Friday, March 16, 2012

I stand before you...

So I have completed 8 years in my company. We have a great training program and a department dedicated towards tracking the trainings that you attend. I am not a great fan of trainings, mainly because I prefer doing my work in whatever time I am in office. And since we’re not a technical team, the trainings that we have to attend are mainly soft skill trainings.

To cut a long blog short, let me just say that I have been successful in dodging one training in particular for all these years. Presentation skills. Now you might think, “What’s the big deal about a Presentation skills training?” Those who know me well, also know that I am not comfortable addressing a crowd. And when I say ‘not comfortable’, I mean that my fingers go numb, my voice starts shivering and all I want is for the world to swallow me when it comes to having to stand up and do something as simple as introducing myself in a crowd (I know, when I say crowd you must be thinking 100’s of people – well sadly that’s not the case; a crowd for me is as much as 2 people that are not my best friends).

Fortunately or unfortunately, the “training gap” finally caught up with me and I was forced to attend this training earlier this week. I even woke up and told Lindo that I was going to call in sick. But he made a very compelling argument (If you don’t go this time, you’ll have to go the next time. Might as well get over with it.)….now that made sense.

So I reached the training room, met the co-participants and needless to say as you might have already guessed (or otherwise what’s the big deal blogging about it?) I managed to talk in front of people I didn’t know. In the beginning I was shivering and worried but by the end of the 2nd day, I was pretty confident.

Well, it might not be the same as when I will have to make a formal presentation and I am still in awe of people who seem to be able to do this effortlessly, but it was a huge leap for me. Yesterday I had to conduct a training for a few people from my team and I have to give credit to the training (the trainer and the other participants) for playing a big role in making this happen.

Coming around to what made me think so much about this and wanting to write about it is the fact that I hope that my boys will not face this kind of aversion towards performing / speaking in public. Children nowadays have the opportunity to do these things at a very tender age and this will definitely take away that huge monster that’s hiding in my closet – Stage fright. I hope they all make use of these facilities and implement them well in their lives.


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