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 Prepare, prepare, prepare. When I’m putting a new seminar together I always keep track of how much time it takes me to get ready. It takes me 20 hours of preparation to get ready for each hour in every new seminar I put together. I'll spend 100 hours getting ready for a 5-hour presentation. And this is for a subject I already know inside and out. You can't be too prepared.Ask yourself the tough questions while you’re preparing the lesson. I will always stop to take a question from someone in the audience, but I’ve learned that if I prepare properly, I won’t have to because I will have already answered that question. When I’m preparing, I spend most of my time thinking of every question my students might ask. Some of the questions I come up are ridiculous, but I want to be prepared. Once I answer my own questions, I work them into the program. I find this keeps the students from asking many questions during my lecture. They don’t have to ask because I just gave them the answer! By thinking it all through beforehand, you can stay on track during your lecture. Organize your material in small bites. I work with five-, ten-, and 15-minute segments, and then tie these together into bigger portions. If I see I’m running long or short, I can add or subtract these little bites and no one ever knows I did it. The beauty of this training technique is that it allows you to trim your talk to fit the time you’re allowed. If you’re 20 minutes away from the coffee break you don’t want to start a segment that’s going to take a half-hour to complete. Your students will resent your taking up "their" time, no matter how interesting you are. By working in small bites, you can fit your material into the time you have available. And again, no one will ever know what you did.
Then a crow flew in.
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Anticipate disasters. I once did a seminar for a wholesaler, but that wasn’t the disaster. It was a hot day and the air-conditioning in the hotel meeting room wasn’t working. That wasn’t the disaster either. They left the doors open to the parking lot and right in the middle of my talk a very big, very nasty dog strutted in and started barking and growling at the students. He took a snap at one guy before we were able to chase him back outside.| Dan Holohan - [Intro] | [Email] | [Website] |
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