Public speaking has never been my strong suit, and it has always tormented me a little as I’ve always wanted to be good at it. A week ago my manager asked if I could present in front of 30 people that had recently joined the company and had gone on the graduate scheme. Essentially I was tasked along with two other lovely colleagues to create a presentation that would help those new to the business understand what search engine optimisation is all about and exactly what we do.
Along with the two lovely aforementioned colleagues we created a beautiful presentation that talked all about search engine optimisation in a simplistic way that those we were speaking to could understand within the hour and a half that we had with them.
It went well. At first I initiated it all by asking everyone their name, position and whether they would like to share any interests. That went really well. Oh, aside from the fact that I didn’t state my name when I told them about myself. My colleagues corrected me on this, and I kind of made fun of the person that corrected me when she stated “we usually call him J J”, which is actually false! No one calls me J J and everyone usually calls me Jonny, except for my boss who seems to like calling me by my full name, Jonathan Jones. We then got into the deck and managed to go through the first 30 minutes of the deck where I talked about search engines, why we use Google, Google’s search algorithm, the AOL Click Curve, tools such as Screaming Frog, BrightEdge, Webmaster Tools etc.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t think I had it in me. I thought I would essentially suffer throughout the entire presentation — stuttering, forgetting everything, or doing something that might embarrass myself. But no, I did the complete opposite. I did well and according to early feedback the people there enjoyed the presentation and found it quite useful. We also did a bit of a Q&A and if they asked questions I was actually able to answer them with accurate information. I’m so pleased with myself, as I’m definitely not a confident person and I guess if whatever came of this presentation was negative then would have been devastated and I would probably be beating myself up about it all.
I actually do want to take part in presentations in the future. I guess that now I know that I can do them, what’s the problem? Haha.
I’m just so happy right now. But I am also so tired as well! It’s off to the shower and to bed!
