The Key to Captivating an Audience? It’s How You Spend Your Time
This article is going to get a little philosophical.
We’ve probably never had less time than we do now, yet our productive output has never been higher. The result is a world in which too many people and too many things are competing for our limited attention.
Why are we talking about this? Because this is the world you step into when giving a presentation.
And it’s even worse if you’re giving a virtual presentation because switching a camera off isn’t nearly as noticeable as getting up and leaving the room.
Will people keep their eyes on you? Or check their email?
Time is Precious
Leading a team means you don’t have full control over your time, and a certain percentage of your day is in service to helping others with their goals and outcomes. Being a parent means you don’t have full control over your time either.
You do control the time allotment of your presentation, but you don’t control much else like if people are paying attention to you.
Constantly competing for the attention of your audience is exhausting. Add to that all of the worries we have about our own lives like Do I have enough money for retirement? Does my work even matter to anyone?
Your work has an impact through presentations because it connects your output to others who can actionalize it. (I know “actionalize” isn’t a word, but it’s a word I use all the time to mean they take your thing and run with it and the result is a ripple effect of transformation).
What’s your experience with work/life balance?
I’ve noticed over years of honing my own productivity and output that nothing improves the quality, creativity, and effectiveness of my work like rest.
In the book The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron calls this “filling the creative well” but this is not advice just for artists. You have to vigorously remove things from your responsibilities in order to take back your time.
You can’t make time for something without taking time from something else.
But people find it hard to accept that by saying yes to something, they’re automatically saying no to something else. But it’s true.
I’ll illustrate this with an example from my own life:
The year 2020 was a hard year for everyone. “Unprecedented” became a trigger word for me.
On January 1, 2020, we arrived home from the hospital after the birth of our daughter. We couldn’t wait to connect our little one with her grandparents who are in different countries.
Those first tender weeks were soon interrupted by closed borders. And we were cut off from our families for more than a year.
My partner and I never had the experience of being with babies. I was an only child, and she was the youngest of her family. Frantic Zoom calls, over-questioning, and anxiety-filled nights were the theme, along with unexpected joy, tears, and perseverance.
I was running my business through all of this chaos. Answering client emails, meeting deadlines, coming up with bold new themes and ideas for campaigns, designing slides until 2 in the morning, and giving virtual presentations to c-suite leaders across the country.
Pretending that the world around me was not the same dumpster fire I felt inside.
We all reach our breaking point, however. For me, it came in December of 2020.
I was exhausted personally from having no time for myself and no energy for my family.
I was exhausted emotionally from having my nerves constantly on high alert for a sustained period of time.
I was exhausted financially from supporting our family as the sole source of support when we knew we wouldn’t qualify for any of the subsidy programs announced.
I was exhausted creatively from clients who continued to ask me to work for money despite all of the above.
With that level of exhaustion and burnout, it’s almost impossible to see where to start healing and turn things around.
So what do entrepreneurs do when they can’t do anything?
We hire a coach, an expert to solve our problems for us and show us the way.
On my darkest night, I remember googling at 2 in the morning “how do you get over burnout fast without resting?”
The truth is I couldn’t heal until I made space for it.
You can’t heal burnout with a hack
We put our daughter in daycare. She started sleeping through the night eventually. We reconnected with our families once borders were open. I hired subcontractors, and stopped putting everything on myself.
Those things all had huge impacts, but nothing as huge as completely changing my business model to get rid of retainers that were financially secure but bankrupted my time.
I was like an employee with 8 different bosses, and because of burnout, I couldn’t even hear the one boss I needed to listen to: ME.
How I was able to do client work at all is still a mystery to me today. Because to do a great presentation you need to be your optimal self.
To have great presentation content you need to have space to be creative, see connections, and have a sense of purpose.
The more space we have, the higher quality of everything we produce, and the happier we become.
Where in your life can you say “No” to things? Where in your life can you delete, delegate, or defer? How are you putting yourself first?
Do you have any experiences in your own life of how you’ve reclaimed your time to make space?
