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Effective Presentation Skills and Communication

I stumbled across this video on Youtube and found it rather amusing and entertaining. Not only does the speaker poke fun at his ethnic background, but he manages to effectively grab the audience’s attention!

Presentation and verbal communication skills are very important skill sets in the business world. These soft skills are sought out from a Human Resourcing perspective. Notably, on a resume, these resume keywords are quickly challenged by an interviewer to confirm validity.

Anyways, getting back to the video, the presenter does a great job of keeping the audience listening. Active listening is defined as paying close attention to detail and drawing the full attention of a listener. In the noted seminar, the speaker satirizes Asian stereotypes to grab the audience’s attention. By doing so, he stops them in their tracks by switching to his regular speaking pitch.

He does poise some great thoughts nonetheless. At a general level, people prefer to communication and associate with others that they can communicate with easily, without ambiguity. For myself, I prefer associating with users with strong communication and verbal skills as it minimizes ambiguity. I hate to admit it, but like the video, I tend to avoid situations where I have to deal with people with poor English skills.

So what some ways to improve your language skills?

Hard Knock Life for Asians?

As for the title, Asians live in a Catch-22 world: we are stereotyped, misunderstood, and misrepresented.

I had a very bizarre experience today on my commute home. It was a typical after-hour’s day and I was riding the public transit: I found a seat and sat there minding my own business. A few stops later, an elderly woman entered the train and awkwardly grabbed the handrail. Instinctively, like all good Samaritans, I offered my seat.

“Would you like to sit down?” I asked, while simultaneously making the gesture of standing up.

She looked at me with a look of astonishment: almost as if I was the last person she expected to offer up a seat. I looked back and forced a smile.

“That was a very kind gesture, thank you!”

I replied: “No problem, you’re very welcome.”

As I was standing there, (struggling to keep my balance) I overheard the woman repeatedly telling her husband + grandson (assumed anyways) that that was a kind gesture. They all looked at me as if I had broken some sort of ’stereotypical Asian persona’. From my observations, Asians typically try to keep a low profile and mind their own business. We avoid confrontation, do our work, and hope that’s all there is to it and I appeared to have made a taboo by breaking this expectation.

My first impression was this woman assumed that I was not fluent in English and like the majority of people, would ‘fake sleep’ to avoid any confrontation. However, this was not the case, and she seemed flabbergasted by the act.

In my opinion, this should be the ‘norm’. That is, offering a seat to the elderly. Unfortunately, after observing my surroundings, I noticed everyone around me seemed to ignore the fact that this person was a senior and pretended to not see her. It was quite embarrassing/depressing to witness.

Anyways, what I came to realize today was that it’s strange how visible minorities are misunderstood, whether it be intentional or not. We’ve heard it before: “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”

Today, I felt good about myself after seeing how the woman’s face had lit up. It gave me a sense of satisfaction; knowing that I exceeded one’s expectation and did not expect, nor required gratification in return.

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