Nidhi J works as a Senior Data Technical Business Analyst in CBA. She has over 9 years of experience in domains such as healthcare and banking. She describes herself as a problem-solver and an avid reader. Nidhi is a mother of young daughter and two fur babies. She’s an analyst by profession, ambivert by nature!
Here’s what Nidhi said after attending Warwick’s 1/2 day Mastering Virtual Presentation Skills training in July 2023:
What kind of presenting do you do at work?
I have worked in various roles like Developer, Team Lead, Scrum master and Analyst. Every role has required me to present something, the difference being the audience. My day-to-day work involves facilitating training sessions, business stakeholder meetings, status updates to leadership teams and even technical walkthroughs / sessions within teams. I am sure there is not a week that has gone by without me presenting.
What prompted you to study with Michelle Bowden Enterprises?
This was an opportunity provided by CBA as I am one of the facilitators of a Business Analytics training session. I am elated to have be given this chance which I might have missed, if not for CBA!
How did Warwick’s teaching change your attitude to presenting in business?
For me personally, it is very important to have the right flow of thoughts to be able to present confidently and effectively. This workshop gave me the simplest way of articulating my thoughts and structuring the content making it the most effective and easy way to communicate what I intend to. Following these methods gives an immense boost to my confidence and also definitely improved my preparation. Not to mention, I now need less time to prepare for a presentation than when I did not have a defined approach for preparation. I always prepared for the meeting but I had never had given a thought to structuring the prep itself! This has been a blessing!
In general, what positive outcomes have you achieved from improving your presentation skills?
It is not just my presentation skills that have seen an improvement. My everyday conversations are now more effective.
Although this training was intended to improve our presentation skills, I have noticed that it has made a real difference when applying a few techniques to our day-to-day conversations.
I started noticing how my emails, messages and even conversations over call had room for improvement. I have started to notice that get across my point clearly without too much back-and-forth ever since I started to use the techniques in my conversations.
I’ve also had a lot more success in my presentations too.
In what specific ways have your presentation skills improved since learning with Warwick?
I have learnt how to make the slides more interesting, identify and stress the right points (key messages) I want to get across and definitely reduced my prep time to a large extent.
Warwick also taught me how to pace the presentation just right to achieve the desired outcome and I have noticed that it does make a huge difference.
I am able to nudge the audience to take the desired actions even after the presentation – which by itself is a big and welcoming change!
What were your top three take-aways from Warwick’s masterclass?
1. I have always been presenting as part of my work, but always used the same tricks of the real-world even when I started presenting virtually. From this class I understand that there is a really great scope of improvement and I have to pay attention to the tiny nitty gritty details which we otherwise tend to overlook.
2. I never paid much attention to the hardware (camera, microphone, background etc.) involved and now I understood how crucial it is to have the right set-up while presenting virtually including the right camera, the angles, the eye contact, my posture.
3. The most important one was to how to draft the right call to action, without which the presentation will remain a presentation and does not serve its purpose of getting the audience to act upon it!
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©2023 MICHELLE BOWDEN CSP is an authority on persuasive presenting in business. She’s run her Persuasive Presentation Skills Masterclass over 970 times for more than 13,000 people over the past 24 years and her name is a synonym for ‘presentation skills’ in Australia. She’s a multi-million-dollar pitch coach to her client list that reads like a who’s who of international business: banking and finance, IT, pharmaceutical, retail, telecommunications plus many more. Michelle is the creator of the Persuasion Smart Profile®, a world-first psychological assessment tool that reports on your persuasive strengths and weaknesses at work, the best-selling internationally published author of How to Present: the ultimate guide to presenting live and online (Wiley) and her new book is called How to Persuade: the skills you need to get what you want (Wiley).