china & chinese
maybe it's a sign that i'll be holding on to the china portfolio for awhile more, given that the first-ever seminar-type presentation i had to do in front of an international audience from the industry was in chinese. was pretty pleased with how it turned out in the end ... over-preparation is good, and all the time spent doing up the script as well as reading and re-reading of the presentation script throughout the flight to beijing was worth it. yes, i was talking to myself for 6 hours in the plane.
happily, for the presentation itself, there were no weird accents, no wrong words and no stumbling. more eye contact would probably have been better, so i'll work on that the next time (hopefully not so soon!). surprisingly, the highly-stressed-out-by-presentations me didn't have too many butterflies in my stomach in the minutes before my presentation ... maybe because i knew i'd done as much as i could already. having a slick set of presentation slides was also a confidence booster. the big boss had called me in the hotel room the night before and left off with "for tomorrow's presentation, just do it and survive lah" (clearly he didn't have very high expectations *sigh*), but he texted me to say "well done!" immediately after i had delivered the presentation, so i guess i did more than "survive". yay!
then again, i STILL think i need business chinese lessons. not fun to feel inadequate in expressing myself. GAH.
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first there's the hard work, and then there's the play. it's nice how work brings me to places in china that i probably wouldn't have travelled to myself.
longmen grottoes in luoyang, a UNESCO heritage site
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did a 7.6km "i'm back!" run at 6'15" per km. had lugged my gym gear all the way to china and back without using the gym at the hotel, so this was to make-up for lost time. 235.6km ...
happily, for the presentation itself, there were no weird accents, no wrong words and no stumbling. more eye contact would probably have been better, so i'll work on that the next time (hopefully not so soon!). surprisingly, the highly-stressed-out-by-presentations me didn't have too many butterflies in my stomach in the minutes before my presentation ... maybe because i knew i'd done as much as i could already. having a slick set of presentation slides was also a confidence booster. the big boss had called me in the hotel room the night before and left off with "for tomorrow's presentation, just do it and survive lah" (clearly he didn't have very high expectations *sigh*), but he texted me to say "well done!" immediately after i had delivered the presentation, so i guess i did more than "survive". yay!
then again, i STILL think i need business chinese lessons. not fun to feel inadequate in expressing myself. GAH.
---
first there's the hard work, and then there's the play. it's nice how work brings me to places in china that i probably wouldn't have travelled to myself.
longmen grottoes in luoyang, a UNESCO heritage site
---
did a 7.6km "i'm back!" run at 6'15" per km. had lugged my gym gear all the way to china and back without using the gym at the hotel, so this was to make-up for lost time. 235.6km ...