Presentations this week

Whoahhh… What a week.  I’ve listened to, or worked ,on presentations

• on marketing (brilliant)
• from one of the UK’s top motivational speakers (so-so, too ego-centric)
• from another of the UK’s top motivational speakers (excellent!)
• about the pregnancy cycle of kangaroos (don’t ask!)
• on games to play with After Eight Mints (but only the clean ones, sadly)
• telling me how to make successful grant applications (times three; each one different)
• looking at various martial arts (fascinating but scary!)
• exploring emotional intelligence (needs some work but a good start)
• introducing me to Peppa Pig (a childrens’ cartoon character – too much fun!).

At some point, I suppose, I could get a real job, but to be honest, this is far, far too much fun right now!  :)

It’s rare, to be honest, I get the opportunity to so directly compare two presentations, almost back to back, by two of the country’s leading speakers. Life gets in the way. Speakers talk about different things. The circumstances are so different that comparing speakers is pointless. And so on.

But this week was unusual.

Both of the speakers branded themselves (and the stats back them up) as among the most popular and highly regarded in the country.  Both of them were entertaining, both of them were quite slick. But one of them left me somewhat disappointed.

Why?

Because he talked about himself.

Now, fair enough, as a motivational speaker, one of his ‘selling points’, his USP, is that he’s been through the mill, so to speak, so his biography is relevant. At the very least it should be used to establish is credibility.

But it shouldn’t be the whole content of the presentation.  And simply adding on a token “I overcame adversity, so you can too” doesn’t do it for  me.  Or many other people in the audience to be honest.  What we needed, and what the second motivational speaker I heard gave us, were tools/tips/techniques – a full three hours-worth!

This second motivational speaker used his troubled background to establish that he knew what he was talking about, but then went on to give us tool after tool to help us over-come problems of our own.  In short, his presentation was about us and what we, as members of his audience, wanted and needed.  The speaker who let me down spoke only about himself.  Obviously what he needed was an audience – but what we needed was a speaker who spoke for the audience, not to them.

So what am I getting at after all this ranting and rambling? No matter how much of an authority you are in your speaking field, if you’re not giving your audience the benefit of that authority, you’re wasting their time (and yours).  It’s not about you. Get over it.

For each sentence you utter, every slide you show, ask yourself this question: will members of the audience be better off when I’ve done this?  Honestly.  If not, shut up and sit down.

Let me look, very briefly, at the presentation I was working on about martial arts.  The speaker used her experience to establish her credibility in the field with one simple sentence: “I’ve got two black belts”.  It’s hard to argue with a sentence like that.

…and that was it – she didn’t go on to tell us how she got them, or how hard she had to train, or what sacrifices she’s made to win them. She simply used them and then got on with it… And what she got on with was telling us about the Martial Arts themselves, not about her.

Great stuff.