The chances of this happening anywhere is pretty remote, but especially so in Japan.  Audiences here are polite and wouldn’t be so rude as to interrupt the speaker.  Having said that, things can happen for which you are not prepared.  I was delivering my debut speech in Nagoya, as the founding Australian Consul, in Japanese, and the unexpected happened.  A local representative of one of the main Japanese government organisations was sitting in the front row on my left.  I began the speech with a very standard Japanese opening, appreciating everyone coming to hear me when they are all so busy.  I barely got that phrase out of my mouth when he erupted in very loud laughter. 

The unexpected is more likely though, with foreigners in the audience.  Depending on the occasion, it could be one of the big bosses weighing in on what you are saying or one of your ambitious colleagues trying to make you look bad, so that they get the promotion and not you.  Regardless, what can we do in these unexpected situations?

 In that first example, I was nervous enough giving my debut speech as the Consul and giving it in Japanese.  I was dumbfounded by his outburst, because I took it he was laughing at my language skills and I still had another thirty-nine minutes to go speaking in Japanese.  I girded my loins and kept going because I didn’t have a choice.  I wasn’t reading the speech, so it was all coming out of my brain, trying to follow the navigation I had planned for the talk. 

 I noticed that some members of the audience were appreciating the fact I was speaking in Japanese and seemed to follow what I was saying.  I ignored that ignoramus and concentrated on the people who were nodding, smiling or at least looking neutral.  This helped my confidence to return and I could carry on.  I recommend you do the same.  There is very little chance of a cabal of hecklers disrupting your talk, so you will probably only face one person and there are plenty of other people in the audience to interact with.

 If there is just one comment, I would just ignore it and carry on as if nothing happened.  If the talk is internal and heckler is your boss, then you have a different problem and you need to stop and get more detail on what is causing the unhappiness.  If it is a sharp elbowed rival, I would just ignore the interruption.  If the rival or the heckler at a public speech should continue with their outbursts, then you have to stop and deal with it.  How should we deal with it though?

 First of all we need to understand this person is not your friend, so forget trying to win them over to your point of view.  They are interrupting everything to show the rest of the audience how awesome and smart they are, by challenging the speaker on what they are saying.  I would ask them to elaborate on their point. I would look straight at them the whole time and not nod or move my face.  Nodding looks like you are agreeing with what they saying and we may do it out of nervousness or habit.  Don’t.  Just look at them and let them speak.  When they finish, we start our reply and we keep maintaining eye contact and after that we never give them any more eye contact.  We address the rest of our answer to the other members of the audience.

By ignoring them, we are taking all the air out of their balloon and withdrawing the ego driven attention they have been so fervently seeking.  We look at the members of the audience who look friendly, supportive or at least not negative.  We give them each six seconds of eye contact and we just keep repeating this throughout the rest of the talk.

 We will do our best to answer their concern and one thing we should never do is ask if they are happy with our explanation. They are not heckling to get illumination. They are there to provide heat to the speaker and make us look bad. We just give our answer and we say something like, “Now I will get back to our topic for today” and we just keep going, ignoring them the rest of time. If the heckler is taking the talk off topic, we should stop them and say we will be happy to discuss their point after the talk and then get back to what we were saying.  If they still want to continue, again, we tell them we are happy to talk at the end and we pick up where we left off.

 The key to remember is that even though we can be quite nervous without this extra pressure, the majority of the audience are with us.  They think the heckler is a jerk and very rude, so they immediately side with us against them.  They didn’t come here to be part of a bun fight between the speaker and the crowd and they feel their time is being wasted by this very selfish person.  So keep going and look confident and positive, no matter how you are feeling on the inside.  The audience will go with your confidence and support you.

 We often mix up words like metaphor and analogy, using them in the wrong context.  Anecdote is another word we often use, but sometimes are not sure what it means.  Basically, it is storytelling about a real incident or about a person.  I was reminded of the power of the anecdote the other day, when listening to a presentation to a select private group, by an international captain of industry.  He was going through what their firm was doing globally and particularly here in Japan.  As presentations go, it was mostly the “inform” variety with a few sprinklings of the “impress” dimension.  That is to say, it was fairly dry, except for a couple of occasions when he related an anecdote about what they were doing and what they had found.

These brief interventions lifted the whole proceedings up into the “insight” category of communication.  That is a much richer dimension and as listeners, we feel we are getting real value here from this speaker.  The speech basically followed the guidelines of a similar speech he had given recently and he was using slides as his navigation.  The rules of this private study group is that we don’t use slides to show what we are talking about.  We just speak and then take questions in depth on the topic.  He was allowed to use the slide deck as his personal navigation for the talk.  Interestingly the anecdotes were not in the deck.  They came out spontaneously as he searched for illustrations and examples to further flesh out his points.  What a contrast.  We were getting fed corporate pap for the most part and then “bingo”, out pops a valuable morsel.

This tells me that he had not planned his talk to maximise the insights they had learnt from running their business globally and in Japan.  Why would that be?  This is a very common problem with presenters.  They are in the “inform” mode of presentations and think that reeling off data and facts is all that is required.  These accidental sharings were the most valuable part of the whole talk.  We should try to eliminate the accidental nature of these sharings and actually plan to inject them into the talk from the very start. 

I am sure his approach was to take a chronological survey of the company and then just build on that, to highlight the main iterations over time.  What if he had said, “right, I am going to sit down and draw out what we have learnt from doing business here in Japan and gather the widsom together”.  Following that he could arrange the structure of the talk around these learnings and present the context and background, so it would be easy for the audience to follow. We still need the “inform” part, because that context gives the insights their power.  It makes them stand out from the ordinary and trumpets the learnings. Business audiences, in my experience, are always hungry to learn.  In particular, they love to hear about disasters, so that they can make sure they don’t replicate the same issue in their world.

It is hard to be bursting with insights, so we are not talking about a talk with wall to wall insights flowing constantly like a massive waterfall.  However, we do things and we do learn what works and what doesn’t.  The difference is the speaker has a mind to capture these and store that information away for when it is needed.  Most people just forget about the insight and move on, because there is always so much more data and information coming at them.  That endless supply dilutes the key points we the audience need to retain.  So from now on, if you hear a good insight or you discover one in your business, find a place to capture that and have it in your mind to use in a future talk.

One other thing is to be excited about the insight and frame it for the audience.  Our speaker on this occasion never got excited about the insights and spoke throughout with the exact same energy when describing something terribly mundane and when talking about something much more breakthrough.  We need to raise our energy and enthusiasm when we get to the juicy bits, so that the audience knows – here comes something very valuable.  We can frame it too.  We can say, “Let me tell you about something which proved to be such a valuable lesson for us”, or “I came across this understanding which really transformed our business here in Japan” or “let me tell you an insight which saved us from disaster”.  The audience will be guaranteed to be on the edge of their seats to hear what is going to come next and that is exactly where we want them.

So, start with the insights when designing the talk and wrap them up in a clear context.  Make sure the audience can fully appreciate the value they are receiving.  Seize those anecdotes and put them to good use.

The chances of this happening anywhere is pretty remote, but especially so in Japan.  Audiences here are polite and wouldn’t be so rude as to interrupt the speaker.  Having said that, things can happen for which you are not prepared.  I was delivering my debut speech in Nagoya, as the founding Australian Consul, in Japanese, and the unexpected happened.  A local representative of one of the main Japanese government organisations was sitting in the front row on my left.  I began the speech with a very standard Japanese opening, appreciating everyone coming to hear me when they are all so busy.  I barely got that phrase out of my mouth when he erupted in very loud laughter. 

The unexpected is more likely though, with foreigners in the audience.  Depending on the occasion, it could be one of the big bosses weighing in on what you are saying or one of your ambitious colleagues trying to make you look bad, so that they get the promotion and not you.  Regardless, what can we do in these unexpected situations?

 In that first example, I was nervous enough giving my debut speech as the Consul and giving it in Japanese.  I was dumbfounded by his outburst, because I took it he was laughing at my language skills and I still had another thirty-nine minutes to go speaking in Japanese.  I girded my loins and kept going because I didn’t have a choice.  I wasn’t reading the speech, so it was all coming out of my brain, trying to follow the navigation I had planned for the talk. 

 I noticed that some members of the audience were appreciating the fact I was speaking in Japanese and seemed to follow what I was saying.  I ignored that ignoramus and concentrated on the people who were nodding, smiling or at least looking neutral.  This helped my confidence to return and I could carry on.  I recommend you do the same.  There is very little chance of a cabal of hecklers disrupting your talk, so you will probably only face one person and there are plenty of other people in the audience to interact with.

 If there is just one comment, I would just ignore it and carry on as if nothing happened.  If the talk is internal and heckler is your boss, then you have a different problem and you need to stop and get more detail on what is causing the unhappiness.  If it is a sharp elbowed rival, I would just ignore the interruption.  If the rival or the heckler at a public speech should continue with their outbursts, then you have to stop and deal with it.  How should we deal with it though?

 First of all we need to understand this person is not your friend, so forget trying to win them over to your point of view.  They are interrupting everything to show the rest of the audience how awesome and smart they are, by challenging the speaker on what they are saying.  I would ask them to elaborate on their point. I would look straight at them the whole time and not nod or move my face.  Nodding looks like you are agreeing with what they saying and we may do it out of nervousness or habit.  Don’t.  Just look at them and let them speak.  When they finish, we start our reply and we keep maintaining eye contact and after that we never give them any more eye contact.  We address the rest of our answer to the other members of the audience.

By ignoring them, we are taking all the air out of their balloon and withdrawing the ego driven attention they have been so fervently seeking.  We look at the members of the audience who look friendly, supportive or at least not negative.  We give them each six seconds of eye contact and we just keep repeating this throughout the rest of the talk.

 We will do our best to answer their concern and one thing we should never do is ask if they are happy with our explanation. They are not heckling to get illumination. They are there to provide heat to the speaker and make us look bad. We just give our answer and we say something like, “Now I will get back to our topic for today” and we just keep going, ignoring them the rest of time. If the heckler is taking the talk off topic, we should stop them and say we will be happy to discuss their point after the talk and then get back to what we were saying.  If they still want to continue, again, we tell them we are happy to talk at the end and we pick up where we left off.

 The key to remember is that even though we can be quite nervous without this extra pressure, the majority of the audience are with us.  They think the heckler is a jerk and very rude, so they immediately side with us against them.  They didn’t come here to be part of a bun fight between the speaker and the crowd and they feel their time is being wasted by this very selfish person.  So keep going and look confident and positive, no matter how you are feeling on the inside.  The audience will go with your confidence and support you.

I had an interesting collision of presenting styles recently.  We were conducting one of our High Impact Presentations Courses and I was one of the two instructors for this programme.  On Day One, a very important pivot takes place.  They do three presentations that day and during the third one, they stop focusing on themselves.  In the first two, they are consumed with nerves and trying to remember all of the things they are supposed to be doing. 

One participant publicly mentioned that she hates having a room full of people staring up at her when she presents.  It makes her feel tremendously nervous and she feels great fear as a result.  Sure enough, she looked totally nervous and very uncomfortable during that first presentation.  We have two instructors, so that one can review the video of the presentation with them, immediately after they finish in the main room.  What a change, when I got to review her third presentation with her that first day. 

Like all class participants, she was looking for all the things which were imperfect.  In Dale Carnegie, we don’t dwell on what isn’t working, because we are too busy looking for what is working and for what can work even better.  I said to her, “Look at this person on screen.  She looks very confident and not at all nervous”.  Sure enough, by the third presentation, she had made that important pivot to stop focusing on her nerves and to try to start engaging with the audience in the room.  Everyone assembled in the room was directing their eyes to her, watching her, staring up at her.  The very thing which she had noted made her supremely nervous, yet by number three, she had forgotten all about that. She was totally focused on others and not on herself.  Now she was concentrating on engaging her audience with her message.

After the two days of teaching the main modules, I attended an event the next evening for a major luxury brand. The Japan CEO gave a brief presentation.  He was bilingual, handsome, and full of confidence.  He gave a very good presentation, but it wasn’t the full package.  Why?  The missing vital ingredient was that he wasn’t engaging his audience and using that framework to drive his message home.  Like most public speakers you will see, he was lacking that engagement factor.  Check it the next time you see someone present. Are they talking “at” their audience or “with” their audience?

His voice was clear and at a good volume, he used humour well, the slides were acceptable, his energy was great, but he wasn’t getting his message through.  He was spraying his message to those assembled that evening.  Everyone was getting the message at the same time, in the same way, so it meant that no one was actually getting a personalised message. It was a shotgun approach, and he needed to be a sniper instead.

If he had directed his eye contact for six seconds each, with each person gathered there, he could cover ten people a minute.  That is a very powerful personal connection – one on one, rather than en masse.  In his fifteen minute talk, he could have easily made a direct connection with one hundred and fifty people.  There were only about fifty people, so he could have covered every single person in that room multiple times.

The next morning, I attended another networking event and here was another bilingual, handsome, confident CEO presenter.  He had a good voice, good phrasing, displayed lots of energy. The slides could have been simpler, though.  Unlike the presenter the evening before, he was spending a lot of time wandering around when speaking.  The movement added no value to the talk and in fact, was distracting. By the way, next time you have a chance, take note of presenters who wander around and ask yourself – is their movement habit adding any value to their message? Back to this speaker. He almost had the full package, but again that same vital ingredient of audience engagement was missing. He was another shotgun speaker.  He was spraying his message across the entire room to everyone, at the same time and so to no one in particular.

There were about 60 people sitting there and he spoke for forty minutes.  That means he could make direct six second eye contact with four hundred people, so again a chance for at least six multiple direct touches with each person in that size of crowd.  Engaging the listeners is how we get our message to sink in.  Just speaking at them doesn’t do it.  it is like being bathed in a morning mist and you feel a little damp, but soon that evaporates and you move on.  His message mist evaporated and was not retained by his audience.  If we asked those assembled what they remember from the talk, I will guess not much and probably not the key points he wanted them to keep.

Just making that one switch in eye contact in the training made a total difference to how well the class participants got their message across.  These two CEOs also need to get their message across too and yet they are falling short at the finish line.  The takeaway here is don’t spray your audience. Instead, engage them, one by one, and keep engaging them right through the talk.  If the object is to get them to accept your message, then this is the secret of how to achieve that goal.

Presenting is physical labour.  We can do it with minimal energy or we can expend large amounts of effort.  There are dangers with both extremes.  The dull speaker, barely getting the words out of their mouth and hard to hear, isn’t going to ignite much interest from the members of the audience.  The nervous speaker, pacing across the stage like a junk yard dog prowling the fence perimeter, is very tiring to watch.  The energy output cannot be at one constant setting either.  Full bore on being boring and hard to hear and full bore on extreme outputs throughout, both tune the audience out.  Variety is the key to keeping the audience with you.  They get into a rhythm, and we have to become asynchronous in our delivery, to break their rhythm to maintain a stranglehold on their attention.

Today we are in the Age of Distraction, with our audiences being trained on social media one minute video outputs, sharply shortening their attention spans.  Anytime the audience gets too much of the one thing they get bored. They are scrambling to get their phones to escape us and access more interesting content, all instantly available on the internet.  Delivery which is too soft, too loud, too continuously the same thing, will see audiences flee us. 

There are key words and phrases we need to highlight with either more power in or less power in.  A secretive yet audible whisper is just as powerful as shouting a word to the audience.  The point is the whole sentence can’t be a whisper or a shout, but only handcrafted words and phrases which we highlight for effect to get into the febrile attention span of the listeners.

Pauses are blank space which can elevate words and phrases which come before or after.  It allows the audience to focus on what is coming or on what has just been said.  When we speak continuously without breaks, it is like winter surf, where the big rollers crash on to the shore, each one wiping out the residue of the previous one.  We want a break here with a pause where the attention span can be elevated and the content can receive the concentration it deserves.

Our gestures must link up with our words and be congruent with what we are saying.  If we need a big gesture we should deliver one.  Often, when we are teaching participants public speaking, they are fearful to make a big movement with their gestures.  When we replay the video and ask them if the larger gesture we have coached for looks crazy or out of place, they always say “no” it looks congruent.  We can use gestures in creative ways.  If we talk about something in the past, we can thrust our arm backward to emphasise the point, this is in the past, it is behind us.

If we refer to ourselves, we can bring both hands back to point at our chest.  It indicates we are talking about ourselves and not someone else.  If we want to involve the audience, we can spread our arms wide and open our palms out, to indicate our listeners.  If we want to show some scale either small or large, we can use our hands to do that.  If I lift my right hand to the top of my head or above and cup the hand, so it is ninety degrees to the floor, it indicates a measuring rod to show height or scale.  If I push my hand down by my side and hold the palm ninety degrees to the floor, it indicates a low height or a small amount.  If I say, “the whole world…” a good gesture is to spread my arms wide and extend my hands to the side at about 170 degrees. Bringing my palms together right in front of my chest shows something very small or narrow.

Breath control is important for singers who are using their voice as their medium. They get training for this but what about speakers, who are using their voice as their medium of communication.  Normally, no one gets any training.  The singer and the speaker secret is lower diaphragm breathing.  This means the lower abdomen expands and contracts as we breathe, rather than having the breath focused in the upper chest.  Place your hand on the front of your tummy at about navel height.  When you breathe in the tummy should expand out and push against your hand.  When you exhale, it should contract and draw your hands into toward your body.  This gives us a rich source of oxygen and breath control to use when speaking, such that we never sound tinny and short of breath.

Another powerful element for speakers is to project your ki (気) or intrinsic energy into the audience.  By directing your energy into those in front of you, they feel energised by you and they keep listening, rather than reaching for their phone to escape.  Try to imagine you are pushing your energy to the back wall of the venue, covering the entire audience.  Don’t keep your intrinsic energy bottled up inside of you – share it with the assembled masses. To help with this, use big gestures and use voice power when speaking loudly, to drive the force into the audience in front of you.  This requires conscious thought at first, but after a while you will be doing this naturally, without any thought required.

We have physical power and we need to plan for this when we are preparing to give talks.  This is another reason why rehearing our presentations is so important.  If we work on these things in preparation for the talk we will be able execute them during our presentation.