The Seven Strategies of Master Presenters - Lifecycle Performance ...

Manage Yourself, Difficult Participants... / 185
You have enough to do in developing your presentation without wasting
time and energy by being your own worst enemy.
3. Persistence. To run a marathon requires a great deal of training
and a lot of persistence. In fact, completing a marathon has as much
to do with persistence as it does with ability. A presentation is like a
marathon. Developing a presentation becomes a question of putting
the time in whether you feel like it or not, and it is up to you to structure
your life in order to get the job done. You can do this by using
techniques such as having a set time and place to work, setting manageable
time-limited goals, monitoring the use of your time, or eliminating
or postponing other activities. These techniques will help you
to program your presentation into your daily schedule. Eventually the
natural rewards of completing the presentation will make working on
it easier and easier and as you build up momentum, the issue of persistence
will largely take care of itself.
4. Forgiving yourself. Even with the best of intentions, we all make
mistakes. One of the factors that separates Master Presenters from
their less masterful counterparts is the ability to limit the damage
from the mistake and to learn from it so that it doesn’t happen again.
If you don’t fail now and then, it means you aren’t reaching far enough,
and you aren’t growing.
—John Paul Getty
Master Presenter Richard Bolles says everyone is entitled to an
off day:
An unknown genius once said, “To forgive oneself is to give
up all hope of ever having a better past.” In other words, you
look back only briefly, to see what you can learn from that mistake,
and then you resolutely turn your face toward the future.
Those who cannot forgive themselves are those who keep dwelling
on their past mistake or mistakes, in their mind and in their
meditative moments, as though this could create a better past. I
never do this. I expect to fail sometimes so, when I do, I simply
say, “Ah well, that’s part of being human.” Part of being human is
also learning to improve.