I keep attending events sponsored by all sorts of organisations, where I hope to learn something new. Perhaps also because I wish to extend my social network. At these events, I listen to presentations.
More often than not, the speakers are glamorous personalities with impressive titles. In their visiting cards, you can read things like “author and key speaker”, “innovative constructor and instructor” or “trainer and speaker”. Naturally, they are all members of the GSA (German Speaker Association) or similar associations. And they pretend to have special expertise on some not very precisely defined topic.
And then they lay it on thick. Using too obviously trained rhetoric skills, they present slides like zillions of times before where the only things they modified are the place and the date. In their show, they link commonly known psycho tricks with banalities, interspersing caricatures that only seem funny at first sight. To make up for it, they keep mixing populist with allegedly provocative theses.
Each of their presentations is full of the same old flat jokes and they always laugh routinely at the same places. They make use of the prejudices of their audience for confirmation of many a thick theory. If you are lucky, they will at least give you a nice cabaret performance.
Then they take their money and disappear. We even celebrate them because, after all, we are used to far worse presentations. Presentations given by persons who have no talent at all but bought their speaker invitation with sponsoring or something similar.
To me, it seems like the number of these make-believe speakers increases all the time. A presentation should be humble and moderate. The speaker should relate what is important to him in an authentic and truthful way. He should talk about what moves him, share his knowledge and experience in life and do without all this knick-knack. Because, when all is said and done, you will otherwise only get distracted from what is really important. Well, getting distracted will also keep you from noticing mistakes.
In a nutshell:
I am fed up with this narcissistic mixture of cheap showmanship, claptrap, semi-truths, more or less hinted at conspiracy theories and the constant game with all kinds of effects used by this commercialized new world of speakers.
And I know from my personal experience as a speaker that it is not at all necessary.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
Loading ...