When it comes to pitching, stop getting it right—start getting real

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I don’t know you, but I am going to make some assumptions. You are driven, visionary, ambitious, conscious, and just the right amount of fearful. You love a challenge, thrive on making big ideas a reality, and get high off of achievement. What you are not is a robot or a mind reader.

I am Minna Taylor, a former actor turned founder from NYC, and my entire career has been about helping people feel confident and at ease when they open their mouths in moments that feel critical or consequential. I help people know what to say and how to say it when it matters most. From the earliest funding stages to scaling globally, I’ve helped founders and their teams connect authentically with investors and stakeholders. In total, I have worked with over 5,000 individuals in a career spanning nearly two decades and three continents. Here’s what I know to be true: no one wants to hear you try to get it right. 

Nearly every single person I’ve worked with starts the same way. They spend hours designing their deck, reviewing the numbers, and scripting their presentation word for word, leaving no room for deviation. They revise, reconsider, furrow their brows, and have bursts of inspiration to move slide 10 earlier in the deck, thinking this tweak is the solution to a winning pitch. All of these decisions and theoretical preparations live in their heads. Each person starts in the space of logic and stays there. They forget that at the end of the process, they actually need to open their mouth and say things out loud in a way that makes people pay attention. They are so concerned with getting it right that they neglect the process of making it real. I was working with a cohort from XRC Labs in NYC.

There was one experienced founder who was so relatable, felt so agile and alive, and invited humour and unpredictability, that people were on their feet cheering after his pitch. In contrast, there was another founder who was deeply fearful of stepping on stage and forgetting his lines. His concept was stellar, his story was compelling, but he was so afraid of messing up. And guess what, we all watched him struggle for 5 minutes trying to get it right. Who do you think had a more successful outcome?

Chris Sacca, a notable startup investor and advisor, in an interview with Tim Ferriss for his book Tools of Titans, supports the benefit of realness when he says, “Never forget that underneath all the math and the MBA bullshit talk, we are all still emotionally driven human beings. We want to attach ourselves to narratives. We don’t act because of equations. We follow our beliefs.” 

The resistance to the possibility of messing up in critical moments keeps people safe and in their comfort zones, but produces a bunch of robots devoid of emotion. They get on stage, enter the boardroom, or click to join the meeting, and they either freeze or regurgitate their pitch with zero connection to themselves—much less their audience. PRO TIP: If you’re not speaking to be heard, put it in an email and save us all the time and energy.

We are beyond the era of the “Meet Sally…” pitch structure. You know the one where we say our name, our company name, and then immediately jump into the archetype narrative of little Sally putting our solution into action? It’s mind-numbing and predictable. We don’t want rote or robotic. We want realness. The willingness to be flawed, imperfect, and human will be the determining factor in influencing your audience in 2025.

I understand that encouraging flaw, imperfection, and availability for improvisation requires a paradigm shift. You may jump to the conclusion that this means don’t prepare or rehearse. “I am seeking authenticity; therefore, I just say what’s on my mind and express how I want to express it, regardless of who is in the room.” Realness doesn’t mean rawness. We must prepare ourselves to rise to the occasion, but we can do that in a way that conditions our body to be both effective and authentic. Mindful and immediate.

This is the intangible space of aliveness that will captivate your audience no matter the circumstances. They will believe what you say because you believe it. They will hear that you are being truthful because you are speaking honestly. They will trust you because they know you are not lying to them. This trust then gives them permission to say yes because you have made it feel safe to do so. Being real over being right will win out every time. This is a quality concern, not a content consideration. 

People are tired of pretense. We’ve been fed polished images of success, overly curated struggles, and artificial personas—it’s exhausting. We can tell when we are not getting the whole truth. We can tell when people are so perfect that they must be hiding something. We are skeptical of those who are too polished. We desperately want to see humans, connect with humans, and invest in humans.

When it comes to pitching, founders forget to prioritize making their audience feel something. We buy what we believe, and we believe when we are moved to care about what we are hearing. If you are not pitching to make people feel something, you are going to lose out on a lot of money and a lot of impact. The only way to make them feel something is to be honest, truthful, and real in how you present it to them.

To successfully accomplish this, you must condition the body to feel resilient to the experience risk, embrace imperfection, and actively seek out moments of unpredictability. Communication is a physical activity. We must get our pitch outside of the head – the realm of theory – and into the body – the realm of realness. As Pattabhi Jois said, “Practice and all is coming.” 

Here’s a quick playbook for preparing the perfectly imperfect pitch: 

  • Start the writing process out loud and on your feet.
    • There are two primary benefits to this approach. One, you immediately start creating muscle memory around your content, which leads to a deeper embodiment of your message. Two, the messaging will be a more authentic representation of your spoken language rather than an intellectualized version of how you think you should sound.
  • Play first, polish last.
    • No one pays to see perfect. What we are seeking is an experience of aliveness and immediacy. Inviting play into the preparation process assures agility, adaptability, and expression in your presentation. This will make the polished elements like gesture, posture, and movement, feel human instead of robotic.  
  • Focus on the message, not the script.
    • The words you plan to say have no intrinsic meaning until you imbue them with a genuine message. For example, the words, “I have a dream,” have little value, but Martin Luther King Jr. proved that they can echo through generations if imbued with a connected message that resonates with the audience. 

Forget right. Invest in Real. Stay Human.

Author

Minna Taylor is the founder of Energize Your Voice, author of The Confident Body, international speaker, and influential thought leader in the theory and application of PLAY. She is committed to helping visionary leaders and their teams transform the world through authentic storytelling.

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