TEACH & TRAIN

Sometimes you see a speaker do things you can only hope you’ll never do yourself.

So if you ever watch me do the following, please stand up and say: »Don’t.«

Imagine.

The speaker is speaking. »Next slide«, he says to his assistant. /Which is actually a don’t in itself, I find./

There it is. The next slide. A psychedelic blur of blues and greens. We stare at it. We are sure it is something wonderful. It must be. It is so… blue. And so very green. It holds all the secrets of the universe. We are holding our breath.

The speaker is not speaking now. He is waiting for the right moment. We, too, are waiting.

Alas, the speaker has forgotten us. He needs a drink.

We are still waiting. We wait. We wonder. The blues and greens begin to move before our eyes. We begin to move. We begin talking to our neighbors. We giggle. It helps with horror movies, maybe it will help us now. Maybe he was taking drugs when he did that, the person next to me says. I giggle. It does not help.

Finally the speaker puts away his bottle and moves on to talk about the universe and everything.  But the moment is lost, the magic is lost, the slide is lost on all of us, he has lost most of us.

So please think about your choreography. Be dramatic. By all means. Life is full of little dramas. Make your presentation life like. Build up tension. But don’t build up tension for a bottled water commercial. Five seconds. Are sometimes all that is needed to get it all wrong. It seemed longer, though. Much longer. But maybe it was just the blues and greens.