It's good to be home. This was the view from my room at the W Hotel in Minneapolis yesterday morning. Cold!!
Over the week I participated in an interesting workshop about giving presentations that focused on soft skills. Soft skills basically refers to people skills: gestures, mannerisms, friendliness, etc. One of the exercises was on how to handle objections.
Our natural and typical response to someone who objects to what we say is to become defensive. So in this exercise we had to turn to one of our peers in the room and say something to really push their buttons. They were then able to practice an appropriate response.
Unfortunately to elicit that kind of response there needs to be some grain of truth to the statement and hitting below the belt would have simply been inappropriate. So my supervisor turned to me and said "Hayward, your training sessions are too long and boring." My response was "I appreciate you sharing that with me. Could you tell me more about what makes you feel that way?"
That short statement was harder to say than I thought it would be. My mind wanted to tell her, "My training sessions aren't a variety show." But she was right, my training sessions ARE long and boring. So I'll figure out how to spice them up a bit to make them more engaging. Maybe they need a comedian and a few pet tricks thrown in for fun.
Overall it was a great workshop that gave me some very specific feedback that I can use to improve my presentation skills.
Unfortunately I had no free time this week. Evenings were spent catching up on work except for the one night that we went to the Minnesota vs. Arizona hockey game. Hockey isn't one of my favorite sports but they did supply the food and drinks since we were using the company suite. Then later that night we had cocktails back at the hotel.
I highly recommend the W Hotel if you ever need to stay in Minneapolis.
5 comments:
What a swish establishment. I wouldn't want to leave...
I would have slapped her.
Perhaps I should be leading that workshop.
Have you tried giving your presentations in the nude?
Princess, the bed was the absolute best part. Although someone in HR must have a predilection for houseboys because they were everywhere. The bellboy that toted my suitcase all the way to the 17th floor was VERY accommodating.
MJ, you would have been perfect leading that workshop. I'm seeing an ice breaker of cake and banana cannons.
MDP, this is usually what I wear for my presentations.
I've actually said something similar to a "This is booooring"
"What do you want, a dancing monkey up here?"
To which the only answer of course, is "Yes!"
Bad question on my part.
I'll have to try some of your techniques next time.
Post a Comment