196: How To More Be Authentic When Presenting

<p>You have genius within you, as yet untapped and never before displayed.  You have seen the good, the bad and the ugly in business.  You have witnessed folly, fun and the fantastic.  Your collection of experiences is a tremendous resource for stories in your presentations. Gripping material worthy of a movie or a book abounds and just perfect for your next presentation.  Let’s look for opportunities to employ these stories and not waste this premium material.</p> <p> </p> <p>It is ironic how talkative we are on some subjects, but how lost we are when it comes to giving public talks.  If you were asked by friends about that awesome holiday trip to Italy, you could probably go on for hours quite comfortably telling us about the food, the sights, the locations you went to and what you saw there.  That romantic boat trip on Lake Como, the earrings you bought during your Murano glass factory visit in Venezia, that huge Florentine steak you had in Firenze, the dip in the Trevi Fountain in Rome, the colour of the sea in the Blue Grotto near Capri – you could go on at length about all of these adventures because they came from your experiences.  So what have you been doing at work all these years in your profession?  Haven’t you accumulated a host of experiences there too? Didn’t you have ups and downs at work, when projects went well and when they combusted? Haven’t you worked with colleagues who were rock stars and others who were idiots?</p> <p> </p> <p>Going straight to the slide deck composition stage for creating your presentation is a big mistake.  Go to your experiences first.  What was the best deal you ever did?  What was the most successful project you ever completed?  What was the most disastrous deal you ever did?  What was the train wreck project from hell you were responsible for?  Where have you seen people succeed and what did they do to be successful. Who have you seen digging a hole for themselves and then just keep digging?</p> <p> </p> <p>In our lives, we have harvested a lot of experiences, which