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Imagine this is what will happen to you the next day. You are going to give a presentation to a group of people whom you have not met before. The presentation topic is something you are familiar with because this is not the first time you present this topic. As a result, you believe that you can do a good job to deliver this topic smoothly to your participants. On the day of your presentation, unexpected events happened. You have unconsciously used a wrong phrase to explain a concept and you participants spotted your mistake. You have just discovered a typographical error on one of your slides. You were challenged by one of your participants who disagreed with a point you made in your presentation. How would you react to these unexpected events?

Here is the truth. In all presentations, always expect the unexpected. If you were hesitant, your confidence level would go down immediately and this could affect the flow of your presentation. The question is what you could have done to maintain your confidence level notwithstanding these unexpected events. In this article, I am going to share with you 4 tips that could help you to exhibit your confidence when giving a presentation.

Dress appropriately

As a speaker and trainer, I do presentation on different topics, for example, tax training and personal development training. I have my own dress code for different types of training.

In my tax training, most participants will be working professionals. Hence, I will put on my business suit to make me look professional. This is always my way of building rapport with this group of participants and raising my credibility.

When it comes to my personal development training, I will dress differently. The reason is that my participants can come from all walks of life and it does not make sense to wear business suit. Instead, I tend to wear black shirt because studies have shown that black colour signals power and authority. Whenever I am in black, I feel strong and unstoppable, and this helps to boost my confidence level and prepare for the unexpected events during my presentation.

State clearly your purpose

Have you come across with speakers who are experts in their relevant fields but do not look confident when giving presentation? Based on my own research, I discovered a secret. That is, they do not have a clear purpose of giving the presentation. There is a saying that “the bigger the why, the easier the how”. What this means is that we must know why we are giving the presentation before doing it.

Here is what I do for my presentation. I will write down my purpose of giving that presentation. I will put myself into the shoes of the participants and ask this question – “Why should I listen to you?” Very often, what I have written down becomes part of the introduction of my presentation and this is another powerful technique of building rapport with my participants and maintaining my confidence level.

Learn to say “Yes”

I am not sure if you notice that we are surrounded by a lot of negative people and negative thoughts. I was told before that for each positive statement we made, there would be 14 negative statements before and after that. In my presentation, I do my best not to allow any negativity to be present because I know that it will affect my confidence level.

Here is what I do in my training. I encourage my participants to say “Yes” with me whenever opportunity arises. When saying “yes’, say with conviction and make sure that all the people in the training room can feel the positive energy. Positive energy in my view is clearly a booster of my confidence level.

Put on our listening ear

Here is my final tip – to put on our listening ear. As mentioned above, one of the unexpected events is that my participants do not agree with what I said in my presentation. Even though I feel strongly that I am right, I will remain silent and let my participants finish their point. I will listen carefully to what they say and handle the objection tactfully based on my business training. Sometimes it may be useful to handle such objection offline because the longer it drags on, the more negative energy will be built in the training room, resulting in a drop of my confidence level.

I hope you enjoy my sharing. Use these tips if they make sense to you and share with me your success stories in my website. I would love to hear from you.

This Raymond Carver poem entitled “Happiness” was the opening to my women’s writing group this past week:

So early it’s still almost dark out.
I’m near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.
When I see the boy and his friend
walking up the road
to deliver the newspaper.
They wear caps and sweaters,
and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.
The are so happy
they aren’t saying anything, these boys.
I think if they could, they would take
each other’s arm.
It’s early in the morning,
and they are doing this thing together.
They come on, slowly.
The sky is taking on light,
though the moon still hangs pale over the water.
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn’t enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.

It is not a complicated poem — the moment it describes is quite ordinary, really — but this poem generated about an hour of conversation. What is happiness? When do we feel the most happy? Why do we struggle to find, recognize and keep those moments? What are some things we can do to maximize our opportunities for true happiness?

As you might suspect, these are universal questions that extend far beyond one poem, or one class. For many of us, these questions emerge in one form or another almost daily. I heard from some of you last week, and two things really struck me about your thoughts on being present: 1.) Every person associated real happiness with very simple things, and 2.) those flashes of pure joy, pure calm, pure bliss all came from paying attention to and naming the small details in those simple moments.

Those precious experiences included a list of things that would make lovely poems in and of themselves: a morning cup of coffee; a bowl of chocolate ice cream; listening to a cat purr while curled up contentedly on the couch; going for a walk in the evening and watching the sun descend slowly; a mother noticing the warm smell of the top of her baby’s head; and catching the second when friends are seated around the dinner table and noticing three things — the candlelight flickering on people’s faces, the sound of utensils clinking on plates, and the comfort of familiar voices and laughter.

We do not live in a culture that readily acknowledges the urgent value of the present moment. We tend to be obsessed with the past or to fixate on the future — both realms over which we have no control. And of course, it isn’t the things themselves — in the past or future — but our addiction to trying to control or change them that cause the suffering.

The 13th-century Sufi poet Rumi had this to say about recognizing the sacredness of each moment by letting go of what we cannot control and embracing what we can:

Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings.
Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move.

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty & frightened.
Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that we often attach an idea of happiness to a quantity of things that could or might happen — I would be more happy if… — but the moments that we recognize as actually making us happy are pedestrian and predictable. The sun sets every night. Cats sleep on couches every day. We eat a meal every day. But we never say stuff like, “I would be truly happy if the sun would set tonight.”

If we did that, then, really, what excuse would we have left for not being content, for not being madly in love with the hours given to us?

So perhaps what we are missing in our quest for happiness is just the willingness to stop and call out the names of the ordinary things that are filling us with true joy. The study of our brain’s chemistry tells us that when we do this, we are simultaneously releasing a whole raft of chemicals that help us to ward off things like depression and anxiety and we are training our brains to think that way again and again by growing new connections that reinforce the activities that bring us pleasure and contentment. Our lives tell us that it isn’t even the moments themselves but our attention to them that really opens us to the experience of happiness.

Negotiation is an important tool, that all of us use at different times, at different phase of our life, to achieve different goals. The first time probably we negotiated in our life, when as a child we kept shouting for mother’s milk. The negotiations are typically tagged with a price, which may or not be expressed in monetary term. For example a marital negotiation has a typical price line of social status, whereas a negotiation in the job interview the price line is clearly money. There can be more than one one price line also, provided there are different areas involved in the negotiation. For example in a union-management negotiation apart form salary, there can be price lines involving working conditions and industrial relations.

To negotiate effectively one must do a proper hoe work on the self strength and weaknesses vis-a-vis the strength and weaknesses of the other side. In the negotiation table, it will all depend upon how one can keep up with the nerve. Thus, it is very important to know the bottom-line of the price where the negotiator can settle. The body language is also extremely important in negotiation.
The price may be social recognition, peer recognition and many others. A negotiation may take place either on 1 to 1 or may involve more than two parties.

It all depends on how well one has prepared about the background and strength areas of the other side. It is also important to know the dynamics of the power game.
To know more about it click here [http://www.homejob.in/stories/self_improvement/negotiation__a_tool_to_change_your_lifestyle.html].