BEST PRACTICES | |||||||||||
Zen and the Art of Presenting
in Public The fantastic Architect's Essentials of Presentation Skills offers public speaking as performance art |
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Architect's Essentials of Presentation Skills by David Greusel, AIA, (John Wiley & Sons, 2002), fourth in this year's "Architect's Essential Series" on best practice skills, presents all aspects of presentation, from preparation to delivery, provides the tools to succeed in project interviews, and offers guidelines on creating that ineffable sense of "stage presence." This is a really great book to help you coach yourself through a lot of public speaking situationsfrom presenting to an audience of thousands, a five-person client meeting, or a one-on-one conversations with the bosswith which many architects may not be naturally facile or comfortable and certainly are not trained. Greusel, himself a principal of HOK Sport + Venue + Event, Kansas City, consistently rates as one of the favorite presenters at AIA conventions, a venue through which he has polled architects about their worst presentation nightmares. These are remarkably consistent he says (the list is in the book), and he succeeds in offering techniques to build the skills needed to conquer the dragons. The
Ten Commandments Be in the moment "'In the moment' is a phrase you hear in connection with performing arts, psychology, and occasionally with sport, usually in the form of a counterpart phrase, 'in the zone.'It refers to a level of focus and concentration that most people, in their everyday lives seldom aspire to or attain. But being in the moment is absolutely critical to delivering a successful presentation and accomplishing your objective. It requires you to devote 100 percent of your resourcesphysical, emotional, mentalto the task at hand, which is presenting. It's not enough to call it commitment, because commitment can be expressed in a variety of ways. A person who spends ninety hours a week at work is said to be committed, but how much of that time does he or she spend surfing the Internet or passing the time with coworkers? Being in the moment is a different level of commitment, the total commitment of self to a task or activity. . . . "Part of being in the moment is the recognition that every design professional wears many hats and plays many roles, of which being a design professional is only one. We are not as single-minded as our resumes and our performance reviews would have us (and others) believe. We are enormously complex creatures with amazing abilities to think about more than one thing at a time. There is nothing wrong with having more than one thing going on in your head most of the timedon't most of the people in your office listen to music while they design? The only time it is wrong to be multitasking is when you are presenting. . . . "There are two main obstacles to being in the moment: the past and the future. The moment, of course, is right now, and being in the moment means bringing your full personality to bear on the activity taking place this second, whether you are speaking or not." Copyright 2002 The American Institute of Architects. All rights reserved. |
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