Why are they falling asleep?

There is no shortage of presentation skills trainings out there for executives. You will be told to open with something that hooks the audience’s attention—it only takes 15 seconds to lose someone, and once you lose the audience it’s very hard to get them back. You will be told that certain body postures communicate relaxed confidence. You might practice certain gestures. You will be told to smile. You might even be told to smile with your voice! You will learn how to offer an agenda at the beginning, and finish with a closing statement. The closing statement might be a call to action—whatever it is, it’s very important. It’s what the audience will remember when they walk away.

And before you present, you will probably be nervous. You will practice your presentation, and you will practice everything you have been taught. You have seen so many terrible presenters. You want to be different. You want to hold their attention. You want to be memorable! You practice the gestures and the smiling and the smiling with your voice. You know your presentation by heart.

The big day comes. You look out at all the faces of colleagues or customers or total strangers. They are The Audience. You want to captivate them in the first fifteen seconds and hold their attention all the way through to the closing statement at the end.

And they are falling asleep.

But you did everything right! You did everything that you were taught to do at the presentation skills training that all the other executives took. In fact, many of those boring presentations that you don’t want to imitate, they were given by people who had the same training. Who had personal coaches helping them all the way through.

It’s not working. Why isn’t it working? Why are they falling asleep? How are they going to remember your call to action if they are asleep!

There is something missing from your presentation. It’s you. You are missing. You care about this, about what you are presenting to these people. You care enough to make a whole presentation about it. And yet instead of getting your authentic longing, we get a practiced version of confidence. We get a stale hook that worked for someone else.

The problem is that we have been given a formula, and good stories aren’t formulaic. Good stories are personal. Good stories are human. They are about what moves you. They are about what you actually care about—not what you are supposed to pretend to care about. A good story is you trying to reach other people, trying to share your longing and your fear. It isn’t about saying to someone what you think they think you should say.

We need to start taking risks and ditching formulas. There is something we give lip service to that we need to start taking seriously: creativity. When you see someone who is really offering something personal, really getting creative with how they present, it can’t help but grab your attention. It isn’t easy to put yourself on the line when you present, and it doesn’t necessarily mean sharing autobiographical details of your life. It means getting serious about why you show up to work, and letting other people see what truly excites you. Not what you’ve done, or where you came from, but who you are today, right now. That’s interesting to us. We want to connect with you, not your presentation skills training.

Storytelling—and all good presentations tell a story—is about connecting with people. But sometimes it seems like as soon as we turn on Powerpoint, we forget what it is to be a person. We must bring humanity back to our corporate communications. We’re people all the time, even at work. And if we’re willing to own that, it could actually be our greatest strength as leaders.