Iran, not Syria

Most of you know I walked across Turkey at one point, right?

(If not, here is a map of the route, photos from the trip, etc)

In the final days of the walk, between Van and the Iran border, I would often ask, just to make sure I was on the right road, "Is this the road to Iran?"

The answer would usually be "No, Syria is that way. This is the road to Iran."

My first thought was "Cool, I'm in the right place."

But my second thought would be "Is my Turkish really so bad that people think I'm asking if this is the road to Syria? And Syria is a long way away; if I were that far off target, don't these people think I would know?"

You might wonder what this has to do with your presentations, and rightly so. The connection to your presentations is this:

Never assume the audience understands the words you are using.

There are a couple ways to do this, and you should be doing both:

The first is to talk to a couple of your audience members beforehand, and listen to the words they use to describe the thing. Use those words. Not your words. Theirs.

The second is to ask your audience a question every couple minutes during your presentation. It doesn't have to be a complicated question, maybe the answer is just one or two words. You're just making sure they are following you.

For example, say you're talking about a customer service chatbot. You could ask, "What is the most common question people ask? ‘Where is my shipment,’ right?"

I call this the "modem handshake." You know those old-style modems from the 90s, and how before they started transmitting, one modem would screech at the other modem, and then the other modem would screech back, and once they found a frequency that worked for both of them, the transmission would start?

Basically, the first tip is telling you what the frequency is probably going to be, and the second is you making sure you're doing it right.

You might hear this suggestion and think, "Duh, Matt, that's obvious." But apparently it's not as obvious as we might think, because I see people messing this up all the time, and their audience spends half the time just trying to figure out what the person is trying to say.