It was time for health check.

Now I can slice my finger open with a kitchen knife or mangle my bare foot in a bicycle wheel; I can break a finger playing rugby or my nose walking into a glass door and patch myself up and just carry on. But put me in front of needles and I am hopeless.

The last blood tests I had were over twenty years ago – I hate and dread the needles.

The check is over now. Done, finished yesterday and it was a breeze. The pain, the discomfort, the fear of making a fool of myself fainting at the sight of a needle was all in my head. The whole thing went without a hitch and I felt nothing.

Because, well frankly, because of the people. They were kind, caring and extremely professional. They knew exactly what they had to do and how to do it. This let their characters to shine through; gave them the opportunity to laugh and joke with me and to be genuine which in turn allowed them to show they cared about me as much as they cared about what they were doing.

The contrast between this health check and the last serious one I had over twenty years ago in Beijing couldn’t have been greater. There I had orders and instructions barked at me, I was dragged from one station to the next with no explanation of what was coming and the needles would have been more at home in a veterinary surgery. And the people seemed cold, uncaring, impatient and detached. As though they were simply reading instructions and directions from a manual or rather, reciting instructions, after memorising them.

All this made me think about the role people play in how we experience things; in particular how we experience communication. How when people let their personalities show, when people are genuine and stop hiding behind structure, process or systems how much richer and more engaging our experiences become.

When people are allowed (or allow themselves) to be themselves they make a genuine connection with us. As a result, the overall experience we share with these people is so much more powerful and infinitely more enjoyable and memorable.

The very same applies to us when we communicate. The more genuine, open and ‘ourselves’ we can be the more of what we have to say will engage, resonate and stay with the audience.

Don’t get me wrong.

In the last Brief I was not berating people for using ‘corporate’ presentations. But, I was saying that there is a preferable and ultimately more fulfilling alternative — designing and delivering your own presentation and letting your personality shine through.

I realise that sometimes we cannot write a presentation from scratch: time pressures, lack of resources, corporate guidelines etc.

So below I will outline a process I have designed that will help you personalise a pre-written presentation so that you can inject (forgive the pun) your own thoughts, style and most importantly personality into it.

We can get around the challenges to our authenticity posed by delivering pre-made presentations to some degree by following what I call ‘The Hansel and Gretel method’.

Just as the lost children dropped a variety of things in the forest so that they could find their way back out, if you are required to deliver a pre-made presentation I recommend that you follow these steps:

1. View and print presentation as thumbnails (postcard card size).

2. Cut presentation into the respective slides.

3. Review full presentation on screen in correct order — talk through each slide to your self as though practising to present.

4. Turn off the screen and mix up paper thumbnail slides — this is crucial, as looking at the presentation as physical objects rather than digital information on screen allows you to use your hands to move the slides and change the order physically with much more ease than the slides can be dragged around on screen.

5. Try to put the slides into correct order from memory.

6. Add post-its to the thumbnails highlighting new sections, important pages where new or key ideas are introduced — anything that helps you remember what you want to say (this is the Hansel and Gretel part).

7. When you feel the presentation is in the correct order compare with the version on screen.

8. Wherever you have slides or even sections in the wrong place pay close attention to the slides near these and try to work out why you placed these slide/sections in a different order.

Then consider if they really are incorrect or if they actually work better that way. Pay close attention to the post-its you’ve place nearby — how do they explain/justify your decision to place the slides in this order? The slides may be in a different order from the original on screen but the post-its may have recorded important reasons for this change in order.

Your brain could be working more effectively at reassembling the presentation than the brain of the person who originally put the presentation together — let’s face it, they may not actually have had your level of expertise in the subject to begin with. At this stage do not be afraid to take slides out (permanently) or to even add some slides I that you feel will help the overall communication.

9. Go back to step 3 above and repeat process either until you start to feel comfortable with the presentation as is and can easily see why it links together the way it has been designed or, until you have your own version in an order that you feel it is better to deliver the message you want to convey.

The upshot of all this is that you need to go to whatever lengths you can to inject your personality, your ideas and your style into the presentation. You need to make the presentation yours.

By deconstructing and rebuilding the deck you will force yourself to see new relationships between the parts and you will start to see a way that you would prefer to tell the story. And by using the post-its, like Hansel and Gretel, you are leaving clues (externalising your thinking) on how to get back through the complexity of the presentation.

The final build should reflect your personality and priorities for story-telling much more than the original ‘generic’ version could ever have.

Remember, the audience will always relate to you more than the things you are showing them. And when they do relate to you they will happily relate more to what you show them and the ideas that you want to convey to them.

As Murakami writes in ‘What I Talk About When I Talk About Running’:

Before I get up on stage I have to memorise a thirty or forty minute talk in English. If you just read a written speech as is, the whole thing will feel lifeless to the audience…I have to convey to those listening a sense of who I am. Even if it’s just for a short time I have to get the audience on my side if I want them to listen to me.

Click on the image to navigate to the full Dispatch.

As I said last month ‘you can’t fake passion’.

But I didn’t say what passion looks like. That is because I don’t know.

One thing I do know is that when passion there it is obvious, you can just feel it.

I realised this the other weekend at Tokyo Blue Note.

We had gone to see the young British jazz drummer Yussef Dayes and his band The Yussef Dayes Experience. I am familiar with them and love their music but didn’t quite know what to expect of them live. If I am honest I expected to be a little bored.

The music and their playing is superb but, they are serious people and you may not feel much passion (sorry lads) from the video (not in the same way as Keith Jarrett conveys it in last month’s Brief).

Click retro image below to watch and listen.

But here is the thing. This guy (Dayes) was grinning from ear to ear from the very moment he walked up on to the stage. The music started and he was gone, he was in a ‘jazz trance’ (to quote Howard Moon, the best jazz trumpeter in Yorkshire). And when he spoke to the audience, which he did frequently between numbers, he came across as a young guy who was completely overjoyed with what he was doing and where he was doing it. He exuded a complete sense of joy and fulfilment at being able to play his music to a live audience in one of the world’s great jazz venues in one of the world’s great jazz cities.

Mid-way through the concert the saxophonist took a break and left the other band members on stage playing. Part-way through his break a loud droning noise started from the upper floor area — as though the air conditioning system was about to over-heat and explode. The audience were clearly distracted and kept looking to the back of the venue and toward the ceiling. The piece of music finished, Mr Dayes pulled his microphone close, smiled to the audience and said ‘it’s all good we’ll just keep playing’. The noise droned on, the audience cheered and clapped and the band launched into the next number. To me this was pure passion, completely absorbed in what they were doing and immune to any distractions. They just wanted to keep playing.

After their encore they decided to play another number to make up for the one that had been distrupted by the mysterious noise. There was a brief explanation to the audience and an apology for the disturbance afterwhich Mr Dayes had said something to the effect of we don’t know what happened but it’s only fair we play a bit more, the saxophonist stepped forward and said ‘actually it was me, I went up there (pointing to the upper level) for a look around and pressed some buttons on the wall and the noise started’.

They laughed, everybody laughed and they launched into the next track. Here was passion at its most potent and their honesty and openness was disarming and frankly, charming.

As I saw it, a group of young musicians on stage, doing what they do best and enjoying it so much they could let all their barriers down and play through disturbance and discomfort and be completely honest about their mistakes because they knew the passion for what they had would win through in the end. And it did just that.

Sometimes when we are in front of an audience, when people are listening to us, things go wrong, something unplanned happens, technology lets us down, we get a very difficult question, we forget what we had planned to say et cetera.

If you have that passion you can ride the unexpected, it is just a glitch and it’s not going to get in the way of you getting your message across. You can laugh, smile, shrug, deal with it and just keep going until it’s time to stop.

Passion, you can’t fake it. If you don’t have any— find some, or stay at home.

Nicholas Raistrick | Communication Strategist, LABtokyo

Nicholas founded LABtokyo 10 years ago with the express commitment to helping people communicate to their highest potential.

We work with private individuals and corporate groups by delivering training and coaching programmes specifically designed to enhance all facets of interpersonal communication.

If you are interested in learning more please write to us here or check our website at labtokyo.com.

We are always more than happy to hear from you.