Absolutely Gabriela, humor can certainly be a great aspect of creating content for a speech or presentation.

In this post, I’m just talking about the strategies to create the presentation (whatever the type of content you’re using). But I do have a post specifically outlining techniques for introducing more humor into presentation content: https://createclarifyarticulate.com/8-steps-to-make-any-story-funnier/

Thanks Daniel! I’m glad you found the post useful. Yes, finding stories from our lives is definitely a skill that we can develop. It just takes putting in the work to get better at it!

Thanks Erika! Yes, absolutely – learning the lines is just the start of the process in acting. Until you’ve learned them, you can’t really get down to the process of acting itself. Which is something that few people seem to realise. Too often I hear people talking as if the only thing that actors do is learn lines. It’s quite infuriating.

I teach this to my clients. I say we must go from unconscious incompetence to conscious competence to unconscious competence, once they have gotten organized and need to create a habit change in order to maintain their gain.

And it is the same with athletes.

In the tennis world they talk about not just hitting backhand after backhand but running through points (serve +1, for example) like you would experience them in a real match.

Hi Nathalie,

Thanks for the comment! Yes, I understand what you mean. I guess that fear could be partly down to not being familiar with the techniques that we can use to rectify the situation if we ever end up rehearsing something in such a way that we end up presenting in mindless autopilot. If we’re not aware that such techniques exist (and there are tons of them!) we’re going to fear that we’re making the situation worse by adding more rehearsal.

In reality, what we need to do is change the way we’re rehearsing. A phrase I often find myself using is “we need to rehearse out the unnaturalness.”

Cheers,
Alex