.
It was the annual technical festival at our college and there were lots of events happening all around the campus. Having finished organizing the informals for the day, I decided I would relax and was scanning through the posters and the header just stuck to my eye, a talk on “Talent Vs Attitude: What do you need to succeed “. Though tired and in a mood to relax, I found this topic so intriguing, it made me curious and drew me towards attending the talk. The speaker, Harsha Bhogle, was from my home town, was one of the country’s most sort after cricket commentators. He had made a phenomenal rise in the broadcasting industry after doing his MBA from one of India’s best B-Schools. Very popular among the youth of the country, he started off his presentation by initiating a discussion on what the audience thought about the talent and attitude. Some of us were pumped up listening to others talking about things we did not agree with. Then Harsha had his take on this topic and came up with a story about his childhood and how he combined attitude and talent on his way to climb the ladder of success. One of his slides had a picture which weighed success against talent and attitude and this picture in a way summarized the importance of each of these characteristics for success. I was able to connect with Harsha and it was we were having a one on one conversation. After the lecture, all of us came out of the room feeling relaxed, enlightened and in a way lucky to have attended such a lecture.
Few days later, as the technical festival ended, we were back to our routines and I was strolling towards one of our lecture theatres. I went through the blackboard and we had this lecture on “2D and 3D normalizations” in Database systems. At first look I thought we are talking about various dimensions and was wondering how this was related to databases. The stroll from the hostel to the lecture hall in a confused state made me late to class. Disinterested, confused and fearing that I might find it tough to follow, I tried to concentrate on the lecture. My professor generally had his slides which were very verbose and rarely had any pictures or illustrations of what he was teaching. Also, his style of teaching made us assume that he thought that students sitting in the first two benches were ones who would be listening to him. He never bothered to address us or make any eye contact with us. This created an impression that we at back didn’t belong to the class. In order to draw attention of the professor, one of my friends asked the professor a question about the 2nd normal form. When asked, the professor gave a puzzled look and tried to shy away from the question and continued his lecture. These turn of events and the approach of the professor made me feel even more disinterested and I walked out of the lecture. Later in the day, me along with few of my friends sat down to discuss about what happened in the class. One of my friends, who was familiar with all these topics, started explaining us using a combination of illustrations and lecture slides we used in the class. He used an abstract example of all of us being team managers of our favorite football teams and related it to how we could use the concepts of the class to manage these teams. This made the topic even more interesting. We cracked a few jokes about how incompetent the professor was in his class, and post our session we thought we achieved what the professor could not – Understanding the topics of the class in a better way.
After I finished my graduation, I started to work and four months into my job, I had to present the second phase of our project. We had worked so hard on it for the past few weeks. My manager thought that I could present the progress of project competently as I had a good and sound understanding of the project. With no experience of doing presentations in my short cooperate life, I was a bit skeptical about
how I could manage the responsibility given by my manager. That night after I was assigned the role of presenter, there was some uneasiness within me about the presentation. As I laid back on my bed after a stressful day, I started to think about how I should handle the presentation, pondering over this, I started to think about the various presentations. The first things that came to my mind were Harsha’s amazing presentation on attitude Vs talent and my Databases professor’s dull lecture during my third year. Both of them though contrastingly different in their styles, helped me analyze the pros and cons of the two styles of presenting. Having thought over the various aspects of their presentations I felt a bit relieved and was more confident about being a good presenter. My change in attitude towards the presentation was best summarized by Mr Richard Saul Wurman, The inventor of famous TeD talks quote which said:
“What to communicate is to understand what it is like not to understand “.
Having being in a position where I was confused as to how to interpret two extremely different styles of presentations, I understood the things I need to take care of when I am presenting. The analysis helped me realize what I should present and how I should ,so as to convey my the story to my target audience. Looking back I am grateful for the experiences I had, they helped me become a more confident and composed speaker and presenter.
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