Think Deeply About Your Topic
By Ellen Finkelstein
Have you ever done a presentation to a small group, only to have one of the members of the audience talk about your subject so deeply and thoroughly that you felt you had just skimmed the surface? This has happened to me — I spoke about a topic I knew well, but then found that a listener had thought about it deeply.
Once I was speaking about management and administration and someone explained to me how you could look at Nature and see how the galaxies are perfectly managed. Another time I was teaching a course in Human Resource Management, and a guest speaker talked about how the Human Resource Department can help employees grow to their full potential. These were just small moments, but they made me realize that I shouldn’t cover a topic on just the surface level.
You’d be surprised how many people think philosophically about software or banking, or whatever field they’re in. People like to feel that their activity is related to a larger purpose. This validates what they’re doing eight hours a day, connecting their work to the wider world.
Practice Broadening Your Outlook
Before you start to develop your outline, try this exercise to expand your horizons. Take your topic and broaden it. Expand your main points to encompass your audience’s family and country. Then think about the meaning for the world. For extra credit, figure out the connection to the universe! This may seem silly, and you probably won’t actually include the results in your presentation, but you will learn something about the broader aspects of your presentation.
For example, let’s say that you’re a business consultant that specializes in applying decision theory to help clients find the best strategies for the future of their business. Decision theory uses advanced mathematical algorithms to analyze the current situation as well as future risks and opportunities. You’re giving a presentation to a large company about your services and you need to explain to them why decision theory is better than just using common sense in today’s complex environment. You could think about how a family analyzes its income and expenses, future obligations (school for the kids, retirement), and handles risk (by buying life, home, auto, and health insurance). Then you can talk about how much more involved the mathematics of economics is for the country, taking into account demographics, financial markets, international relations, and so on. (Economists get Nobel prizes for advanced work in this area.) Finally, you can talk about how the Universe runs on complex mathematical principles — so complex that physicists spend their entire working lives trying to figure them out (for more Nobel prizes). These principles govern everything perfectly — every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
You can go in the opposite direction towards finer and finer objects, and think about the perfect orderliness of atoms, and the interesting life of quarks, bosons, and other subatomic particles, and their interplay with the four basic underlying forces of quantum field theory.
You, Too, Can Be Inspirational
This analysis is just an example. You can certainly come up with others. The idea is to rise higher, dive deeper, expand further, than you normally would. Relate your topic to universal values and basic principles. Even if you never add these thoughts to your PowerPoint slides, some of that deep thinking will rub off on your presentation. I encourage you to include at least some broader principles in your talk. If you think about inspiring speeches that you have heard or read, they all reached out in the direction of underlying, broad-reaching principles.
What could be more trite than popular music? Yet Bruce Springsteen, in an article for the New York Times, wrote “A nation’s artists and musicians have a particular place in its social and political life. Over the years I’ve tried to think long and hard about what it means to be an American…I have been partisan about a set of ideals: economic justice, civil rights, a humane foreign policy, freedom and a decent life for all our citizens.” Okay, he’s not bringing in the entire Universe, but it’s better than most pop stars.
In everything that we do, even a sales presentation, we should think about and express the implications and consequences of our actions. That means thinking a little more deeply than we usually do. When you can connect your audience to a larger framework and expand their boundaries, you can motivate them. They will remember what you said more clearly and are more likely to take action. That’s the definition of success for any presenter.
Learn more about Ellen Finkelstein in our Contributor’s section.
