One of the tenants at presentationYOU is to honor individuality.

Everyone comes to the process of presenting with their own ideas, expectations, experiences, skills, biases, knowledge, and worldview. And that can not be ignored if you want to be successful in delivering your message.

The presentationYOU approach is made up of recommendations and guidelines with a few rules sprinkled throughout. It’s important to know the difference between then and when you add more of your authentic strengths to the mix.

Take Elizabeth as an example. She is a young entrepreneur preparing to pitch an idea for a new business to potential investors. She comes to the process with a creative and fluid style.

The Rules
The process of getting her business plan together is a difficult one because it stretches her skills beyond her normal zone of creative chaos and spontaneous flow of ideas. But she does it. She follows the directions of her mentors because the business plan is a rule dictated by the conditions and context of the pitch.

The Guidelines
However when it comes time to prepare for the pitch presentation, she can tap into her creative flow a bit more.

At first her mentors took the same structured approach to the presentation and directed her to write word-for-word what she was going to say on each slide. It was a script to be memorized and delivered with precision.

That was a bad idea.

Elizabeth’s strength in presenting is her passion and her knowledge of her product. The better approach for her would be to have her identify the key points she wants to make and when they would be made in the presentation (a little structure) but allow her to talk freely when delivering the presentation to allow her to respond to her own passion and the engagement of the audience (fluid guidelines).

You see the presentation has less rules and more guidelines. It needs to adapt to the 4 elements of communication (you, the audience, the context, the message).

Structured to fluid, rules to guidelines: a continuum between opposites that you must gage for yourself. What is both comfortable for you and what will give you the results you need. That is what a presentationYOU coach will help you do – find your approach to presenting.