Your own expertise practically guarantees that you'll bore your audiences.
"Made to Stick" by Chip Heath and Dan Heath is a fascinating study of how sticky ideas get people to change their opinions and their actions--or not. If your ideas don't stick, the audience will not budge.
Your expertise may get you invited to speak, but then it will hamper your ability to give the audience what it craves: surprise and mystery. You want to share everything--no surprise, no mystery.
At the same time the audience will resist this information dump as same old, same old. No need to pay attention--"I'll think about what interests me, thank you very much."
Analogies are one way to provide some surprise and mystery. When the audience thinks you're about to talk about financial results in terms of billions of dollars, surprise them by talking about small, every day purchases. Create a personal context they can then spend some mental energy on translating to the corporate context.
Try for unexpected analogies--instead of football teams, try something a bit less familiar-synchronized swimming for example. Instead of road maps talk about recipes. Instead of a lecture, pose a series of questions they will not know the answers to, then creatively deliver the information they need so they can answer the questions by the end of the talk.
I've been coaching CEOs, key executives and sales teams to build their presentations with leading materials.These are many different types of content, including exercises, props, handouts, stories and pop culture icons. It's the leading materials, well crafted and delivered creatively, that grab the audience and keep them. They help your ideas stick.
They may not seem in the mold of "business speak" but neither does Disney's daily, years-long analogy that makes employees into "cast members" and the parks into "stages."
What analogies do you use to surprise your listeners and what mysteries keep them paying attention? Share your ideas through our comment link.
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