Anyway, Rajaei recently wrote a post on “How To Effectively Deal with Negative Comments on Your Blog“, which I just read, and which gave me a kick-start out of my writers’ block.

You see, I had to deal with a similar situation in the past few days.

In June, I gave a presentation at SIGiST Israel 2008 on Finding Requirements Bugs, as a result of which I was invited to give a similar talk to the test team at Company X. My talk lasted for just over 2 hours, and most of the attendees were really “with me”, asking questions, taking part, and genuinely enjoying the presentation.

However, there were one or two attendees who were obviously not impressed. During an exercise in “Ambiguity Review”, while we were brainstorming the possible ambiguities in the exercise they had just done, one of them said (and I allow myself some poetic license) “If I go and bug the developers, business analysts, etc. with these silly ambiguities (i.e. non-problems), they’ll throw me down the stairs“.

Well, I couldn’t “Take A Break, Go For A Walk“, as Rajaie suggests (tip #8). And “Send The Commenter An Email, A Friendly One“ (tip #3) was obviously irrelevant!

So, what could I do?

Firstly, when you are giving a presentation, and you get a negative comment, that comment is out there for all to hear. “Don’t Delete The Comment” (tip #1) is a no-brainer, unless you are Dr. Who.

You probably aren’t expecting a negative comment, so take a minute to “Understand What The Commenter Is Trying To Say” (tip #6) – just because the comment is negative, doesn’t mean it should be ignored. It may in fact contain much more valuable information than a whole pile of positive comments.

You need to think fast on your feet, and quickly work out if “It’s OK To Be Wrong Every Once In A While” (tip #2), or “Ask Yourself, Did I Deserve It?” (tip #9), although not quite in the way Rajaie talks about.

If you can “Observe The Situation From A Different Point Of View” (tip #10), you may be able to relate better to the negative comment by putting yourself in the commentor’s shoes. If you find that the negative comment really does hold good advice, then ”Don’t Ignore The Advice, Put It Into Action, Immediately“, if you can (tip #7).

And do remember, “You Will NEVER Impress Everyone Every-Time” (tip #12), however long and hard you’ve worked on your presentation (and believe me, I certainly did that!). Sometimes, people just don’t like something for no reason whatsoever, period. As Rajaie says “But you could always make a poll asking your readers for their opinion on the article to improve it for next time.”

And what in fact did I do?

Firstly, I asked the commentor what he was trying to say (#6), after which I tried to observe the situation from his point of view (#10).

I asked myself whether I deserved his comment (#9), and realized that I did – I had made a mistake (#2) by not explaining the rules of the brainstorming session. I should have started by telling the audience that we were going to collect as many ambiguities as possible, even those that are trivial in the real world, and after that we would reduce the list to the most important ones.

I should have taken the opportunity to ask him to lead the effort of reducing the brainstormed list (#7), but we were running out of time (no excuse …).

On the way home in the car, I rationalized with myself that you can’t impress everyone all the time (#12), but when I got back to the office I did write to the Manager who invited me, and requested that she send me the feedbacks from the team, so that I can see how to improve for next time.

And finally, I’m ending it with “Writing A Post Discussing How You Deal With Negative Comments” (#4)

Many of us will find ourselves in the position of receiving negative comments, be it at work, at home, in front of an audience, or from a single person. We can just “blow up” and get mad – believe me, I’ve done that on occasion - or we can try and deal with it as a learning experience.

Have you been in this type of situation before? How did you handle it? Any tips that you’d like to share as comments below will be a added bonus to me and my readers.

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How To Deal With Negative Comments is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.

After a very good keynote speech (separate post on the keynotes coming up soon), it was time for me to brave the crowd. I will admit to being a tad nervous.

I’ve given dozens of presentations in the past, but mostly to “friendly” audiences, i.e. my colleagues at work. Sure, they’ve often given me a hard time, but we were still part of the same family.

The last time I presented at an open conference was in 1993, when I presented “The Road to Requirements Maturity” at the IEEE International Conference on Software-Science, Technology & Engineering. That time, my updated version of the presentation wouldn’t load to the conference computer, and I had to give my updated (and better) presentation whilst the audience were viewing the older (and not-so-great) version…

This time I was not planning a rerun. With time to spare, I rounded up a couple of ex-team members, and asked them to please help me do a dry-run of my presentation.

Now these guys are good. VERY good. They make you shiver, they question every slide: why is it here? what do you want it to say? it doesn’t work…, it doesn’t make sense…, you aren’t focused enough…, who’s the audience? why is this subject important to you? why are you “wasting” their time? what do you want them to get out of it? the whole thing is backwards… etc. etc. etc.

They had no problem doing this when I was their boss, they certainly had no problem doing it when I wasn’t their boss anymore!

But seriously – there was no comparison between the presentation I had ready for the dry run, and the one I ended up presenting. It was night and day. And I felt a heck of a lot more confident because of that.

So a big, big thank you go to Shlomit Halevi and Mordechai Cikk from NDS. A big thank you also to Joel Tessler and David Egyes (also from NDS) for being the inspiration, and more, behind this presentation. Last but by no means least, my thanks go to Donna Abraham, a wonderful teacher, and Communications Specialist at Boyer Communications Group. Donna taught me “Presenting for Action“, which is so much more than “just another presentation course”, and which has improved my presentation skills more than I could have imagined.

Before I carry on, I need to add that I was proud to have my presentation voted as one of the top 3 (out of 23), and I can safely say that a dry run with really good people is one of the things that can help you get an OK presentation into an excellent one. If there’s one lesson you take away with you from this blog post (!), that should be it.

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The Difference Between a Good Presentation and an Excellent One is a post from: Debi'Z Organic SEO, experts in Organic SEO Services and SEO Coaching.