The days of the expert or reliable narrator are over. We have entered the “Disinformation Age” where fake news, conspiracy stories, and meme warfare rule.
One of the most prominent casualties, at least from a presentation perspective, is the TED-like style, top down, subject matter expert: the teacher or preacher schooling their passively sitting and listening students.
We see trust move from the command and control leadership style and morph into something vastly flatter, decentralized/distributed, and perhaps even autonomously self-organizing.
A funny thing happened when I was describing my “dream job” to a friend. I imagined a company whose mission would be to help people become great presenters, and had a culture that was both supporting and nurturing while remaining professional and attentive to clients’ needs. My friend said: “I know that company!”
A few weeks later after a relaxing summer vacation between positions, I found myself in the company of all my new colleagues, some whom I met for the very first time, at our annual Fall team meeting.
It’s your turn to present. You’ve launched your presentation and enter the stage. But how do you know if your presentation remote is working? If you start clicking back and forth between your first and second slide to see if it is working, everyone will notice what you’re doing, and you will not make a great first impression.
Luckily, someone shared a simple tip on twitter. Just duplicate your first slide.
Moving with purpose on stage is good. Moving around aimlessly is not. It’s what we call derivative actions, things that we do unconsciously that betray our stress, lack of confidence or lack of preparation. Luckily, it’s very easy to stop parasitic movements, but the solution sounds counterintuitive: use eye contact to “anchor” yourself on the ground.
Yes, that’s right. Making eye contact with your audience will stabilise your attention and will prevent your feet from moving you around the stage.
What is it about designing events that I love so much? Suddenly I think of cookie dough, the small crunchy granules of sugar blended with butter, the heavenly flavour of vanilla extract and the sublime melt of dark chocolate chips. Even before I bake the cookies, the main event in this case, the ingredients themselves have satisfied.
Designing events are similar because I love what goes into making them delicious–I mean, shine.
Some adults behave like bad, spoiled kids. They whine, they threaten, they become petty if they don’t get their way. They don’t hesitate to lie, or even worse, use the emotional card to play the victim, make you look bad and make you submit to their will.
These people are easy to recognize, but very difficult to deal with. Just think of the child rolling on the floor screaming. His parents will look bad whatever they do: scold him, do nothing, leave… they have zero good solutions.
There is one key objective at the heart of all presenting. Persuading the human mind.
Today there is a war on for attention and space, with the human mind as object of the conquest. In 2019, emotions rule the stage and calm reasoned logic seems to have gone out of fashion. Individually and collectively, most of us are getting our information from sound bites, news summaries, and short burst headlines provided by our iPhone feed; while opinions change from one glance at the screen to the next.
Recently I had the chance to do an internship with Ideas on Stage, which has been by far one of my best experiences.
At first, I didn’t quite know what I had stepped into. It was a totally new place and I walked in full of curiosity.
You might know the famous saying “Behind every successful man there is a woman.” Well, within this week I understood that “behind every successful presentation there is Ideas on Stage.
