Located in the Quadrant of presentations that require a persuasion mindset and assertive communication, we will encounter the inspirational presentation.
We can easily identify the inspirational presentation because it's like the typical TED Talk. It's a presentation that flies high in the sky of inspiration. What this means is that it's less specific regarding the details of the plan being communicated, and is much more focused on motivating and empowering attendees to take action.
The inspirational presentation is high in persuasion, which means it has a clear objective: to inspire participants to take action.
It's also high in empathetic language, which means it focuses on connecting with the audience by touching their emotional buttons.
There was a time when giving inspirational presentations was an activity reserved for motivational speakers. Back then, it was common for a company to hire a speaker who had a powerful life story and who, through example, would inspire others to act.
And although this continues to be a common practice today, it's increasingly frequent that team leaders (or even directors and leaders without formal positions) are asked to do this inspiration work, because they are closer to the team and have greater sensitivity toward the challenges a particular company faces.
Giving inspirational presentations is not something limited to the corporate sphere. Non-profit organizations, civil society organizations, government organizations, and any other type of institution can give this type of presentation to their internal or external community, with the purpose of creating awareness about the organization's values.
Commercial and non-commercial organizations can use the power of the inspirational presentation to turn their mission into a movement. And achieve that people participate (formally or informally) not only for an economic reward, but because they feel they are contributing to a greater good. An important purpose. Meaningful to them. That is the power of the inspirational presentation.
From Company to Tribe
The inspirational presentation is the one that has the potential to turn your team into a tribe. I'm going to explain why.
What happens is that a slightly more transactional presentation, such as the Executive Presentation, has the ability to move people to action, but it does so from a slightly more rational dimension, from data, from facts and from the knowledge that each and every one of us has to do our job, because if we don't do our job, well, our position is at stake.
The inspirational presentation, on the other hand, has a completely different nature because it crosses my rational self, it also crosses my emotional self and reaches a much deeper place, one that almost no one is accustomed to reaching, even in their own introspective work. Let's see why the inspirational presentation is so powerful.
I want you to imagine a straight line on a blank piece of paper. That line represents your self on the day you were born, before you knew how to speak and before you had any possibility of rational communication with anyone. The only window that opened for you to connect with other people was crying, and that was you on the day you were born.
Now, from that day on, and continuously, you kept learning and learning and learning more things, and at some point, roughly between the time you turned one and three years old, you learned to speak with greater fluency. Your brain, like a sponge, started to retain words and more words, and more and more words, and those words began to connect up here in our brain.
Words allowed us to connect ideas to each other and put a plausible and malleable image on the most abstract concepts.
You learned, for example, that a tree can be a tree even if it's small, if it's big or if it's one species or another. You learned what a man is and what a woman is. You learned the difference between being hungry and being sleepy, between being fed and being rested, and you learned things so complex that, compared to how your consciousness was on the day you were born, it's something that, well, cannot be compared. And that happened between the first year and three years of life.
We are very aware that you and I, and all of us, have developed a rational self, and much has been said about the very important relationship that exists between our language and our ability to reason. And I want you to imagine that ability to reason as if it were the tip of the iceberg. The straight line you imagined at the beginning is the surface of the water, and above the surface of the water you see there in the distance on the horizon a certain relief, and that relief is all the reason and all the language that you are capable of processing.
What we sometimes forget is that we are not entirely rational beings, but rather, at the same time and by way of reflection, as we were developing our rational self, our irrational self was also unfolding before us, which I will call our emotional self, that surface broader than reason, which is below the water level, which we commonly call the subconscious, which is integrated mainly by memories, traumas, positive memories and different expressions of our emotions.
Our rational self is broad and diverse, because we have as many rational facets as words in our vocabulary. Our irrational or emotional self, which is found on the subconscious side, also has many emotions, but we don't have as many emotions as words. And something interesting is that, if we reflect on it, almost all, or all of our words, we can associate them with an underlying emotion.
In fact, it has been widely documented that we make rational decisions for the purpose of justifying the irrational decisions we make. There have already been studies on the subject; authors in evolutionary and behavioral psychology have conducted replicable experiments that allow us to verify that this is true. And I think at this point no one questions the relationship that exists between emotional subconscious and rational conscious.
Very well, what we sometimes don't take so much into consideration, and what in fact many people don't know, is that beyond the subconscious there is a deeper layer, further down in the iceberg, which is what Carl Jung calls the collective subconscious.
When we think about the collective subconscious, many times we can imagine a kind of interdimensional portal, that if we cross, we can access mystical and distant knowledge.
But that's not what Carl Jung meant when he spoke about the collective subconscious. The collective subconscious is something that lives in our mind, but that connects us with others. It connects us not because my subconscious is literally connected to your subconscious, but because our subconscious, at the deepest level, encompasses things that we all have: truths so dark that many times we repress them and ignore them; archetypal truths that have been part of us since man is man and woman is woman. And that is what we are going to call the collective subconscious.
Notions such as life, death, femininity and masculinity, pain, sense of belonging and the desire to dominate, all these things come from our collective subconscious, are expressed in the emotional subconscious and are finally rationalized above water in the rational self.
And the reason why the inspirational presentation is so powerful for creating a sense of belonging and tribal feeling is because it touches those deep and eternal truths that we have beyond reason, beyond emotion, in our collective subconscious.
Good inspirational speakers know how to access those truths. They know how to go beyond conventions and political correctness, and they know how to go beyond the emotional obviousness that is already perfectly mentioned and understood.
An inspirational speaker understands what is true about you, at your core, at your center, and that is precisely where he directs his words. That's why the inspirational presentation is so powerful for inspiring action.
It differs from the executive presentation because the executive presentation inspires action at a rational level, while the inspirational presentation does so at a deep, tribal, animal, eternal and archetypal level.
Common Mistakes
One of the most common mistakes that team leaders and speakers make when trying to give inspirational presentations is giving executive presentations with emotional words and expecting those presentations to be inspiring.
Reading it like that sounds ridiculous, but that's what we do. And if we think about it, giving an inspirational presentation is something very different from giving an executive presentation. The executive presentation is to put data at the disposal of the audience and do it in an assertive way.
The inspirational presentation, on the other hand, has much less to do with data and more to do with action, with inspiring action, with dictating direction, and then, subsequently, through probably executive presentations, the details of specific actions are seen. But the inspirational presentation has more to do with igniting the fire in the person and motivating them to act.
The most important reason why we give executive presentations and expect results from inspirational presentations is because we don't understand the difference well between rational information and archetypal access to a person's deep and eternal motivation.
An inspirational presentation is not about reaching the objective, selling more or reaching a certain KPI. An inspirational presentation is about the eternal and archetypal reasons that we all have, which are (as I have mentioned) even less than emotions, because emotions have a level of complexity superior to the archetypal.
What are, then, the archetypal motivations of our audience? Well, they are the true and deep motivations that we all have and share.
- First archetypal motivation: health for me and mine.
- Second archetypal motivation: security and wealth for me and mine.
- Third archetypal motivation: status and power.
End of story. It's not that complicated. The inspirational presentation is not difficult to give; what's difficult is removing all the layers of political correctness to access the true and real motivations of my audience.
What's difficult is removing reason. What's difficult is removing emotion. But once we've removed reason and removed emotion in my presentation, all that's left is what is eternal, archetypal, deep and true for all of us.
That's where you connect with people. That's where we connect with a true sense of belonging. That's where the team becomes a tribe, and where the corporate mission goes from being a series of statements that sound like more of the same, to a tribal manifesto that I use as if it were my flag and defend as if it were my family.
Best Practices
Best practices for giving inspirational presentations is first to recognize that each and every one of us can do it. It's not a supernatural ability.
Maybe sometimes we see great motivational speakers like Tony Robbins and Simon Sinek and think they are people blessed with great talents that we don't have. We see them as if they were virtuosos, artists or gifted, philosophers who can do something that we simply cannot do.
The first thing you have to do to start giving inspirational presentations is to understand that it has much less to do with adding something to your speech, and much more to do with removing what's over.
Giving inspirational presentations has less to do with learning and more to do with unlearning and forgetting.
The most common reason ordinary people cannot give inspirational presentations is because they are not even in contact themselves with what is eternal, deep and archetypal for them.
They have bought into countless messages that companies, governments, teachers and others have wanted to instill in us. We have learned to live for others, for what others will say, to satisfy an endless stream of expectations from others, and we have concentrated on being everything except who we are ourselves.
How are we going to be able to put others in contact with their eternal self, if we ourselves are not in contact with our eternal self?
That's why the first step to giving good inspirational presentations is to give up the expectations of others, to give up political correctness, to give up the fear of what others will say.
We believe that by speaking the truth we will lose our job, our friendships and our family. The reality is that speaking the truth is what will give us truly satisfying personal relationships and professional relationships that give me the prosperity I'm yearning for.
Having good relationships and professional success is not something that comes with exercising new skills; it has to do with forgetting all those new skills and returning to what's original.
In Practice
You can make your first attempts at your inspirational presentation following this script: