Japanese culture is pretty specific about making eye contact with people.  In ancient times, a commoner might lose their head if a samurai felt they were making eye contact with them in an arrogant or disrespectful way.  Even amongst samurai, in the presence of superiors, you would only raise your eyes to make eye contact when invited to do so, otherwise your right place would be looking down at the floor with your head bowed.  Here we are in the modern era and making direct eye contact is still felt to be inappropriate.  The guidelines are look at the person’s throat or forehead or chin, but don’t make eye contact.  It is thought to be too aggressive and rude, especially if they are older or higher in status than you.  Okay, you might not agree with it, but so what, that is how we do things around here.

As a result, I rarely ever see Japanese presenters making conscious, specific eye contact with the people assembled before them.  I don’t see too many foreigners doing it either.  My old Japanese history Professor at University, had the habit of looking at the joint between the back wall and the ceiling behind us in the lecture theatre and looking there whenever he wasn’t reading from his text.  Zero eye contact and engagement with any of us plebs.   

Now “when in Rome, do as the Romans do” is ancient wisdom, so should we foreigners blend in with the locals and avoid eye contact with our audiences?  Absolutely not! This point can become contentious, but we are mixing up scenarios. Chatting with your colleague, boss or friends while not making eye contact is fine, if that is the appropriate relationship.  I had to retrain myself to make eye contact when I went back to Australia after studying here for the first four and half years.  I had automatically gotten out of the habit, which was treated with suspicion back home.  Why couldn’t I look people in the eye? Was I hiding something or was I a dodgy character you couldn’t trust?

As a presenter, we may be conversational in our delivery, but this isn’t the same as a chat over coffee.  We are on stage and we are the person commanding the attention of the room.  The formality associated with this speaker scenario is a lot more substantial than chatting together.  So we need to make eye contact, because we want to engage our audience. 

This audience engagement piece is where a lot of speakers fail.  They spray their eye contact equally over the whole ensemble.  They give everyone the same degree of eye contact at the precisely same time and in effect, make eye contact with no one in particular.    I am looking at you all, so I am making eye contact is the theme. This is fake eye contact.  You see it most often with politicians, who try to look like they are at one with the masses, but actually don’t engage with any of them.  They dart their eyes left and right, but they are not really looking at anyone.

One of the reasons it is hard to make eye contact is we are not taught how to do so when we are speakers.  We just take our cues from the people we see presenting and imagine that must be how we should do it.  With a large crowd of people peering up at us this can be confronting and make us self-conscious and nervous. Any plans for looking at people are now out the window, as we mentally retreat in fear.  The answer isn’t to look at the crowd as one entity but to look at one person at a time.  We need to break the room up into segments.  You will have those on the left, those in the middle and those on the right.  We can cut this in two and break the venue into those up front and those down the back in the cheap seats.  Our aim is to engage as many people as possible and the best way to do that is to cover each of these segments.  If we are too predictable, say going from left to right, the audience will realise it and will tune us out.  The element of surprise is a good one to keep audiences engaged. 

We take one of these segments and then we choose a single person and we make eye contact with them.  It is very confusing to look at two things at once, so don’t bother with that.  Select one of their eyes and use your two eyes to make eye contact with their one eye.  You will find this much easier.  We have also removed the fear of having a mass of people looking up at us, because we are only looking at a single person.  At a distance, the twenty people sitting around that individual, will think we are looking at them too.

In short order, we can cover a large amount of people in the crowd.  We are only engaging with them for around six seconds, so we can cover a lot of ground in a forty-minute speech.  In fact, we can make eye contact, one on one, with 400 individuals in that one speech.  If we have an audience of fifty people, we can do eight rotations during the forty minute speech and really personalise the occasion. 

Why six seconds and why not four or twenty?  Burning a hole in someone’s retina by making overly long one-on-one eye contact is a bit creepy, a lot of pressure and feels intrusive.  Six seconds gives us enough time to make close contact, personalise what we are saying and yet not be too oppressive for the audience member.  Four seconds just isn’t long enough and we meld into the fake eye contact world.

Engaging our audience is what we are after. Making eye contact, with one individual for  six seconds is how we do it and we try to interact with as many people in the audience as possible over the course of the talk.

It is a mystery why more people don’t bring storytelling into their presentations.  Technical subjects may seem to be oblivious to storytelling, because we are only dealing with hard data.  Absolutely not the case.  This type of dry talk really benefits from injecting stories into the presentation.  Numbers can be brought to life through telling stories.  Our minds are geared up to absorb stories much easier than a download of numbers, so it makes a lot of sense to introduce the stories behind the numbers.  One of the reasons presenters don’t use more stories is they don’t have any.  Or more correctly, they don’t think they have any, which is not the case.

Things happen and there is always a background and a context tucked in behind.  Targets have some basis, but usually we just get the number and not the explanation of the basis.  Strategic directions are set and we just hear the outcome, but we are not told the basis for the idea.  You get the picture.  Behind all of the things which happen in business, there are individuals and circumstances involved and this is where the stories can be found.  We hear about the direction of the new marketing campaign, but that is it.  We need to broaden out the WHY behind these decision and tell the story of how we got to this point. 

For example, if the new marketing campaign is going to be using more influencers we need to explain how that decision came about rather than just announcing “we are going to use more influencers”.  We could explain,  “In January this year Takahashi san and Suzuki san in the marketing department had received a tip off that our key competitor Z Corporation was having success by driving sales in e-commerce, due to recommendations from influencers in social media.  They have been gaining market share of late and initially we didn’t know why.  Suzuki san did some checking on the influencer costs relative to their return and the numbers stacked up very well and so a pilot programme was suggested to test it.  Over a three month period, the pilot programme showed a 27.5% uptick in e-commerce sales”.  

This little vignette is a lot more powerful in persuasion terms, than just saying “we are going to use more influencers”.  We have introduced characters who people will know – Takahashi and Suzuki in the Marketing Department, so this gives more credence to the talk.  We have a timeline – this January and a three month pilot period, so that the audience can plot the timing. There is the bogeyman of Z Corporation getting ahead of us by using influencers and the luck of the tip off, so there is a sense of heightened risk involved if we do nothing.  The outcome of 27.5% is a solid enough improvement during the pilot period to warrant continuing with the e-Commerce strategy using influencers.

All of this information was already available.  The difference is the presenter harvested this context to explain the strategy direction as opposed to just announcing the direction.  That WHY component is absolutely critical to getting people behind the effort.  Without it, all we have is a chorus of critics and naysayers, who want to argue the point based on opinion and no information, other than the announcement.  Once we feed in the background we redirect people’s brains and it is easier to get them to support the new initiative, which is what we want.

On top of the background detail there are other stories we can tell.  These might involve our own experience or the experience of others in the company.  For example, “When Takahashi san and Suzuki san first noticed this influencer strategy by Z Corporation, the Head of the Marketing Department Tanaka san, recalled how in her previous company there had been success using influencers and she encouraged them to investigate if we could match this strategy or not”.  This lends further credence to what we are saying.  Or we might reference something from research or from the media.  “Last year, Takahashi san had come across a broad based five year study on influencer’s impact on e-Commerce sales covering various industries.  The report concluded that for certain products and services there was a very positive ROI involved and that traditional marketing was ignoring this new trend at its peril”.

 We are all seeing reports in the media about trends which influence our markets, but we usually ignore them. We are not thinking that we can possibly use some of these in our presentations and that is a mistake. Keeping abreast of trends is a basic element of professional life. Researching what is out there around the theme of the talk will quickly bring up data which we can turn into stories to support our thesis in the presentation.  The key is to be looking for how we can translate information into stories.  Once we have that idea as a central plank in constructing our talk, we will find there is a rich cornucopia of information out there waiting to be scooped up and converted into stories for our presentation.

In some professions, there is a lot of media scrutiny on what the speaker is saying.  The organisation they represent also has very strict rules around who can say what.  This makes giving the presentation very restrictive and difficult.  Usually, the people in that line of work, are used to giving these types of presentations, so they are accustomed to be being very guarded in their remarks.  They also become very guarded in the way they deliver the presentation.  The danger is the message transmission is being killed off by the restrictions and rigidities of the content and their delivery methodology.

Sentences contain words and they deliver those words.  The problem is they are giving every word equal treatment.  Public speaking is not a democracy, but a dictatorship.  A world ruled by key words and phrases, which must absolutely dominate the plebeian words which link and connect the core content together.  These key words are handcrafted for special attention, with the view that their elevation during the presentation will drive home the key messages more effectively.  Our speaker was a democrat, as far as not granting special favours to key words by hitting them harder or softer than the rest.  He spoke in an even tempo, with the same power throughout the talk.

Given his profession, it was natural that he would read the document.  That document had to be cleared for release and many eyes would have scrutinised it for any irregularities.  It had been thoroughly cleansed of any potential controversy by the time it was presented.  There was also simultaneous translation going on and in fact the translator had the same text in Japanese to work from.  This is a golden way of ensuring that what is meant to be said, is coming across exactly as it should, in Japanese as well as English.  Freestyling is frowned upon because this is where things can be said, as an aside, which make the front pages of the media and cause the speaker to lose their job.  No wonder caution is the name of the game.

Does this mean that these types of talk are doomed forever to be dull and boring?  I have mentioned voice modulation, through word and phrase emphasis as a way of departing from the usual monotone delivery.  The latter is almost 100% guaranteed to put people to sleep.  Pauses also can add gravitas to what we have said, as we allow our audience a little time to digest the deeper meanings and nuances of what we have just said.  We can add gestures to bring strength to a point we are making, as we engage our body language and don’t just abandon our hands to the task of page turning. 

We can work the room with eye contact.  We can look at individuals in the audience, grab their attention and then read the next sentence to them.  They feel we are appealing directly to them, as we again direct our eyes to theirs, after we finish the sentence.  We cannot be satisfied with a broad sweep of the room with our eye contact, effectively looking at everyone at the same time and so therefore, no one in particular.  This is where pausing is so powerful.  By stopping what we are saying, we are forcing the audience to look at us, to hang on our next words in anticipation.  This is how we can funnel attention.  This means the speech has to be designed for this and not created as a mad rush to the end, to get it all done in the time allocated.  Less is more for us and we should build in pauses into the delivery.

Our facial expressions are so much more powerful that any slides on a screen. We need to engage our face and combine our expressions with certain key words and phrases.  It may mean becoming more animated in our expression, looking quizzical, upset, concerned, happy, excited, etc.

One notable absence from these types of rigid talks is storytelling.  The presenters are usually elite, powerful people. They can relate stories about well known figures. They can drop names and get away with it, because it is all congruent with the circles they move in.  The story can be cleared for telling and if necessary the name of the key person in the story can be hidden. The point can be attached to that individual, without identifying them by name and a strong connection made about the key message being communicated.  It also allows the message to be humanised and as an audience, that is very appealing because we may not be able to move in such stratospheric circles, but we love hearing about what they are getting up to.

Getting our slide deck functioning properly is another simple fix.  We don't compromise the approved content, but we can make it more accessible to the audience.  As with many others, this speaker often had three or four slides all combined into one, such that the individual parts were too small in size and so hard to see.  We should be aiming for one idea per slide and to make the content as large as possible on screen.

With a few tweeks, even the most rigid talk can be brought to life in the hands of a polished speaker.  Because it so rare to see this done, most people go through life squelching the life out of their super formal talks, in their attempt to conform to the rigidities the organisation demands.  If we know what we are doing, we can stand out and show how it should be done, no matter how restrictive the occasion.

We know that being formal and stiff creates distance between the speaker and the audience.  We also know that a “conversational tone” is ideal, as it creates a strong feeling of inclusivity between the presenter and those in the room.  That conversational tone means a relaxed style on the part of the speaker, but how relaxed?  We gauge people’s education and intelligence level by the way they speak.  So we want to sound smart, but we don’t want to sound snobby.  Where is the line?

If you speak with a regional or national accent, should you stick with that or should you OxBridge it up?  Typical Australians have very strong accents.  Educated urban Australians speak quite differently to rural dwellers and the further you go from the coast, the stronger the accent becomes.  Television presenters in Australia all spoke as if they were aping BBC presenters until the 1960s, when television commercials started adopting the lingua franca of the masses.  I have read that in the USA, regional accents are a barrier in many cases and as people move around for work, they have to change the way they speak to be better respected. So, when presenting should you present in a more highbrow fashion and change your diction or speak as if you would to one of your local neighbours?  

It will depend to a great extent on your audience and the topic.  If I was presenting to a room full of Aussies and I put on a posh OxBridge accent, that would be seen as fake and lacking in authenticity and would impact how my message was received.  If I was presenting to a room full of well educated Aussies, in a down and dirty local Brisbane boy accent, that would also have a negative impact.  If it was a highbrow topic, I would be seen as uneducated and therefore not seen as credible for that audience. 

In Japan, I often speak to national Chambers of Commerce.  Often these are mixed audiences of non-native speakers.  Generally, the international businesspeople you meet in Tokyo speak excellent English, no matter where they come from.  However, my Aussie vowels can confuse people at times.  I think I am saying “a” and they are hearing “I”.  It is always a surprise for me, because I thought I had moved on from that.  I have learnt to neutralise my accent for the most part, when speaking to these groups, in order to have the greatest shot at getting my message across. 

Am I being authentic, if I am not speaking as I would back in Brisbane? I think there is room for variation of our accents to give us the best communication vehicle to get the job done.  If I go all OxBridge though, then that is too much, because I am not British and not a graduate of either of those storied universities and now I am just faking it for effect.  If I put on an American accent, that would be ridiculous as well and I am not sure I could carry it off anyway.  I go for a neutral accent, which will give me the greatest access to the listener’s attention and will sound both natural and unforced.

What about the way we present? Should we be standing around in a relaxed fashion, as we would down the pub or should we be there ramrod straight and upstanding?  Should we put our hands in our trouser pockets or keep them out?  Should we be leaning on the rostrum as we talk or should we be standing with 50/50 weight displacement on our feet?  I think standing up straight with a 50/50 split is the most professional approach, but it doesn't have to be stiff and tense.  Just standing up straight with the knees unlocked is enough.  You look good without looking forced.  

Hands in the trouser pockets is usually the male speaker thrusting them in there, because he doesn't know what to do with his hands.  The most natural position is for the hands to just hang by the side of your body.  To find that magic spot, just raise your arms up to a 90 degree angle to the floor and then drop them.  Where they land is the most natural position for them when you are not employing them for gestures.  Hands in the pocket, behind the back, fig leaf in front of the groin, are all guaranteed to restrict your use of gestures and that should be avoided at all costs. 

We need our hands to add power to the point we are making and we want to treat it like a faucet.  We turn the gestures on and then we turn them off again.  We don’t hold the same gesture for longer than 15 seconds, because the power just dies after that point and it adds no value to anything we are doing.   Don’t forget about your hands and just allow the same gesture to linger long. People become self-conscious about where their hands are, but if you are using your eyes, face and voice to engage the audience, they won’t be paying any attention to your hands in the rest position.  Your gestures will come up in a natural way and the audience won't think twice about what you are doing, as it just fits in nicely with the whole flow of the presentation. 

Our audience and topic will determine how we choose to speak and how we decide to present.  There is a range we can adopt and we should use that range to suit our purposes.  The extremes of that range are where we will get ourselves into trouble and we should avoid doing that if want our message to get through.