Two office co-workers meet while getting a fresh cup of coffee down the hall.
“Hey, how was your weekend?” asks one.
“Optimum,” replies the other. “Our family’s agenda commenced at 6:36 a.m. Saturday when we awoke from our overnight slumber. We then performed acts of personal hygiene, dressed and proceeded to consume foods of varying nutritional value with which to stimulate our energy levels for the as-yet undetermined but anticipated tasks to come.
“We then deliberated our options for how to utilize the remainder of the day and by consensus determined our time would be best occupied with a journey to the river, where we would attempt to capture a water-residing, gilled creature at the end of a filament line…”
Silliness? Yes, of course. It’s a Monday-morning conversation over coffee, after all.
So let’s try it again:
“How was your weekend?”
“Really great! We got up early Saturday and decided we needed to head down to the river to get in some fishing. Fantastic day!”
Same story. Same conclusion. Significantly different character, however.
The first version is pompous, passionless and inaccessible; the second answers a simple question simply, with obvious delight and enthusiasm.
The first reflects the speaker’s concerns with a process of presentation rather than its purpose. The other tells a story.
Which works better for the listener, do you think?
Presenters too often get all caught up in stuffy formalities. They fall into the darkness of thinking the act of public speaking means they must strip themselves of personality, of authenticity, of directness. Perfectly clear, wonderfully appropriate conversational language gets edited out of their remarks and replaced with colorless, passionless, stupefying memo-speak.
These folks approach their remarks in the flawed belief the more bland they are, the more seriously their message will be taken.
They figure, why not be safe by being boring?
Because boring doesn’t work.
Boredom gets in the way of understanding. What enables and encourages understanding, on the other hand, is style. Style engages the audience. It delights them. It speaks to them on a human level.
Style casts your message in a context that means something to most people.
Now, some folks use boring as a shield, an insulator, to protect them from their own fears of vulnerability. They reckon if they don’t reveal their emotions in any way, if they retreat behind the barrier of memo-speak, then any rejection by the audience will be directed at their remarks and not at them.
They’re mistaken, of course. When you bore an audience, you can expect their rejection to be very personal. After all, it’s you who made that 15-minute presentation seem like an hour. It’s you who made the message unnecessarily complex, the ideas unnecessarily difficult to grasp.
A presentation is not a data stream. It is one human speaking to other humans. Getting a message across is already enough of a challenge; don’t make it more difficult. Tell a story. Tell it simply. Tell it as if it’s worth telling.
And, please, try to enjoy yourself in the telling.
Brilliant. I love your ideas, love the way you express them.
And you are a great teacher. Thank you.
Posted by: Diego | July 28, 2005 at 09:03 PM