Presentation skills ~ tellingpeople

Okay, this might be the bravest or dumbest thing I’ve done on this blog but I feel quite well motivated, so I’m going to do it now, before I “bottle-out” as we say in the UK.

I’ve read in many places about the TED presentations (such as Garr’s Presentatation Zen blog) and I have to confess I’ve not (yet) watched them all, but I have watched the one by Tony Robbins. For those of you who haven’t heard of him, he’s described variously as things like “the world’s leading motivational speaker”. For me to critisize him is pretty presumptive, but I’m going to risk it.

His presentation was apparently a good one at first sight, no doubt about it. Certainly the audience loved it - if you don’t get bored and stop watching, you’ll have seen the standing ovation at the end…. and yet I can’t help but feel that this ovation was in part at least, set up for him by previous speakers. Watch the other presentations and you’ll see what I mean: by comparison to thier content, TR was just a wind-up act.

His voice was high, in the chest and rough: all of those contribute to a sense of urgency and excitement in the audience, certainly, but also to a (longer term) feeling that he doesn’t actually mean what he says… which is ironic because for the second half of the presentation at least he was talking about emotions. Heaven alone knows what he was talking about for the first half of his presentation - I’ve forgotten already and I only watched it a few minutes ago! A victory of presentation style over presentation substance.

There is a sad but wonderful irony here too, that the second half of his presentation didn’t really even make sense overall - sure, each sentence and paragraph individually was sensible (even if it was nothing more than a hyped up re-packaging of Maslow’s pyramid of motivation with sexier wording) but the overall presentation structure didn’t hold water. (Watch the presentation yourself and see!) Why not?

Because he made the biggest mistake that presenters can make! He forgot to keep an eye on the time he had left for his presentation! Given that there was a great big count-down timer on the floor at the front of the stage, that takes some doing! So why did such an experienced presenter as TR make such a basic mistake - a mistake that meant his presentation lost focus, rushed, skipped things and ultimately just stopped and finished un-satisfactoraly for everyone?
Well, I’m probably biased because I’ve heard lots of bad things about TR and this is the first of his presentations I’ve ever actually witnessed for myself but it seemed to me that the clue lay in how well his presentation was being received…. very well indeed at the time.

I believe that’s because his presentation became a “self-presentation”. He, TR, became the focus, instead of his content. He’s a great presenter, no doubt about it, but that’s a basic mistake: perhaps a less powerful presenter would have retained the necessary ounce of self-doubt to be just that little bit more humble in his/her presentation.

A presentation is not about the presenter, it’s about the message. It seems to me that TR forgot the basic mantra of presentations:

A presentation is not about telling people what you know. It’s about telling them what they need to know, in the way they need to know it.

Go through the video again, and count the number of times you hear the word “I”.