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.
You may have heard about it, a basic security problem was found in Zoom for Mac, that allowed attackers to turn the camera on remotely. Zoom is an application used to organize videoconferences on the web. It works well and has been widely adopted by corporations and individuals seeking to provide a quality service to employees working remotely or on different sites. The security problem itself was easy to correct, and, at the time of this article, should have been fixed.
One of the most stressful moments when speaking at an event is actually not during your presentation, but the hours before your presentation. To some speakers, the wait can be so stressful that they completely lose their presence. As mother nature didn’t give humans an appropriate instinctive response to face the stress of a presentation, they adopt one of the basic survival techniques for protection: they fight the public, they flee, or they “play dead”.
You know these presenters who speak for 20 minutes before they finally understand what they are talking about? I had a colleague who was just like that. When I asked him why he couldn’t do a shorter introduction, he said that he felt that all the details he gave in his opening were indispensable to understand the presentation. In other words, he was taking the time to explain the context before talking about his subject.
Should we move on stage when speaking, to avoid looking static? Or should we stay put on our feet, avoiding any unnecessary movements? Strangely, if we ask different coaches, we’re likely to get different answers. I remember meeting several coaches who followed classical theatre training at “La Comédie Française”, and they would recommend that you don’t move on stage when you’re speaking. I also remember other coaches telling startup pitchers that they looked like dead trees devoid of any energy because they didn’t move enough.