Spellcasting with Peanut Butter (and other presentation tactics)

Letter for the storytellers and meeting survivors. This one is about serving ideas with peanut butter.

Dear content coma survivor,

There’s a very specific kind of death that happens in meetings.

None too dramatic. No weeping. The subject of content coma is what I refer to. The eyes appear wide awake, but souls have quietly evacuated the premises.

You start with best of intentions. Important data. Real insights. You care.
But somewhere between slide four and font size twelve, your audience drifts. Slack faces. Shuffling. One person blinks in Morse code for help.

It’s not because they don’t care. It’s that you’ve accidentally tranquilized them with too much truth and not enough peanut butter.

Let me talk about a sick dog now.

Not miserably sick — more like a mildly sick, the one that sends you Googling symptoms at 1 a.m. and texting a friend who is officially a superhero, and unofficially a vet.

Vet gave us pills. Dog have us betrayal.

Spit them out with resentment. Like, how dare you give me this awful thing? You’d think he swallowed it - then, within a second, plop. On the rug, again.

We tried to wrap it up in everything.

🧀 Cheese — no luck
🙏 Pleading — no luck
🙇‍♀️ Prayer — no luck

Until someone whispered the secret spell:

And just like that…Down it went without fight, and with much joy.

That’s when it hit me. The pill was inevitable. But it was the peanut butter that made it acceptable.

This, I decided, is The Peanut Butter Principle.

Ideas slide down better with peanut butter.

That’s the way it works with stories: you’ve got a fab insight — the pill. You know it works. You’ve used it a hundred times and learned your lesson. But your audience? They ain’t there yet. They spit it out, and maybe tune out.

Not because they’re slow. But because the brain doesn’t want to work that hard without a little sugar.

So, the next time you're about to unload 37 bullet points onto a slide deck, ask:

🥜 Where’s the peanut butter?

And no, it doesn’t involve dumbing down. It involves casting the spell differently. It involves draping the hard stuff in story, in humor, in something they already adore.

You’ll see, they’ll eat it.

Then watch how the medicine finally goes down.

With grid and wonder,
— Miss Solvent