Lessons from a Hockey Coach

NO, THIS ISN’T ABOUT “PRESENTATIONS ON ICE!” And I’m not a rabid hockey fan, so I won’t dwell on aspects of the game. But I came across this video of a speech — well, it’s really more of a “talk” — by Don Lucia, the coach for the University of Minnesota’s men’s hockey team. (If you’re seeing this in your feed reader, you’ll need to click through to this page to see the video.)

His speech/talk/presentation lasts nine minutes, but you can get a good sense of this in the first two minutes. Here’s what makes it so good:

· It feels like a conversation, not a formal speech.

· He rarely breaks his focus on the audience.

· It flows really well throughout.

It flows too well, in fact, to be completely extemporaneous, yet it has the quality of some friend on a long riff while sitting around your kitchen table.

NOW, imagine if he had added PowerPoint to the mix . . . He probably would’ve done a good job, but it would’ve been a different experience — and not necessarily a better one.
        So my question (or challenge?) for you today is: Could you do your presentation without PowerPoint or Keynote or some other slideware? What would happen if you threw out ALL your slides and just got up and talked?
        You’d probably have a bit of a hurdle initially (“What do I do with my hands?!”), and you might have to find new ways to express things you typically would put into charts or graphs. But you’ll likely make an even stronger connection with your audience, and isn’t what they take away the most important part of your presentation? (I hope your answer is “Yes”...)

<btw>
If you coach youth sports, or have kids in youth sports, or plan to have kids some day, you might want to watch the complete video. It’s not so much about hockey as it is about having perspective on what youth sports are really about. I coach soccer and his ideas definitely apply.