How to be a Presentation God: Build, Design, and Deliver Presentations that Dominate!

Chapter 12. Chatterbox

Confidence is the painted metal door that separates the nerds stuffed in the locker from the jocks doing the stuffing. Having confidence is important—after all, you can't properly detain a nerd in a locker without that door—but knowing how to wield it is paramount. No one takes advice from a feeble advisor, but no one takes advice from an egomaniac, either.

I have withheld a simple truth regarding presentations that may undermine the burgeoning confidence of some novice presenters. This truth has to do with group-think, a phenomenon that happens when large numbers of otherwise manageable individuals come together as an audience to listen to you talk.

The bad news is that they all think they're experts. Not just on your subject matter, but on how they should be reached, what's funny versus what isn't, what constitutes an appropriate catering menu in late August, what a supposed expert keynote speaker (that's you) should wear, and so on. The masses are going to be judging you. I'm sorry; that's just the way it is.

The good news is—well, that actually depends. It may just end up being all bad news. Some presenters set out to own their audience in a way that is almost uncomfortably rooted in mind control. That, in a sense, is the good news: An audience is like a big knife, and group-think sharpens the edge, making it easier for many people to act at once. Where ...