Whether it is dreams or screens, resolution refers to clarity of vision. How clearly can you see the future? How clearly can you see yourself? Is it an inspired scene or a disturbing drama? Great presentations create a compelling vision of the future and invite your audience to experience it with you. When you commit to the future, resolve what not to do and congruently blend the present and the past, you can create resolutions worth seeing and realizing.
Congruency between the future, the present and the past make resolutions reality. Have you ever listened to someone trying to talk their way out of something they behaved their way into? Perhaps you repeatedly engaged in some youthful indiscretions, slowing down just long enough to apologize when you got caught. The doubt in your parents’ or teachers’ eyes came from wondering how closely your apologetic words would match your indiscreet deeds. As you mature, a resolution can be an apology to yourself, an internal commitment to begin anew or a decision just to stop doing what does not serve you. The power of your public promises comes from the strength of your internal integrity. Resolving your internal conflicts often means making peace with your past, so your present resolutions can become your future reality.
When you resolve to become a better public speaker, you start to notice all your flaws: your use of verbal graffiti (er, um, ah, ya know audible pauses), how you stand and where you place your hands become constant concerns. This awareness exaggerates the reality of your issues. Your future success depends more on what you stop doing, than getting better at what you are doing. Do you have a stop-doing list? This list is just as important as your to-do list because the former captures your past, while the latter creates your future. Everything on your stop doing list comes from a beneficial intent which resulted in your current discontent. Focusing on eliminating quirky gestures and meaningless mumbling is the right intent to improve your speaking. Worrying, thinly disguised as concentration about them, just makes it worse. You need to discover the benefits within your behaviors. What? I just want to get rid of them! Agreed; however, the truth is that you are nervous and this nervous energy is tripping up your thinking and wiggling your hands. The benefit is that stumbling and shaking does dissipate nervous energy until you become even more nervous as you notice that you are stumbling and shaking. Accept that you are going to be nervous, and resolve to guide the resulting energy instead of resisting it.
When you understand what you will feel in the future you can confidently commit to your future. A resolution is a commitment to your future. When you are giving a presentation the strength of this commitment will be tested; first, as you summon the courage to speak and again when others question your convictions. Your answers do not need to convince others to adopt your beliefs, just evince your resolve in believing. The greater your resolution the clearer the future will be to you. The clearer you see the more clearly you can express yourself. Knowing how you will feel in the future is impossible to know, though feeling something is inevitable. Resolving what you want to feel in the future allows you to see and realize a compelling future.
Resolutions are just dreams with deadlines. Your present choices can either dismay and delay, or create and compel. Take the time to find the benefits behind your behaviors. You may be nervous at first, but the clearer you see yourself, the finer the resolution of your future visions will become.