{"id":1523,"date":"2012-06-25T09:10:21","date_gmt":"2012-06-25T09:10:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/presentation-skills-blog.co.uk\/?p=1523"},"modified":"2012-06-25T09:10:21","modified_gmt":"2012-06-25T09:10:21","slug":"presenters-are-like-doctors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/presenters-are-like-doctors\/","title":{"rendered":"Presenters are like doctors"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"width: 268px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"Wheelchair Steve\" src=\"http:\/\/wheelchairsteve.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/Steve_and_Bridges20080709019-1024x680.jpg\" alt=\"Wheelchair Steve (Wilkinson)\" width=\"258\" height=\"172\" \/><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Wheelchair Steve (Wilkinson)<\/p><\/div>\n<p>I popped in to the RVI hospital in Newcastle not long ago to visit a mate &#8211; Steve Wilkinson, or &#8216;Wheelchair Steve&#8217;. \u00a0 (Hi <a title=\"wheelchair steve\" href=\"http:\/\/wheelchairsteve.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Steve<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>That trip, and the fact that my elder daughter is, as I type, just over half way through her finals to be a medical doctor brought to mind an interesting observation, specifically that<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A doctor&#8217;s job isn&#8217;t to practise medicine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Nope, a doctor&#8217;s job is to make you better. Being a doctor is just how they do it. I don&#8217;t believe that waving shrunken heads and chanting in Latin while dancing naked under a full moon works, but if it did that would be how they doctors practiced their healing.<\/p>\n<p>What has that got to do with being a presenter or making a presentation? \u00a0It&#8217;s like this<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A presenter&#8217;s job is not to make presentations<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>A presenter&#8217;s job is, basically, to give people the information they need in the way they need it. <strong>Patients don&#8217;t want to have medicine practiced on them, they want to be healthy. Audiences don&#8217;t want to be presented to, they want to learn something.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Like I said above, I don&#8217;t believe dancing naked and reciting Latin backwards works, but if it did that would be what a presenter would have to do.<\/p>\n<p>Okay, so that sounds a bit silly, frankly, but you know what I mean. To put it another way<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>it&#8217;s not about you, it&#8217;s about the message<\/li>\n<li>it&#8217;s not about how you do it, it&#8217;s about what you do<\/li>\n<li>it&#8217;s not even about how you do it, it&#8217;s about the effect it has<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&#8230; and that makes a huge difference to how presenters should approach their task. Too many presenters think they&#8217;re important: too many presenters think they matter: frankly, too many presenters worry too much about the tiny technical details (many of which are trumped up by trainers just to justify their own existence and fees!).<\/p>\n<p>For experienced presenters, this focus-on-self-and-message often apparently comes from things being routine or from an urge to get it <strong>absolutely<\/strong> right. For fledgling presenters it seems to come more from fear of getting it wrong and &#8216;hiding&#8217; behind process at the expense of outcomes.<\/p>\n<p>Whatever the cause, it&#8217;s not big, and it&#8217;s not clever (as they say).<\/p>\n<p>So in terms of how to use this pearl of wisdom for your presentations? Simple! When you sit down to design your presentation, start at the end&#8230; <strong>start with what you need to happen for your audience<\/strong> rather than what you want to do. Work backwards from there.<\/p>\n<p>See! \u00a0Told you it was simple.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, simple doesn&#8217;t equate to easy &#8211; to lose weight all you have to do is eat less and exercise more (which is simple but hardly easy!)<\/p>\n<p>Before you fire up your computer and rush to your slidedeck software, as yourself these questions:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>what does my audience need?<\/li>\n<li>what&#8217;s the best way to give it to them?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If the answer isn&#8217;t you, or isn&#8217;t Powerpoint or isn&#8217;t even &#8216;a presentation&#8217; walk away. Step away from the laptop, put away your ego or your fear (or the combination of the two) and do something more useful with your time instead.<\/p>\n<p>Come to that, do something more useful with your audience&#8217;s time, too&#8230;&#8230;&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I popped in to the RVI hospital in Newcastle not long ago to visit a mate &#8211; Steve Wilkinson, or &#8216;Wheelchair Steve&#8217;. \u00a0 (Hi Steve). That trip, and the fact that my elder daughter is, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5,9,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-key-posts","category-presentation-tips","category-rant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1523","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1523\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}