Presentation Time!

Our ninth session was about giving a presentation which we spent a long time preparing.
I was a little bit nervous before the presentation. It turned out I wasn't the only one who was nervous. All my friends said they were too before the presentation. In my case, I didn't feel confident because I was not fully prepared for it because I've been too busy with work these days. To my surprise, I did much better than I expected.

I gave a presentation about the Toyota Corporation and its future business. I had searched many websites including Toyota’s to try make my presentation good. I collected a lot of useful information about Toyota but my weak point was I did not make power point presentation well. Before the presentation, I read through the key points to follow to make use of them during my session.

After the presentation, we each looked back to how we did and self-assessed the good points and improvements that we needed to make. The good points with me were eye contacts, rhythm and smile. My weaknesses were I acted rather uneasy and the Power Point slides were short. My afterthought is I could have overcome those weaknesses had I prepared for it more thoroughly. I always feel that I really need more practice in presentation, which itself is a lesson to learn.

After the self-assessment, we had other two agendas for the day: UCLA Extension Course evaluation and our future goals. My thoughts are that learning about business English communication helped me a lot with improving my business English. I got a chance to study English as well as reviewing many things like financial information. Furthermore, I would like to work on my English so that I can enjoy my stay more when I visit an English speaking country in the future. I've promised myself I would study a lot harder in my spare time.

Regarding future goals, we asked each other questions and talked about our career goals and about the skills we need to make our dreams come true.

Thanks!

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!