Preparing for a presentation can be an overwhelming experience if a life coaching client allows it to be one. This skill is vital to master as it is the single most important part of creating a successful presentation. It is an indispensable foundation which means that you, as the life coach, should devote as much time to teaching it as possible and avoid short-cuts. Good preparation will ensure you have thought carefully about the messages which you want (or need) to communicate in your sporting organisation and it will also help boost your confidence.
Here are strategies and steps to help life coaching client break down what they might view as a big job into smaller, easier-to-manage tasks.
- Analyse your audience
- Choose a topic
- Define the objective of the presentation
- Prepare the content of your presentation
- Prepare the body of the presentation
- Prepare the introduction as well as the conclusion
To help life coaches teach their clients how to put together the best possible presentation, we thought that it would be useful to look at how people learn so that the presentation can be tailor-made to these styles.
How do we learn?
People learn constantly, from everything around them. We know that some cases are more conducive to learning than others and that learning can be unpredictable.
Considerations of the learning process itself, in particular as informed by the latest discoveries in cognitive neuroscience, offers a wealth of guidance for a general Learning Systems Theory and for building positive as well as effective learning experiences for a wide variety of learners. Having an understanding of how learning actually occurs in the brain can help to inform the design of:
- Support systems which anticipate the requirements of learners in their learning activities
- Knowledge management systems that align with the strategic needs of learning organisations
- Learning systems which provide the rich content needed for different learning styles and depth of learning.
From a cognitive perspective, learning is a mental activity involving internal coding of incoming information and may be defined as the acquisitions of knowledge and skills. On the other hand, behaviourists tend to seel earning as an alteration in performance which arises from experience. In fact, if learning is seen as a whole process with input and outputs these apparently opposing perspectives become just two sides of a single coin with acquisition representing the input phase and performance as the output.
Seen in this manner it is clear that the central feature of learning is the storing of information or know-how. Of course, it’s not as simple a storage process as putting something away in the attic and forgetting about it. We also must be able to retrieve that information again appropriately. As any librarian will tell you the key to being able to retrieve or apply stored information is to catalogue and index it as it is being stored.
In human and other higher-order organisms the process occurs in the brain and generally results in memories. Sensory experiences give rise to changes in the connections between the neurons of our brains and the reactivation of these stored neural patters enables the expression of that learning at a later time. Whether it’s a simple recall of information or complex psychomotor activities it involves the same indexing, storage and retrieval process.
Contact Trifocus Fitness Academy
If you want to discover more on the topic that we’ve discussed in this article, and possibly become a life coach yourself, then you need to check out our Life Coaching Certification. Follow this link for more information.
