Carl Pritchard rocks, no doubt about it. He's my kind of infogeek, unabashedly passionate about what he talks about and not afraid to learn, with a penchant for discussing the origin of phrases (yes, it's another one of those posts.)

I was interested in the Austin PMI summer seminar  on "Project Presentation Success - Classic Briefing and Facilitation Techniques" when I first heard about it, because I can always brush up on my presentation and public speaking skills.  Unfortunately, like most people these days, my personal budget is not as flexible as I'd like, and paying out of my own pocket for seminars is not as easy as I'd like it to be.  It turned out to be a moot point, as I won the raffle at the chapter meeting a few weeks ago, so I got to go anyway.   

Since my current contract is ending, I figured it served dual purposes; honing my skills and networking.  And the timing is absolutely perfect, because I'm working on two workshop presentations for the PMI chapter to present in August as part of the Job Fair preparation strategies. So I was willing to get up earlier than normal to trudge off in the heat to The Commons up at UT's JJ Pickle Research Center.

If you ever get a chance to attend one of Carl's workshops or presentations, go. He's a very entertaining speaker, and mugs it up with the best of them without being distracting about it.  Some of his funnier comments sound like my own inner voice, and I'm sure I wasn't alone on that. I've never heard better "wrong answer!" responses that were funny, informative, and never dismissive of the person who gave the answer. And he personalizes his stories as well as uses examples that validate his credentials, both important.

His credibility with me rose when he first started talking Edward Tufte.  His shotgun miming over animated power point made it soar.  Amen, brother!  Although I disagree with him about Century Schoolbook font; I'm not fond of it, although I didn't like penmanship class, either, as I hated having to make the letters "just so" when learning to write. I did my own geeking out and mentioning the documentary Helvetica to him. (I'm a font geek. So?) 

He promised at the start that we'd all learn at least five things from it (or otherwise steal for our own presentation.  Many things he covered I knew, some of which I was actively doing, and quite a few I'd stopped prioritizing.  But some things I either didn't know, hadn't thought of, or ever thought about in that particular way.  So let's count what I learned:

The power of post-its (what a fantastic tool in a presentation/workshop)

"Where to you want to be 20 minutes?"

"You only have 30 seconds" (something I've let myself forget)

Excel "circle out" from a table or graph

That I'm not wrong to want to know my material cold before presenting

That I really need to replace my copy of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

And Carl, I used to know someone who was in fact Mr. Rogers' neighbor when she was growing up.  From what she said, everyone who ever met him ended up in awe because he really was that nice, in a way impressed even the cynical.