Episode #380: What If We Make Ourselves The Center Of Our Talk?

Where is the line between referencing our experiences and insights and just talking about ourselves? I attended a talk recently where the speaker had a perspective to share with the audience, to add value to their careers and businesses. What surprised me was how much of the talk was cantered on the speaker rather than the audience. I was thinking about this later and wondered what the better balance would be? When we go on about ourselves, we are getting further away from points of relevance for the listeners. We have to remember that people are unapologetically 100% focused on themselves and their own interests and don’t care all that much about our story.

As the speaker, the closer we can align what we are saying to the listener’s interests, the greater the acceptance of what we are saying and the bigger the impact we will have as the presenter. That is fine in theory, but we can’t just make a series of pompous statements about how things should be and not back them up with evidence. Often that evidence is coming from our own experiences and that can be the most convincing variety. Unveiling a lot of sexy data during the talk is interesting, but a mud and blood rendition of what happened to us in the trenches, is always more gripping and compelling. This speaker, in my mind, strayed across the line and was wallowing in too much self-indulgence about what they had been doing.

How do we balance our story with the audience's need for alignment with their benefit? What the speaker could have done was better draw out how to transfer their learnings into concrete examples, where the listeners could apply them to their own circumstances. Instead of just saying this is what I did, and this is how it worked for me, they could have gone a bit deeper on the application for others who are not them. When the example is too idiosyncratic, the agency for others becomes diminished or diluted.

We could say, “I did this and got this result. Now here are three ways you could take this same idea and apply it to your situation”. We have now crossed over to the audience’s application of the knowledge. By giving more than one opportunity, we are more likely to hit on what the majority of audience members are looking for. Importantly, by prior analysis of who is showing up the talk, we can anticipate common needs and circumstances. This allows us to get closer to the mark of listener reality when we explain our examples.

A simple rule of thumb should be 20% of what happened to us and 80% of the time on explaining why this will work for our audience. Our speaker, in this case, reversed those percentages and spent the majority of the time talking about what happened to them. The problem with this is we in the audience are not them and we have to parse out what we can apply from their story. It is much better of the speaker saves us that drama and they tell us what we can apply.

We draw out the key points we want to make for the audience, align our war stories with the points and then add a significant section in the talk on explaining why doing this is a great idea and specifically why it is a great idea bolstered with concrete cases and options. This is an unbeatable combination. We demonstrate in words that because we did it, they can, too. We draw out how it will work for the audience and convince them that it has a broader application than just working for us alone. We have to marshal the benefits of taking our advice, and the more concretely we can do that, the better.

Our speaker convinced us that it worked for them, but failed to make the case that it would work for us. They hinted at it, but statements are cheap and we sceptical folk want more evidence. We are all risk averse, so we want chapter and verse and solid provable details.

When constructing the talk, keep that 20%-80% dichotomy in mind. Certainly use ourselves as proof, but don’t rely on it exclusively. If we can talk about others doing marvellous things with our advice, that is the icing on the cake. We love to hear case studies and then draw our own conclusions on how much we can take from the example and apply it in our world. That idea is something we need to be constantly hammering away at too. Keep telling them to think how they can adapt it, and apply it for themselves. In this way, we can keep switching the focus back to the audience away from us and we will get the balance right.