{"id":3556,"date":"2016-02-22T19:26:40","date_gmt":"2016-02-22T19:26:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=3556"},"modified":"2016-02-22T19:26:40","modified_gmt":"2016-02-22T19:26:40","slug":"bible-stores-and-presentations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/bible-stores-and-presentations\/","title":{"rendered":"Bible stores and presentations"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_3564\" style=\"width: 260px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-3564\" class=\"size-full wp-image-3564\" src=\"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Bible-e1455569793771.jpg\" alt=\"The sacred book the bible on a white background\" width=\"250\" height=\"188\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-3564\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Presentation tips from the Bible!<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Before we go any further, check out The Bible &#8211; book of Mark, Chapter 4; verses 1 to 20. \u00a0It&#8217;s the parable of the farmer who casts seed onto the land. \u00a0Some of it lands on the path and gets eaten by bird; some lands on thin soil where it sprouts quickly but then dies back; some lands amongst weeds where it gets choked. \u00a0Some of it, of course, lands on good soil.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m fairly sure the analogy for presentations is obvious but I&#8217;ll go through it anyway! ;)<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The seed that gets eaten by the birds are those times when you give people something in your presentation and they just don&#8217;t &#8216;get it&#8217;. There are other things that are more important to them that distract them, take their attention and so they never try out or apply your ideas.<\/li>\n<li>The seed that sprouts then dies back are those people who take your ideas enthusiastically at the time, try &#8217;em out at first but give up quickly &#8211; often because they rushed into things without thinking, planning or understanding.<\/li>\n<li>The seed that gets eaten are those people who try your ideas out but get swamped by distractions &#8211; perhaps they even go back to their old ways &#8211; because the day to day is too much for them to change.<\/li>\n<li>And the good soil seed are those people who take your ideas, run with them and apply them in the long term.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m sure you can find different ways of interpreting the analogy but that&#8217;s what I&#8217;m going to work with for now. After all, the original story is a parable in itself, so we&#8217;re working quite hard here already! :)<\/p>\n<p>The question is how we make our presentations work for these different kinds of people in the audience.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3>Eaten by the birds<\/h3>\n<p>The important thing for these people is to reduce the distractions. It&#8217;s easier said than done but you might want to consider things like<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>making sure they turn off their phones and laptops during the presentation itself<\/li>\n<li>give them a &#8216;cheet-sheet&#8217; at the end of the presentation with exact, specific steps they need to take next &#8211; that way it&#8217;s less likely they&#8217;ll get distracted once they leave<\/li>\n<li>set them some kind of timed limit for follow up &#8211; put a tiny bit of pressure on them<\/li>\n<li>keep the presentation high-energy and focussed; skip the details<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The challenge here is getting them engaged in the first place, so all the usual &#8216;rules&#8217; for making your presentations interesting and valuable apply doubly here!<\/p>\n<h3>Sprouts and dies<\/h3>\n<p>These people need a bit of longer term support. After all, they&#8217;ve rushed at your ideas enthusiastically but they&#8217;ve dropped away &#8211; long term support is how to stop the drop off. I&#8217;ve tried a number of things in the past, including<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>follow up emails at regular, agreed intervals &#8211; maybe even on an auto-responder<\/li>\n<li>phone calls are even more effective, for some people<\/li>\n<li>subsequent meetings of attendees<\/li>\n<li>buddy systems or small groups to co-support each other (Action Learning Sets, in the jargon)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Nothing works all the time, so try a combination!<\/p>\n<h3>Swamped by weeds<\/h3>\n<p>The weeds here are the minutia of people daily lives and the way they did things before your presentation. A lot of the ideas for the last group are worth trying here, too. \u00a0Other things to think about are<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>giving your presentation when workloads are lighter<\/li>\n<li>arranging with people bosses that they&#8217;ll get some bed-in time after your presentation<\/li>\n<li>taking up some of their slack yourself!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I know this last one wont&#8217; be popular with presenters, but it&#8217;s made me very popular indeed as a presenter!<\/p>\n<h3>And don&#8217;t forget the good\u00a0soil<\/h3>\n<p>These are the people you love &#8211; but who it&#8217;s easy to forget! \u00a0Nurture them. Turn them into evangelists and get them to support the other groups for you and with you! Drop them a line every now and again. \u00a0And ask if there&#8217;s anything else you can do for them &#8211; just don&#8217;t forget them!<\/p>\n<h3>Summary<\/h3>\n<p>It&#8217;s not a perfect analogy. I know it isn&#8217;t. But it&#8217;s a start!<\/p>\n<p>What ways would you support your different little seeds?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Before we go any further, check out The Bible &#8211; book of Mark, Chapter 4; verses 1 to 20. \u00a0It&#8217;s the parable of the farmer who casts seed onto the land. \u00a0Some of it lands [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3564,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3556","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=3556"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3565,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3556\/revisions\/3565"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}