re: WPC 10K Post Challenge - You Ready?!
What I wanted to say is that I had to think for a moment what I wanted to say, what led to an uncomfortable pause. I have to give the presentation in English, I have less trouble speaking fluently in German (of course).
When doing presentations for jobs I tend to stick to the following formula over a 5 day period.
Write down exactly what I want to say in one long prose and read it a couple of times every other hour.
The following day I break it down into defined stages then read one stage every hour.
The day after I stand up and present each stage as a practice one stage an hour with the full text as a guide.
Day after that I condense what I was going to say for each stage into bullet points and run through the whole presentation at least 3 times.
Final day before presentation I run through the whole thing without any guidance notes but I have someone listening with my original script for guidance should I need it.
I have found that I capture almost everything that I originally wrote down but I also tend to ad-lib and enhance some of my ideas as I go through - I guess its a mixture of nerves and coming up with ideas on the spot that causes me to do this - however my presentations always seem to go pretty well.