Show and Tell

by R. L. Howser on July 14, 2012 · 3 comments

Do you remember the first presentation you ever gave?

I’ll bet for many of you it was the same as mine. It was “Show and Tell” in kindergarten. For those of you who haven’t experienced this, the concept is simple. Bring something interesting from home, show it to your classmates and tell them about it.

Presentation doesn’t get much more basic than that. There was no outline, no script and no PowerPoint. There was no success or a failure attached to the outcome. It was simply an opportunity to share something interesting with your friends.

The family junk drawer was generally full of offbeat treasures that could safely be sent off in the care of a six-year old, so the children brought an envelope with an exotic foreign stamp, an oddly shaped piece of wood or an unusual kitchen tool. We would stand up in front of the class, show the item to our classmates and the facts, stories, rumors and totally unfounded speculations would flow.

It was actually remarkably good training in effective presentation skills. It’s too bad that, by the time we reach working age, most of those skills have been forgotten or suppressed.

As adults, business presentations all too often become ornate productions, laced with jargon, buzzwords and reams of detailed data, but designed primarily to give the appearance of useful communication, rather than to take a position, make a prediction or suggest a course of action. God forbid, we should say anything that could come back to bite us in the ass.

The totally unfounded speculation is the same, although in the corporate world it requires several PowerPoint slides with complex graphs and spreadsheets to give it a veneer of respectability.

We would be wise to go back to the spirit of Show and Tell. Show your audience something interesting or important and tell them, in simple and clear words, what it is. Use facts and stories, rumors and even totally unfounded speculation to help them understand what it means and why it matters.

Presentation doesn’t get much better than that.

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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }

1 tobe November 14, 2012 at 8:45 pm

yea I understand that when we were younger we would try and impress our friends rather than our teachers and bosses. The pressure from your friends is a lot less than the one for a grade or a job.

2 tobe November 14, 2012 at 8:45 pm

yea I understand that when we were younger we would try and impress our friends rather than our teachers and bosses. The pressure from your friends is a lot less than the one for a grade or a job.

3 R. L. Howser November 14, 2012 at 9:23 pm

True. As we get older the stakes go up, but so do our skills and emotional resilience.

I feel less pressure standing in front of a thousand strangers today than I did standing in front of my kindergarten classmates.

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