In the current age of emails, texts, tweets and social media, the importance of personal communication, whether one-to-one or in front of a group, has never been more important, nor more difficult to accomplish. While the movement to digital communications channels provides speed and potentially broad reach, they generally fail to incorporate that which makes each of us unique, our personalities and human traits. From my experiences in the business and academic worlds, whether delivering a business presentation, making a sales pitch, or over the past decade teaching business classes, the ability to engage colleagues, clients or students, has become more challenging and critical.
For the business executive, manager, sales representative, in fact from virtually every functional area, this vital skill set is often overlooked in favor of analytic analysis, or the creation and utilization of the next ”hot app” for our ever-increasing reliance on the individual’s smartphone or tablet. There is no argument that texting, tweeting (with its 140-character limit), posting on social media such as Facebook and Linked-In, and other digital options, are rapidly becoming our modern “lingua franca.” PowerPoint, with its disengaging format of slides rather than speech, has become the preferred “modus operandi” of the business world, supplanting the individual as the focal point of corporate communication.
Yet none of these communications mediums delivers like a personal address. From hybriding the words of communication, to eliminating human characteristics such as body language and voice usage, modern digitized communications falls short. No matter how technology changes there will always be situations where a personal presentation is the most effective way to reach someone and convince them of something. The simple fact is there is nothing more powerful than one’s ability to forcefully deliver a speech, presentation, lecture, address or other personal communication. An individual’s presence is that unique element that differentiates these from a written, or in today’s environment tweeted, communication.
A major part of any lecture is withou
