Paranormally Persistent

In The Sixth Sense, the air goes cold before a ghost shows up. The tiny hairs on Cole Sear’s arms stand up. He can see his breath. He’s a kid who sees dead people everywhere, and he spends half the film hiding from them in a blanket fort.

Then his psychologist asks what the ghosts actually want.

“Just help,” Cole says.

“They just want help, even the scary ones,” Malcolm tells him. His prescription is three words: “Listen to them.”

They mean him no harm. Each one carries unfinished business, a message somebody still needs to act on. One girl has something her father needs to know, and she can’t tell him herself.

I watched it again this week for the first time since 1999, and I kept thinking about the leaders I coach. Their presentations are full of ghosts too. Most of them mean well. They just won’t leave.

Good Advice Has a Jurisdiction

Somebody we trust once told us the right way to present. A boss, a mentor, a trainer, a VP who left years ago. It worked for them, so we act on it, and many of us keep acting on it, in some cases as law instead of guidance.

You may know the old story about the roast. A daughter trims both ends before it goes in the oven, because her mother always did. Her mother did it because Grandma did. But Grandma did it because her pan was too small, and the family let this limitation define a process for generations.

The rule was right. For one pan.

Trusted advice works the same way. It arrives as a single sentence, and it travels light. The person who said it was solving a problem in one meeting, with one audience, under one kind of pressure. None of that context arrives with the advice. Just the rule, and it carries a strange, unearned authority into situations it was never meant to control.

Advice travels. The situation that made it true stays home.

Most advice is good, which is why we stop checking it. We grant it jurisdiction everywhere, and it only ever governed the place it came from.

Listen to What Each Ghost Wants

Three spectres of advice haunt countless presentations every day. Their earthly bodies probably meant no harm, and neither do their spirits. Listen closely, though, and each one is carrying a problem.

“Be brief, be brilliant, be gone.”

Start with brief. Brevity is indeed important because people read it as mastery. Nobody should present longer than the idea needs. Read literally, though, the ghost ranks brevity above everything, and the point of presenting is what your audience understands, believes, or does next. Sometimes that takes longer than the advice allows. Making that call is your job. The ghost doesn’t get a vote.

Then brilliant. Nobody cares whether you’re brilliant. They care whether you respect their brilliance. Chase the first, and you push the idea and the audience, the two things that matter most, down the list. You’re the medium for your idea, which means you should take your place as the third-most brilliant party in the room.

Then gone. It probably started as “don’t overstay your welcome,” which is true. Ideas travel through people, though. Leave before the exchange is finished, and only half of it ever happens. Many of us already feel more disconnected at work than ever, and a rule that tells the presenter to disappear doesn’t help.

“Tell them what you’re gonna tell them, tell them, and tell them what you told them.”

Talk to anyone this way outside a presentation and they’d punch you in the face. Why do we tolerate it inside one? Repetition matters, because listeners can’t scroll back. Built into a structure, though, the formula leaves most of the meat on the bone. It has no tension and no turn, nothing for an audience to lean toward. A fire alarm repeats itself too. And it clears the building.

“Make them think it was their idea.”

People defend what they helped build, so the instinct is sound. But the advice leaves off the most important part: how. It gets tossed around conference rooms, usually by leaders who can tell a presentation missed and can’t say exactly why. So many of us grow up in business treating it as the destination, with no map. Done well, inviting your audience into the conclusion is selling as an act of compassion. When performed as a parlor trick, audiences feel the setup, and trust evacuates.

Every ghost has something worth hearing. But none of them deserve the final word. This is an invitation to stop inheriting your habits and start choosing them.

Whose Voice Do You Hear When You Prepare?

Which presentation rule do you follow every time without knowing who gave it to you?

What problem was it solving when they handed it over?

Which piece of advice did someone give you without telling you how to achieve it?

If you examined it further, which part of the advice would you keep, and for which situation?

Worth Keeping, or Ready to Bury?

Most of us inherited a few good ones.

The hard part is telling them apart. The quickest way I know is to say one out loud to someone who wasn’t there when you got it. So say it to me.

What’s one piece of presentation advice you inherited? Is it a ghost worth keeping, or one you’re ready to bury? Hit reply and tell me who handed it to you.

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