“It’s not about being brilliant about what you know if no one can access it.”

Rebecca said these words last night during a professional development session I attended.

I grabbed my pencil and wrote them down as fast as I could because I can’t remember anything these days but those words, I remembered.

They struck me in three ways:

First, they are so true. So many people have so much knowledge, so much to say, so much to share, but they don’t know how to make it accessible to the masses.

If it’s the person who had 17 letters worth of acronyms in a 30-minute talk…you might know a lot of stuff, but there’s no way I’m going to remember 17 themes in 30 minutes. (See memory issue above.)

You can have the research, the PhD, the data, and the graphs, and if you can’t tell the story in a way that non-analytical people can understand, your knowledge goes nowhere.

If you have a story that can change the way people think, act, or show up, but you tell it through over-sharing, or throwing out overused cliches, or rambling on for hours, you’re missing that opportunity for impact.

Second, this is fixable! Learning how to present, share information, command the room, own your presence, and create impact are all learnable skills. (I might know someone who teaches them. 😉)

Maybe your pitches aren’t landing. Maybe your presentations are a snooze. Maybe the team doesn’t take any action after your all-hands meeting. Maybe with a little awareness you can see that if you change up your delivery, work on those skills, and practice this craft that you can be the champagne glass to the champagne that is your knowledge…the conduit for pouring sparkling, crisp, refreshing information and stories into people so they sparkle and light up when they hear you speak. 🥂

Finally, being able to share your brilliance through your presence, impact, and the experience you create for people is the way of the future. Human experiences. Authenticity. Being real, relatable. Taking all the drivel that AI produces and putting it aside to ground into your credibility, your knowledge, your being to create an experience of YOU is how people are going to access your brilliance.

Not a chart alone. Not a spreadsheet alone. Not one presentation. Not one talk. The entire experience you create by being you–that’s what people want access to.