You Now Know the Dirty Little Secret of Presentation Skills

Let me tell you a little secret. Everybody is scared and uncomfortable when it comes to their presentation skills. Now, you're a beginner at presentation skills, so you may think, well, of course I have the right to be scared. What you might not realize is so many people are scared, uncomfortable, nervous even when they've given thousands of presentations, speeches, media interviews. It's something that doesn't go away for some people. It will go away for you after going through this course. Now, most of what I do in my day job is give face to face workshops, one on one group workshops with people to help them improve their presentation skills. And quite often people will start crying when they see themselves on video. Now, I typically say the same thing, which is, hey, relax, we're all in this together. Nobody's 21 anymore because they hate how they look and sound. I say, nobody's 21. My hair is falling out. I'm getting wrinkles and gray hair and jowls. Don't worry about it. I'll never forget one time, it was in my New York City studio. I'm doing a training with a client, public speaking and media training. She starts crying. I said, what's wrong? She'd just done her first presentation of the day, watched it. Tj I hate the way I look. I hate the way I sound. It's awful. And I was about to say what I normally do, which is, relax, Jennifer. It's not that bad. Nobody's 21 anymore. But then I realized I couldn't say that because she actually was 21 and she was a current Miss Universe. She didn't like the way she looked, she didn't like the way she sounded. How could that be, you're thinking? Because she'd never seen herself on video before. So it's disorienting. It doesn't matter how good you look, how flawless your skin is, your teeth or anything else. And very few of us are flawless. It's simply disorienting to human beings to watch themselves give presentations. So if you do practice your speech or you hear it, or you hear your own voice coming back on a voicemail, if you're uncomfortable with that, it's completely normal. You're in good company. So don't think of yourself as sort of uniquely scared. It scares everyone. I remember the first time I gave a presentation, I was very nervous. Fortunately, you're here today and there's some technology tricks, as we already talked about in the first lecture, that will make it so much easier for you to get over being scared when it comes to your presentation skills, let's hop right in with more.