I could mouth the opening lines of 98% of business presentations along with the speaker verbatim:
“Good morning. My name is [Name here]
and I am the [Position Here].
Today, we are going to talk about…”
[CLICK. AGENDA SLIDE]
[READS AGENDA]”
Yawn.
Where’s the suspense? The interest? The creativity?
I know, I know. You’re probably saying, “Cynthia, I am a Controller/Engineer/Financial Analyst. I’m not supposed to be creative.”
Yes. You. Are.
The reason? Communication fatigue.
Communication fatigue is that overwhelming, tired feeling we get because we are bombarded with messages all day long. Email, voicemail, text, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, same-time-messaging, Power Points….
We can’t possibly wade through another dense, boring presentation that asks us, as audience members, to do all the work. We are already at the information super-saturation point.
You feel it. Your audience feels it. So, it’s your job to do the work for the audience: make it interesting, make it creative, make us feel like we’ll die of curiosity if we can’t hear your presentation!
How? It’s all in the opening.
In the next few blog postings, I’ll give you some ideas. You’ll get it- then, you can start doing it.