Nice interview with substantive answers. The answers are a nice length for teaching input and discussion - I’d probably choose a few and break them up and use one to three for a class, or more for higher levels.

Best answer for our BE students:

You should rehearse at least three to four times all the way through and rehearse the first three minutes at least ten times or more. You also need to do a formal dress rehearsal in front of a real audience such as coworkers who can give you constructive criticism.In some ways good presenting is like good writing, you’ve got to pare it down and dump the superfluous and the non-essential. But since we are so close to the material it is hard for us to see what works and what does not, or what is repetitive, etc. This is why you cannot only rehearse alone. You’ve got to rehearse in front of others so that you can experience the nerves, the blank stares, etc.

The more you rehearse the more the fear of the unknown is removed. The more the fear is removed, the more confident you will become. As you become more confident you will feel more relaxed and your confidence will shine through. The thing about confidence is that it’s impossible to fake, but with practice you will indeed become a confident speaker.

Many of our students work in multinationals, and so have limited design choices because they receive a PowerPoint “deck” they have to follow. I wonder at what point the stricter client companies will realize how they squander their intellectual assets by constraining them this way - our students basically just plug the numbers in pre-formatted slides. It’d be great if the culture moved towards allowing more flexibility in presentations.

In my experience, most of the time our students are crunching numbers until the last minute, so a full run-through is often difficult to pull off. What I do is help them develop and practice the introduction and conclusion many times, and group classes are perfect for the “formal dress rehearsal in front of a real audience such as coworkers” that Reynolds recommends. We also make sure the key messages for each section are clearly established, and practice the transitions, intros, and conclusions for each section as well.