Presentation Advice from Musicians and Athletes

February 3, 2010 by Jerry

art tatum

Three musicians and two athletes share a performance quality that any presenter would do well to emulate. The musicians are jazz pianist Art Tatum, violinist Jascha Heifetz, and dancer Fred Astaire; the two athletes are baseball great Joe DiMaggio and any good trapeze artist. All of them perform their specialties with supreme effortlessness or, in the idiom of trapeze artists, without a net. The lesson for presenters is to stand up in front of a mission critical audience and appear supremely confident in describing their businesses. But this is far easier said than done, because presenters, unlike musicians and athletes, are not performers.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Terry Teachout, the Journal’s drama critic illustrated Art Tatum’s effortlessness in a YouTube video of his 1954 performance of “Yesterdays,”

Close your eyes and it sounds as though someone had tossed a string of lit firecrackers
into the Steinway. Open them and it looks as though you’re watching a court reporter
take down the testimony of a witness in a civil suit.

Teachout went on to describe Heifetz’s ease, “[he] brought off his stupendous feats of technical wizardry without ever cracking a smile or looking anything other than blasé.” Fred Astaire and Joe DiMaggio were both noted for the consummate grace with which they performed their vigorous physical activities.

How can a presenter achieve that grace? The answer goes back to the old vaudeville joke about a visitor to New York City seeking directions. The visitor stops a man on the street and asks, “How do I get to Carnegie Hall? The man replies “Practice.”

Practice in presentations, however, takes on a special form called Verbalization, the subject of a prior blog. Simply put, Verbalization means rehearsing your presentation aloud—just as you will in front of an actual audience, and doing it many times over.

As an illustration of the power of Verbalization, the next post will be the story of The Bootstrap CEO.

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