Recently I found myself in a conversation with both my kids and my mother about what it’s like to participate in a class or meeting virtually. We’ve all had lots of experience with this over the past year, on Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, and just about any other platform you can think of. 

Each of us shared our observations about being in this format. How do we learn best? Do we prefer to have the camera off or on? How does it feel when other people are really chatty or when they never speak? What are we missing out on? What have we accepted as the norm? What will it be like to go back, when that’s possible?

What I was left thinking is this. Every time I log onto a video call I am reminded that I’m by myself in front of my laptop. I can see the faces of my clients or my colleagues, and I’m grateful that that’s possible. But each of us is alone, sitting in our office or kitchen or bedroom, dialing in. Because we are alone, it can feel like it doesn’t matter if the camera is on, and who cares if we participate? The social pressure to at least act like we’re paying attention is gone.


But this disengagement is contagious. Each blank rectangle leads to more people turning theirs off. Each person who decides to return emails instead of engage degrades the quality of everyone’s experience. Soon there’s no reason to have held the call at all.

Each call is a chance to be intentional about why you’re there. Each call is an opportunity to listen more deeply, ask better questions, and create more of a connection than was there before. And on each call, you’re actually not alone. All these other people are there, hoping you will make a difference.

Who decides what you’re talking about in your presentation? Are you responsible for your own material, or do you have other people making suggestions and inserting content?

I am working with an incredible client right now. She is a powerhouse. She’s extremely knowledgable and capable, and she runs a huge organization inside a global company. 

She sent me a video of a presentation she delivered recently. Watching it, I got a great sense of her charisma and personality, as well as her confidence and experience.

Then it happened. Her volume dropped, her eyes cut away, and she swallowed half her sentence, throwing away those words. It was totally unlike everything else she had done, so I asked: what happened in this segment of your presentation? Did someone else write that part?

Yes. Her boss had made a suggestion of something to add to her speech, and she did her best to incorporate it, even though it was not her style and threw off her flow. 

It’s what I call a speed bump. You’re cruising along, doing a great job, and now you spy the speed bump up in the next block. Knowing it’s there is a preoccupation, and to navigate it you have to slow down and think about getting over it. It impedes your flow. It’s an obstacle. If it were up to you, the speed bump wouldn’t be there.

Now, I’m not saying you should tell your boss you won’t use their suggestions! However, be intentional in how you incorporate them into the rest of your material. Does what they want you to say sound like you? Can you rephrase it to blend into the rest of the content? Can you suggest that the chart/example/story they want you to include come at the optimum place for your structure and flow?

Whatever you choose to do, don’t ignore the speed bump. 

In the last twenty years, we have become cyborgs. Our humanity is intersecting into our technology, and the submersion is  accelerating.

There are lots of examples of this phenomenon, from our phones constantly in our hands to the intermediary of screens in many areas of our work and personal lives.



But today what is blowing me away is clients who prioritize their slide deck over their own human communication. We were working with a client just this week who didn’t realize that he could refine the delivery of his content without altering his slides. His voice, his energy, his experience and understanding are all vital parts of communicating the presentation, and he had no idea that he could improve those elements, only that he could continue to work on the deck.



In his work culture, PowerPoint has become the norm so completely that the person delivering the slides is secondary (at best).

And people complain that presentations are boring.

And people feel disengaged.

And teams have to discuss the same topics over and over.

And teams complain about the time they spend in meetings.

And companies like Ignite CSP are brought in to coach, only to hear “My slides are what really matters.”



If your slides are all that matters, email them to the people who need to see them and save everyone a lot of time. If your company doesn’t need humans to present the deck, then don’t ask them to do it. Send the slides alone, or have an AI tool record a narration track.

If, on the other hand, a human being’s expertise will elucidate the content, give them what they need to be the most important part of the presentation. Give them coaching so they can present with impact. Choose a set-up, in person or virtually, that gives the privilege of center stage to the person and not the screen. Suggest a switch from data-heavy charts and slides to evocative visuals.

We need to be clear about what all these presentations are for. Shift the culture to slide decks that supplement, rather than supplant, the speaker.

One of the most common bits of conventional wisdom about public speaking is: “Break the ice with a joke.”

First things first: this is bad advice. If you’re a person who uses human naturally and easily, you can find places to lighten your talk with a funny moment. But if you are not, this advice will make you nervous and definitely backfire. 

Second, there is interesting new research that indicates that humor, like so much else in the brave new world of screens, doesn’t work as well virtually as it does in person. This article explains a few reasons why this is, but one in particular jumped out at me. Humor is contagious. We get social cues from people around us as to what’s funny, and one person laughing often leads to more laughter. 

The lack of connection and contagion (the good kind!) means humor is hard to manage in a virtual space. What can you do instead? I suggest having a light tone, when appropriate, and making sure that you’re involving your audience in the experience, whether through discussion, chat, or other facilitation tools. As the group finds ways to connect, humor will naturally find its way back into the mix.

When you’re writing, you can use italics, CAPS, bold, punctuation…

and spacing 

to get your point across.

When you’re speaking, you use different tools: your voice and your body language. 

When you forget to use these tools, the result is like handing someone a four-page, single-spaced, unpunctuated run-on sentence and expecting them to be able to really understand your message.

Help your audience get it! Energize your voice, use pausing and volume changes, and most of all, remember your intention. How do you want to make them feel? Your voice and body language will help you connect

Here’s what matters when you are speaking to an audience:
How you make the audience feel.

Here’s what doesn’t matter:
How you feel. 

Have you ever been asked to tell your story?

How did you know where to start? What to include? Which parts to highlight, or to skip, or to tweak?

Did you begin at birth, or later? Did you talk about your school, your best friend, your first dog, a car accident?

All of us have long, complex life stories that can be told in a million ways to focus on different aspects of ourselves. When you’re asked to tell your story, it’s an invitation to curate and create a streamlined version of your journey that spotlights an outcome, a result, or a question.

In order to choose what to include, think about the context you’re in. What interests the questioner? What do you want them to know? What values or qualities of yours do you want to shape your story around? 

Not everything can make it into a telling of your story. Choose an organizing principle to help you select what goes in, and what stays out.

In a workshop we coached this week, a participant apologized for his casual clothing and not totally “professional” background. He said, “Usually I’d be more ready to be on.” 

But what I noticed wasn’t his clothes or the room behind him. What I noticed was how ready he was to interact, to ask questions, and to immerse himself in the material we had to offer. 

All he needed in order to be “on” was the willingness to engage. Nothing else mattered.

Effective communication is a life skill, albeit one we often take for granted. And I believe that we can become better communicators with intentional practice. 

Learning any new skill, including communication, is an exercise in “two steps forward, one step back.” You get good at one element of the skill, and then in order to level up, you have to add more complexity. 

Take, for example, learning to play the violin. There is so much to think about: You hold the violin under your chin. You support it with one hand and move the bow across the strings with the other. You have to hold each hand in a particular way, and move the bow just the right distance.

 And all of this is before you even get to reading music, translating the notes to a pattern of pressure your fingers apply to the strings, whether your bow should be moving up or down… Each time the violin student adds a new element, they often take a step back before they can progress. (Can you tell I had two kids study the violin?) 

The “step back” can be really frustrating. It is demotivating to see your progress slip away, just when you thought things were on the upswing. This natural part of the learning process can cause people to give up, right when they’re on the verge of a breakthrough. 

It’s important to know that, far from being a sign of failure, the “step back” is a crucial part of integrating our learning. This is how we can make progress, get better, and then do it all over again.

For many people, the hardest part of a presentation is the very beginning. 
We’re nervous. We step up to the mic or look into the camera and suddenly it’s time to be “on.” There’s strange pressure suddenly to do or be something more than we usually are.

On top of this potential stress, we often sabotage ourselves with opening lines that don’t serve us. Introductions that bore us or don’t really reflect our personalities are an impediment to getting to the content we’re excited about.

So what should we do?

Break your own ice. Throw away the typical opening thank-yous and the long ramp-up to your main point. What do you really care about it in your talk? What does your audience really want to hear?

Say that first!