It’s the large poster with the picture of the President smiling down on the population that stays in the mind as you drive off the airport road into Tbilisi. The President of the United States that is, George W himself. To British eyes, it must be ironic – there to make us laugh, cheer us up by its incongruity. It takes a moment to realise that there is no irony intended at all – this is a country that is determinedly toiling away from a Soviet past and into a Western future, with all of the uncertainties and difficulties that future may hold. But at least it’s their future.
I was returning to Tbilisi, back to the OSCE headquarters in the Dacha complex for a second year, this time with a new cameraman Peter Johnstone who had never been to Georgia before. I did my best to prepare him for the city. Like many westerners he’d been telling his colleagues for weeks that he was going to Russia. We nearly missed our plane because at the last minute he went back home to fetch his winter jacket – a huge fur lined quilted monstrosity which would have sheltered a small family. He never wore it – a fact I pointed out many times as we sat on the rooftop terrace of the Kopola hotel sipping cool beer in the warmth of the evenings after work, mesmerised by the stunning lighting display of Tbilisi’s spotlit public buildings at night.
I felt instantly at home as soon as the OSCE driver picked up my bags, welcomed us to Georgia, and gave every impression that it was perfectly normal to ferry Scotsmen to and from the airport at five o’clock in the morning – it was all in a day’s work. I enjoyed showing my colleague Peter, who was expecting a land resembling the gulag archipelago, that Georgia is exactly what you would expect of a country which invented wine: warm, colourful, energetic, religious, fun. I relaxed in the company of OSCE’s smart, clever and friendly staff. People who have worked hard to get into the organisation, and who enjoy the company of others as quick-witted as they are. I must have been a disappointment, but they never showed it.
We were there to deliver training in Presentation skills. Training courses are easy to deliver when the people who attend are completely inexperienced. Everything you tell them is new, and therefore valuable. It is much more difficult when, as with the OSCE, the people who attend the course already have the natural skills and experience to do a good job. Nobody welcomes a trainer who tells them the basic rules of presentation which they already adopt as soon as they walk out of their house in the morning – there has to be more to it than that. So I ditched the golden rules of presentation: what Noel Coward described as “remember the lines and don’t bump into the furniture”. We moved straight on to the advanced level: how to structure your presentation to keep your audience enthralled. How to give the impression that you really mean what you say. How to end on a climax that has them begging for more.
And then, comes the moment of unbeatable satisfaction for a trainer: to see your audience change before your eyes as they pick up the specific skills you are teaching, put them into practice, and succeed in giving a performance that has changed beyond recognition from the initial plunge into the deep end first thing in the morning. In both our groups over two days, everyone succeeded in convincing me that they had absorbed the techniques I taught, and that they actually wanted to adopt the presentation skills we practiced in their daily lives.
Life changing? That probably pitches it a bit high. But certainly confidence building, certainly a help along the road of daily work at the OSCE. The aim of any training is to give people the impression that you haven’t been trained. You know when presentation training has worked. It is when people think you are a natural. They don’t know why your presentations are so successful. They just think you have a natural knack for it. That is why we see ourselves, as trainers, as an invisible force. Working our magic behind the closed doors of the conference room. Spotting and eradicating the mistakes well out of the way of any audience. Polishing the skills of our participants when no-one else can see them. Then leaving you to show your audience that you are more skilled, more experienced, more in control than they are.
As we lifted off from the runway at Tbilisi airport Peter turned to me as said “so, do you think we’ll be back in Russia next year?” I said I hope not. But I certainly hope we’ll be back in Georgia to experience once again the zest for life and pride in their nation that Georgians have. We’ll look forward to coming back to the excitement and the bustle of the City of Brilliantly Lit Buildings.
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