Maybe Friday afternoon on a super hot day in a stuffy auditorium would test the listening capacity of any grade seven and eight students.

Maybe it’s too much to expect that the kids would be engaged in my presentation when they haven’t heard anything about me, haven’t read the book, or been prepared in any way. It was only the second week of school for goodness sakes!

Maybe I’m being too hard on myself.

And maybe it’s not wise to even blog about this because it sure wasn’t a success!

But then life’s not a success only journey and I think others might be able to learn from my experience as I did.

The problem with developing a new presentation is that it takes a while to get all the ‘bugs’ out of it. To have it flow, in a natural way, where you know exactly what you’re supposed to say from point to point.

With developing my presentations I try to make them interesting and each with their own story arc, just as if they were a story on paper.

But a good presentation is like a recipe for a favourite cake, miss one ingredient–a MAIN ingredient–and the presentation just won’t come out as good as it should.

Oh it may be edible, and you may even get a few compliments, but you won’t blow them away like you usually do!

Well that’s what happened with my Wanting Mor presentation on Friday afternoon.

Maybe it was because I was tired. Maybe it was because I hadn’t done the presentation since the launch in Italy. And yes, maybe I was a bit rusty after having spent all summer working on other projects.

I should have made notes of what I covered in the presentation. I did that with my Work in Progress presentation!

A quick reference to it and I’m good to go. It’s not like I have to read from it during the presentation or anything.

But how could I have forgot the part about fatherhood? I mean that was such a HUGE part of the book! And in writing it, I was trying to understand how a father could abandon his daughter like that. It was a KEY ingredient of the presentation!

I got all the other ingredients of the presentation right, and yet I knew, even as I was wrapping it up by reading the first chapter, that something was missing.

It wasn’t until I was reading the paragraph that contains the theme of the book, the one about people being like clay pots, that I realized I’d missed that whole part of the presentation.

There was nothing I could do about it at that point. My time was up as it was.

Yes, there were still a number of kids who came up to me afterwards and asked me where they could buy the book and told me how much they’d enjoyed the presentation.

That should be enough.

That should be satisfying.

But I know I could have done it so much better!

I am definitely writing up a short little tip sheet of the topics to cover. From a to b to c to d, so next time, I don’t skip any!