Presenting Good Is The Enemy Of Great
We need to become the best we can possibly be
I was recently reminded of this point about a good presentation being the enemy of a great presentation. Two speakers with a tonne of business experience gave their talks, one after the other. Both were very confident, quite competent and rather boring. By most people’s measure they probably did a “good job”, but they could have been great instead. What was missing? The neglected elements are what makes the difference between being great rather than just being good.
One of the speakers used notes and did a pretty fair attempt of looking at the audience rather than concentrating on the text. This is not easy. You have to read the content, then reproduce it from memory, as you are eye balling the audience. If you think this is a snap, just try it.
Did he need to have a written text? Actually no. He could have talked to his key points, given he was highly articulate and experienced enough to do so. Being able to spend more time engaging with the assembled masses, rather than engaging with your script takes work. The content contained all of the expected things. That is an issue as well. Once your audience realizes you are doing the usual routine expected of someone in your exalted position, they tend to mentally switch off. It was delivered with supreme confidence and you could tell this wasn’t the speaker’s first rodeo. It was good, but it wasn’t great.
The second speaker upped the ante and spoke with no notes. This is a much better version. It means you can spend your entire speaking time engaging your audience with eye contact. It would have been better if the speaker had actually done that, picking out individuals in the crowd and engaging them one by one. Rather, it was one of those one size fits all jobs, where the speaker is talking to everyone and no one at the same time.
It was a big crowd. In these cases, when you select one person and you look and speak directly to them, the distance involved provides the illusion that you are talking directly to a number of people standing or sitting around the person you are actually concentrating on. It means you are engaging many individuals with the sensation that you are directly addressing them and no one else in the room at that moment. This is so powerful you would think all speakers would do it.
So both speakers were using eye contact, but it was fake eye contact. It looks like they are speaking to the people in front of them, but actually it is an undifferentiated mass affair, rather than creating a feeling of one on one intimacy.
All you have to do to change that, is look directly into the eyes of one person for around six seconds and they will feel a profound sense of personal connection with you. Why six seconds? The time spent under six seconds can come across as fleeting and perfunctory, rather than a genuine attempt to really engage. Over six seconds of you staring intently at someone, brings out the fear you are a psycho axe murderer, to the audience member involved.
The other element that was missing was engagement with the message. I am struggling with finding the correct descriptor here. Uninspiring platitudes is too harsh a judgment, because I am sure they were genuine in what they were telling the audience. The problem was it sounded just like the type of thing they should be saying, so our expectations were met, rather than exceeded. Good, but not great.
On both occasions, there were no attempts to connect with the audience at the emotional level through storytelling. This is rather the problem with most business speakers. They are talking to us, but not engaging or moving us. Storytelling really brings the human element to the fore. We easily follow the plot, we can identify with the characters and we will feel an emotional connection with the point being made by the speaker. This is how you go beyond good to achieve greatness, as a communicator in business. The fatally sad part is that both of these speakers’ professional lives are absolutely brimming with human stories which we can naturally grasp and appreciate. There is such a richness in using stories to drive home the point, but the treasure was unspent on this occasion. Why?
Because they couldn't go beyond being good to challenge themselves to be great. This is the issue when we gain confidence to address an audience. We feel we were professional, that we did a good job, that we completed the task competently compared to most others. This is true, but we fall short of our full potential when we are self-satisfied with these lower rungs on the ladder to speaking success.
It sounds harsh but realistically most business presenters we experience are rubbish, so our scope of comparison creates a false sense of achievement. We need to become the best we can possibly be. To do that we need to engage the audience with our eyes, speak directly to them and regale them with human stories that really stir their emotions. This should be the standard against which we measure ourselves.