I hate presentations.

I hate presentations. I get nervous spells 70% of the time, and it happens when (one or more of the following):

1. I’m not prepared enough
2. When I’m mentally exhausted (especially since I’ve been programming and programming these past few days)
3. When it’s one of those days where I experience speech deficiency problems (also influenced by the lack of sleep)
4. Whatever reasons that are there but that I can’t remember right now (cos I’m brain-dead at the moment)

The worst thing about presentations is when I have to explain things into detail. It’s not that lack the ideas, it’s just that when I talk in front of everyone, I have this tendency to forget what I want to say. The only way to overcome this is by practising at home what I want to talk about during the presentation. I simply can’t slip into the position of speaker as easily as I would like.

The 2 presentations I had to give this week were disastrous for me. On Tuesday, my Business module presentation, I got nervous for a variety of reasons and though I’m not completely inclined to talk about it on this blog, one of the reasons I shall mention was the lack of sleep. In today’s presentation, well though I presented most of the points I wanted to speak about, I think I sounded more nervous than ever. Firstly, this subject New Media Art is something that really isn’t what I’m used to doing. Secondly, I’ve been having a nasty sore feeling in my throat these few days because I haven’t been sleeping well. Thirdly, it’s the lack of sleep again.

See, normally to calm myself before a presentation, I try to do a little breathing exercises. In yoga, we do the ujjayi breathing which I find helps to prepare me for the balancing poses which require a calm mind and concentration. However, I was unable to do that today. Because of the deadlines in my project schedules, I haven’t been able to practice yoga like I normally do. In fact, I missed my yoga session with Yusof (my yoga instructor) on Saturday. So I’ve been feeling so tensed lately that I can’t even find myself in the state of mind to relax myself. It’s quite ironic i guess, that you need to achieve a certain degree of the feeling of ease before you can put your mind to calming yourself down.

So what is the moral of the story today? Never become a computer programming. I’m not surprised why there is the stereotype of the computer programmer who has lousy social skills, and cannot speak properly. See, it’s not just the fact that it’s because of what they are that they are programmers, but it’s also because a side effect of overdosing on computers is that when your brain is overly-exhausted, your speech faculties are rendered useless (at least temporarily) in the process.

BTW, i must not forget to mention that I just found out that the programming specifications (which were only released today) are really so limited. What’s being tested is only a fraction of the original program described to us. They should have told us earlier, the stuff I did over the week could have easily been done in a day or two. I’m quite annoyed about this… Oh well, that’s life I guess. Unanticipated situations meet us at every turn. =(

Subjects: School 学校

Mood: Raves and Rants

Tags: new media, programming, tension, yoga