Take off the Steve Jobs mask and speak like yourself

I love Apple products. This blog is created on a MacBook (must upgrade to a MacBook Air STAT). I love my iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. If I could have adopted my cats from the Apple Store, I totally would have.

I live in Seattle, just miles from Microsoft, and I'm a huge Apple loyalist.

I admire Steve Jobs. He thought differently, innovated and was a bit of a prick.

As a speech coach, most notably, Steve Jobs was a public speaking God.

Frankly, I'm over it.

I'm over presentation tips from Steve Jobs, how I changed my speaking style to be like Steve Jobs, public speaking the Jobs way and let's find Steve's DNA, clone him so he can make more presentations we can talk about non-stop.

I get it. He's phenomenal.

I'm not saying that you can't learn valuable presentation tips from Steve. You can. God knows there's enough articles and books on the subject. What I am saying is…

There was 1 Steve Jobs & you're not him

Recently, I read a blog post from a fairly well-know blogger. It was about how he changed his presentation style to “mimic” (his word not mine) Jobs. He knew he had to repeat himself, slow down, be passionate about his product, and implement at least 4 other strategies.

Of course, there was a video of his speaking gig. As I viewed, I could totally tell he was channeling his inner Jobs (at least he didn't don the black turtle neck and jeans), but it was blatantly obvious because it was inauthentic. I could tell he was not being himself. He was trying to be someone else. Something just didn't ring true.

I would have preferred to have watched him speaking as himself not him wearing a Steve Jobs mask acting out a presentation. The presenters I love the most speak to their strengths, embrace their flaws and are the same person on the stage as they are off.

Of course you can learn from a master, but you can never be the master. Take those tips, tricks and pointers and adapt them to your own style in a way that rings true to you.

For the love of all things good in the world…

Stop trying to speak like Steve Jobs and be your awesome, imperfect self!