Anxiety Presentations

Today I shall tell you about my most recent presentation experience.

On Tuesday we had a Science Day at our university. That sounds like a big deal but it isn't. In fact, I am fairly sure that despite publicizing, no one else knows about it besides the people attending the Popularizing Science course. Which is a course that I am indeed attending. The goal was to talk about a sciencey thing, like your own thesis, in a way that would be interesting and understandable to a layman audience – Science Day being open for all. Popularized science, sort of like Sci-Show – though I think they occasionally use more jargon than would be encouraged in a presentation like this.

Anyways, I was to speak about crystal skulls for about 20 minutes. I was pretty nervous. I hadn't practiced much and I wasn't even sure whether my presentation was any good, though I had written a word for word script of what I would say, even trying to add humorous tone in places. I tested it on my mother who started questioning the way I spoke (”Do you always speak in such a mixture of literal and dialect?” * ”Do you do this intentionally or...?”) and the fact that I had to repeat a guy's name several times during the presentation. Since his name is a hyphenated combo my mother thought I was repeating both the first and last names of the person. And I felt the little touch of humorous tone I had written also sounded like crap. So this really did not boost my confidence all that much the evening before the presentation.

Before the presentations, a woman sitting near me started having a chat with me (this course is odd, with these people who seem to just start chatting up with people they don't know, saying friendly good mornings and all. I am not used to this!). She was nervous about her presentation as well. Though her worries were about shaking and fainting while mine were related to forgetting things, making slip-ups and staring at my paper too much. But, during our chat, I started to fixate on another worry: what if I sound like the driest speaker ever. No humor, just monotonic reading off my notes. I thought back to all the most horrendous presentations I'd seen before. Then I realized that I hadn't actually held a presentation all alone during the whole time I've spent at the university. Which is actually pretty amazing – just, how? But really, not the best thing to realize right before a presentation.

I was not actually as scared of performing as I thought I would be, especially as a person who has become more shy over the years and likely suffers from social anxiety. I think I was numbing myself in some sort of self defense. No idea really. I just know I felt weird and my mind was trying to assure itself that no outsiders would bother showing up, and that no one in there cared. Of course my mind also nagged back about trying to lull itself into a false sense of security. But really, a presentation just happens one time, something horrendous happening didn't even cross my mind, surprisingly enough.

The thing that really made me nervous was the fact that the teacher was going to record us and we will have to watch the videos of ourselves performing and write an analysis about it. Presentations happen once. I can forget about them. I can't see myself and I seem to forget what I'm saying as I'm saying it because of the off numbness. See I generally have a problem where I over analyze just about every social interaction I have, I find that one flaw and it will bother me till the day I die. I might stay up nights thinking about it. And when I feel particularly down, while trying to sleep, suddenly I remember all of these little things whether I want to or not. This is what social anxiety does to me. On top of this, I have body image issues.

So what I am saying is that I am scared to death of watching a recording of myself do the presentation. I'm worried that I will find all the flaws I hadn't before, and that I will roll them in my head over and over again. I will be thoroughly embarrassed by them and then I'm going to actually be terrified of holding a presentation ever again. Rational or not. The ironic thing will be that this is the exact opposite of what the recording is supposed to do. A part of the point of us watching the recording is that we will see that our nervousness doesn't show. This is supposed to make us feel better about performing. I am just hoping that I will go numb again and just push through it, which is probably what I am going to do since I do have to do this in order to pass the course.

I think the actual presentation went well, though! I got a positive experience out of it (which is also a part of the reason I don't want to ruin it by watching the recording). Turns out I barely looked at my notes and I didn't end up being dry and monotonic. Something about the situation made me able to have the humorous tone in a natural way, even throwing in some added comments. I got chuckles out of the audience, which felt great. It was just easier to play off of a real audience, well, at least this particular audience. What was even better was that when it was time for questions, I got asked the questions I had hoped would be asked, because I couldn't fit the information in the actual presentation in a way that would make sense, and it bugged me. I also actually remembered things and sounded like I knew what I was talking about, unlike I had feared. The written feedback I got was also positive. The main critique was that I had too much text on some slides, which was something I was already fully aware of and didn't mind.

The thing that I would like to solve though, is that my mouth gets really dry during presentations or when I'm nervous. It makes it harder to speak when the inside of your lip wants to cling to your teeth like a desperate koala bear and your tongue feels like it's passed that cow skull every desert seems to have for the fifth time. I think I might actually have to start using a water bottle, though I'm not sure even that will help.

So. If you ever want to know something about crystal skulls... don't ask me. I've written two articles about them, I have talked about them with my friends, and I have held two presentations about them, as well as watched two shitty documentaries about them more often than I would have liked to, making me pretty sick of talking about them. My written feedback mistook this for me being passionate about the subject. I am not. It just happens to be an easy subject for me.

Okay, fine, you can ask me. Mitchell-Hedges was an amusing character and I will talk about him.

Do you have any worst/best presentation experiences to share? Do you get extremely anxious about presentations?

*Spoken Finnish is, in most regions, different from written. Speaking completely grammatically correct Finnish sounds weird to most, including me. Also, we do not have accents, we have dialects.