Guide to Improve Eye Contact in Presentations

Having done my first presentation at office speech craft program, I was advised to improve the Eye-Contact. As a result I glanced each and everyone in the audience at my second speech. But again comments included that I need to improve my eye contact. But I didn't have any idea how. 

Luckily I got a chance to participate Business English Course at office conducted by British Council and it had a good practical session on improving presentation skills, specially eye contact. I felt that I improved my self a lot by following those guidelines. I'm sharing it here.Try yourself and be surprised with your improvements.

Eye Contact Technique

Target one person for one small sentence. If your sentence is too long, then break it into meaningful parts (you can do this from your mind). Look at one person when you say one portion and when you deliver the next part of that sentence look at another person. Remember to cover entire audience.

Lets take an example;

If you are going to say.... Hi, I'm (your Name). I work at (Your Company). My hobbies are watching movies, reading books and playing video games. Let's think if your audience has three columns. Then you can pick one person from each column and deliver one sentence to each of them. You can cover entire audience by following this method. Below image brief the whole idea.

If you have a long sentence like... I previously worked at XYZ Company, the world famous auto mobile manufacturer who invented ABC car model.  When we present this sentence we can identify three different parts as

•  I previously worked at XYZ Company...
• The world famous auto mobile manufacturer...
• Who invented ABC car model.

Then you can deliver one part to one person each.

Practicing this straightly in the presentation is not that much easy. Hence we practiced this in the class room. First we wrote a paragraph with small sentences and practiced reading it loudly in front of the audience, balancing the eye contact. Then we prepared a small paragraph with long sentences and practiced the same way.

It was really easy to maintain  and balance the eye contact in the presentation after practicing it with the method explained above. You can try it by yourself, but if you don't have a class room or audience to practice it, try in front of a mirror imagining you have a big audience. ENJOY!!!

Too busy chopping wood to sharpen the axe?

This is the article I supplied to Exilesoft magazine last time. Hope it will help someone.

He, who wanted to start his life as a wood cutter, bought an Axe and went to the jungle. He earned money by selling trees that he cuts. He wanted to be rich, so he worked hard to achieve his goal.

When days turned to weeks and weeks to months, his productivity went down. The amount of wood he collected each day started to decrease day by day. But he worked more hours till his hands hurt but he was barely able to achieve his margin. He couldn’t collect as much wood as he did in the beginning.

One day he thought, “If I continue like this, I won’t be able to achieve my goal”. Then he sat on a fallen tree and wondered what had gone wrong. Aha... His enemy was right in front of him. His productivity was low due to his own fault. He realized that he was only concerned about his output. He hadn’t spared a thought for the tools he used in his work. He quickly sharpened the axe and started to cut the trees. He realized that productivity was not based on his effort alone but also on the improvement he made.

You may have heard of this story but have you taken this lesson to heart? Do you act in a similar manner in your own career? Think about it.

1. Are you always busy with your job, completing your tasks?

2. Do you also complain you don’t have time to improve your career?

If so you could end up being less productive. It’s true we all have plenty of work each and every day. But be wise enough to manage your work while spending few minutes to develop your skills. If not you will become a person with obsolete knowledge. On that day even your employer will not acknowledge the work you did. They will blame you for your redundant knowledge. 

Let’s say you are given 86 400 rupees every day. If you spend it all without saving any, at the end you will have nothing left. Imagine this 86 400 as seconds you are blessed with every day. If you just waste it without doing anything for your career, you are not investing in your future.

Just think about it and spare few minutes every day to enhance yourself.

Be a person who contributes something towards your career every day.

How I started Blogging

It was nearly two years back, in February 2011, I was working on a SharePoint project. We had a special member in our team, who was very good with SQL but knew very little about SharePoint. As he was new to the project I had to work with him most of the time to transfer the knowledge about the domain and technology. When I explain the things, specially about technical, sometimes he pause me and asked few minutes to take screen shots and update the things in a particular web page. I just let him do his task and waited. Since I didn't have started blogging I didn't realize that he was drafting a blog post with the content we were discussing.

After few days he asked me "Do you know what am I doing?”. I said "No". Then he explained... I'm drafting major points to a blog post. Do you know why I'm doing this? I said no… without even thinking. Because I wanted to know his answer. These are few points which may help you to understand why blogging is important.

• If we think about this SharePoint project, we have lots of configurations and customizations. We do it today but after few days we probably forget it. If I note it somewhere I can find it easily later when I want it.
• You can keep a note book and write those notes. But surely it will misplace after some time. You can keep documents or note in your computer, but those are also not permanent. But if you write them in a blog it will be there and you can access from everywhere if you have internet.
• In this IT world not only you who meet the same issue you met. So if you publish the answer found by you in the internet then it will help others to make their job easier.
• Also you can improve your written skills.
• When you get matured with writing posts, you might write the most useful and popular things and you will be followed by many people in the industry. It will help you to be in touch with the people.

Yeh...Everything was true. I wanted to try blogging. I created a blog address for me and was thinking what to write. Spending lot of time… Finally, I completed the 1st blog post. Wow what a feeling. You should experience it if you haven't felt it yet. Not only for the 1st post but for the every post I write, I get so motivated, that feeling is not easy to describe but everyone should feel by themselves.

p.s. Big Thank should goes to Gogula (Who was mentioned above) for motivating me to start blogging.

Forget the Weaknesses, Use your Strengths to find Opportunities.

It's true everybody has ups and downs in their career. I had few identified weaknesses on myself with regard to the career. I wanted to discuss them with some one having more experiences in their career than me and who can guide me to overcome them.

 

Luckily I met Kosala after a long time and got a chance to discuss about the weaknesses I mentioned above. This is not actually to tell what were the problems I discussed or the solutions he gave. But to highlight something I found very important when we talk.

Me:       I feel I'm not good at these kind of things in my career, Do you have any advices to improve myself?

Kosala: Why you are thinking too much on your negative things?

Me:       When I find the solutions I can improve myself.

Kosala:  Have you ever thought about your strengths?

Me:       hmm...No.

Kosala: See... You should have so many strengths with you, but even you haven't identify them yet. If you don't want to identify your strengths, who else will? It's sure that there will be people who will point at you on the things you are not good at. See now you also have joined with them.

            Before think about your negative points, just start to identify your strengths. Thinking about negatives will put you down. So find your strengths and try to find opportunities from them.

Later you can think about the things you want to improve and then you can work on it. Otherwise you are worrying about the things you don't have while you are having lot of things to be happy. You can use them to go higher in your career.

 Yes... It's true. What is the point of worrying about the things which we don't have while we are having lot to value?

Always be Smart with your answers

Suddenly your boss might give some ideas to a project and ask you how many days will it take to implement.  At the moment you hear the words "How many days" you may tend to give your answer with a number. In that case you will guess a number and give him a answer. But later you and your boss may realize that the estimation was wrong.

In most cases it goes wrong since you just guess and answered. Both you and your boss knows that giving even a rough estimation for a software project is not easy without going deep to the scenario.

Then why did you give exact answer? Since your boss asked the question with the phrase "How many days". But you don't need to answer this question by a number as he asked. Be smart and share the reality that you want to study the scenario and take your time to give correct answer.

You don't need to give exact answer for most of the questions asked by you in your life. Just take your time and give smart answers.

A Big Fear Has Gone.....

Presentations and Public Speaking brought me a big fear and I have mentioned about it in my last post.

Finally I did my first Technical presentation at my office (Exilesoft) on 20th January 2012. The Topic was "Introduction to Design Patterns". I'm not going to write technical stuff about the topic. The purpose of this blog is to share my ideas and experiences of my career life.

After the presentation I saw this on tweeter which motivated me to go further.

shiranginige Shiran Ginige

It's amazing hw you are nt bored about design patterns no matter how many times you hear of them. Good session again on the topic @exilesoft

But what would happen if I get some bad comments at my 1st presentation? Most probably I would not go to do any other presentations. 

when thinking of this....

I found a way to help others. Never discourage your colleagues, but show them how they can improve.

Things I can never do...

There are things in our lives which we think we can never do. I had a same kind of thought in my career. It's doing presentations. Actually it was a fear to me. In my 5+ years career life I haven't done any presentation. Management asked me to do presentations several times and forced me to do. Than that they have set up dates as well. But I was so scared and skipped them always.

But... The most important thing is I wanted to do presentations.

The first reason I felt scared of presentations was my English knowledge. I felt I might get stuck or sometimes I might forget correct words when I do presentations.

Talking in front of a crowd was also a challenge, but I am not too much scared about it.

Nearly one year back I joined a new company I was given a project to continue by myself only. Nearly after two months I was asked to do a code walk through to the client. There were no chances to skip it or to say No. I had to do it. I practiced entire weekend and did it. Yes it went well. I got the guts that I won't stuck with English language any more.

Two three months later, Company organized Speech Craft program for us. It was so much helpful for me to improve myself to talk in front of the audience. I did several speeches and also I had to do an impromptu speech at the last session called "Grand Finale". Actually it was a grand finale. I passed that challenge too.

Again I had to do a 10 min presentation about my project in front of entire company. I was scared but I used to think like this, if I gave impromptu speech at speech craft program why I'm afraid to talk what I've already practiced. Yes actually, I did it well.

Finally it’s again a big time. First technical presentation of my entire career life.... it's tomorrow... "Introduction to Design Patterns". Hope it will be successful.

I fell like this…..

If you  have something that you think can be never done, but still if you want, one day you can do it.