“Orange is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow”

This week involved making my first presentation which up until now was something that I had not given much thought to. When Steve informed us that we had from 10am until 2pm to research, prepare and rehearse a 2-3 minute presentation on any given colour my first thoughts were that this would not be possible. As I had never done anything like this before I was apprehensive about doing this and just wanted to get it out of the way.

When we were put into different groups and each given a separate colour I was quite happy with the outcome. I was placed with Drew and given the colour orange. Because I get on well with Drew I was confident that we would be able to prepare well enough to be able to produce a decent presentation. I was also quite happy with the colour orange as there were several associations that I thought of straight away such as Holland, the mobile phone company Orange and EasyJet.

I enjoyed researching into everything that we would be putting into our visual aid (PowerPoint presentation) as I learnt many interesting things such as the origins of Holland’s relationship with orange. As we had created a list of ideas which seemed to be getting longer by the minute we were quite worried that we may not have enough time to cover them all. We resolved this by splitting the task in half with Drew making the visual aid with me creating the fact sheet and this seemed to work well.

When it got to 1pm it was time to rehearse, we decided to go to the car for this as there would be no distractions. However this proved to build up my nerves even more! The more times I rehearsed the presentation the more mistakes I seemed to be making. I even confused orange with yellow! I did though find that rehearsing with somebody in a quiet place without any distractions was a big help and I feel that if I were to do this again I would certainly use this method.

After sitting in the canteen waiting for my turn for what seemed like an eternity but was more like 2 hours it was my turn to give my talk. By this point I was incredibly nervous. I did feel though that the lecture that we had been given that morning was a huge help as it went through what different emotions we may be feeling and in a way this acted as a tool to calm me down a bit.

The presentation was not perfect but I was pleased that I did not make such a mess as I had thought! I think that we definitely created too much work for ourselves and this resulted in not having much time to cover each section of content we had written about. This was also a hindrance when it came to rehearsing as I seemed to forget some parts. If I were to do this again I would certainly make life easier for myself by making the visual aids shorter and simpler which will allow me to focus on other aspects which I struggled on such as my body language.

So overall I feel that the presentation was a quite a helpful exercise. I think that getting the first one out of the way will remove any fear of the unknown and the whole process will be extremely beneficial to me as I progress through the course and perform other presentations.