Preparation for Presentation and Communication

Our agendas for our eighth class were presentation skills, presentation practices, essential skills and communication styles.

First we reviewed our previous class which was about making rules for a meeting.
I already mentioned the set of rules to follow when having a meeting in my previous blog. Do you remember the important rules?
When we call a meeting first we have to have the purpose and the agenda of the meeting set. We need to establish who are the participants, timing, minute taker, chairperson in the meeting. After that we can have a meeting properly.
All these things are necessary to have a meeting. The most important thing for a project manager to do before the session begins is to provide the participants with information regarding the meeting.

After reviewing the rules we learned about presentation skills. We have to know the following key points to give a good presentation.

1. Consider the needs of audience
2. Organize the ideas logically
3. Use transitions
4. Smile
5. Eye contact
6. Speak with variation
7. Posture and gesture

If we do not know about these key points we cannot give a good presentation. If we cannot give a good presentation, we will not do well at meetings. So we learned these things briefly in our eighth session.

What is the difference between a good presentation and a bad presentation?

Giving a good presentation is not a simple task. We must be prepared physically and mentally before the presentation because we have to speak in front of people, usually in a foreign environment. We practiced giving presentations one by one and when we made any mistake, we received comments from our teacher.

In my case I never felt at ease standing in front of people and give a presentation. All in all, I think I did pretty well today because my classmates and my teacher were not new to me, but I still need more practice speaking in front of many people.

After practicing the presentation we learned communication styles.
It is not such a new topic but normally we do not really think about our communication styles. People communicate in different ways; systematic and organic, direct and diplomatic, formal and informal, inductive and deductive, head and heart, high context and low context, among colleagues and friends.

These communication styles are used in different kinds of presentation. Finding out about different styles of communication helps us to vary our ways in which give presentations to different kinds of people.

How would you describe your own communication style?
I think it depends on your nationality, culture and society you belong to.

Thanks!