For years I’ve been saying, “There are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and there are the realities of our lives, and the two are almost never the same.”

However, all this time, I conveniently managed to not apply this tidbit of wisdom to myself.

Then the other day, in a conversation with a friend, I finally applied it to myself, and it was kind of uncomfortable.

You see, for years I’ve been telling myself my life was all about flexibility, and I used that to justify choices I was making. And then, in the conversation, I said, “Wait a minute, the god I’ve been worshipping is not flexibility, it’s something else entirely.”

I realized I had, unintentionally, been quite successful at obtaining that other thing. But flexibility, maybe there was a little, but what there was was there almost by accident.

You might wonder, quite rightly, what this has to do with your presentations. And it’s this:

If you want to hold an audience’s attention, there are two guaranteed ways:

One, and I’ve written about this many times before, is to break a pattern. Remember, the human brain loves patterns, seeks them out, craves them, and in fact earns its keep by seeing (or imagining) them. So break a pattern, and let the audience watch as you put the pieces back together in a way they haven’t seen before.

The other is to remember that your audience members are, quite likely, all misunderstanding the world around them. If you see another way of looking at the world, show it to them. They will watch in rapt attention as you draw a picture of a world that has been right in front of them the whole time, but that they have never seen in quite that way.