{"id":3751,"date":"2016-06-09T07:19:46","date_gmt":"2016-06-09T06:19:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=3751"},"modified":"2016-06-10T10:37:50","modified_gmt":"2016-06-10T09:37:50","slug":"i-dont-care-about-my-audience-when-i-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/i-dont-care-about-my-audience-when-i-present\/","title":{"rendered":"I don&#8217;t care about my audience when I present"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well that\u2019s a lie, of course I do. I\u2019m not a monster (I don\u2019t think) so of course I care about audiences while I do presentations&#8230; What I mean is that I\u2019d like to put forward an alternative line of reasoning to the more-or-less ubiquitous mantra of \u201c<strong>We\u2019re here to serve our audience<\/strong>\u201d. Sounds like a good mantra for presenters and speakers, doesn&#8217;t it, but it has a number of implied corollaries such as \u201cWe need to give our audience what they want\u201d and so on. I believe it\u2019s all tosh.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-3769\" src=\"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Donald_Trump_August_19_2015_cropped-221x300.jpg\" alt=\"Donald_Trump_August_19,_2015_(cropped)\" width=\"221\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Donald_Trump_August_19_2015_cropped-221x300.jpg 221w, http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Donald_Trump_August_19_2015_cropped.jpg 342w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 221px) 100vw, 221px\" \/>Don\u2019t get me wrong, it\u2019s effective tosh, as proven by Donald Trump at the moment. The Donald is experiencing very considerable success by presenting\u00a0what they want to hear. But he&#8217;s not <em>serving<\/em> them. (He&#8217;s using them to serve him, perhaps. It&#8217;s an ego thing.)<\/p>\n<p><strong>I believe presentations are about the content. Above everything else it&#8217;s about the integrity of what you say. By all means tweak it to help your audience, but don&#8217;t compromise your message.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Obviously there\u2019s no point in having the best material in the world if there\u2019s no one there to hear it (trust me on this, I\u2019ve spoken to almost empty rooms!) but similarly there\u2019s no point in \u2018serving\u2019 your audience if what you\u2019re serving them with doesn\u2019t hold water.<\/p>\n<p>You best serve your audience by giving them &#8216;a useful truth&#8217; &#8211; not by some nebulous idea of <em>being there for them.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Unless you\u2019re an entertainer, whose job it is by definition to entertain, you\u2019re not there to entertain. You\u2019re there to get a message over and entertaining your audience is a means to an end, not an end in itself.<\/p>\n<p>Serving your audience doesn\u2019t mean keeping them happy at all costs&#8230;\u00a0it means being true to your material whether the audience like it or not. What is true is true, no matter how your audience want you to \u2018serve\u2019 them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well that\u2019s a lie, of course I do. I\u2019m not a monster (I don\u2019t think) so of course I care about audiences while I do presentations&#8230; What I mean is that I\u2019d like to put [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3769,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3751","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\/3751","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=3751"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3751\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3778,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3751\/revisions\/3778"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}