Episode #222: Breaking The Rules By Choice, When Presenting

Many people break the rules of presenting, usually unknowingly. They have Johari Window style blind spots, where others know they are making mistakes, but they themselves are oblivious and just don’t know. This is extremely dangerous, because when you don’t know, you keep hardening the arteries of your habit formation. It is diabolically difficult to break out of those habit patterns once formed because you become comfortable with sub-standard performance. On the other hand, breaking them for effect, is very powerful and can be a tremendous differentiator in a world of mainly tedious presentations.

There is an old saying that “to break the rules, you need to know the rules”. Presenting is the same. Breaking them unwittingly or in ignorance is not the same thing as a conscious, well informed, professional choice. Let’s take some rules and break them on purpose.

The “berserker stage fiend” is the presenter who wears a furrow in the stage as they pound across from left to right, over and over again throughout the presentation. This is normally derived through a combination of heightened nerves and low self-awareness. They are not tuned into how much all of this pointless striding backwards and forwards, is diminishing the power of their message. Moving with purpose is fine, but incognisant hyperactivity is not.

We can however, for effect, suddenly explore dynamic activity on stage to drive home a point. For example, if we were to relate the story of the leadership teams’ panic over the nail biting 90% drop in revenues, thanks to lockdowns caused by Covid-19, we could suddenly start pacing furiously across the stage. We mimic and then exaggerate the emotions of that moment. We move on stage in this way with the intention to demonstrate the sheer scale of the dilemma and the psychological impact it was having on the leaders. We wouldn’t be doing this throughout the whole speech. That would engender an audience meltdown. For a minute or two, it is a dramatic re-enactment of the fear, frustration and sense of doom’s arrival, that everyone was feeling. Together we bring forth a dialogue of distress, fusing it with the frantic on stage pacing movements.

The “galactic black hole” presenter sucks all of the energy out of the room. They completely break contact with their audience. This time the desired effect is one of total despair, all hope lost, no solutions available and facing massive unforgiving defeat. The speaker drops all eye contact, stares at the floor about a meter in front of them and drops their chin onto their throat, so that they are looking downward at an accentuated sharp angle. The shoulders hunch over and the body energy is reduced to a minus number. The voice is frail, catching, weak, whispering but still audible. You definitely need a microphone to pull this one off. With this “in character” rendition of the replay of the horrific experience, we exaggerate for effect. This is not something we should sustain for too long or do too often. It works best as a single, short duration, audience undermine effort.

The “whoop and holler “presenter goes way over the top. Sometimes you will see comedians use this device. They employ the micro psycho rant, at top volume, to drive home the point. This energy rocket differentiates the point being made from all that has gone before. In this Age of Distraction and Era of Cynicism holding audience attention has become a zero sum game between the presenter and the punters’ hand held phones. Either we keep them with us or they slip into the magnetic field embrace of internet access. For these reasons in telling the story, we might want to imitate on stage, an explosion which took place back at the executive suite. Or it might be the re-enactment of a big client meltdown of epic proportions. We become overly dramatic for dramatic effect.

Yelling at your audience isn’t normal behaviour. We have to set it up and then move into character to pull it off. It has to be a crescendo. It peaks then subsides back to normality. But for those few seconds, we are going all out to flag the key message we want to bring to everyone’s attention. Voice, gestures and body language are combiningg for the big combust.

Pacing like a frantic madman, ignoring completely or totally yelling at our audience are radical ideas in presenting. These pivots break the rules, but when required, may help us to break through to our audience. It will depend on the context of the topic, the audience and the event, as to whether these big guns would be employed. At least we need to have them in our armoury should we want to call on them. Choosing them with purpose and doing them without intelligence are divergent universes. We know the rules perfectly, but we choose to break them, on our terms and at our pleasure. When fully congruent with the points we are making, they work for us in ways others presenters cannot match in the major messaging stakes.