Wheelchair Steve (Wilkinson)
I popped in to the RVI hospital in Newcastle not long ago to visit a mate – Steve Wilkinson, or ‘Wheelchair Steve’. (Hi Steve).
That trip, and the fact that my elder daughter is, as I type, just over half way through her finals to be a medical doctor brought to mind an interesting observation, specifically that
A doctor’s job isn’t to practise medicine.
Nope, a doctor’s job is to make you better. Being a doctor is just how they do it. I don’t believe that waving shrunken heads and chanting in Latin while dancing naked under a full moon works, but if it did that would be how they doctors practiced their healing.
What has that got to do with being a presenter or making a presentation? It’s like this
A presenter’s job is not to make presentations
A presenter’s job is, basically, to give people the information they need in the way they need it. Patients don’t want to have medicine practiced on them, they want to be healthy. Audiences don’t want to be presented to, they want to learn something.
Like I said above, I don’t believe dancing naked and reciting Latin backwards works, but if it did that would be what a presenter would have to do.
Okay, so that sounds a bit silly, frankly, but you know what I mean. To put it another way
- it’s not about you, it’s about the message
- it’s not about how you do it, it’s about what you do
- it’s not even about how you do it, it’s about the effect it has
… and that makes a huge difference to how presenters should approach their task. Too many presenters think they’re important: too many presenters think they matter: frankly, too many presenters worry too much about the tiny technical details (many of which are trumped up by trainers just to justify their own existence and fees!).
For experienced presenters, this focus-on-self-and-message often apparently comes from things being routine or from an urge to get it absolutely right. For fledgling presenters it seems to come more from fear of getting it wrong and ‘hiding’ behind process at the expense of outcomes.
Whatever the cause, it’s not big, and it’s not clever (as they say).
So in terms of how to use this pearl of wisdom for your presentations? Simple! When you sit down to design your presentation, start at the end… start with what you need to happen for your audience rather than what you want to do. Work backwards from there.
See! Told you it was simple.
Of course, simple doesn’t equate to easy – to lose weight all you have to do is eat less and exercise more (which is simple but hardly easy!)
Before you fire up your computer and rush to your slidedeck software, as yourself these questions:
- what does my audience need?
- what’s the best way to give it to them?
If the answer isn’t you, or isn’t Powerpoint or isn’t even ‘a presentation’ walk away. Step away from the laptop, put away your ego or your fear (or the combination of the two) and do something more useful with your time instead.
Come to that, do something more useful with your audience’s time, too………