Presentation
I rocked out yesterday! The presentation really was pretty bad when I rehearsed it the previous night, but all it needed was a little cutting and rearranging to make it come together beautifully. The problems with analyzing the data that had me so panicked over the weekend melted away; I managed to come up with a set of really simple, easy-to-communicate, analyses that got across a big chunk of what we'd found. And when I looked at it I realized that this wasn't even an all-out fishing expedition; the meditation participants improved on the majority of measures, and we really did get evidence that it was because they were experiencing more day-to-day positive emotion. Until I wrote this up, I didn't realize how successful the study really was, or how excited I could get people about it.
I was especially pleased that astella3 told me I'd done a good job of addressing the question she asked at the end. One of the public speaking skills I most want to develop is the ability to really listen to questions and give them direct answers, rather than just playing back something I wanted to pontificate on. I think I did well with the other questions also; I moved really fluidly between giving them intelligent, theoretically-based answers, and saying, "that's a pretty good idea! We'll work on finding a way to test that in the follow-up."
Being able to talk to people about my work is really invigorating. I also get a boost from the physical action of standing up and putting on my presentation demeanor (this created some problems for euziere, who was sitting in the office helping me rehearse and asked me to lower my voice. "but I don't know if I can say this without projecting!").
Anyway, great! Going to see if the momentum from this will help me get some enthusiasm back about my other work.
I was especially pleased that astella3 told me I'd done a good job of addressing the question she asked at the end. One of the public speaking skills I most want to develop is the ability to really listen to questions and give them direct answers, rather than just playing back something I wanted to pontificate on. I think I did well with the other questions also; I moved really fluidly between giving them intelligent, theoretically-based answers, and saying, "that's a pretty good idea! We'll work on finding a way to test that in the follow-up."
Being able to talk to people about my work is really invigorating. I also get a boost from the physical action of standing up and putting on my presentation demeanor (this created some problems for euziere, who was sitting in the office helping me rehearse and asked me to lower my voice. "but I don't know if I can say this without projecting!").
Anyway, great! Going to see if the momentum from this will help me get some enthusiasm back about my other work.