Episode #109: Plumb Your Own Experiences For Content When Presenting

It is ironic how talkative we are on some subjects, but how lost we are when it comes to giving public talks. If you were asked by friends about your holiday trip to Italy, you could probably go on for hours quite comfortably telling us about the food, the sights, the locations you went to and what you saw there. That romantic boat trip on Lake Como, the earrings you bought during your Murano glass factory visit in Venezia, that huge Florentine steak you had in Firenze, the dip in the Trevi Fountain in Rome, the colour of the sea in the Blue Grotto near Capri – you could go on at length about all of these adventures because they came from your experiences. So what have you been doing at work all these years in your profession? Haven’t you accumulated a host of experiences there too? Didn’t you have ups and downs at work, when projects went well and when they combusted? Haven’t you worked with colleagues who were rock stars and others who were idiots?

Going straight to the slide deck composition stage for creating your presentation is a big mistake. Go to your experiences first. What was the best deal you ever did? What was the most successful project you ever completed? What was the biggest disaster deal you ever suffered? What was the train wreck project from hell you were responsible for? Where have you seen people succeed and what did they do to be successful. Who have you seen digging a hole for themselves and then just keep digging?

In our lives, we have harvested a lot of experiences, which we can use in our presentations. If we were better organized, we might have had the forethought to keep notes, so it would be easier to refer to them when we are looking for material. Well there is a hint right there – keep notes from now. You can just jot down in your Evernote or something similar, the key points you will want to recall later in a talk.

Storytelling is not some Hollywood script writer level requirement for speakers. It is just telling our stories from real life, the lives of people we have observed. We can also share and acknowledge incidents from authors who have captured their experiences on paper, but in our own words. We just have to be observant and be able to see a good connection between a point we are making in our presentation and an example where we can relate it as a story.

We know with planning our talk we should start with the conclusion of our talk first, boiled down to its essence. We then pick up the main points we are going to use to illustrate why our viewpoint or our conclusion is correct. We then design the opening to grab people’s attention, amidst the mad world they live in, which seems to permanently distract them.

Now when we are fleshing out the key points we want to make, in the main body of the presentation, we are searching for evidence to back up our claims. This comes in the form of data, expert authority and stories to make the point come to life. This is the time to drop into the vault of our collection of stories and find good matches between the point and the story.

This may seem hard at first, but when you reflect on why you think something, about an issue there is usually a good reason for it. Something happened which you witnessed or were aware of, which influenced your take on the matter. There will be a story in there somewhere. Usually these are either successes or failures. We all have a rich storehouse of these, but we haven’t thought to employ them before. We thought of evidence as hard evidence composed of statistics, surveys, testimonials, academic writing, etc. Stories are evidence too and much more memorable and therefore more powerful, than numbers in reams of spreadsheets or a mess of graphs thrown up on screen.

If you are a regular consumer of my content, then you will know that I am often using things I have seen in other’s presentations to bring forth a point, either good or bad. Sadly, it is usually the negative example I am using, but not exclusively. These are just stories from real life that make my point of instruction about giving presentations.

We can all become careful observers of things going on in our business lives, which we can sew into the fabric of what we will be saying in our talk. There is no shortage of actors and characters out there in businessland from which we can draw. Let’s start our collection today if we don’t have one and keep adding to it, if we do. Some of this stuff you couldn’t make up by the way, which is always exciting. The point is to capture it and employ it.