So presentations are boring.
How do we change that?
Well, there's something that I call the great presentation debate.
People are arguing, what's more important is it how you say it or what you say?
Is it about your non-verbals,
about your pauses, gestures,
presence, projecting your voice to the audience?
Or is it about what you say?
Is it about eloquence,
three part lists, structure?
As far as I'm concerned, the single most important thing is why.
It's not about how you say,
it's not about what you say,
it's about why you say that.
The great Edgar Shein,
a professor of MIT and the great theoretician of communication said once that you see,
breakdowns occur when people start to make different assumptions about well,
how they say, what they say but most importantly,
why they say things.
And to me, this is the most basic and fundamental assumption one can make.
Now, according to none other than Cicero,
there are three goals,
three ways that the presenter can set for oneself.
A presenter can delight,
decere was the original Latin word,
to entertain the audience.
They presenter could motivate,
to move the audience to you know,
argue in favor of one position or another.
And a presenter could inform,
to teach, to show things to the audience.
And of course, these are all, you know, wonderful goals,
but I'm afraid that entertainment largely is not an option for us.
I would say that we are not going to talk about entertainment
to great extent because this is never our main goal.
Presenters are not artists.
Presenters are not professional entertainers.
This is a very hard thing to do.
I once heard a CEO of a company who came to me and well,
asked me, "I need your help with this next presentation."
And I asked him, "What are you trying to achieve?"
And he said, "I want them to like me."
And of course, this is a very hard thing to accomplish.
He said, "I would rather dig a ditch than to do this presentation."
No wonder, you know,
he's not a professional comedian.
Its very hard for him to do.
We might incorporate elements of entertainment though.
Well, I mean by all means do have fun when you are presenting.
But this is not our profession.
We are mostly salespeople.
We are mostly here to motivate.
We are mostly here to argue in favor of that position or another position,
or maybe we're here to inform.
We're here to show,
to educate people right.
And of course, client education is a big part of the sales process.
So, this is the big dilemma,
should I inform or should I motivate?
And motivation of course,
is about people. It's very subjective.
It's about relationships.
It's emotional and it's about who did what and why.
And information to contrast is about facts and figures.
It's very low level stuff. It's subjective.
It's often abstract and it's about what and how and when and how much things like this.
Now motivation is interesting.
Information, well, it depends on the relevancy, right.
How relevant this information to you.
But most of the time you have to sort of think and
put this information into context for it to motivate you.
If I say this processor is, I don't know,
2GHz, well, is it fast enough?
And do you need a fast processor in the first place?
You have to understand this by yourself.
If I tell you, "Well,
just buy this processor.
It's quite fast."
This would be motivation.
I am arguing in support of this position.