We go to a lot of effort to prepare for our presentations. We find the best quality information, assemble the slides to showcase that data and we make big efforts for the successful delivery of the talk. Once it is over, then that is the end of it. It was a lot of effort for a one time event. It reminds me of that esoteric Japanese art Sunae, where you craft sand into artistic landscapes and designs and then discard the artwork thereafter. We craft our artistic efforts and then as the presentation comes to an end we discard the work. Isn’t this a waste? Or should each presentation stand alone, representing a point in time in our speaker journey?
For me, I try to create the opportunity to give the same presentation a number of times. Obviously, repetition helps to improve the presentation. We learn so much from the first time we gave it, that it seems motainai or a complete waste not to be able to use those insights and try again. The problem is how to create the opportunity to repeat the presentation? Various host organisations have some degree of requirement for exclusivity and they want their members to have the virgin roll out and not the recycled rendition. They resist allowing you the opportunity to offer them the new and improved version because they want to differentiate themselves from other organisations.
I understand the point but in fact no two presentations are ever the same anyway. The speech is not being read out aloud (if you are doing that please contact me immediately!), so we are usually talking to the points we bring up. What we say in the moment may be phrased an entirely different way to last time. In fact one would hope that was the case, because the idea is we learnt something from last time and now we can offer a better version.
We may have supplemented the slide deck or thinned it down based on our last experience with the limits of the time, for the quantity material we prepared. Hopefully these were not too far apart, because we should have been rehearsing before we gave it, so we should know the time required for the delivery. After we gave it the first time we realised that now there may be some slides which no longer fit, given the time interregnum between presentations or we may have found something better since the last time.
We may have left bits out the first time, in our fevered efforts to get through the presentation and this second time we want to make sure they are not missed. The audience questions may have raised issues we hadn’t considered when framing the presentation and now we can incorporate the answers to those issues this time around. Or we may have been given constructive feedback and have now been able to incorporate that into this delivery.
We might worry we will be flat the second time around, as it has become a bit ho-hum for us. That is rarely the case though, unless you are doing the exact same presentation every week for months, which for most businesspeople is highly unlikely. Even stage actors, who have their shows run for weeks, always manage to freshen up their performance. If you see the same show twice, you will notice that the two performances are slightly different.
If we can, we should try to convince the good burghers in our towns, to have us present the same topic to different groups, within a reasonably close span of time, to reap the benefits of what we learn from actually doing the presentation in front of an audience. I remember when I gave a talk to a 5000 person audience. I found the scale of the venue was so different from normal, that I had to change how I presented. I instinctively knew that in order to master that environment and that situation, I would need to repeat that experience at least five times a row in order to master it.
Keep all of your presentation materials and notes and plunder the past for the keys to future glory. Practice makes perfect, so manufacture lots of opportunities to speak. Don’t wait for the phone to ring, instead get on the phone and get the next gig. That is how the pros did it and why wouldn’t we do the same.
