Presentation Secrets: Do What you Never Thought Possible With Your Presentations

CLARITY

— You can begin now.

— Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to present you a *** development program, which was devised by the Ministry of *** and approved by the resolution number ***. Among the key goals of this program are …

— Okay, stop here. Please talk to me. There's no one else here. Look me in the eye and talk to me. Don't talk to the audience; they are not here.

— The said program was developed …

— Yes, but explain it to me.

— Okay … Look, it's quite simple. There's a region called *** which has great difficulties with ***. We had a contract with the Ministry of *** and produced a program for them. According to the program, monitoring procedures should be implemented in the following …

— Hello! I'm here!

— Monitoring … Damn! Okay, our task here is to collect the data and make sure that the volumes of *** are equal to the volumes of ***; do you get it?

— Much better; please continue …

This is an excerpt from a coaching session with a client. I've omitted some of the details to protect confidentiality, but I didn't add anything to this dialogue. This is how things sometimes are. While delivering and even while rehearsing a presentation, people often switch to “bureaucratese” gobbledygook. They don't talk this way anywhere else. They don't think this way. At maximum, they sometimes write this way, but that's pretty much it. Since they don't have a lot of practice, speaking in gobbledygook during a presentation requires a lot of conscious effort. They have to make ...