Episode #196: How To More Be Authentic When Presenting

You have genius within you, as yet untapped and never before displayed. You have seen the good, the bad and the ugly in business. You have witnessed folly, fun and the fantastic. Your collection of experiences is a tremendous resource for stories in your presentations. Gripping material worthy of a movie or a book abounds and just perfect for your next presentation. Let’s look for opportunities to employ these stories and not waste this premium material.

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 that awesome 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 most disastrous deal you ever did? 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, 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. Never allow a disaster to go unrecorded again, yours or someone elses.

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 very 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. We need this to grab people’s attention, amidst the mad, mad world they live in, which seems to permanently distract them.