Episode #368: Authentic Bumbling Or Fake Perfection When Presenting?

Authentic Bumbling Or Fake Perfection When Presenting?

“I want to be perfect when I speak”. No, you don’t! Let me tell you a tale of two CEO presenters with different approaches to addressing their audiences. One CEO used recent movies as his navigation for his speech. Actually, I had watched none of them, but he added enough context for me to get the point he was making about his own journey as a CEO, in a tough industry, in tough times. Actually, we all love a talk about hard times and woe, followed by ultimate success against the odds. This type of speech gives us a mix of empathy for the presenter and hope for ourselves. By the way, which version of a talk would you be more interested in – “How I made $20 million” or “How I lost $20 million”? Most of us would probably be more interested in the latter, because our risk averse natures are always looking for clues as to what we should avoid doing. The other CEO speaker was just perfect. The speech flowed beautifully, it was carefully crafted and manicured. The navigation was exact and it had no delivery blemishes. It simply failed.

Part of the difference was in the storytelling aspect of the two talks. The first CEO got us hooked on his struggles, his despair, his tale of redemption. He opened up the kimono to share his vulnerability, his imposter syndrome, his raw fears. It was painful and real. We had a context to gauge his ultimate success, because he took us to the bottom, to the depths. He helped us visualise, through his word pictures, his challenging ascent back into the fiscal black. The other speaker told a tale of solid progress, a stable journey onward and upward. It was hard to hear, because it sounded too foreign, too far removed from the reality of the last couple of years of struggle.

The delivery styles were also diametrically opposed. The first CEO stumbled over his words at times, had a foreign accent which frankly challenged my ears to comprehend certain terms. He used the movies selected as navigation and spoke to the point each one represented and stitched his own story into the narrative to make his points come alive. His hands were empty for gestures. He was relaxed and concentrated on engaging his audience by looking at us throughout the talk. He used the stage area to cover the room to the left and right, but he wasn’t manic and aimlessly wandering around free range without purpose, like so many crazed speakers you see.

The second CEO sent a chill through my spine when I noticed he was bringing his iPad with him to the podium. Uh oh! Sure enough, he read that perfectly constructed speech to us all. He was a much more fluent speaker of English, had no pronunciation flaws and the construction of the talk and the navigation was excellent. He had clearly labored hard over the text to whip it into shape and make it as perfect as possible. That was the problem. It was perfect, but it lacked authenticity. He didn’t feel engaging as a speaker. It was a canned speech and by choosing to read it to us; he disconnected himself from his audience. He looked down at the iPad to give that talk and that meant he wasn’t 100% concentrated on his audience, unlike the first CEO.

We are not perfect when we speak, mispronouncing words and stumbling over cartain phrases. We have flaws and that is why we are appealing to our listeners. They know themselves that they are like that too. We forgive the speaker for our common flaws. There is a limit, though. Anyone who has had the misfortune to hear a speaker um and ah their way throughout the entire talk, says to themselves, “end this torture now please”. That is at the other extreme of flaws which surpasses the audience's ability to bear the unbearable. By the way, if that is you, constantly uming and ahing, then please do the rest of us a favour and stop speaking in public, until you can string two words together without destroying our souls.

Counterintuitively, when the delivery is too perfect, we struggle to feel any great commonality with the speaker. They are a different animal to the rest of us. Reading the talk guarantees perfection, but it comes at a severe cost. It can easily become a lifeless, moribund and boring exercise.
My guess is that this second CEO speaker spent the entire preparation time working on the crafting of the text. Effort was spent on shuffling words around and working hard on the flow of the document. There seemed no idea in play of “how can I deliver this talk and really engage the audience when I read it?”. Our word emphasis, phrasing, pauses, eye contact and gestures can still be employed when reading the text to bring it alive as much as possible. We can depart from the text to tell a side story or make a key point. Let’s engage in eye contact with the crowd, so that it feels like we are talking directly to them. We have all the tools at our disposal and we need to be drawing on them.
My advice though is to avoid perfection and go for authenticity. Concentrate on your audience. They will forgive your few flaws and will gravitate to you when you speak. Think about it. It is exceedingly rare that someone reading a talk can hold the audience in the palm of their hand. Have you ever witnessed that phenomenon in actuality? Our first CEO achieved that breakthrough, because he made us the centerpiece of his talk, not his carefully crafted text, like the second CEO did. You don’t need perfection – go for being truly authentic. If you are going to read it to me, word for word, then send it by email – that would be better.