Page 136 - James Caan - Get the Job you Really Want

He said, ‘I thought it was useless.’
‘It’s OK,’ I dead-panned, ‘you can be straight with me, I can
take it. Was it really that good?’
‘James, it was boring.’
‘Really, why?’

‘Because you didn’t once look at the audience, you read o≠
your notes. It was monotonous. It was stale.’
He absolutely destroyed my presentation. Which was great –

thank goodness he did.
At the same event I watched another speaker, and he was
brilliant. He moved around, he used his arms, he worked with
the crowd, he didn’t have any notes. I engaged with him. The
interesting thing was, if you’d asked me afterwards what he

had actually said, there was nothing compelling, but I enjoyed
the speech. I spoke to the event manager, asked him to send
me a copy of the event video, and set about improving my

technique.
Prepare, rehearse, have a mental structure, and deliver
what you want to say in your own style. Focus, of course, but
don’t prepare to the extent where you lose your individuality.
Whenever I am delivering a speech, I am projecting my person-

ality, my style. The content is not the key. With a joke, it’s not
the quality of the joke, it’s the quality of the delivery that makes
you laugh. We all know that from when we’ve tried retelling a

joke we heard on TV and it falls completely flat – the words are
the same but, to coin a phrase, ‘It’s the way you tell ’em.’

124 get the job you really want