How do I fix my poor presentation performance?

I would like to start this article to tell you a true story.

I want to share a bad experience with you that I had in 2022. In March, couple of good friends and I signed up for an innovation program in our company. We have had some good ideas to subscribe to this program and we were happy about one idea to go ahead for nexts steps.

After weeks of waiting for the results, we were informed that our idea was chosen to continue in the program. We were so happy because It was a great opportunity to show the company who we are. We started working hard every week, because we wanted our idea to move on to the next steps. It happened. Our idea arrived on final steps and we won the program.

Until that point everything went great, right? Everything looked good, but I need to tell you that I made a big mistake during the final presentation. To be honest, I always had difficulty speaking in front of others and during the final step of the innovation program I needed to present our idea in front of our director and other people. Some days before the presentation I had trained a lot for delivering presentation, I had spoken in front of the mirror, I had done a presentation for our group and tried to record my speech. However, nothing had worked for me. During the presentation I was very nervous and started stuttering, speaking so fast and breathing in the microphone. It was terrible! It was the worst presentation in my career. I left the room with a bad feeling about my performance. For a moment my confidence disappeared from my hands. I was so embarrassed because I could not control myself in front of our bosses.

I was upset for a long time about it. My group won the program, but for me, I had a sour taste about my presentation. I needed to do something to fix it. I promised myself that I needed to do another presentation better than the last one this year. And I fulfilled this.

A friend invited me to share an IT success case that we achieved together at an IT event called TDC — The Developers Conference — and I accepted this challenge. We wrote the case and subscribed to the TDC platform. We waited for weeks while the program was choosing the best presentation to organize the event. After some weeks We got the good news. Our presentation was selected. I was happy at the same time I was nervous, because I have had a bad experience before.

This new experience was amazing, because I had the opportunity to experience a new city that I had never been to before and I met a good friend who I did not speak to for a long time.

Besides that, my performance presentation was very good. What did I do to change my results? I will tell you! During the trip, I was preparing my mind for the presentation. When I was in the hotel room I did many visualization exercises for my performance presentation. I saw in my mind details about my performance. I visualized how I would be on stage, how I would provoke the public about the subject, what voice intonation would be better to apply and other things. In other words, I trained my brain to understand what I wanted to do there - through visualization and the results were very good. I received some good feedback about the presentation and my personal performance about it. The power of visualization helped me to control my fear about speaking in front of others and I could complete my mission.