If You Truly Loved Me You’d Demonstrate It

And Other Complaints the Unappreciated Party Presents

It’s not exactly comfortable having a conversation about expressing one’s affections to a person that feels unappreciated, is insignificant or even ignored.  When the statement, “If you love me you’d demonstrate it sincerely.”

What does one do? One party either makes a presentation of affection as the image above reflects, or the aggrieved demonstrates love by way of kind acts, good deeds, showing affection, or even offering gifts of love and appreciation.

So, now that I’ve got the messy stuff out of the way, the question still remains for the rest of the world; which is better, presentation or demonstration?

In my opinion, presentations inform, demonstrations teach.

All too often, the world has fallen asleep to the dreaded slide presentation where the presenter drones on (like the man in the picture) while the audience loses focus, becomes distracted, or just plain bored (aka the woman).  Presentations are usually one-way communications.

Demonstrations are two-way communications. One, the knowledgeable one on the subject shares the information with the person receiving the instruction or information by way of interaction.  The process is telling and showing, then switch actions. The teacher describes the intended actions, and the student listens. Then the teacher demonstrates whatever the lesson is.

Think something like describing how to tie shoes. Just describing the activity, even showing a slide image of the action, cannot truly transfer worthwhile knowledge.  There must be action involved with the verbal transfer.  How do children learn to tie shoes? The adult shows and tells, while the child watches and hears the instruction.  Then it’s the child’s turn. They do while the adult tells, encourages and corrects as needed. To ensure the child knows the activity, the child demonstrates and tells the adult the activity for reassurance.

Artificial intelligence technology is attempting to create “interactive presentations” whereby the audience is actively engaged in some sort of action, either before, during, or after the presentation.

One example is:

The audience has the ability to key in response to a query from the presenter, either by some sort of hand-held device communicating with the presenter’s information gathering tech, or today, audiences can use their smartphone.

There might be built-in evaluations of particular products where they are compared, and the audience selects their choice.

There are now slide presentation techniques where music is triggered at a certain point; the slides morph into a different image and all sorts of other gadgetry.

In my opinion, that is all for the benefit of keeping the audience engaged, but until there is a way to demonstrate what they have learned in an environment outside of the confines, the presentation will always hold the second place in teaching and learning.

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David Dunworth

David J Dunworth is the Chief Experiences Officer of Marketing Partners, a marketing advisory services firm.
David has lived on 4 of the 6 continents with plans to finish the lot.
An author of 6 books, co-author of 2 more (one of which is an international best-seller in eight categories).He loves writing and reading, cooking, and rescuing glasses of red wine from evaporation.His books are on Amazon, and you can find him at david@marketingpartnersllc.com., or drop a comment on his blog at marketingpartnersllc.com/blog.

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