Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021, 21:34 IST

For a long time, I used to believe in the fact that you cannot judge a person's ability by a single conversation, AND SO you don't need to bother working on your first impression/ presentation skills. If your work is good enough, you will outshine anyhow.

Why did I think so?

• I believed whatever I learnt in school regarding vocabulary and presentation was sufficient.
• Somewhere inside, I didn't want to put extra efforts into these auxiliary skills.

At (very) early stages of my design career, I had to change my behaviour. Back then (for me), Design was all about a kickass presentation and putting the work online to survive in an everyday evolving stream. With time I realised, Design is more about the thought process behind everything that I do.

So why do my presentation skills matter?

Because no matter how good of a solution I have, it would be worthless if I cannot explain it. And to explain anything to anyone, I should know it in and out.

I caught myself losing opportunities due to a lack of these skills.

For me, this problem had a simple (& obvious) approach (thanks to the designer mind):

1. Anything that I am unclear of, I won't be able to explain. Get clarity before jumping to solutions. Act as if you own every project.
2. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Fix it whenever I can.
3. Always listen to every kind of feedback and then filter out the noise. But listen to ALL of 'em.
4. Communicate to yourself and articulate all of your thoughts (in private/ public).