The Benefits of Presenting

This is Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-newer podcast. We will accomplish our goals through sharing experience, improving tech skills, increasing business knowledge, and embracing life. Let's dive into the next episode. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season where we're looking at the bright side of things, the positives that come out of the various things that annoy us or generally give us a reason to complain in our daily work or weekly or monthly. There's a wide range of stuff. Some of these are very big annoyances and things that probably bother you on a regular basis and quite a bit. There's some others that maybe bother you a little and some of them that may bother you a little or a lot but are less frequent. In this episode, we're going to tackle one of the less frequent ones and that would be giving a presentation. Look at the positives, the upsides, the benefits of giving a presentation. For most people, and I think it's most from what I've seen, presentations are not fun. It's nerve-racking. You have to put a lot of work in. There's a lot of stress. There's a lot of editing and changing stuff up and thinking through what you want to say and how you want to say it. Then you've got to get up in front of people and you've got all of them staring at you. It's just not a fun experience for most people. Some people love it. There are those that that is their thing. They enjoy getting up in front of an audience and having everybody paying attention to them and going through slides or whatever it is that they're doing. They just generally are built that way. That's the thing they like to do. Developers in particular, I find most of us do not prefer that. We'd much rather be sitting in an office somewhere writing code, not having to deal with people any more than we have to, and definitely do not want to be on a stage of any kind and presenting. That being said, there are a lot of benefits to presenting an idea, to creating a presentation on a topic, whatever it happens to be. Part of that benefit is why we do presentations on our weekly, bi-weekly, depending on how often we're doing at that time, in our mentor sessions. It's very valuable to take a topic as a presentation as opposed to just, hey, I'm going to talk for a couple of minutes on it. I'll throw something together. I want to mention this to the group. That brings us to one of the first of the positives that come out of a presentation. When you present material for most of us, I think that even no matter what your work ethic is and all the other things that can go into your daily effort in your job and morale and all the other stuff, when we give a presentation, most of us want to bring our A game. Most of us want to spend some time perfecting the ideas and the presentation in a way that, ideally, that people come back and say afterwards, that was a great presentation. None of us want to be up on a stage presenting on something and have people heckling us and have things not go right, find out that we've made some very wrong assumptions or that we're telling somebody something that's incorrect, all of those things. Politicians notwithstanding, most of us don't like to lie to large numbers of people or think, act like we know something when we don't. When we do a presentation, even though we have other ways to learn material and to even master material that some of those we'll talk about in this season, when you do a presentation, it's a very typically short period of time where you're going to be very focused. Even the topic you're working with is probably going to be more focused than you normally would deal with, you normally would experience. There's a difference between, let's say, getting a security certification and doing a presentation on, let's say, single sign-on for whatever language you're developing in. Once yet, you can tell by the topics themselves. One is much more broad, one is much more focused. When you do a presentation, it's actually, I think, more than studying for certification because you don't have, for lack of a better term, you don't have the structure, you don't have the guideline of the test that you would normally have in a certification. When you do a presentation, you have to figure out what the scope is of that topic and then you need to essentially master it within that scope. Now, you can make adjustments here and there, but you want to be rock solid on the point that you bring up and you want to make sure that they're interesting points, that they're points that bring value to the listener. If you want to learn something really good, then present on it. It goes back to, now there's the old saw that those who can do, those who can't teach, but there's also the idea that one of the best ways to master something is to teach it, because you have that repetition. Now, in a presentation, you may not present more than once, but the workup to creating that presentation is a lot of repetition. A good friend of mine is a perfectionist, generally speaking, but when she does presentations, it's kicked up to 110%. She kicks it up to 11. Usually by the time her presentation is done, it has been done, performed, and re-performed hundreds of times in her head and with other people and on paper. Although I think that's more than most of us, there are definitely some people that that's their approach to every presentation. Some people, they essentially script it and memorize every word of it. Some people just really hammer every detail down. Some don't, but in any of those cases, and I'm not going to say that one is right or wrong or anything like that, but in any of those cases, you still end up going over the topic many, many, many times. You're going to read it, you're going to reread on it, you're going to write it, you're going to edit it. You're going to know it. Presenting is a great way to really, in your mind, seal down a topic and say, yeah, I got this. I know what this is. This is something I can talk on, a matter of fact. That leads us into the side effect of that. This is another great way of presentation is not only are you going to be confident that you know the topic, everybody that sees you present on the topic is going to assume that you're an expert. That's just sort of how we work. It may be a little bit sad, a little scary even at times, but if you present on a topic, then people are going to assume that you are an expert. To be fair, if you presented on a topic and you're talking to somebody who hasn't, the odds are you know more about that topic than they do. Because just pure repetition, unless it's something that is their daily bread and butter or something like that, then they're just not going to have spent as much time really digging into that topic as you probably do when you present on it. Those two things sort of feed each other so well. When you have something you're confident in and you already have the appearance of being an expert, then that confidence and that knowledge just feeds into you being an expert, you filling the role of an expert. So if you want to master something, present on it. If you want to be seen as a master of something, present on it. I don't know where that falls with regard to things like degrees and certifications, but I think there's a lot of people out there that have crafted one or two presentations and been able to essentially ride that out for quite a while as being a quote unquote expert in that topic. And who's to say they aren't? Another thing with a presentation that we get, particularly in the IT world, is it forces us, force is probably a strong word, more often than not when we do it, we're going to improve our ability to communicate. We're going to, a lot of times, we're going to go through and we're going to put together presentation and then as we go through it and maybe present to test it out with other people or even review it, we're going to realize that there's ideas and concepts and language that we use that is not commonly known. There are those magic words that every profession or area of business has that others don't really, other people that are outside of it don't necessarily understand the specific meaning that they have. Or maybe it's a common word that you use that other people are not exposed to as often. If you're not in Europe, then maybe you don't understand, you aren't exposed to the idea of a queue very often, but you are a lot in the IT world. There's queues all over the place. Of course, you queue up if you're in Great Britain or something like that, but in America, it's lines and so you get in a line. You've got things like that and that's just a very simple example, but there are a lot of those, there's a lot of terms and concepts and ideas that we get into in whatever our profession is. We master those, we really understand them because those are part of what we deal with on a daily basis. People outside of that profession don't. When you present, you force yourself to, I think, I think you're going to force yourself to be able to communicate those complex ideas to other people in a language that is more commonly accessible. That will rub off on you moving forward. Maybe you read a little more understandable emails. Maybe when you speak, you do so with language that is more accessible to people that are not in your line of business. When you present, this is definitely, I think it's obvious, but it's definitely a communication skill. Being an IT and people that are not generally recognized as great communicators, this is a perfect opportunity to do so. Now, the next one is, I think, a tougher one for some people to look at. This goes back to our oft cited, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. There is a strength we get from facing our fears. If you have a fear or a discomfort with giving a presentation, then getting out there and doing one is going to be, that actually brings a lot of positives. One is it's you deciding to will yourself over or past a fear. Another thing is it gives us an opportunity to see that more often than not, what we fear is not as bad as we thought it was. The anticipation is the worst part. Once you get through it, it's not that bad. Presentations are often like that. Maybe it feeds itself. We have this fear of failing, so we work harder. Then when you get to the presentation, it actually comes off great. People say, you know, that was a good presentation. I learned some information I didn't have before. I liked how you presented it. The topic was interesting and they give you a bunch of kudos. You may even look back and say, wow, why was I afraid of that? You may even stand up on that stage and be quivering with nerves and stage fright the whole time. Maybe nobody notices. I say, wow, you were so calm and collected and you did such a great job. You may look back and say, wow, I fooled them. That also means that maybe the next time around, you'll be a little less stressed, a little less nervous, a little more comfortable going out there and presenting on that topic. Another thing that is a positive in doing presentations, and this is really any presentation, to this point I've been focused more when you've got a sizable crowd where you are the main person presenting and it's more of a presentation and not maybe a meeting or a dialogue or something like that. But now if you think about it when you're having to present to even to small groups and maybe to your family or one or two people, one of the things that we typically find is that there are tools out there to communicate and to get things done that otherwise we would never even have thought of or worried about. And now that doesn't, even though we wouldn't have thought about them, that doesn't mean that they wouldn't be, they're not useful. It is amazing how many people I've worked with that had to do a presentation and use Visio in particularly or maybe PowerPoint or even Word or Excel to a level that they, and in a way that they hadn't before. And you see that moving forward, that they're quicker to include an Excel spreadsheet or a spreadsheet in their email or some slide, some sort of slide deck as part of their regular communication or design documents. Visio in particular, something like that where you've got a graphical tool that suddenly they start including more images. They include more diagrams and things like that that are highly valuable. And we probably learned how to do them manually with pencil and paper back when we were going through school. But somewhere along the way, if we don't keep doing that or if we don't get pushed to see what's out there, we don't recognize that there are tools that allow us to do that just as easily, maybe more so, and maybe with a higher polish, with a higher amount of style. So when we do these things that are outside of our normal comfort zone, sometimes we find some incredibly valuable tools that we also have a purpose for within our comfort zone, within our daily work. And so we become, dare I say, more well-rounded. We have another, more tools, more arrows in our quiver basically that we can work with. And so presentations while being challenging to a lot of people and not always something that, sometimes they take, they're very time consuming. A 30 minute presentation may take you weeks to research and put together all information. But the benefits of going through that, of that focused learning, of having to set a lot of times a scope, an outline, a thought process around the topic rather than have it spoon fed to you. The positives are quite a bit. There's just a lot of them out there. And it goes, and I say again, it goes way beyond just overcoming your fears and things like that. When you're overcoming your fears and stepping into an area that you're not normally in, it's a lack of being in the comfort zone or just something that's new, it's just sort of new-ish, something that you don't do as often. And just think about it, it's a, as they say, a target rich environment. If you don't know as much about an area, a topic, a task, there's more for you to learn. So if you want to improve yourself quickly, I think presentations are an incredible way to do it. And now as a sort of a shameless plug, definitely if you ever want to do a presentation, even if you haven't shown up to any of our mentor classes, shoot us an email. We would love to have you present on just about any topic. I mean, I don't, we've, we've gone all over the place and it has proven valuable to everybody that's done it. They've come back and said, yeah, this is really good. I really enjoy the fact that I did that. Sometimes it's a professional thing where they're, they got to present to their boss or board or conference or something like that. And so they use us as skinny pigs. But it's, it's just, it's a great environment to step into. And if you don't want to do that with us, find some people that you can. I think it's highly valuable to have that, essentially a mastermind type group where everybody does a presentation. You get people that you are comfortable with. They give you some great feedback and it tends to be less nerve wracking because you can, you know, you set it up so that if you fail miserably, okay. And everybody just says, well, you know, here's some things to work on. And you go back to the drawing board and you make it better. It's a great way to learn. Challenge of the week. When was the last time you presented, did a presentation on anything? And if it was more than a few weeks ago, and even if it was like yesterday, the bigger part of the challenge is what are you going to present on next? Put together, even in your mind, you don't have to like actually put all this stuff together. Spend a few minutes and think about what would be a good topic for you to do a presentation on. And maybe you come up with an idea where you say, no, I need to, maybe I need to pitch this to a conference or maybe I need to do this at a local, maybe at my company, Brown Bag Sessions or something like that. Maybe it opens up a whole new world of opportunities for you. And that being said, it's time for us to get back out to that world of opportunities. And as always have yourself a great day, a great week, and we'll talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Developer Noor Podcast. For more episodes like this one, you can find us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, and other podcast venues, or visit our site at developernoor.com. Just a step forward a day is still progress. So let's keep moving forward together. One more thing before you go, the Developer Noor Podcast and site are a labor of love. We enjoy whatever we do trying to help developers become better. But if you've gotten some value out of this and you'd like to help us, be great if you go out to developernoor.com slash donate and donate whatever feels good for you. If you get a lot of value, a lot. If you don't get a lot of value, even a little would be awesome. In any case, we will thank you and maybe I'll make you feel just a little bit warmer as well. Now you can go back and have yourself a great day.