On Fri, 11 Jul 2008 19:00:08 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
> 
>> I think most people are nervous about public speaking to some degree.
> 
> Good. It's nice to know I know *something* about something...

Well, you've demonstrated that repeatedly here.

>> Whenever I get up in front of a class (or one of the toughest crowds -
>> an audience of other instructors, which I do at least once a year for a
>> whole day - along with several other presenters that I select), I'm
>> always nervous and I *always* think I've done a poor job.  It's
>> reassuring to have these people - many of whom are lifelong instructors
>> - come up and tell me what a good job I did.
> 
> See, this is the part I'm missing. I always think I did poorly, but
> nobody ever comes up to me and says "hey, you did that really well".
> Possibly just because I don't have any friends, I'm not sure.

It's got nothing to do with having friends or not in the audience.  I 
consider the vast majority of the people in my instructor program to be 
professional colleagues.  A few are good friends, but not many (less than 
1% certainly - the program's not that big).

I think the audience also does matter - in retrospect, having an audience 
of people who teach, they know the importance of telling a speaker 
they've done a good job.  General audiences tend not to unless they're 
asked to do a formal evaluation (and even then many don't - I've 
presented to groups of a couple hundred and only had 3 or 4 formal 
evaluations come back - and almost *always* from the ones who weren't 
happy about something).

With a general audience, no feedback is generally considered a good 
thing, because *most* people will tend to say something only if they're 
unhappy.

I hadn't really thought about that before.  It's not really that 
different from my experiences in the Novell Forums as a SysOp there, 
though - the only customers who came in were the ones who were having 
problems - people didn't come in and say "just wanted to say, 
everything's working fine - well done, Novell!".

> The *best* thing about performing Shakespear live is... the audience is
> asleep anyway! ;-)

There is also that possibility, though I find usually if someone in the 
audience is put to sleep by a presentation, they'll be one of the 
complainers.  Often they will complain that you didn't cover something 
that you did - they just weren't paying attention and missed it.

Jim

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