15 Things to do before a Presentation

"The human brain starts working the moment you are born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public." —George Jessel

It is uncanny how public speaking can make almost anyone feel uncomfortable. In the past we have explored how preparation (Simple, Unexpected, Story) can make a world of difference. However even the most confident of speakers can feel butterflies before a talk - even a talk they have given hundreds of times. The key is to harness these feelings and make the butterflies work for us. The following Business Insider article looks at 15 things we can do to make that happen. The entire article is worth a read. We wanted to touch on a few of the points. 

Remember and live up to the 3 Audience Truths

• "This audience believes I am the expert."  This is especially true in Balika and Bal Mandal. However even in Kishori/Kishore/Yuva Mandal this can apply. You have read the syllabus, done your home work (SUS). So at the very least, the material is fresh for you. You are also the expert in your opinion and point of view.
• "They want me to succeed." Nobody wants a boring sabha. Everybody wants you to do well because that means they are engaging in something of value. Samp is not relegated to basketball and team building activities. Samp is also rooting for you to give an amazing talk. Even the apathetic of audiences will be happy if your talk goes well.
• "They don't know what I'm going to say." If you forget a prasang or don't say everything exactly as you planned - nobody will know. (Yes the karyakars that previewed your talk will know, but they REALLY want you to do a great talk - it's their seva - so they will be the ones who are most forgiving).

Take several deep belly breathe
Pranayam - it works.

Practice the first (few) minutes of your talk
Nerves tend to dissipate as our talk goes on. If we are going to choke it is going to be right at the beginning (I once messed up the Jai Naad when giving a talk). If we nail the first five minutes - the rest of the talk should follow with flow.

Smile

We never believed this one until we tried it. Smiling relaxes us when we are most stressed. Guy Kawasaki has written a whole book about it, which expounded the idea that true (duchenne) smile is indicated by crows feet at the side of the eyes. More recently Kraft and Pressman replicated an earlier study showing that forces smiling reduces stress. (They made subjects bite chopsticks whereas the previous study had them bite pencils).

Retention Remixed

As always, we love to see what ideas others have to share, so here's one sent to us a few days ago on the timeless topic of how to keep sabha topics fresh. For those that try this idea out, please shoot us a photo - we'd love to feature it to our fellow sabhaologists.

I take care of K2 sabhas in my region, and one of the most frustrating things in sabha has been properly doing the monthly retention game.  

The K2s are old enough to not really care about the games that can be somewhat silly, and the session really lacks the stickiness punch needed to make an impact. 

So, much like with the vicharan shake-up which has been going amazingly well (even the kishores who never want to put their cell phones away in sabha now can't help putting them away during these sessions), I tried something different. 

In our K2 sabha room, we have a huge pin board. Usually we put up issues of Bliss or Nilkanth on it, but nobody reads them. I decided to put up a huge empty board, and put out a bunch of markers near the beginning and at the end of each sabha. Kishores then write memorable quotes, draw some quick picture, or maybe write a phrase about a story that we heard in sabha. 

What makes this effective is that the "retention" part of it is ongoing. And because they themselves write on it, it makes it a lot more interesting and memorable when they look back on it every time they come to sabha.  

It's a collage of different colors, different hand writings, a mix of English and Gujarati. It adds a lot more color to our sabha room also. 

Try putting something like this up in your sabha room. June is about to start. It may just change how memorable a month's worth of sabhas can be. 

Give something like this a shot. If these kinds of experiments can be done at a shiksharbandh mandir center, maybe others can try it also.