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There's the presentation you planned to give. The one you actually gave. And then there's the deliver you wish you'd given. --------------- I've made this LinkedIn learning lesson free so you can learn. Just use the link to watch. --------------- Most financial professionals spend all of their preparation time on the first one. The problem is, and I bet you've experienced it...the first one never happens. Presentations are rarely one-way communications. And the more senior your audience, the more interruptions, tangents, and competing egos you're walking into. One realization that took me a while to figure out is the difference between memorization and rehearsal. To many people, they sound like the same thing. But they're not. Memorization means you've committed specific lines and phrases to memory. It feels thorough until someone asks a question mid-slide and suddenly you're lost. Rehearsal means you know your material well enough to take a detour and still find your way back. When an executive steers the conversation somewhere unexpected, you have a few options: 1) You can address the tangent and return. 2) You can follow it all the way down, or 3) You can acknowledge it and redirect: "I want to make sure we get to that, and I'll tie it in when we cover the next section." Which one you choose depends on the room, the goals you've set, and what you're trying to accomplish. None of them is always right. But what is always right is you being positioned to recalibrate and reposition whenever you need to. If you'd like to learn more about effective communication in finance, FP&A, modeling and more: https://lnkd.in/gSwWYzf4