tellingpeople

It’s been a long while since I’ve blogged (sorry!) because I’ve been training people every day (we do presentation skills training after all! ) and I’ve not had the chance to write anything (or the energy for that matter). Thanks to my sexy new iPhone however, I’ve been able to read stuff while on busses, trains and waiting in queues so I’ve kept up with what other people are writing.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading ‘on the move’ that this has struck me; maybe there’s genuinely a surge of this type of suggestion; or maybe it’s just (bad) luck; but time and time again I’ve been clobbered with the hint from various so called presentation skills training websites (and books) to start strongly in my presentation.

Certainly.

But please, please, please can you come up with a more sophisticated example than things like “60% of the people in this room are failing at X” or “In the next five years almost everyone here will have Y”?

Why?

Because it’s crass and unsubtle and – frankly – I believe it actually turns people off, not engages them. It’s such a crude and blatant attempt to capture their interest, so blatantly ‘a technique’, that it actually has the opposite effect.

Speaking personally, it makes me grown inwardly. Occasionally I even mutter out loud under my breath. I see people around me positively, actually, visibly flinch with embarrassment. Frankly, if that’s the best you can do by way of an opening, you’re in trouble.

Maybe it was a useful technique a few years ago. Maybe it still works in parts of the world where they are more tolerant of ‘razzamatazz’ (or even expect and need it!) but I work in the UK. Here, its a death knell to any presenter who wants to be taken seriously.

By the way, even if you audience tolerates something this crude and doesn’t see it as a rather stale device, you run the risk of alienating some of your audience in your first ten seconds. You know the ones, they ones who think

Not me, sucker! Shows how much you know
or the ones who think
OMG he’s right! I’d better spend the rest of his 20 minutes thinking about it

If there’s anyone left paying attention, do you really want to be presenting to people who don’t react to such a brazen gambit? They’re probably not listening anyway.