Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is a bad idea and yet so many presenters do it.  I was attending an Annual General Meeting event and the organisation President gave a short talk.  The content was appropriate for the occasion. The length was good, not too long and not too short, the voice strength loud enough to be easily heard, and the cadence was easy to follow.  Unfortunately, he managed to slip an “um” into just about every sentence.  This is a filler word to allow the brain to assemble the next words, and it is always a catastrophe for presenters. 

He was a mature man, so presumably, he has always been peppering his sentences with this filler word and has now built it into a solid habit.  I am not even sure he is aware he is doing it, but as the listener, it grates on you and grates every sentence. Effectively, he is opposing himself whenever he speaks.  He has his message he wants to impart, and he defeats that message getting through, by creating an annoying distraction for his audience.

There is a cure for this bad habit and it just talks time, patience and discipline to break it.  Pursing our lips becomes the technological intervention we need to stop using filler words.  When we start a sentence, hit the first word with a little more strength than the other words, so that no filler word can intervene.  We now concentrate on speaking continuously and smoothly with no breaks – again we deny filler words any entry points. 

When we get to the end of the sentence, we purse our lips together, so no words can emerge and we get ready to hit the next first word in the sentence slightly harder than the other words.  We just keep repeating this process.

 It won’t eliminate filler words automatically or immediately, but you will find you no longer start your sentence, as a lot of people do, with “um”.  The flow continuity of the sentence is important. That doesn’t mean we cannot use pauses. 

The pauses need the same application I described we should use at the start of the sentence.  When you get to a pause, you are effectively starting again, so purse the lips so no “ums’ can emerge and hit that next word a little harder, so no “ums” can intervene when you restart.

Keep working on this pattern and eventually you will almost entirely eliminate filler words.  I know this is true, because like everyone else, I was using “ums’ and “ahs” too.  Once I worked on eliminating them using this technique, life got a lot better.  It is a very rare occasion today that a filler word slips into my sentences.  I do a lot of training and public speaking which is not me reading stuff but coming straight out of my brain.  This means there is always the problems of trying to think what I want to say and having a filler word pop up. When I look at the videos of my presentations, I can see that there are almost no filler words, so the system is working.

I was watching a video on how shoes are handmade and the cobbler had a habit of saying “you know” in almost every sentence.  Technically, this is not a filler word, but it is a bad habit and again distracts the audience from our message.  Not just humble cobblers get trapped with these junk expressions, which add no value to what we are saying.  I was chatting with a high-powered lawyer here about how important presenting skills were for lawyers. He agreed, and he assured me he was always making an effort to speak well and differentiate himself from all the other hungry lawyers out there looking for new clients.  Lo and behold, next minute he was up on stage in a panel discussion and there they were, a continuous string of “you know” combos distracting from what he was saying.

Another one is “like” which gets thrown in for no reason.  It gets quite sad, when the really challenged start linking them together, “Um, well you know, like.…”.  This is a lifetime of habit formation with no conscious thought going into the process of presenting in front of others.  As I said, video is such a great tool.  Whenever I present, I always try to video myself.  I do this to drive the content out through social media but also so that I can check myself to see if I have any bad habits creaping in.

Just in case you get the impression I see myself perfect, I am working on my overuse of “so”.  I have a habit of abusing this word as a bridge between chapters or sections of what I am going to say.  I will finish one point then add “so” with a pause and move on to the next section.  Once in a talk is okay, but more than that and it becomes a distraction I need to eliminate.  I need to train myself to use a variety of expressions such as, “let’s move on”, “another key point is”, “next”, “let’s talk about”, etc. I realised I had developed this habit when I watched myself on video. I was not conscious I was using that bridge so often, so video review is always a good idea, no matter how much presenting we do.

What a double act they were. Two economists giving us some insights into where the markets are going and making sense of the world we face.  Anytime you see an event where there is going to be some crystal ball gazing going on about where we are headed in the global economy, you want to be there.  We are all more risk averse than greedy, and we want to cocoon ourselves from trouble by getting some early warning of what to expect.  This was a Chamber of Commerce event, so I knew a lot of the attendees and did my best to exchange business cards with those I didn’t already know. In the process of doing so, I gained a very clear idea of who was in the room, what industry sectors they were in, and the relative size of their companies.  Neither of the double act speakers did that.

They migrated straight to the VIP table and sat there waiting to go on.  They were there to present, and that was it in their minds. For speakers, that is a basic error.  In many cases these days, the event hosts won’t share the details of who is attending.  We should always get there early and try to meet as many of the members of the audience as we can.  This does a couple of things. 

It connects us with complete strangers and creates a level of rapport with the listeners, which translates into support for us as the presenter.  It also enables us to gauge who is in the room, how senior they are, how big their operation is and how long they have been in Japan.  This is important, because we can adjust the level we set for the presentation to make sure we are not speaking down to anyone or over their heads. 

Our speakers didn’t bother to analyse their audience before they launched forth with their canned presentation. I say “canned” because it was obvious they had been travelling around APAC giving this same presentation to various audiences.  The first speaker was comfortable as a public speaker and had given many talks in his role as an economist.  He did a couple of things I found annoying, as someone in my role who instructs people on how to present.  He was good in many ways, but certainly not perfect. 

One thing I don’t recommend is wandering around the stage as you talk.  He did this and really, the movement had no relevance to the talk.  There should be some theory behind the movement rather than just sashaying around the stage to show you are a seasoned speaker.  There are three distances we can use.  If we want to make a macro point we can move to the back of the venue, away from the crowd.  If we want to make a micro point, we can move very close to members of the audience and deliver our comments at a very close quarters.  We shouldn’t stay in either position for too long and we should then move to a middle, more neutral position.

When we move around, we create a distraction from our message.  If we move, then we move with purpose and use those three distances, I noted, to our advantage. Otherwise, we anchor ourselves and use our neck to swivel around to make eye contact with members of the audience.  As he was wandering around, he was looking in the general direction of his audience and successfully making no specific eye contact with anyone.  That is a big opportunity lost to connect one on one with members of our audience.

There was one more problem with his talk.  The flair of public speaking was on display but the content was rather “so what”.  I keep up to date with the media and probably so did everyone else in that audience, so there were no “oh wow” moments.  I felt cheated that I had wasted my time and money listening to someone who didn’t deliver any value to my investment in attending the talk.

His colleague had the same wanderlust, although a little more restrained.  He also was someone who did these types of talks on a regular basis, so he was plainly comfortable to be standing up in front of a crowd and talking.  The problem became obvious almost immediately when he started putting up his slides.  They were very difficult to understand.  For whatever reason there were a lot of acronyms in use and abbreviations.  This made parsing the content on screen extremely difficult. His method of explaining it all was also complicated to a simple punter like me.  People I spoke to afterward said they were also struggling to follow where he was going.

This was an unforced error on his part. He didn’t research his audience to understand at what level he needed to pitch the talk.  It was way over the heads of this audience, but he probably still has no idea of that, because he wasn’t engaging his listeners.  When you single people out for six seconds of eye contact and you work the room using this technique, you can see in their eyes if they are following you or not and you can adjust.  He was blind to the take up of the talk, because he wasn’t using any eye contact.

As a double act, they were duds, for different reasons and they hurt their personal and professional brands.  It didn’t have to be like that and with some minor adjustments, they could have done a much better job.  We should take their faults to heart and make sure we are not reproducing them ourselves. 

Value is a difficult thing to pin down.  In any audience, there is bound to be a wide range of interests, needs, and wants.  How do we decipher that array into a presentation which meets all expectations?  Well, we can’t.  There are too many variables at play, so we have to work on hitting the target for the majority of those who have assembled to hear us speak.  There is a designated theme for the talk, hosted by an organisation whose members have aligned around a central set of interests.  That is a good starting point to ascertain which angle of approach will be the best and most effective. Within that broad spectrum, we have our own areas of expertise and interest, and we seek the nexus of those two forces to find the right theme for the talk. 

Having worked out which theme and approach will meet the needs of most of the audience, we need to look for our value bombs.  What do we know which they don’t?  What valuable experiences have we had, which they won’t have had?  What dead ends and failed missions have we experienced, which they won’t have had as yet and will want to avoid?  The process of elimination is at work here as we dissect our own knowledge bank and our host of experiences, as we draw on the resources we have available to us for assembling the talk.

There is a balance between talking about ourselves and making it relevant to the audience.  Some speakers get that line of demarcation confused and spend too much time on their own glorious career.  They forget the audience is not like us and have different drivers of importance to them.  Our examples, from our own hard wrought experiences, are certainly powerful and appealing to an audience.  However, we have to move from the specifics about us to the broader frame of reference to how the audience can apply the lessons we have learnt.

This is where the value transition takes place.  We need to craft that transition carefully.  This is what happened to me – the incident; this is what I learnt as a result – the insight; and here is what you can learn and apply for yourself – the application.  This incident-insight-application formula is a very handy frame of reference to throw over the talk we are designing, to make sure we can draw out the value for the listeners. 

Because it happened to us, it is true.  Now what we deduce from the experience can be debated, but usually when everyone shares the same context, the chances are high that similar conclusions will be reached. This lessens the chances of an audience disagreeing with our findings.  The application has to be broad enough to capture the various situations of those in the audience.  There is usually a range of industry sectors, ages, genders and experience sets we have to appeal to.

A good way to cover off this variety is to think about what would be the top five possible applications of our insight for this audience.  Probably we won’t get everyone perfectly included, but the chances are high we will get the majority catered for.  Even if we use the rule of three and say here are the three best applications of this idea, that will usually be enough if we think that five is stretching things too much. 

When we line up the experience, insight and application, the audience can all see that we are providing value, even if it happens that we are not hitting that particular person’s bullseye.  That effort to make the talk relevant for the listeners will be appreciated and it shows we really know what we are talking about. 

Pontificating is great fun, but audiences usually want the lessons on what not to do and what to do in that order.  The risk averse nature of people requires that we outline where we failed as a warning lesson to others, that they should avoid doing what we did and save themselves a lot of money and trouble in the process.  Everyone loves a good train wreck story, and I am sure we all have plenty of them to share.

The design stage of any talk is critical and so let’s make sure we are thinking value provision from the very start, as an overall guiding light before do anything else.  What value do we have to offer and work from there to align that with the likely members of the audience for our talk.  Include some “don’t do this folks” lessons and everyone will be happy.

We love another acronym, not!  It is a handy memory jogger though, so let’s persevere with yet another one.  Whenever you are in a situation where you need to get collaboration,  support, funding or agreement, then the EAR formula is a very effective tool for presenters.  It is simplicity itself in terms of understanding the formula.  The delivery though is the key and this will make all the difference.

The Formula stands for E – Event, A – Action and R – Result.  It is quite counterintuitive and therein lies a lot of its success.  It is disarming and makes the presenter a small target for opposition to what they are recommending.  Often, we have something we want and our first instinct is to just blurt it out.  We have convinced ourselves that it is the best course of action, the most logical, high value approach and obviously the weight of all of these factors will automatically sway our listeners to adopt our recommendation.

What is the reaction to all of this blurting though?  Immediately the audience hears what we have to say, we are suddenly facing a crowd of card carrying sceptics.  We shouldn’t be surprised but we usually are.  What have we done?  We have offered the flimsiest tissue of an idea to the listeners and expected them to extrapolate what they have heard to encompass the full weight of our argument.  Of course we are intending to now launch into the detail of the idea, the rationale, the evidence etc.  This makes sense.  We are taught at business school to get the executive summary to the top of the report and then go into labyrinthine detail on why this idea makes a lot sense.  When it is in document form, the audience do read the detail and do pay attention to the proof of our idea.

Sadly, when we are live, they lose all senses and depart from the plan.  They hear our raw unaided, unprotected, unabashed idea and they go into deafness.  Their eyes are open but their mind has raced away to a distant place, where they are roiling through why this blurted idea makes little or no sense, or why it flies in the face of their experience or expectations, or a thousand other reasons why this simply won’t work.  We have lost their attention.

Instead we apply the EAR formula and we take them to a place in their mind’s eye.  There must be a reason why we believe what we think and that must have come from a limited number of sources – what we heard, read or experienced.  The Event piece is to reconstruct that moment when we had our epiphany, our realisation our breakthrough on this idea.  We want to transport them to the spot too, so that they can reconstruct the roots of this idea.

We don’t have unlimited time for this and we are telling a story, but it is a brief story.  If we get tangled up in the intricacies of the story and are going on and on, then the listeners will become impatient and dissatisfied.  If they are our bosses they will just tell us “to hurry up and get on with it”.

The secret is to put in the season – a snowy day, a hot summers day, a fall day, a spring day.  We can all imagine what that would look like, because it corresponds to our own experience and we can visualise it. We now locate the moment – a dark wood panelled boardroom, a meeting room at the headquarters, a Zoom call, on the factory or shop floor etc.  Again we paint the picture of the scene.  Not just a factory, but which factory, what type of factory, how did it look.  People they know should be introduced into the story where possible.  These actors may be known to them and this adds credibility to the story and the point. 

The bulk of the speaking time is given over to the telling of the background of how we got to this idea.  An excellent outcome is upon hearing all of this background context, the listener is racing ahead of us and drawing their own conclusions on what needs to be done based on the evidence given.  Given the same context, the chances are strong that they have reached the same conclusion we have, looking at the same evidence.

After we tell the story we lower the boom and hit them with our call to action.  This is A- Action we want them to take component.  The big mistake a lot of people make at this point is to just keep adding a series of actions, rather than singling out one central action we want executed.  We cannot distract them or nudge them away from considering one decision only.  Take action or not.  This part of the puzzle is about 5-10 seconds long.  This forces us to be crystal clear on what is the one thing we want them to do.  For example, “So based on the research, I recommend we begin a prototype and test our assumptions”. 

We cannot let that hang there alone.  We need to back it up with one of the goodies that will come with it and we must settle on the most powerful “Result” we will enjoy if they take our advice.  We do not keep adding benefits and dilute the core message.  We go for the blockbuster benefit and that also only takes 5-10 seconds and then we shut up and wait for their response.  We could say, “if the prototype works, we are looking at an immediate 30% lift in revenues just in the first year”.

The EAR formula is a jujitsu move, because we are navigating around their potential objections.  They just cannot disagree with our context.  Our conclusions yes, but not the background to that conclusion.  They also have to hear the whole story first before they jump in with a rebuttal.  This formula provides us with the means to be heard in a genuine and fair manner.  We can keep doing things the hard way or we can use the EAR formula and make business a lot easier for ourselves.

Where is the line between referencing our experiences and insights and just talking about ourselves?  I attended a talk recently where the speaker had a perspective to share with the audience, to add value to their careers and businesses.  What surprised me was how much of the talk was cantered on the speaker rather than the audience.  I was thinking about this later and wondered what the better balance would be?  When we go on about ourselves, we are getting further away from points of relevance for the listeners.  We have to remember that people are unapologetically 100% focused on themselves and their own interests and don’t care all that much about our story.

As the speaker, the closer we can align what we are saying to the listener’s interests, the greater the acceptance of what we are saying and the bigger the impact we will have as the presenter.  That is fine in theory, but we can’t just make a series of pompous statements about how things should be and not back them up with evidence.  Often that evidence is coming from our own experiences and that can be the most convincing variety.  Unveiling a lot of sexy data during the talk is interesting, but a mud and blood rendition of what happened to us in the trenches, is always more gripping and compelling. This speaker, in my mind, strayed across the line and was wallowing in too much self-indulgence about what they had been doing.

How do we balance our story with the audience's need for alignment with their benefit?  What the speaker could have done was better draw out how to transfer their learnings into concrete examples, where the listeners could apply them to their own circumstances.  Instead of just saying this is what I did, and this is how it worked for me, they could have gone a bit deeper on the application for others who are not them.  When the example is too idiosyncratic, the agency for others becomes diminished or diluted.

We could say, “I did this and got this result.  Now here are three ways you could take this same idea and apply it to your situation”.  We have now crossed over to the audience’s application of the knowledge. By giving more than one opportunity, we are more likely to hit on what the majority of audience members are looking for.   Importantly, by prior analysis of who is showing up the talk, we can anticipate common needs and circumstances. This allows us to get closer to the mark of listener reality when we explain our examples.

A simple rule of thumb should be 20% of what happened to us and 80% of the time on explaining why this will work for our audience.  Our speaker, in this case, reversed those percentages and spent the majority of the time talking about what happened to them. The problem with this is we in the audience are not them and we have to parse out what we can apply from their story.  It is much better of the speaker saves us that drama and they tell us what we can apply. 

We draw out the key points we want to make for the audience, align our war stories with the points and then add a significant section in the talk on explaining why doing this is a great idea and specifically why it is a great idea bolstered with concrete cases and options.  This is an unbeatable combination.  We demonstrate in words that because we did it, they can, too.  We draw out how it will work for the audience and convince them that it has a broader application than just working for us alone.  We have to marshal the benefits of taking our advice, and the more concretely we can do that, the better.

Our speaker convinced us that it worked for them, but failed to make the case that it would work for us.  They hinted at it, but statements are cheap and we sceptical folk want more evidence.  We are all risk averse, so we want chapter and verse and solid provable details.

When constructing the talk, keep that 20%-80% dichotomy in mind.  Certainly use ourselves as proof, but don’t rely on it exclusively.  If we can talk about others doing marvellous things with our advice, that is the icing on the cake.  We love to hear case studies and then draw our own conclusions on how much we can take from the example and apply it in our world. That idea is something we need to be constantly hammering away at too.  Keep telling them to think how they can adapt it, and apply it for themselves.  In this way, we can keep switching the focus back to the audience away from us and we will get the balance right.

Would the people who know you or meet you describe you as persuasive? Do you think you are persuasive enough? Persuasion power is the most important, but the most commonly lacking skill in the business world. Do it yourself trial and error wastes time and resources. It is time to change things up and get that key skill.  There is a perfect solution for you- to LEARN MORE click here (https://bit.ly/3VhvR2B )

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About The Author

Dr. Greg Story, President Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training

Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

Bestselling author of “Japan Sales Mastery” (the Japanese translation is "The Eigyo" (The営業), “Japan Business Mastery” and "Japan Presentations Mastery" and his new books "How To Stop Wasting Money On Training" and the translation "Toreningu De Okane Wo Muda Ni Suru No Wa Yamemashoo" (トレーニングでお金を無駄にするのは止めま

Dr. Greg Story is an international keynote speaker, an executive coach, and a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. He leads the Dale Carnegie Franchise in Tokyo which traces its roots straight back to the very establishment of Dale Carnegie in Japan in 1963 by Mr. Frank Mochizuki.

He publishes daily blogs on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter

Has 6 weekly podcasts:

1.     Mondays -  The Leadership Japan Series,

2.    Tuesdays – The Presentations Japan Series

Every second Tuesday - ビジネス達人の教え

3.    Wednesdays - The Sales Japan Series

4.    Thursdays – The Leadership Japan Series

Also every second Thursday - ビジネスプロポッドキャスト

5.    Fridays - The Japan Business Mastery Show

6.    Saturdays – Japan’s Top Business Interviews

Has 3 weekly TV shows on YouTube:

1.     Mondays - The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

Also every Second Thursday - ビジネスプロTV

2.    Fridays – Japan Business Mastery

3.    Saturdays – Japan Top Business Interviews

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development.

Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making, become a 39 year veteran of Japan and run his own company in Tokyo.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate (糸東流) and is currently a 6th Dan.

Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.