On Friday we ended our trip with team presentations regarding the site visit that we visited an were assigned to talk about. Presentations are certainly not one of my strong suits. I always get extremely nervous when speaking in front of a group regardless of how many times I have done it in my life. Something that I think I do well in regards to presentations is preparation. Since I know that presentations make me feel uncomfortable, I make sure that I practice my presentation many times before hand and make sure that I am comfortable with the information I am presenting on. If I didn’t do this then I would most likely freeze up in front of the room and forget what I was supposed to say.

One of aspect of presenting that is hard for me is keeping eye contact with the group and talking at a good speed. Because I am generally pretty nervous for presentations, I tend to talk extremely fast. My public speaking professor freshman year told me that my words mumble together during presentations because I talk to fast which is not good! I do my best to take a deep breath and talk slowly if possible. If there was something I would like to get better at, it would be to talk in a confident and strong tone of voice. This is something I struggle with and would really like to improve.

Moving forward, I have drawn from my plus3 presentation that preparation is absolutely key especially when it is on a topic I do not know well and the presentation had to be done relatively quickly. I learned from this presentation that I need to be okay with some ambiguity and work to go with the flow more. Sometimes I do not think that my type A personality is not well suited for business in Dublin!