Woman’s Hour: Presentation Passion!

They’re right, it is, so I thought I’d write a very quick blog response.

Without passion your presentation will be boring and if you’re not passionate about your subject, why the heck should your audience be?

But passion isn’t enough.  It needs to be backed up by a certain amount of technique. After all, Phill Davison’s presentation had plenty of passion – but his presentation sucked (badly!).

I’m not saying that to make a great presentation you need to be the greatest technical presenter in the world, but you do need enough to let your passion show, so to speak. Without technique, your passion will just get in the way.

Let me try an analogy and see if you like it…

For me, presenting is a bit like driving.  When you’re learning to drive you concentrate so very hard on not crashing the car you’ve not got any ‘head space’ left to deal with anything else – such as talking to your passenger, glancing at the scenery, following roadsigns or navigation.  In other words, it’s all you can do to control the car… so you can’t think about where you’re going.

Once you’re better at controlling the vehicle itself, you can concentrate on where you’re going, why you’re going there and so on.

Presentation technique is like driving the car.  The idea is to get good enough at it to be able to let it take car of itself so that you can concentrate on the other stuff – things that are analogous to thinking about where you’re driving to and what you’re going there for.  In other words, the content of your presentation…

…. and yes, letting the passion out!  ;)

You don’t need to be able to drive like Jenson Button, but you do need to be able at least pass your driving test!