I remember being told once, long ago, way back in the mists of time, that you can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t make presentations if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not fit and that, conversely, presenting is such a high energy activity that you burn calories at a respectable rate.<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not sure how accurate either of these claims are, in that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve not come across any research (that I trust) about how many calories per hour a presenter will burn, but I do know that after a day\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s training (six or seven hours on stage, performing) I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m absolutely shattered.<\/p>\n
I guess if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not fit you just adapt your presentation style to what you can do – I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know – but what I do know is even a \u00e2\u20ac\u02dctrivial\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 injury can have a significant effect upon how well I present. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got Bursitis at the moment (an inflammation of the elbow – it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not at all serious but it is painful) and I noticed this week how I tended to make fewer and more restricted gestures as a result.<\/p>\n
Not only did that mean I wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t at my physical best, but the fact that I was noticing it meant my head wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 100% in my game, either!<\/p>\n
On the other hand, one of the best presenters I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve ever heard presented from a wheelchair and was fairly limited in how much he could do with his hands, too, so maybe it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not about not being able to do things so much as it is about not being able to do things that you normally could.<\/p>\n
Or maybe it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s about a different sort of energy.<\/p>\n
Head energy.<\/p>\n
The guy I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m thinking here (let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s call him Ian) had one really big thing going for him – he cared. He never presented unless it was important to him – important enough for him to have done months of research, checking and rechecking – and so every presentation he gave was a labour of love. I never saw Ian with an un-necessary word, let alone an un-necessary slide!<\/p>\n
The energy was in his head – and it came out in his voice, in his passion. As an audience member you never saw the wheelchair. It was only on a bad day for Ian, shortly before he died, that you even saw Ian himself.<\/p>\n
Instead, you saw his vision – you saw what it was that mattered to him. You saw the problem he was wrestling with and you saw his proposed solution and you saw how he was going to work to implement that solution. In the end, you saw how the world could be just that little bit better.<\/p>\n
It helped, of course, that Ian wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t ever talking about trivial things like how to make more money or increase your sales or… whatever… Ian presented about deprivation, economic growth, poverty. In that sense he had a head start of some other presenters.<\/p>\n
But like I said, he only ever presented when, and if, it mattered.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t about physical energy (I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t wave my arms around at the moment because of my elbow), it was about his head-energy.<\/p>\n
If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve not got that head-energy, if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve not found a way of getting it into your presentation, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re wasting your physical energy and you may as well shut up.<\/p>\n
And for many a high-physical-energy but low-head-energy presenter, frankly, I wish they would.<\/p>\n
Citing Shakespeare, in Macbeth, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153full of sound and fury, signifying nothing\u00e2\u20ac\u009d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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