| Home > Presentation Skills/Keynote > The absolute importance of story telling in presentation skills training - a demonstration using an unforgettable example |
| The absolute importance of story telling in presentation skills training - a demonstration using an unforgettable example | | Date Created: 19 Jun, 2007, 10:00 PM |
 In previous entries about presentation skills, I've written about the various struggles I put myself through in order to come up with the best presentation I can. Apple's Keynote is so much more helpful than Powerpoint, but frankly, it's but a tool.
While many of the Keynote slides can transfer from talk to talk, I try to make each talk unique in the belief that staleness can creep in when you rehearse to the point of blandness. Audiences feel that as insincerity and will feed it back to you, further increasing any leadenness in your performance.
This is why I struggle so much to get a great opening set of slides happening, a set that informs the audience that this is not your father's powerpoint.
Sooner or later, if I'm doing a workshop on presentation skills, I'll describe why story telling or narrative is so important. Our desire for stories starts even before we can read or write, if we're lucky. By that I mean our parents, guardians or teachers told us stories before we ourselves were literate, and could read stories for ourselves.
How they selected stories and the affect or emotion with which they told them is perhaps something we would like to hand on to others, in some implicit chain of narrative - an oral tradition - that connects us deeply with ancestors of thousands of years ago.
Which is why I'm going to pass on to you an affective story which I'll incorporate into my next presentation skills workshop next month in Brisbane. It's a short story, but one which only now has a beginning which those in the UK especially will know about shortly.
It concerns the man whose rather ordinary visage sits at the top of the blog, above left. His name is Paul Potts, and when our story begins, he's a mobile (or cell) phone salesman in Cardiff, in the UK.
In early June 2007 he participated in a talent contest called Britain's Got Talent, which has equivalents in Australia and the US, with the appropriate name change.
This link on YouTube here (don't go there yet) and iTunes (also, don't go there yet) is a four minute narrative that will show the power of story telling. Think Hans Christian Anderson's "The Ugly Duckling", or the scene in the Burt Lancaster's portrayal of P.T. Barnum where he brings Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind to New York amidst much jeering and low expectations.
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 In particular, when you watch the video a second time - and believe me, you will watch it a second and third time - watch the judges closely, before and after his performance. Watch their body language as they judge a book by its cover, and watch what happens when Potts is but five seconds into his audition. Watch, as it is with any visual illusion where expectations are violated, how the judges unwittingly reveal more about themselves while the contestant remains simple and straight to his desires.
And watch as a four minute or so story is told with masterful editing and sound, and then tell me there is no place for story telling in presentation skills training.
Ok, go to the link now and watch, and have your speakers switched on.
There's room for comments when you come back here after watching... |
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