I have been coaching a group of PhD students to improve their presentation skills. Their professor's care of them is exceptional. He understood that these young people need more than just science to survive in the competitive global research world. We need more professors like him.

It is gratifying to work with young and brilliant minds. They are curious, eager to learn, and clever—very, very smart—and I can see some Nobel prizes coming their way because they work and study at one of the cutting-edge research institutes and with global leaders in their field.

However, there is a problem.

These students come from different cultures and come to New Zealand to learn and advance their careers. They are also the hardest-working students I have ever seen. 

They are already privileged and selected from hundreds of other aspiring young people. The only Kiwi in the group is the most privileged because he can speak English as his mother tongue. But they all have the same problem.

And the problem is that there is no connection between their brains and hearts. 

Education systems seem to work globally by isolating brains and hearts—emotions and thoughts—from each other. It became self-evident when I observed the first presentations of these young scientists.

I could see how their brains were in overdrive, and their lack of emotional awareness froze them in front of the audience. And because they were young, they lacked the tools to bridge that gap between feelings and thoughts. They didn't know that you can fake it before you make it. It was painful to watch.

It is like Sir Ken Robinson, the late education guru, so well put it: "We are educating people out of their creativity."

So, what is the fix? How did I help these young people to acquire better presentation skills?

Wait, one more thing before I can go into the practicalities.

Standards in human behaviour do not exist.

I was a troublemaker at school—a square peg in a round hole. Don't get me wrong; I love all kinds of holes, but expecting that there is only one of the right kind made me rebellious. I wanted to make all holes (square, round, triangular, even the naughty ones) accessible to my curiosity.

I could have done better with tests. Actually, I often failed them on purpose—just for fun and to see the teacher's face. I didn't do well with psychological evaluations either. 

I was part of the nationwide test group of year 13 students, where these psychologists tested our aptitudes and intellectual abilities. The moment of truth came after months of filling out forms and attending interviews. Our future was about to be revealed.

Instead of reading the scientific taro cards for me, the psychologist (who then became a friend of mine – a fun fact) said to me, "Jussi, I am afraid that your results are so off the chart in every direction that I cannot really tell you anything but to be what you want to be and good luck".

After reading years of everything I could find about psychology, psychiatry and sociology, I had to surrender to the idea that life is bigger than your intellect (my eternal motto), and I started to seek the answers from art, music, spirituality and creativity in general. It was a great relief, and I could say goodbye to the school system in my quest to understand life and myself and make something out of them.

I could see that my brainy PhD blokes were the victims of a school system that measured everything but didn't value anything human in them. They haven't had a psychologist (teacher, priest, counsellor or compassionate parent) to permit them to be more than their intellect.

Again, Sir Ken Robinson says it better in his article on Wired: "Usually, the problem is not the learners – it's the inherent bias of education and the enforced culture of schools. For generations, formal education has been systematically biased towards narrow forms of academic ability. The result is that it largely disregards the marvellous diversity of human talents and interests."

However, true advancement comes not from academic rigour but from a creative approach to using it. 

"It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry." [Albert Einstein in The New York Times, March 13 1949, p. 34]

But governments don't listen to Einstein or Robinson —and our current one in New Zealand, in particular, is entirely deaf to these truths— but are on their way to leading schools and taking the children to the gallows to break their creative necks forever. 

The one truth and three little hacks for my PhD students

When I told the students that perfect is boring, I could feel their relief. They didn't need to be perfect. They did not have a single, standardised right hole to fit in with their presentations. They only had to be curious about the audience.

Their eyes widened, and their tails got bushier when they realised that the audience matters, not them: their broken English or introverted nature is insignificant if they are curious about the audience. If they are curious about the audience's needs, they have a winner. If they are enthusiastic about their research and want to convey something remarkable to the audience, the rest is just some hacks and practice. If they look at their audience like they look at the sexy science challenge they want to understand better, they are all good.

So, this was my only truth—the mother of all holes—for them: it's about the audience, not you. That hole is generous and lets all pegs in—introverted or not, native speakers or accents thicker than the water of the Rivers Ganges or Yangtze. 

Then, it was just three things they needed to practice a little:

1) Talk slower so that your audience can follow you and you have some time to think about your message regardless of the accents and occasional blunders. 

2) Look at your audience. All the time, one by one, individual touch points are built that only the eyes can see. Your slides are there not for you to look at, but the eyes of your audience tell you when it is time to move on to the next one. Look at them. All the time.

3) Smile. If you smile, the audience cannot but smile back, and the human brain is such that it takes in stuff when you smile. The muscles you use when smiling are powerful; they move emotional mountains and help you build bridges for your messages to travel to the audience. 

Then, we just practised these things with some little tips on how to use basic design principles to build slides, how to use whiteboards, and how to model your thinking to become accessible for audiences who have different preferences (you know: left-brain thinkers, right-brain creators, and a mix of them). 

The results were amazing. The most introverted guy, who hated even the idea of going in front of an audience, was the first to volunteer to give his final presentation. He did it with such grace and pose that we could have listened to him forever. The same was true for the others. 

All this can be said in one sentence: The audience is there for you – and you are worthy of their interest if you think of them first. The rest will follow.

So, this is all for today. I have a new group of PhD students starting soon, and I cannot wait to help them poke some holes into the beliefs the school system has forced upon them. 

Ngā mihi

Jussi

Book of the week: The Marlow Murder Club

"The Marlow Murder Club" by Robert Thorogood is an irresistible murder mystery set in the quiet English town of Marlow. 

The story revolves around Judith Potts, an eccentric 77-year-old woman who witnesses a murder in a house across the River Thames while she is swimming naked in the river. 

The local police dismiss her claim, but she decides to investigate the murder herself. She forms an unbelievably funny alliance with two other women in her town - Suzie, a dog walker, and Becks, the vicar's wife. 

These ladies form the Marlow Murder Club and investigate a series of murders in this quintessential English town. Despite being amateurs to the core, they manage to unravel the complex clues that even the police struggle to comprehend. 

The book is thrilling, filled with wit, humour, and a fair share of suspense; the trio outsmarts the killer at every turn. It has the best touches from Agatha Christie and funny flavours of British eccentricity to make the story's wheels turn faster than you can turn the pages. 

I love every word of this book. It's a real autumn treat when it's too wet to go out, and you don't have the energy to do anything but read something well-written and funny. 

Get it from Apple Books or Amazon.

A golden nugget of the week

"Knowledge alone does not produce wisdom. Transforming knowledge into wisdom requires input from the heart." – Daisaku Ikeda