How to Deliver a Presentation that Educates with Empathy

Educational presentation is the presentation we frequently see in classes, seminars or conferences that pursue educational purposes. We will find it right at the intersection of information availability and empathetic communication.

Not all teachers are good teachers, but if you think about it, many times the best teachers we've had are those who have managed to be empathetic with us.

A presentation with a mentoring purpose implies not only transmitting information, but making the additional effort to ask ourselves how this data that I'm trying to teach this group to learn fits better into the picture of values, into the worldview and into the belief system of the people in my audience.

A teacher who decides to go beyond simply transmitting information, and makes the attempt to connect with the audience, is going to be a teacher who not only teaches, but becomes a mentor to their students.

Just as in the other cases, this doesn't mean that teachers only find themselves in the quadrant of information availability and empathy.

A good teacher knows how and when to use the rest of the communication skills. Remember that this is not a typology of people, but of Types of Presentations.

To make that difference clearer: the same person can make an Executive Presentation using assertive language and making information available. This person could do it, for example, if they have to make a report with their bosses. Later, the same person can make a Promotional Presentation if they are in the position of selling their products or services. In that case, they would have to use their assertive language and do it from a persuasion mindset.

The same person, when training their work team, could deliver an educational presentation, being empathetic in the transmission of information.

And that same person could deliver an inspirational or motivational presentation to their work team at another time, making use of their persuasion mindset and their empathetic language.

Do you see how it's not that they are different people, but different uses we give to the tools we already have?

When you, I or anyone else find ourselves in the situation of having to teach or train, the best thing is to do it through an educational presentation, with empathetic language and a mindset of making information available.

Common Mistakes

Educational presentation is not only seen in the classroom or training room.

There are also occasions where specialized information dissemination requires using mentoring presentations to educate different stakeholders effectively.

To give you an example, let me share a story with you. Last Sunday, my wife, my daughters and I went for a walk in the forest.

The idea was that my oldest daughter would look for squirrels to feed them. So we got to the forest and, upon arrival, we were very surprised when we realized there was a huge market of local products.

There was much more commotion than we would have expected, and of course the squirrels didn't show up anywhere.

But instead, at this fair that formed around the market, a certain anniversary or a celebration related to the work done by firefighters happened to be taking place.

And in that context, when we arrived at the forest clearing, a puppet theater show for small children was starting, explaining the important work that firefighters do.

We arrived just as the show was starting, so we ran to take a seat and the spectacle began. The story was as follows: a person had left trash in the forest and had lit a campfire.

After that, irresponsibly, they had left the fire burning and gone away, which resulted in the fire spreading beyond the boundaries of the campfire and causing a major fire.

The people of the locality quickly informed the firefighters, who went at full speed to try to put out the fire.

At that moment, a well-intentioned neighbor approached the firefighters, who were doing the hard work of putting out the fire, and this neighbor came up to tell them that he wanted to help and how he could help, to which the firefighters responded that the best way to help was not to get in the way, since he didn't have the training and protective equipment necessary to do the job.

At the end of the story, the firefighters managed to put out the fire, and all the animals came out to celebrate that they could continue living peacefully, while the people of the nearby communities could continue in their homes, which had not suffered significant damage.

I'm going to be very honest with you: before I had that experience, I had never taken the time to explain to my daughter what firefighters did, or the importance of their work.

In fact, I myself didn't have much clarity about certain aspects that were touched on in that brief puppet show.

For example, when the neighbor approached the firefighters to offer his help, I imagined thinking that I probably would have done the same if I found myself in that situation.

The truth is I had never thought about the importance of being well trained in civil protection to put out a fire. And neither had my daughter.

But at the end of the play, my daughter was much more aware and educated about the importance of not throwing trash in the forest and being careful with spontaneous fires that can occur.

This is an excellent example of an educational presentation. What this group of people did very well, making this communication effort, is that they not only made a list of the facts that people needed to know, but they made a great effort to build a message that was appropriate for children.

Instead of showing them an institutional video or a lecture from a firefighter, they brought a series of puppets telling a very simple story, in the language of the small children who attended the show.

The problem with many educational presentations is that there are times when those who deliver them do not keep in mind the importance of adapting the language to the language of the audience.

It's not that they do it because they are bad people, but because it doesn't occur to them that it might be necessary.

We see it, for example, in the case of medical messages. There are times when people who have scientific knowledge don't have the vision needed to adapt the message to the listener's language.

We see this type of phenomenon, for example, when an expert doctor is invited to a radio program to talk about a public health problem. Sometimes that doctor can be a good communicator, but sometimes not. And when the answer is no, people can end up more confused than they were originally.

This is not only seen in scientific dissemination to the general public. The problem is repeated, on a different scale, in specialized scientific dissemination situations.

For example, at Leaderlix we have helped companies in the health sector. We have worked with groups of specialized or subspecialized doctors who have to give medical dissemination presentations to general practitioners, nursing staff or patient organizations, to name a few.

What happens a lot in this type of event is that, since medicine is a domain of knowledge that has such specialized language, many times the presenters don't take the time to adapt the message to the people who will listen to it.

It even happens in presentations that are from specialist doctors to specialist doctors that many of them are so immersed in technical language that they don't make the additional effort to ask themselves: in what way could this message reach my audience more quickly?

Scientific communication is a long and fascinating topic that we could talk about for hours.

But what I'm going to say for now is that one of the most common mistakes we see in this regard is that a person who has to deliver a presentation of this nature doesn't give enough importance to adapting the message to who will listen to it.

This can result in two outcomes that are not so positive: the first is that the message simply doesn't get through; the second is that it does get through, but because it has been transmitted to me in such a bland and flat way, I can forget that message, or I might not know how to act now that I have the information from that message.

The idea I want you to take away from this conversation is that no matter how much knowledge you have for purposes of information transmission, education or educational presentations, it is very important that, in addition to having the knowledge, you have the intention and willingness to adapt your message to the experiences and perspectives of your audience. Doing this requires a purpose of education and mentoring.

To give excellent educational presentations, it's not only important that you do it from the point of view of empathy. It's also key that you have knowledge and control over the subject you are teaching.

One of the frequent mistakes I see is people trying to teach topics about which they don't have mastery.

Aristotle, in his volume on Rhetoric, distinguishes three main abilities for public speaking.

• The first is logos, or the rational structure of your argument.
• The second is pathos, which is the emotional and empathetic aspect of the presentation.

We see these two elements very frequently in all types of presentations, but what sometimes we fail to take into consideration is ethos, which is the

In other words, let's say in a few words, to simplify, that logos and pathos are related to the message, while ethos is much more related to the authority that the person transmitting the message projects.

In his book The McKinsey Way, Ethan M. Rasiel recounts a series of interesting anecdotes about how McKinsey works from within, which is, as you know, one of the most important business consulting firms that exist on the planet.

Ethan recounts, for example, the anecdote of a junior consultant who had recently joined the firm, and who, as part of a kind of initiation ritual, was given the challenging task of going and presenting, before a general director of a multinational company, a specific recommendation on how he could optimize a certain business opportunity in his company.

He recounts that this junior consultant, who had just graduated from his MBA at a prestigious university in the United States, was still nervous, since he was about to present to a person much older, with much more authority and, above all, with much more experience in his own field.

That type of challenge consultants at McKinsey face, and in any other type of company dedicated to consulting.

Ethan M. Rasiel explains the way McKinsey deals with this Impostor Syndrome that people with less credibility can experience when they have to give presentations before people with greater credibility.

The secret lies in how you handle the evidence in your presentation.

One thing is to share your opinion, your story, your perspective or your point of view, but something completely different is to give a mentoring presentation where you carry the enormous responsibility of teaching a new generation concepts that often could exceed your own experience. The secret is not in knowing everything or in waiting to have years of experience. The secret is in learning to research sources with credibility.

It's that simple: in fact, a person with very low level of seniority in a company or organization can suddenly gain a lot of authority simply by knowing the information and evidence.

Evidence is presented in many types of containers. In fact, there is a classification that allows us to understand how much credibility using a certain type of evidence will give us.

The first level of evidence is personal experience, which is a level that does have some credibility, but not much and only in front of certain people.

Personal experience allows you to give first-hand proof that a phenomenon or a certain situation is true because it has happened to you, and although the fact that it happened to you can be a sign of credibility in front of certain types of audiences, there will be other types of people for whom personal experience is insufficient.

In front of these somewhat more critical and skeptical audiences, you can use the second level of evidence, which are descriptive studies.

When a descriptive study is published in a magazine of certain prestige in the industry, it can give us as a result that, after reading it, we can better understand what is happening in a certain phenomenon from a descriptive point of view. Although it may still have elements of subjectivity, having been carried out with scientific method, it has a little more credibility than simple experience.

It can be said, for the purposes of this argument, that a descriptive study surpasses personal experience in credibility because it can include multiple personal experiences. So, it is no longer just what one person says, but a somewhat more objective description from the point of view of many people.

Then, on the third level, we have observational studies, which have greater credibility than descriptive studies, because observational studies offer conclusions derived from somewhat more systematized observation. Because observational study is analytical, while descriptive study only describes.

The fourth level of evidence is randomized clinical trials, which already come with a very important level of credibility.

A randomized clinical trial is a study in which a group of researchers, usually backed by a prestigious institution, a university or a research group, proposes a hypothesis and seeks to validate that hypothesis through the integration of randomized groups, which are sometimes double blind, and that offer a higher level of certainty, since their level of replicability is superior.

What that means is that if a group of researchers replicates a randomized study on the other side of the world, in general it should offer identical or similar results.

Now, although refutation studies often provide information that invalidates the previous study, this relationship of proposal-refutation, proposal-refutation, proposal-refutation gives these studies greater credibility.

In fact, it can be said with confidence that, in many ways, scientific consensus comes from randomized clinical trials.

This does not mean at all that a randomized clinical trial is capable of offering the true and final answer to a certain phenomenon. But, with all the limitations that human experience entails, it can be said with confidence that a randomized clinical trial, being based on the scientific method, offers us as much level of certainty as we can have access to.

That said, no study is final, and the scientific perspective obliges us to always be questioning the status quo. This is how we manage to constantly challenge ourselves and arrive at what ideally is a version closer to objective reality.

For example: in the middle of the last century, it was part of the status quo that formula feeding could be better than breastfeeding for nutrition of newborns.

Recent studies from the end of the last century and throughout this century have disproven this assumption.

Now we know that, although formula feeding can have fortifying properties, there is nothing that replaces the breast milk that a mother gives to her baby. And that's how science advances: study by study, consensus level by consensus level.

The highest level of credibility that the scientific method can offer us we can see through the so-called meta-analyses.

A meta-analysis is a systematic compilation in which different sources are grouped together, allowing a higher volume for the analyzed sample, and that, due to the methodological care to which these data are subjected, can give us conclusions with a level of certainty higher than that of a randomized clinical trial.

It can be said, for the purposes of this argument, that a meta-analysis is a compilation of randomized clinical trials, and that when done well, it can provide us with a valuable point of view that may also be difficult to refute.

Scientific disciplines, such as medicine, will be based on meta-analyses to make guides and recommendations, and although again the information evolves in each generation, it can be said that, through these meta-analyses, we can approach the most recent knowledge we have on a given subject.

Now, that said, it is very important to emphasize that everything I just mentioned is sometimes the ideal, because in practice, there are multiple political reasons, information organization and particular interests that taint this system of information generation.

Our system of article publication and study financing still has a long way to go, and it is true that often there is data that is left out for reasons not necessarily academic, but due to system errors. That is an undeniable reality that we have to recognize.

What this means is that, even if we were to have all the knowledge of all the publications made on a given subject, there is still the human element that affects our process of arriving at knowledge.

What that means is that there is no way to have access to objective knowledge, but this system of levels of evidence is the best we have. And we have to know the information, maybe to use it or, if not, to discard it, but at least we have to do it in the knowledge that this information exists.

I cannot present myself to give an educational presentation without knowing the status quo, or the consensus. I can question it, undoubtedly, but one thing is to question knowledge knowing what it is about and another very different thing is to speak from ignorance.

That is, I can question what is known, but if my questioning is based on ignorance, well, I'm not going to have any kind of credibility in my educational presentation.

Giving a mentoring presentation is something we do from empathy and the intention of making information available to our group. But both empathy and credibility in information are two things that, in the ideal, are perfect… but in practice are deeply imperfect.

That means I will never fully empathize with a group of people, just as I will not be able to project credibility and teach the available information and evidence perfectly.

This is because we are human beings, and the act of teaching is fallible per se. So, the risk that all of us who teach specialized topics to specialized audiences face is the risk of failing. The risk of trying and not succeeding. The risk of trying to empathize and, instead, alienating my audience. The challenge of telling my story and having that story not be received the way I intended it to be received.

I'm going to tell you a story. Many years ago, I was invited to give a presentation in front of a group of doctors from Central and South America.

The event was in a beautiful hotel on a beach, and the presentation I was going to give themwas a presentation about impactful communication in medical presentations.

When I arrived at the venue, I wanted to visit the auditorium to see roughly how the chair arrangement, lighting and everything else would be set up. The venue itself was beautiful: on one side, the rustic landscape of a hotel integrated into nature; on the other side, the sunset over the sea; and in front of me hundreds of empty seats that would soon be occupied.

The time came and I started my presentation and began to make my point. The audience reacted well and participated enthusiastically. At some point, I shared with them the story that I'm going to tell you next.

...

When my wife became pregnant for the first time, she started seeing her trusted gynecologist, who was a young and very talented doctor.

At one of the visits, when the pregnancy was already advanced, she routinely took my wife's blood pressure, and it came out a bit higher than it should have.

The doctor attributed it to the fact that my wife had probably climbed the stairs to get to the clinic, and that this had affected the reading, so she didn't consider it necessary to take a second reading during the same appointment.

Weeks later, my wife started having pain in her mid-back, becoming increasingly intense throughout the day. And one day, at midnight, the pain was so difficult for her to manage that we ended up taking her to the emergency room at Ángeles del Pedregal in Mexico City.

A doctor attended to her there, who ordered a general ultrasound. Everything came out normal. By morning, my wife's pain had stopped, so, on the recommendation of the doctor who had attended to her and her gynecologist, she was discharged, and we all waited to see if it would happen again.

As weeks went by, the pain returned (and on that occasion, more intense) and, for different reasons, my wife visited a doctor, not in Mexico, but in the United States.

When my wife was admitted to the clinic, the first thing they did was draw 12 vials of blood for all kinds of necessary tests. And that's when we found out, for the first time, when my wife was two months away from giving birth, that she was showing symptoms of a condition called HELLP syndrome, which is preeclampsia in its most advanced state.

That same morning they scheduled an emergency cesarean section. And thank God, my daughter was born.

She spent two weeks in the incubator, but today she's doing well and giving us a hard time. And thank God, my wife's levels returned to normal.

....

The reason I shared this story with these doctors was to talk to them about the importance of having information when communicating in front of others.

My intention was to emphasize by sharing that only after more specific blood tests were done was the correct diagnosis reached.

And although the vast majority of the doctors received the presentation very well, some of them approached me at the end to tell me:

"Hey Gerardo, it seems like bad vibes to me that you told that story that makes Hispanic doctors look bad compared to American doctors, because there are many differences that have to be taken into consideration."

It was in no way my intention to make the attendees feel less than, much less to say that doctors in Mexico or Latin America are not good and those in the United States are. That was never my intention. But a couple of them took it that way.

And remembering that experience allows me to see that, although there are times when we try to be empathetic and share our story to achieve it, sometimes the opposite effect can happen. And although this is something that, with experience, should happen less and less, we are always at risk of trying to connect with people and having them not take it well.

However, we take the risk. Because this doesn't mean we should stop trying. Empathy is a result that sometimes is achieved and sometimes is not. But the more we try, the better we become and the more experience we gain.

What is required of you to give a good mentorship presentation depends on what your background or communication profile is.

It can be said that there are two types of people who often find themselves in the position of giving mentorship presentations.

The first are people who have a high level of mastery of the data and, therefore, project credibility.

Then, on the other hand, there are those who do not have this level of mastery of the information, but who do have greater skills to connect with empathy with the audience.

If you are one of those expert people with access to information, what you need to do is become more empathetic when bringing that information to your audience.

On the other hand, if you are a person who is high in empathy but lacks the research means and credibility to present truthful information, then you need to develop research skills and appropriate the types of evidence I have shared with you, so that you can do it with much more fluidity, and thus gain authority.

Now, if you already have both aspects well developed, then go for it! Because then the only thing you have to do is keep doing it, keep touching lives, transmitting knowledge and doing it in a human and close way for your audience.

In Practice

There are many ways to give educational presentations, if you are preparing one at that moment, you can go through this script and then personalize it to make the presentation yours.

Bibliography

Aristotle. (2007). On rhetoric: A theory of civic discourse (G. A. Kennedy, Trans., 2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published ca. 4th century B.C.).

Rasiel, E. M. (1999). The McKinsey way: Using the techniques of the world's top strategic consultants to help you and your business. McGraw-Hill.