Presentations with motivations

Presentations should change the world – or at least your little part of it.  Something should be different by the end of it, compared to the start of it. Otherwise you’ve just wasted everyone’s time. And yours.

And you’ve probably cost your organisation quite a bit of money, too, by the time you’ve costed in for time and lost productivity.

In an ideal world, of course, you’d just give people the facts and your audience will see the innate superiority of what you’re saying/offering/doing and leap to adopts your proposed suggestion. 

But people don’t change their behaviour just from knowing things.

If that was the case, we’d all eat less, drink less alcohol, exercise more and – obviously – none of us would smoke. What your presentation needs as well as the facts is (drumroll please) ways of motivating your audience to change their behaviour.

Few of us are in the lucky place of being able to say “You’ll change your behaviour by the end of my presentation because it’s the law”. We need to help people make the change. Unfortunately, motivation isn’t always easy (ask yourself about the last time you tried to lose weight), not least because there are two different types

• away – getting some distance from things that are unpleasant
• towards – getting closer and closer to something that’s desirable.

Different people are motivated by a combination of the two options – for different things and at different times. As a rule of thumb, away from motivation is a good kickstarter but towards is better at keeping changes going – but that’s a huge simplification. And in any case, it’s almost impossible to predict which of the two types work for different people at what time, about what, unless you know them very, very well. The best you can do is to make sure your presentation includes both away from and towards motivations.

Obvious right?

Well yes, except for one tiny detail – unless you think about it carefully you’ll default to providing the kind of motivation that would work for you, when you need to be motivated for the topic in hand. My suggestion is that you make a conscious effort to see things from the other perspective – and if you can’t, get someone else involved in designing your presentation who can.

Caution – your mileage may vary! The box above is a personal observation only.

So if you want to get away from the state where your presentations are a boring waste of time (away-from motivation) and instead give presentation that absolutely rock and make you look special to your boss (towards motivation) have a go…

… and tell me how you do it because I’m still struggling to get to the gym: I just can’t find the motivation! :)

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PS: We’ve just launched the new website for Presentation Genius, Simon’s new book on presentations.  Pop over and have a look around at phase one of the project! at http://www.presentationgenius.info