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

6.5. DON THE WHITE COAT

Don't let that expensive Italian suit fool you: You are the servant, and the audience is the master. They invited you. They signed the check. They cleared their schedules and suspended countless potential work hours to hear you say what you have to say. To be fair, you've been working hard yourself: clarifying, brainstorming, outlining, revising, and practicing, practicing, practicing. Really, the lengths we'll go to in order to hear someone speak, or to speak to someone, are pretty amazing.

There's no faster way to turn bated breath to halitosis than to show up looking for spa treatment. At the worst presentation I ever attended, the keynote speaker spent 20 minutes of a 30-minute slot explaining, in great detail, his academic pedigree and personal achievements. The moral of the story was that more individuals in society should aspire to be like him, or even just a tenth of the man he fancied himself to be. Needless to say, we all walked away quite determined to forget everything he had said.

When we step on stage, we need to imagine that we're putting on a white service coat. How can we help the audience? How can we meet their top needs and desires expeditiously? This approach covers so many presentation sins, even (dare I say) the sin of using bullet-pointed lists. The people roaming about the world today are hungry for connections. We have a million technological devices that provide a semblance of relationships, but very few of us ever feel truly loved, ...