{"id":147,"date":"2008-05-28T10:41:10","date_gmt":"2008-05-28T09:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elementally.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=147"},"modified":"2008-05-28T10:41:10","modified_gmt":"2008-05-28T09:41:10","slug":"for-heavens-sake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/for-heavens-sake\/","title":{"rendered":"For Heaven&#8217;s Sake&#8230;.."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve spent some time, recently, listening to a speaker who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been described to me as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153brilliant\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153inspirational\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.  I went, therefore, with a certain expectation and got exactly what I expected.  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.philotrust.com\/\">J John<\/a>\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s certainly charismatic and entertaining&#8230; but I nearly didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t go because of the video material he had on his website.<\/p>\n<p>Watching the videos, obviously intended to show me how good the speaker was, my hackles were raised (so to speak), by his \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcpersonal\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 stories.  The problem was that they weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t.  Personal that is, not that they weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stories.  Anything that starts \u00e2\u20ac\u0153A couple of months ago, I &#8230;.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d should be about something that happened a couple of months ago to the speaker &#8211; not a re-telling of material the comedian Dave Allen was using on the BBC over a decade ago!  It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a shame, because the idea was good and the story was certainly relevant but it jarred on me&#8230; <\/p>\n<p>Even on the night, there were a dozen times when it was possible to tell the story a few seconds ahead of the speaker, because we&#8217;d heard it before somewhere else.<\/p>\n<p>Now I freely admit that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m over-critical in terms of things like that so it may be that I was the only person in the audience of a couple of thousand who was actually <strong>bugged<\/strong> by this pretense, (though I wasn&#8217;t the only person who noticed it) but why, for the sake of a simple gag, pretend?  It may have felt like a little white lie from the speaker\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s point of view but who cares about the speaker\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s point of view &#8211; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all about the audience\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s perspective.<\/p>\n<p>Given that the speaker was a Christian evangelist, and presumably he was keen on getting me along, it seems a silly mistake to make.   If it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s yours, use it &#8211; if it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s someone else\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s, accredit it!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve spent some time, recently, listening to a speaker who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been described to me as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153brilliant\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153inspirational\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. I went, therefore, with a certain expectation and got exactly what I expected. J John\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s certainly charismatic [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal-blog-related","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}