Building a Presentation – Part II
“Belief in oneself is one of the most important bricks in building any successful venture.”
- Lydia M. Child
This is the second part of my four-part series on the process that I use as I build a presentation.
The example I am using is a talk I did recently for an elementary school. The students ages ranged from 4-years-old to 13-years olds (Pre-K – 6th Grade).
Part I dealt with the first three parts of the building process.
· Step One: Understanding the message that your client is sending to their group so that you can re-message and give it a push farther down the line.
· Step Two: Brainstorming the topics, stories and content that would help capture the audience.
· Step Three: Make an outline or a skeleton to hang your content upon. This is so important because it keeps you moving down the right path.
I’ve attached the Part I here: Building a Presentation — Chris Carlisle (thecoachcarlisle.com)
Part II focuses on the content of the talk, or the flesh. Enjoy.
Step Four: Filling Out the Skeleton: The Flesh: Stories
Each part of the Skeleton needed to be anchored by a major story that told the story that was introduced in the Introduction. The stories could be large 2 to 3-minute stories or they could be a fact that helped to validate the storyline.
Each story had to be relevant to, not only the audience, but to the flow of the presentation.
Some motivational speakers are purely storytellers who will stand in front of an audience and will tell stories that can range from poignant to hilarious and everywhere in between. This is their “style”. I could do that, God, knows I have 10,000 stories from my life that would more than fill a time slot at an event. But I am a little different. My style, as a motivational speaker, is to use stories to draw the listener towards a realization. The stories help to lift or challenge the audience. Once they are caught up I the message I call on the audience to take action.
The stories will help make a difficult subject more understandable. It’s like trying to tell someone what a duckbilled platypus looks like to a person who has never seen one. You can use all the descriptive words in your dictionary, but even then the picture they will have in their mind, will be different than what you are trying to describe. The stories are like showing the audience a picture of a duckbilled platypus. The verbal side is the concept, the picture is the story in my presentations. After I have built this idea in your head I will then ask you to act in one way or another based on how excited you are on my topic.
Using this method of motivational story telling keeps everyone connected to the main theme of the presentation.
For the presentation to this elementary school, I chose these three subjects:
- Believe in You
- Everyone Matters
- Never Lose Your Imagination
These three subjects fit into the overall theme of Trust. Trust to me is one of the single most important elements that we all can have regardless of our age, education, economic background, race, religion or gender.
This topic also encompassed the RAISE program the school already used. But at the same time it was just not regurgitating the words and phrases that they had used in the past.
It’s different but the same.
Diving Into the Topics
Believe in You:
This topic is as vital to Move or Die as it was to RAISE.
People get stuck every day because they don’t believe in themselves. I spoke about how we go through life believing in ourselves until we make a mistake. Too many of us will makes mistakes in our lives. But for some a mistake is a sign that they are a failure. It may come in the guise of struggling with a class in school. It might come in the form of not being successful in front of our peers. It may be a significant other that we bring into our lives. It may be a decision-making error that caused you to be seen as a lesser person in the real world.
No matter where it happens, we can’t let this stop our progress. We need to look at it as a learning experience. We cannot let the past dictate what we do, or how we feel about ourselves at this moment or in the future.
Here’s an example from my life. I was terrible in math. My teachers told my parents that I had a “lack of concentration”. I was in elementary school. It very well could have been that. Or it might have been the dyscalculia that went undiagnosed. To try to stop the bleeding I worked out a system where I would memorize the number combinations. Memorizing and learning are two different learning methodologies. But with the help of my parents, I found a way. I was one of the worst math students in the school, but it wasn’t because of a lack of effort. Even though it was embarrassing, when we had math games in front of the class and I would be picked last. But I didn’t quit trying. I didn’t drop out of school.
I understood it for what it was. It wasn’t my effort it was something else. In response I stayed away from math classes. After graduating from high school, I took one more math course in my life, “College Math 101” as a freshman at North Iowa Area Community College. I slid by with a C. Since then, I have never needed to know a Pythagorean Theorem or the area of an isosceles triangle. I’ve been lucky I guess, because the amount of time they spent trying to teach me this stuff seemed like I would be confronted with these issues daily.
Believing in oneself is a huge issue in our society today. Too many people are afraid of “what might happen” rather than the possibilities that could push them down their path faster and farther than they could have ever realized.
I wasn’t only speaking to the students during this talk but also to the teachers and staff of the school. They need to believe in their potential and pass this idea on to their students.
Everyone Matters:
The second topic is one that is becoming more and more of an issue in today’s society. It is probably worse now than at any time in our history. That topic is the acceptance of others even if their ideas or opinions run opposite of your own.
In our society old friends are walking away from each other because of one’s opinions or beliefs. To me that is a sign of the breaking down of our society. When we become “THEM” and “US” we have issues. When society starts to divide itself based on how we speak or look then the is no chance for WE. “WE” is all about respect. “WE” is about trying to understand another point of view, and then allowing them to believe differently. “WE” is about speaking to each other, not yelling. Most importantly “WE” is about listening.
Our children don’t care how people look or how they think. I saw two young boys who were taking care of one of their classmates who was not like them. They showed compassion and fellowship as they tried to keep their friend focused on the speaker. They were a perfect example of “WE”. They didn’t need an adults help or their opinion. They knew what the right thing to do was. And they did it.
The story I told was about how a new student in the school feels when they first come into a classroom. Do help them understand the concept I told them about how I moved a lot when I was growing up. One of those times was in the 3rd grade. Mrs. Daugherty took me to my seat. She turned to the boy sitting behind me, whose name was Rod Coyan, (Carlisle – Coyan in the alphabetical seating arrangement) and said to him, “Rod, you will be Chris’s friend.” We still joke today, after more than 52 years, that the only reason that we remained friends was because she never gave us a time limit on how long we had to remain friends.
I spoke about how Rod and I didn’t always see eye to eye on issues like lunch or whether we were going to play basketball or football at recess, but we always remained friends.
We totally control the acceptance and integration of others into our lives.
Never Lose Your Imagination:
This is another topic that I thought was important. Ever since music videos became the norm, I feel like we have lost our imagination. I remember growing up, pre-MTV, I would listen to a song and imagine the story that the singer was singing.
And then MTV came out and every song had a video. So, now when you hear a song, your mind goes to the video. We no longer can imagine what the song meant. Someone else is telling us, “This is what the song means.” Were we wrong to think differently. I think that is what happens. With Netflix and Prime showing more and more movies we are now unable to imagine much in the way of stories.
Books are now on the out. How can I tell? Go to a mall and show me where the book stores are. They have all been moved out because they couldn’t pay rent, because no one is reading. Why read, when we can just wait for the next adaptation of the book comes out.
I started the talk by telling the students how important their imagination is. “It allows you to see what others can’t see and do what others don’t think is possible, until you show them anything is possible.”
I spoke how we use our imagination to motivate ourselves to learn. How imagination was the thing that all of the great thinkers in history had in common. Like Mia Angelou and her poetry. Thomas Edison and the light bulb. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his fight for civil rights. They took their imaginations and made them real. Because they believed so hard, we all could realize and see their imagination come to life.
Summary
This section is on its own because of the depth of thought that I had to put into each section. Part III of this blog will go into more depth on how all of this is put together with:
Examples of each topic to make it real for the young minds
Transitions within the talk that tie it all together in a seamless package
Setting the Stage so that I am not just standing in the middle of the room talking. Nothing more boring that listening to a person stand behind a microphone and try to entertain you with only his voice.
Have an amazing day!