The One with a Presentation Preparation

We are going to have our quarterly company-wide Open Space tomorrow. Almost 300 people from all of our 21 branches across Germany will come to Cologne to do an Open Space together and a big 90s party in the evening.

Since I have worked a lot on learning more about emotional problems and stress management, I decided to do a session on these. I am going to talk mostly about the “Training emotionaler Kompetenzen” stuff I got from my therapist with their 7 basic competences, but added some other resources from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

The preparation was a tiny bit rushed because I wasn’t really sure if this is a good topic to present in front of potentially lots of people I have never seen before. Talking about something like this at SoCraTes or a similar conference would be easy. I know people there are open to talking about things like that. I hope my coworkers are too, so in the end I decided to do it, with only a short amount of time to prepare a presentation and some notes.

But fortunately one of my mentors also took some time to look through my slides so I got some good feedback beforehand. I had a bit too many words on some slides and it is probably better to just say those things. I also put in some worksheets with loads of text on them and he suggested that I make them really tiny so there was absolutely no chance anyone could read what was actually on them, so I could just explain them a bit. I wasn’t going to go into these too deeply anyways, but I am going to add them to a folder that I will share later.

He also reminded me to speak very slowly and make lots of pauses. I have the tendency to speak really, really fast when I am a bit nervous or unsure so that was a good reminder. And something that I should work on. I am doing quite well (in my opinion) in our reviews (I usually present all of my team’s sprint progress), but I think that’s because I am speaking about something I know quite well (from having actually implemented or reviewed most of the stuff) and I have done this format of public speaking quite a lot in the past few years. Now I need practice public speaking in other situations, I guess.