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You cannot learn to be a great presenter in one day. To be honest, you probably can’t learn to be even a good presenter in one day. You’ll be lucky if you end up decidedly average.
Yet, every day of every week, there are vast numbers of one- and two-day Presentation Skills training courses going on all over the world. Rooms full of eager learners lured by the promise of overcoming their anxieties and presenting with confidence; tempted, as they are, into the presentation nirvana where excellence is available in every presenting opportunity. “Join us”, our starry-eyed novices are told, “and you will learn to deliver your presentations successfully”.
Erm.... really? You are going to be taught to deliver successfully?
Are there courses out there that promise to teach you to deliver un-successfully?
I should damn well hope that you’re going to learn to deliver successfully. That’s the point of teaching and learning isn’t it? To have a successful outcome?
Yet another riveting statement from the Ministry of the Bleeding Obvious.
That’s less a promise and more an example of marketing manure.
However, in the interest of fairness, I shall point out that there are some promises that these one-day programmes and their providers can certainly deliver on. One, you will know a little bit more about presenting than you did before attending; and, two, your bank account will definitely be £300 - £500 lighter – and that’s a promise. Just stop and think about that for a moment. £500 for 6 hours of training - that’s £83 an hour. And you’re not even getting individual attention for that; there are likely to be 14 other people in that room who got mugged just like you did.
Becoming an outstanding presenter is a lifetime of work. Even the very best speakers fail to connect with their audience sometimes. To become a better presenter you need to stand up and deliver. At first you may fail more often than you succeed. But failure is the best teacher you could possibly ask for. So when you do fall on your backside, take time to review your performance, make the changes and try again. Dissect your presentation and attend to every detail. Fix it and get back up in front of an audience and do it again.
Standing up to deliver a presentation takes time. There is work to be done if you want to deliver a great talk. You have to research your topic; analyse your audience; plan your structure; prepare your supporting visuals and practise your delivery.
Crafting stories that stick takes time. Applying solid design principles to your visuals and supporting documentation takes time. Learning, rehearsing and honing your speech takes time. But how much time should you invest to deliver presentations that are outstanding, connect with the audience and move them to take action?
In his book Bounce: How Champions are Made, Matthew Syed argues that talent isn’t what we think it is. Becoming outstanding at something isn’t about talent; it’s about time; a lot of time. He quotes research by Anders Ericsson to demonstrate that the best become the best because they practise. But, more importantly, they practide more than anyone else. Anders has established that it takes a minimum of 10,000 hours of focussed practice to achieve excellence. Excellence is not about talent, anyone can be the best at something if they commit to spending time working hard in a focussed and directed manner.
Tiger Woods didn’t become a great golfer by sitting in a one-day training course. Roger Federer didn’t reach the heights of world tennis by attending a lecture on tennis skills. Both Woods & Federer got to where they are because they practised. They practised hard; harder than everyone else around them. They went out and spent hour after hour on the golf course or tennis court. They didn’t just hear about it or read about it, they did it. Over and over again. They did the hard work. They clocked up the hours.
Now, you may think those examples are extreme. Okay I’ll give you that. So, instead, think of someone you know who is very good at what they do. Someone you’ve had the pleasure of working with or who you know personally. Do you honestly think that they got to where they are by attending a one-day course?
Yet we are quite happy to attend a short course on presentation skills believing it will evaporate our nerves, improve our confidence and teach us to take advantage of every presenting opportunity. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.... Bullshit! If you want to be a great presenter then you need practice. And the best way to practise is to stand in front of people and present. It’s not about talent; there’s no such thing. It’s about consistent and focussed hard work.
As Master Yoda might say: “Talent there is not; hard work you must do!”
Every time you stand up to speak, you take on the ‘shoving’ role. Every presentation must be aimed at moving something. Move a product; move a service, move your ideas and concepts. But most importantly you need to move people to take action.
John F Kennedy said: “The only reason to give a speech is to change the world”.
You can only change the world if your ideas are adopted by other people. If you’re not doing that, then why are you standing at the front? Shut up, sit down and stop wasting everyone’s time.
If you want to deliver presentations that truly hit the mark, look for a training programme that gets you standing up as much as possible. Find a tutor or coach who will work with you over a period of months to hone all the little things, one detail at a time, one hour at a time. Just like the top sportsmen and entertainers do every day. They practise, they rehearse, they rely on coaches to help them fix things and then they go out they practise some more.
You cannot learn this in one day.
