Nervous wrecking...

This is a mentally exhausting week for me. Shacked out. I just had a presentation to a group of international audience on Friday. To be very frank, just the thought of giving a presentation already turned me into a nervous wreck. I was so busy with other things until I almost didn’t have time to prepare my slides. Panic.

I was very stressed. I worried about too many things… I somehow feel that my contents are too simple for the researchers, and too useless for the practitioners. The more I scrutinize the things I have done, the more flaws I find. I also worry about not having enough say, saying the wrong things, and audience not being able to follow what I say. What if they snipe at me during Q&A and mock over the things I have said?

I know I am not a witty and entertaining speaker. So the least I could do is to put up decent contents to speak about. I spent days to fix the flaws, to prepare my slides, and only had a few hours to rehearse what I was going to say. The pressure was immense. Yesterday morning, I realized I don’t need much breakfast. There are enough butterflies to fill my stomach. Since I worked through day and night, I sort of become a walking zombie on the actual day. Luckily my mind was quick to switch from a standby mode to a working mode (although a little on the power-saving side) during those 25 minutes.

I was nervous but not to the point of breaking down or forgetting whole segments of my talk. I did fumble. Frankly, being a perfectionist, I was a little disappointed. It definitely wasn’t my best performance but I was really glad I had done it. Yes! It was over. I stood there to answer two questions. Not difficult.

After it was over, the first assurance I got was a thumbs-up from one person I know. Then another practitioner sitting in front told me that my topic hit it head-on to what they are doing and that he had related information to share with me. Another from a consulting firm passed me his name card and requested for my slides. Then came a handshake from my sup who is sitting a row behind me. From then on, I didn’t care if everyone understood what I said… a few were enough. After that, my stomach acid begin to kill the butterflies one by one… it was a great experience.

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This time round, the preparation for this presentation was special because I didn’t discuss anything about what I was going to say with my sup. I didn’t even show him my slides. I decide to do it on my own (my sup is fine with this – maybe he trusts me… keke…). But he said I should have acknowledged a company. Oops, forgotten to do it! Actually I should also have acknowledged an organization too. Will do it the next time – if there’s a chance.

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After this event, I realized I definitely couldn't be labelled the worst speaker. There's one who spoke very slowly and sounded like a robot. There's another one who used a lot of "er" and "emm" in his speech (before that I didn't count cos I wasn't really listening... at least 20 and 37 in his last two slides when I decided to count). And I wonder if I'm the youngest person there... hmm...