The best person to judge you, is YOU. It may be hard to believe sometimes, but it's true, because who knows you better than yourself? I think no one.
This week we have begun to delve deeper into the presentation we are going to pitch to the different companies that we have targeted as potential candidates to financially support Kantaya. When we decided to deliver presentations as one of our main products, we knew what we were getting into, and it isn't easy.
Presenting pitches is the riskiest type of presentation because it determines your success; it determines whether the audience will support/agree with you or not. We went to a workshop in Procter and Gamble on Thursday so they would show us the basics on EFFECTIVE presentation making/delivering.
I came to realize that what is KEY here is knowing your information and becoming "the smartest person in the world on what you are going to present".This obviously isn't literal, but in order to be prepared enough to give a meaningful presentation, you need to know e v e r y t h i n g you can about your topic.
This, to me, was frightening at first because what we tend to focus on when planning presentations is the content: what we are going to say. Little did I know that the actual magic happens when planning how you are going to say it. You might have your detailed information written down on a KeyNote presentation and know exactly what you are going to say in each slide, but how prepared are you really?
It doesn't mean that the content you're presenting isn't important, on the contrary. What you say will take a huge part in the message your audience takes with them and you need to make sure it's accurate, concise, and inspiring. But the content you give out, though extremely important, is the least of your worries.
To have engaging content all you need is an effective preparation, which is basically a good and reliable base of knowledge. When you start thinking about the audience though, it gets more complicated because the way you move your hands, the way you vary your volume, your voice tone, and the way you transmit your content, all influences on how your audience perceives the message. |
If you want to have the "best knowledge in the market" on your topic, you need to become your own devil's advocate. You need to ask yourself those questions that could be an opposition to your argument and think of negative possible scenarios, so this way you can be prepared for the worst during the presentation delivery. Sure it works to ask for other's feedback, but they might not know your topic as much as you do, so their hard questions won't be as challenging or contradictory. This is what I plan on doing with my group when practicing for the presentation. We will ask for feedback from the founders of Kantaya to get their consent, but the questioning will be done by us. Not as Camila, Romina, and Chiara, but as our own devil's advocates.