Over the past ten to fifteen years, there has been a quiet but pronounced change in what is expected from public speakers. Fueled partly by TED, partly by the rise of social media, and partly by a more relaxed office culture, we no longer expect speakers to be stuffy and long winded. We expect authenticity.
And here’s where things get complicated. What is authenticity? Who decides what’s “authentic”? And, perhaps most important, how authentic is too authentic?
Instead of focusing on this word that has different meanings to different people, I like to think about being able to show up in a way that you can connect. When we connect, we are bringing some part of our real self to other people’s real selves. It doesn’t mean they are seeing all of who we are, but that they get a glimpse of our human-ness. This means that the focus of presentations and speeches is to illuminate the message by creating a live experience for the audience.
“Authenticity” isn’t writing jokes or telling the audience about your family and where you went to school. It’s about being willing to be a little bit vulnerable, to sacrifice some of the certainty of a word-for-word script and dozens of slides in order to give the audience more of who you are.
