Report 3: Oral Reports

Report 3: Oral Presentations

My Oral Reports One and Two

Introduction

Welcome to my Report 3, for Psychology 409a, Fall 2003, consisting of my two oral reports given in class. This report, like Reports 1 and 2 were assigned to my class by Dr. Leon James in order to help us with our “self-witnessing” of errors, thinking, and emotions as we complete the tasks. This is Task 6 as given in our instructions from which can also be found on our class homepage. Included in this report are my affective and cognitive reactions towards both my oral presentations, and also the pre and post-ratings and notes for Task 6 itself.

First, I went to our class home and looked up the directions and criteria I needed to follow in order to make this report successful. This report will consist of both of my oral presentations given in class, and how I coped with organizing the presentation material while facing many deadlines from the class.

My first oral presentation was on Chapter 6, from Road Rage and Aggressive Driving, by Dr. Leon James (enter his webpage here) and Dr. Diane Nahl (which also has a webpage DrDriving.org). Chapter 6’s topic was about, “Three-Step Driver Self-Improvement Program” which consisted of sub-topics dealing with witnessing driving errors and how to make self-improvements. I chose this chapter well in advance of the due date so that I would not have to rush and could prepare well for the presentation.

I am not normally a nervous speaker but for some reason as the due date loomed nearer, I was beginning to “fret” over not doing well. This was a new feeling for me and I think it was because I sub-consciously knew that I had not prepared well enough. Sure I had done mock presentations to practice, but talking to the mirror and a live audience differs greatly, and although I felt sure I was prepared, something nagged at me. So I looked at how I organized my notes and realized a little late that I had not done any note cards! It was too late to do them by that time and I knew that this was an important factor for success during a speech, especially one that didn’t have power point to help with visual aides…etc. So making note of this error, I pursued onward with my “check list” and thought that my handout for the class was adequate. Next was to give the presentation and see what kind of feedbacks I got.

Oral Presentation #1 was not a success. I received a 5 out of 7 from Dr. James (see email) with some tips on how to strengthen my next oral presentation. Some of the points he made were things that I already had reflected on after my presentation so I wasn’t too shocked to see them on his email. However, this did not help with my feeling of failure. I had not seen this coming when I filled out my pre and post-ratings, but would be sure to take into account when I do my next presentation (and ratings).

My initial reaction to his email (and some of my classmates) was to be defensive. “Don’t they know how hard it is to maintain a steady stream of talk?!! Especially when no one is paying attention to you?!!” These were my first thoughts that I wrote down in my notes, along with a few other obscenities directed at my “judges”. But was it really their fault that I did so poorly? NO. I was merely trying to use their objectivity as a scapegoat for what I realized were my faults during my preparation [and presentation of] the oral report. In fact, at the time I was thinking defensively the thought that they were struggling as well hadn’t crossed my mind.

This affected me emotionally and I was sort of down for a few days. This was the first time I was faced with more than one critic, and no one ENJOYS being criticized even if it is constructive. The thought of my classmates being “salty” at me for my comments on their presentation struck me as being ironic because I knew that they were going through the same thing as I. And just as soon as the ill feelings came, they were gone. I had just witnessed myself being irrational and irresponsible for my actions. Now that I had accepted “my errors” it was time for me to think about how I could do better on the next one. I had learned a long time ago that dwelling on failures won’t manifest any successes. Dealing with the affective effects from the critiques was the hardest part for me during most of the tasks and I knew that self-improvement is needed in every aspect of my life; why not this too.

This did not change the fact that I was still a bothered by my poor performance. Those feelings stuck with me even as I was preparing my next oral presentation. The first reports’ feedback had forced me to be more paranoid about the job I was doing. “Is it better than the first? What if they don’t like this either? What else can I do to strengthen my report?” These are a few of the questions I wrote down for myself to consider as I worked on organizing my notes for Oral #2. I knew for sure that I wanted note cards or at least a note sheet so that I could keep the information in order while I was presenting it. I also made notes for the improvements that were suggested by Dr. James and my classmates.

The negative affect from the first oral was forcing me to be more conscious of myself. I had changed my cognitive approach and had decided that writing everything out from that point on would help me keep things in order. This was not true. After writing out the suggestions and ideas from everyone (including my own) I had come up with a page full of mumbo-jumbo. I saw from my notes that I wanted to cover EVERY sub-topic of Chapter 12, which was insane. In the midst of trying to make my notes and ideas more organized, I had successfully confused the heck out of myself. I had to narrow the sub-topics down to a few in order to make time and research requirements.

After I had gotten a handle on my feeling of failure and reorganized my preparation methods I looked at my Oral Presentation 2 and felt satisfied. After all, I had read the comments and accepted my errors, found the cause, and then tackled the next task positively. A positive attitude was definitely necessary because if I had dwelt on being negative, I would never have been able to accept my mistakes and try to improve on them. This positive attitude was reflected in my ratings for oral 2 which further reinforced what I understood to be the power of positive thinking.

Conclusion

Being able to accept my mistakes helped me because if I had not been able to accept them I would have stayed in denial and not tried to do better. The way emotions affects a person greatly determines how motivated they are when the situation arises again. I learned that having a positive attitude when faced with failure does help light the tunnel that a person can feel they are “trapped” walking in with no direction. I feel that the excersices have helped me learn how to handle the effect my emotions (affective) have on my cognitive processing.

In conclusion, the course work for this class was heavily reliant on self-witnessing and self-report, which is something that most people do not take the time to analyze when errors occur. Those that do can see where the improvements are needed and can think [and plan] out how to stop the reoccurring errors. The first step to that is being able to acknowledge that a mistake was made and then moving on to look “inside” the self to see what caused it instead of brushing it aside knowing it probably will occur again (and that’s when they’ll deal with it). The importance of these tasks is not lost to me, and I have learned a great deal from being (essentially) forced to monitor myself and to think about how the errors affected me what I can do to help future performances. What I learned from this course will help me greatly for the rest of my life, not because I went through the motions of doing the tasks, but because it made me realize that even things I feel are not in my control can still be affected by me and my attitude.