I want to take a slight detour into English Literature to illustrate my point. Specifically, I'd like to travel back to the middle ages to the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote the Canterbury Tales and a great poem called Troilus and Criseyde. Geoffrey Chaucer is a very early English poet. He's a medieval poet, he's not the first English poet. But he's an important one. And his story, Troilus and Criseyde is a story of lovers and warriors in the Trojan War. It's really a fantastic read. It exists in a number of manuscripts. Of course this is the Middle Ages, before the printing press. So these are handmade books. One book in Cambridge, that's held in the Cambridge Library, is particularly impressive. It's lavishly illustrated. Really beautiful hand illustrations and I put the opening illustration, the frontice piece, online so you can see it. I don't think you need to download this one, because it's beautiful in color and I'd like you to appreciate how it looks. So take a look at that. The page really tells us a story, I think, about storytelling and about successful presentation. Initially when we look at it, it's just a swirl of color. I have trouble telling where the frame ends and what's just illustration on the page. It's really, it's really chaotic when you first look at it. Beautiful, but chaotic. And in my mind, this kind of evokes the beginnings of any presentation. What's going on? Who's in charge? And as we begin to focus in, I think we see a lot is going on. In the upper corners, there are castles. Beneath that, there seems to be a row of people walking on a bridge towards one castle. In the bottom, there are these almost Pre-Raphaelite looking women listening and sitting and perhaps talking, having their side conversations. And in the center is the speaker. I take that to be Chaucer. And he's telling his story, but he almost appears to be priestly, as if he's endowed with a kind of spiritual power that centers the entire illustration. And as he speaks, he seems to have forged a relationship with one individual, the man in gold, who, a little lower than him, looks up. The man's face partially erased by time. And they seem to have forged, amidst this busy scenery, they seem to have forged an intimacy together. So I see this as a story of successful presentation. A story of public presentation as almost private communication. You can do that. You can do that because the greatest of public speakers, the most successful of presentations, are at once public and private. They communicate this kind of centering power. And they're able to make the speaker connect with individuals in the audience. Because his or her focus moves from those individuals but makes a connection each time his or her eyes pass over them. If you do this, you'll not just be successful, but you will be invulnerable. This brings us to Kuskin best practice number ten. [SOUND] Great speakers construct their brand and the field of play as one. What do I mean by that? I mean that a great speaker attends to his or her audience, listens to their cues, and delivers the speech, the presentation, right to them. By doing so, the great speaker appears, not as an anonymous figure, but as a personal figure. The great speaker crafts his or her public performance as a private performance delivered to each individual. In that he or she creates a community. And though that community may be violated by interruption, it becomes strong enough to withstand that and carry through to the end.
