The Reluctant Presenter

Preface

January 15, 2018.

I have spent most of my career helping others communicate. But when I most needed to speak up, I didn’t until it was almost too late.

It is three days after my daughter Brooke’s birth and, aside from a quick kiss on her forehead, I haven’t held her until that afternoon. She was delivered nine weeks early because I had HELLP, a severe form of preeclampsia that doubled my blood pressure, caused my platelet count to plummet, and damaged my liver and kidneys. From scans, we could tell that Brooke wasn’t growing fast enough.

I’m overwhelmed for reasons that only NICU parents can understand. Tiny. Brooke is so tiny and tethered to wires and loud machines. Her skin is translucent. I don’t know what to do or understand what is going on, though a team of brilliant strangers do. They know how to care for my daughter, and I do not, for which I feel both grateful and inadequate.

Now I’m back in my recovery room, and I can’t get comfortable. Something feels off. Once again, I quiet my panic, as I have for the last few weeks of pregnancy. I decide to wait until the movie I am watching is over before pressing the call button. The film ends, and I feel even worse. I push the button and a nurse arrives, followed by a resident.

The resident might be Swedish based on his accent and blond hair.

I understand you’re not feeling well, he says.

I can’t explain it; a wave of pressure is moving around my chest.

Well, you’ve had quite a week. A lot of stress.

I wait.

So this might be a panic attack? I ask.

He nods while looking at the floor.

Shame pricks the back of my neck; I should not have pressed the call button. But then I remember I’ve had panic attacks before. This wasn’t one of them.

I don’t think that’s it, I reply. The resident nods again and says he will order a few tests.

Within twenty minutes, I count eleven people in my room. The doctor from my practice tells me she will call my husband. Sensing my confusion, she adds, He should be here. The HELLP syndrome has returned, and that wave of pressure was a heart attack. I wonder how that is possible; I am a runner with a resting heart rate that hovers below fifty.

I spend the next three days in the ICU in the supportive care phase. My husband, Wyn, shuttles between the NICU and ICU, sharing photos and updates on Brooke’s progress. There is nothing for me to do but wait and see if I get better, which, by seeming miracle, I do.

Weeks later, Brooke is home, and we are settling into a typical life with a newborn. At last, on day ninety‐nine, Brooke gives me her first smile. I am many things at that moment—exhausted, overjoyed, relieved—but I am also unsettled.

The what ifs start—what if I hadn’t pressed the call button? When I was thirty weeks pregnant, I called the doctor because I felt awful. They assured me my symptoms were normal. What if my sister hadn’t convinced me to call the doctor again? The second call led to my hospital admission and HELLP diagnosis.

The series of questions compels me to research HELLP, and I learn that while it is rare, it is more likely to happen in women younger than twenty or over forty. Black women are three to four times more likely to die of preeclampsia than white women (Boakye et al., 2021).

I talk to other women and discover that they, too, have stories about traumatic births. Nearly all of them mention their hesitation to speak up when they sensed something was wrong. Then it dawned on me that I held back for many of the reasons that I did earlier in my career:

I don’t want to be difficult.

They know more than I do.

I’m overreacting.

Most of all, I am afraid of what others will think of me.

I am a middle‐aged white woman who spends most of her waking hours at work helping people figure out what to say. If I wasn’t comfortable speaking up, what must this be like for those who are Black, very young, or have a language barrier? How much of the difference in mortality rate comes down to communication; the patient hesitates to speak up, or the doctor doesn’t listen to them?

There are plenty of reasons you might not want to speak up at work. You’re nervous, you’re not sure it’s worth the effort, you don’t want to draw attention to yourself. And while avoiding a presentation at work might hold you back in your career, reluctance can cost you much more than that.

As I found out, you don’t leave your work persona at the office. This realization gave new urgency to my work and my goal of one day writing a book. Speaking up might not cost you your life, though it affects how you navigate it.

Introduction

Let’s try an experiment.

Stand in front of a mirror. Now imagine you’ve just been asked to give a presentation. What’s your expression? Is it one of joy? Relief? Excitement?

I didn’t think so. If you’re like most people, the idea of getting in front of an audience fills you with a sense of dread.

Perhaps you’re feeling this sense of dread more often. You’re at a point in your career where you can no longer avoid public speaking. You might feel as if you’re being extracted from your real work in order to dumb it down for others.

Why do you and so many others feel this way about presentations and meetings?

It turns out that having the skills to speak concisely and persuasively is the way to reach your goals. Communication underpins everything we do—it allows us to be heard and to command a presence.

You may have told yourself that you’re not a natural speaker and lack the confidence that seems to come so easily to others, or that you don’t have time to develop these skills. But great presenting skills aren’t hardwired into your, or anyone’s, DNA. Charisma comes from genuine passion about the story you want to share with the audience. But don’t delude yourself into believing that making the point quickly or persuasively comes easily to anyone. Every great speaker has done the work to become great.

This book tells you how to do that work. Like most things in life, becoming an effective speaker takes effort. But it’s probably not the kind of work you’ve been doing. It has less to do with slides and more to do with storytelling. It also demands honesty. Speaking has far less to do with fake it ’til you make it and a lot more with trust your gut.

I know you have limited time. With unlimited time to prepare, you could become an award‐winning orator. But that’s not what this book is about. You have competing deadlines and back‐to‐back meetings that make preparation seem like a luxury. For this reason, I offer you the fastest path possible to get what you need from workplace communication.

This book also addresses the underlying reason why most speakers fail. Two people can have the same script and presentation slides but produce different outcomes. The speaker who feels as if they belong and wants to be in the room will outperform those who don’t every time.

Having the right mindset toward presenting makes it easier to prepare and to speak with more confidence and charisma. You won’t find nearly as much success with the methods and approaches I share if you haven’t bought into the value of speaking and are not comfortable with the idea that you should be leading the room.

If each of us has one secret power, mine is helping people communicate what they really want to say so that they’re heard. Once I had an inkling of this ability, I pursued a career at a public relations agency in New York, then moved home to Washington, DC, leading communication at a global Fortune 200 company. I loved developing strategies and working with the media. My colleagues nicknamed me the engineer whisperer because I could help technical experts translate their work to less technically minded audiences.

Despite my communications expertise, I struggled with presentations. A lot. I felt as if my brain hit the brakes every time I opened a PowerPoint file. Once, a supervisor in New York called me late at night, flabbergasted by the deck I drafted for our new client, one of the largest banks in the country.

Dotter! he yelled. What is wrong with you? This makes no sense!

I also knew the more assured and coherent person I presented through my writing did not show up when I spoke to executives. This had a debilitating effect on my performance. Each time I found myself in these settings, I was reminded of just how bad I was in them. I relived the trauma of rushing through remarks.

I reached the point where I faced a decision: outsource this work entirely or buckle down and figure out how to get better at presenting. Deep down I knew that outsourcing slide production would not solve the anxiety I experienced when I spoke.

One day Anna, a well‐meaning MBA intern (who must have seen me suffer through a meeting), gave me a copy of Nancy Duarte’s Resonate. I loved her talk and thought you’d like to read her book, offered Anna. I thanked Anna and promised to look it up.

No, please… take my copy, smiled Anna as she handed me the book. This felt like a professional intervention.

I proceeded to put the book on the shelf, where it sat for a few months while I tried to get out from under my to‐do list. Then one day I brought Resonate home from work, and I could not put it down. Duarte explained why certain presentations succeeded, using storytelling and slide examples to give readers a path. You have probably seen her company’s work: Duarte, Inc. created the visuals for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and her organization works with major companies, from Hershey to Salesforce.

I was hooked. I read all of Duarte’s books and encourage you to do the same. I read the academic papers she cited, and I looked up everything I could on presenting. This journey took me beyond design tips and building confidence. My library expanded to psychology to understand why people make decisions, to cognitive learning, the performing arts, even how to develop an awareness of and use your voice and body language for more effect.

I also thought about organizations and the culture of communication and presenting they often haphazardly create. My challenges with speaking were only partially because of not knowing the how. It is one thing to learn best practices; it is quite another to put them into action, especially in organizations with different views on what presentations should look, sound, and feel like.

I used vacation time and savings to attend workshops, watched webinars, and then began asking friends and family if they needed help with their presentations.

So began a journey of learning about what goes into a great presentation. I started working with friends and leaders at organizations where I volunteered to help them transform. I found so much joy in this work that I started Portico PR, a company to help others present better. I realized that if I figured this out, others could too—and I wanted to help them.

I’ve coached hundreds and spoken to thousands of people about communication skills. Each audience is different, and each person has their own story. However, a few requests consistently emerge:

How do I engage the audience more?

How do I manage my nerves?

How do I remember what to say?

The short answer to all these (and more), is this:

You solve nearly all these issues when you have a good story, you genuinely care about the people you’re speaking to, and you have a specific ask. When you have these things, you will find the rest comes naturally and in your own voice. You become the best version of you.

Everyone has a story to share and needs to connect and find meaning in their work. Presentations are the most powerful way people can come together to collaborate and move forward faster.

You put too much time and effort into your work to let it go unnoticed. If colleagues don’t know what you do, or why, you miss out on promotions and plum assignments. Connor, a vice president of communication at a Fortune 100 company, lost his job during a reorganization. As a communication professional, he felt he should have prepared better. I was so busy doing work to help others communicate that I took it for granted that people knew the value of what I did. As a result, no one was there to defend what he did to the consultants who recommended which employees were most valuable.

At some point in their career, every great presenter figured out that getting better requires intention. The lucky ones figured this out early on, perhaps in school. John, a law firm partner, admitted, I thought that somewhere along the line I’d just pick it up. But here I am, almost twenty years of working, and I still struggle whenever I get up in front of a room.

Wherever you are in your career, you will benefit by improving your approach to speaking. Remove the angst, endless rounds of slide edits, and overall dread you associate with presentations and meetings. You’ll also find this quite liberating.

In Part 1, Mindset, you’ll learn why you are reluctant to present and what this costs you. You’ll move past the barriers that keep you from improving with a new approach to confidence and heading off impostor syndrome. Then you’ll learn the real meaning of presence—and why so much of the advice on how to develop it doesn’t work. Finally, you’ll explore the concept of agency: that the presentation you give comes down to your instincts and what you value. With the right mindset, you can transform into a more effective speaker.

In Part 2, Method, we’ll revisit some of the assumptions you’ve made about how to prepare presentations. Understanding which steps will deliver the highest return on investment enables you to spend your time