The first time I had to present design to a client, I vomited in their bathroom. And I’m not talking a little vomit. I’m talking full blast jet propulsion pea soup right into their toilet. (Hello. I’m a design professional!) The second time I did it wasn’t much better, but it’s been a while since I’ve had a full fledged freak out. In fact, I’ve gotten pretty good at it.

And I want to teach other people how to be good at it.

Part of this class I was doing is that you have to actually do a presentation. A short one. Five minutes. (I’ll break the whole class down in a minute.) So this woman who’d flown in from Japan goes up and starts her presentation. She’s a product manager. So she’s talking about project health. And she’s nervous. Everyone’s always nervous when they get up there. It was clear she was nervous. It was also clear she knew what she was talking about. She was clearly good at her job, just nervous about talking about it. Again, this is everyone in the class.

Yes, our workshops cost money. But the stuff you learn will end up making you so much more money than the workshop cost you.

Here’s the thing, as good as this woman was at her job, chances are she was going to get judged on situations like this. Situations she’d never been taught how to handle. Her next raise might depend on it. Her upward mobility might depend on it. Her next job (not that she was looking) might depend on it. And I really wanted to help her because no one had ever taught her how. And she flew all the way in from Japan. That’s a long trip.

I initially sucked at presenting work because nobody taught me how to do it. In fact, I was actively encouraged not to do it. I was told that good work, really good work, sold itself. And that if you had to stoop to selling it you were demeaning the profession. This is shit advice from shit people.

I’ve written about how designers screw up presentations in the past. (Go read it!) This is part two of that story. This is the part about how we’ve been helping to fix the problem. And one of the first things we learned was this problem was much bigger than designers.

A few years ago we started doing workshops on how to present your work more effectively. Everyone shows up scared. Everyone shows up looking tentative. Everyone shows up looking like they might wanna bail. But they show up. They show up to get better at something they’re scared of doing and that’s amazing.