This Japanese saying the “frog in the well doesn't know the ocean” is a favourite. When I think about its application to presenting, one of the issues we face is we are all living in small wells. We go the same conferences or events and the people presenting are rather homogeneous and so the bar gets set pretty low, because they usually are not very good. Without understanding the process, our expectations are getting conditioned to mediocrity.
When we are growing up, we are usually not exposed to great speakers. High School teachers are unexciting speakers. Politicians on television are normally underwhelming, doing their best to avoid answering the questions or recommending anything too strategic, in case there is an electoral backlash. They are all looking for the middle of the middle. Our professors at Uni do a lot of public speaking, except you would never know that judging by how they deliver their lectures. The speakers invited to the degree graduation ceremony are normally dull dogs. When we get into business, we rarely encounter much professionalism around presenting. It is field of frogs croaking in their wells.
A few decades of this and you are done. If we want to lift our game, increase our persuasion power, we need to get out of the well and start exploring the ocean. Persuasion power is absolutely required. The amount of data and information coming at all of us on a daily basis is staggering. Traditional media and social media are conspiring to drown us with sheer volume. How do we cut through all of that dross and white noise and register with our audience when it is our turn to communicate? We need to be crafting our messages using storytelling and backing it up with solid and relevant data. Just a big data dump, no matter how good the data is, won’t cut it anymore. Audiences today have micro-concentration spans and also way too many options to escape from us. If we are just reproducing the same old same old from decades ago, we are kidding ourselves. The good news is it is all getting better for us.
What is amazing today is how easy it is to expose ourselves to the best speakers. Content marketing requires that we all put our goods up on display so that potential buyers can see how good we are and if we have what they want. This means it is all out there for free to sample. YouTube and other platforms allow us to search out content we are interested in and find people who are knowledgeable and within that group find out the top communicators to follow. Search engines can help us to locate content from people who we know are renowned skilled speakers and we can usually access their talks easily and for free. TED talks vary of course in quality and the format is rather limited to short presentations of under 15 minutes. There are just so many available though, with a bit of searching, we can find the best content. In our local areas there will be a broad number of organisations sponsoring talks. In Tokyo there are a number of Chambers of Commerce which are running talks all of the time. If you are a Rotarian like me, then at least once a week, you are listening to a speech by some notable.
So, we have a cornucopia of options to observe and learn. Now we hit the main barrier. Having the ability to access the ocean and doing anything about it though, are different things. We just keep in our lane and we don’t devote the time to exposing ourselves to the best of what is available. We can learn from what is working and also from what is a train wreck, a shambles, a catastrophe. Learning what not to do is also a valuable lesson and there are scores of instructors available in that regard.
We are all feeling pressed for time, but actually we have a lot of time. If we take out working and sleeping, our available time for study is still sufficient, quite sufficient. The choices we make determine how far we move forward. Accepting that persuasion power is a fundamental requirement, you could argue a duty for people in business. If that is the case, then we need to make the priority to access all of the available resources and work on improving our knowledge and understanding.
If we only watched one of the top speakers for an hour a week and took extensive notes and then referred to those notes before we contemplated making a speech, then we would be in the top 1% of presenters immediately. This is only because most people don’t do anything and what they do do is pretty dull and awful. Presenting is the bastion of scoundrels for the most part, so devoting time to build the skills makes us stand above and apart from the rabble very quickly.