Nancy Duarte: evaluation

Transcript context

…Let's dive into these then. And I was actually going to ask around empathy, and it feels like that comes up a lot in your recommendations to people's empathy is kind of the heart of your methodology of telling great stories, telling great presentations. So, let's spend a little time there. Why is that so important and what does that actually look like in practice? Empathy is important to Duarte, everything we do is empathy first. And some of it comes from my own childhood story a little bit. I was raised by a clinically narcissistic mom and narcissist are missing the empathy gene. So, I feel like that void of not having it modeled for me is why I keep clawing at empathy as being important. And I think a lot of people listening might work for a boss that does not have empathy, that isn't other centric, that doesn't think before they talk and all of those things. And I was raised by someone like that. And so every single book and every single model that I ever make has empathy at the core because you have to have to think about who am I speaking with, especially in communication, who am I speaking with? And so when I went on my journey through storytelling, I figured out that I thought, okay, the presenter's the hero, for sure the presenter's the hero, they're the central figure. They're talking the most. They're well lit, they're up on a stage. So, when I started to look at all the archetypes, that's where I landed. And then I was like, oh my god. When I got to really digging into the mentor, I realized it's really the mentor in myths and movies that's the presenter and who really holds the power in the room of a presentation is the audience, the audience gets to make a choice if they accept or reject your idea. So, the balance of power is with them and not you. So, it really is the role of the presenter to be the mentor. And in myths and movies, the mentor comes alongside the hero. In other words, the presenter should come alongside the audience and help them get unstuck or bring a magical tool. So, I think Obi Won Kenobi's a great example. He did two things for Luke Skywalker. He gave him a light saber, which was for his outer journey, the physical journey he was doing, and then an inner tool, which was the resolve, which came to him through the force. So, when you're speaking to an audience, they're going to have an internal conflict that you have to give them something to soothe. And then you're asking them to therefore go and do this thing, take this action, do this call to action. That's asking them to physically do something or physically change in some way. So, they're not going to do that for you if you haven't empathetically thought about how hard what you're asking them is going to be for them to do. And so you have to change your mindset when you're starting to build your deck to think about who am I talking to? How am I going to help them get unstuck? And that's just a super foundational principle in everything we do. What is an example of that in practice as we go through these? Because this is really great of that implemented the deck that we know about maybe?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.