Dare to Break a Rule– In Life and in your Presentations!

My mother, Theresa, was a force of nature:  Joyous, divinely artistic, unpredictable, enthusiastic and passionately invested in every moment she had the pleasure to inhabit.

One sunny afternoon, when I was ten years old, after we had just finished eating tuna sandwiches at the white Formica table in our kitchen, my mother absentmindedly grabbed a black felt pen and began to draw.  Not on the napkin by her plate, or on a scrap of paper, but on the surface of the table itself.  I was shocked!  Had Ma gone crazy?  This was so against the rules! With a flourish, she pushed away the lunch dishes and sketched the large, fluid outline of what I realized was a cartoon horse.  When she was done, she paused to survey it, then added long, fluttery eyelashes.  “Ok,” she said, handing me the pen,” it’s your turn!”

Draw?  On the kitchen table?  With a pen?  Really? “Come on,” ma said with a grin, “do it!”. Tentatively, I took the pen, and, after a moment’s trepidation, carefully added a flowered bathing suit top to what was surely a female horse.  Ma crowed with laughter, and added a girdle with garters and fishnets.  I snatched the pen out of her hand and drew big fat kissy lips and a band-aid on the horse’s thigh.  We laughed and drew madly for ten more minutes, trying gleefully to outdo the other.  It was fantastic.

Once we were done, we surveyed our creation with deep satisfaction.  And we kept it there,  on the kitchen table, prancing in all its finery, for the rest of the day, until dinnertime, when ma took a wet paper towel and washed it off.

Rules, rules, rules are everywhere.  Some of them are important, some of them not so much.  Life is, after all, short, and some rules—especially the ones that are self-imposed (“Never literally draw on the kitchen tabletop!”  “Never eat more than one scoop of ice cream!”  “Always give my presentatations the way everyone else in the office does!”) can keep us from having fun, expressing our deepest selves or leaping joyfully into the moment.. Choosing to break a rule every once in a while can be exhilerating and freeing, as my mother so ably taught me.  As she would have said, “Look at Picasso!  HE broke rules and look where it got him!”

Public speaking and presentations, like our lives, often benefit from punting the rules out the window.  Just because Microsoft invented Power Point doesn’t mean you are obligated to use it! What if you used your creative powers to come up with a whole new way – YOUR way– of giving a presentation?  What if your way was infinitely more memorable and impactful than the usual, ho-hum Power Point presentation burdened with gazillion slides and a gazillion-billion bullet points?

I dare you:  Kick up your heels and break a rule– especially a silly one. Be a little wild, a little wacky.  Stay out late on a work night!  Eat cookies in bed and revel in the crumbs!   Throw the Power Point out the window and create a presentation that reeks of your uniqueness…  props, poems, juggling, whatever floats your boat and makes your point sing! Have a second scoop of ice cream! Remember: You’re in charge,  and the rules you — or others– make are yours to break!