(NOTE: there are some of you who forward these emails to your kids; you might want to think twice about doing that this time; I try to keep it family-friendly, but every family has different standards about what is and what is not acceptable)

Many years ago, I had a girlfriend who was a software developer for a phone sex company.

(yes, I’ve written about her before, she was the one I mentioned a few months back in that one about me being addicted to the creamed corn at Boston Market)

If a problem arose in the middle of the night, her beeper would go off and she would have to go into the office.

I typically accompanied her on these trips.

Once, she sat me down in the server room and asked if I wanted to listen in on some calls while she did her software developer work.

I tried not to sound too eager when I said yes.

She sat me down and threw some headphones at me before running off to fix whatever software bug she had been called in to fix.

I put the headphones on (probably breaking a gazillion privacy laws in the process), and listened in on a two-way conversation where the guy was paying $6 a minute to talk about what he was going to do when she put his “X” into her “Y” and did “Z.”

(okay, you can let your kids back into the room now, that’s the worst of it)

My girlfriend reappeared, having fixed whatever software bug she had been called in for, and asked if I wanted to see the room with the “girls.”

Once again, I tried not to sound too eager when I said yes.

She led me down a non-descript hallway with grey carpet and plain white walls. She opened a non-descript door, and I peered into a room expecting to see a bunch of hot women in wet Tshirts washing cars (it was 3am, but dreams die hard).

Instead, the room was filled with row upon row of morbidly-obese women with “high and tight” haircuts chain-smoking cheap cigarettes while watching the Oprah rerun coming out of a monitor perched up high in the corner with the sound turned down.

My mind had created images of cropped Tshirts and slumber party pillow fights. Instead I was looking at a call center.

My girlfriend, evidently seeing my disappointment, twisted the knife further into my chest: “Sorry, Matt, they’re all lesbians.”

Here’s what this has to do with your presentations:

In their heads, your audience has an image, and that image is not the one you are seeing. Your job as presenter is to manipulate the image your audience has, not the image you have.

If you are presenting about, say, a water park, you see a post holding up one of the ramps, and the main issue on your mind is should that post be glued to the ground, bolted to the ground, or both? Your audience, however, sees the P&L (profit and loss) statement from the water park. That is what your presentation needs to be about, not about gluing or bolting the pole.