The Power Of Conversational Style When Presenting
We often see presenters elevated up on stage or positioned at the front of the room, flanked by or under a screen, and protected from the audience by a rostrum. In Japan standing above your seated audience requires an apology for doing so at the start of the speech. This is a very hierarchy conscious society, so implying your superiority to your audience, through your physical positioning has to be wound back immediately. We add to this feeling by driving the slide deck, playing around with the lighting, using a microphone and speaking in a knowledgeable, commanding voice. All of these devices place a barrier between the speaker and the attendees of the talk.
Is that what we want though – a barrier to our audience? If we want the audience to buy what we are selling we want to have total access to the participants. Believe my statistics, follow my suggestions, take action on my ideas are typical outcomes we want to achieve. Getting people to come with us necessitates persuasion and having appeal. The less barriers between us and them, the better.
A useful approach is to speak conversationally with our audience, as if we were all intimates of long standing, where the trust had been built up over the years and where the simpatico is flowing. It also lends itself to sharing information like confidences, that only the specially initiated and conspiratorial are made privy to. We are letting you into special data and insights, that only those in the room can know.
This requires a switch from speaking at an audience to speaking with an audience. We call out the names of audience members we know or have just met, to build that feeling of connection between speaker and participants. “Suzuki san and I were chatting a moment ago and she made an interesting observation on the subject”, “I am glad my old friend Tanaka san is with us today, because I consider him a great model for what I am proposing”, “Obayashi san and I were speaking during the networking before lunch and she mentioned that there was some new data on this topic”. As soon as we do this, the people we are referring to feel three meters tall, because their name was mentioned in a positive, supporting way. We also break through the mental barrier between speaker and audience by including the audience members into our speech.
The tone we apply moves from oratory to more of a chatting over the backyard fence style. It is much more inclusive, convivial, endearing and conversational. We still pick out key words for emphasis by either putting the power in or pulling it out, we use pattern interrupters like speeding up or slowing down our speaking speed. A conversational monotone is still a sleep inducer. We need to avoid that. We still use gestures and we will increase the frequency of inclusive gestures. What would be an inclusive gesture? The stylised wrapping your arms around your collective audience is a good one, as if you were drawing them in toward you. Pointing to the audience with your arm outstretched and the palm up is a non-threating way of engaging your audience. Our eye contact at six seconds for each person, has enough balance to make it inclusive without it becoming invasive.
Talking about ourselves, sometimes in a self disparaging manner, reduces the hierarchy feeling between us and them. Boris Johnson is master of this. He has a very elite background, but makes fun of himself in his public speeches. Depending on the audience, he sometimes makes a show of being flustered and disorganised for effect. This positions him better as an “everyman” with his audience, rather than a distant upper class elitist. Not taking yourself too seriously is always good advice, if you want to connect with your audience no matter how brainy, powerful, superior you may see yourself relative to the assembled punters. Just don’t overdo it, because then it becomes sensed as manipulative and fake. A little humour at your own expense goes a long way.
Action Steps
Remember, if you would like any questions you have, answered live by me, then just put in the email header “I am based in…and am interested in joining your live Presentations Q&A” and send that email to me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com. I am planning to do a Zoom meeting with everyone and we will record it for those who can’t make it. Tell me your location because I may do a couple of versions, to best suit your time zone.
Avoiding Flat Presentations
“The good is the enemy of the great” is a clever saying and very true. In presenting terms we can have people who are competent but not even close to maximising their potential. They are sitting there in the lukewarm bath, never experiencing or understanding the joys of an extra ten degrees of heat. In presenting terms, turning your inner thermometer up ten degrees when facing an audience has a tremendous impact.
Our presenter was intelligent, well read, well researched and had good content. The presentation was workman like. It got done. The content was covered. The points were made, the slides were run through, the questions got handled. And then….
This is the point. There was nothing. It wasn’t retained in the audience’s mind. There wasn’t that feeling of WOW. It just dribbled out and ended, disappearing into the void with all of mankind’s other mediocre speeches. What was missing? Where was that ten degrees of heat which was never applied?
The opening was flat. It just started. The level of voice strength of the speaker, chatting with the attendees before the talk and the start of their actual talk, was at the same strength. The body language was at the same calibration for before and after the start. It was if the speech was just a continuation of the dialogue that had been going on prior to the kick off.
Everyone has a full brain when they walk in to hear us talk. We have to get out the crow bar and jemmy our way in there to be heard. That means the first words out of our mouth have to signal the talk has now begun, pay attention, listen up, cease and desist what you have been doing prior. We have to clearly draw a line for the audience to get them to concentrate on what we are saying. We only have a few seconds to capture their attention so they will grant us their permission allow us to hold their attention.
We cannot leave such a vital intervention to chance. We must design it carefully. The words have to be laden with hooks to keep them interested and with us. We might lure the audience into our story, using word pictures to capture their imagination. We want them to mentally see the scene we are painting. We could hit them with a stunning statistic that baffles the brain and make it sit up and take note. It might be a quotation from a famous person to add credibility to the point we are making. We need to plan for cut through.
Part of that planning needs to involve how we are going to marshal our physical resources particularly our eyes, voice, gestures, posture and positioning. Voice is where we start, because that is a powerful tool to break into the consciousness of the audience. By lifting the volume up, we force people to stop whatever it is they are doing and listen to us. When we add in a gesture to back up the voice the overall impact is strong. We cannot use eye power with the whole audience at the same time and have any impact so we select one person around the middle, then we give them both barrels of eye contact, for around six seconds. We just keep repeating this as we work our way through the whole audience. If it is a huge crowd we keep doing the same thing and at a certain distance, everyone sitting around the intended recipient of our eye power thinks we are looking at them anyway. We can physically move closer to our audience. When we do that, we use our standing height above a seated audience, to tower over them and add more power to our physical presence.
If we can get the start going well, then all we have to do is maintain that throughout the talk. We will add in vocal range when we are talking, to keep our audience in Japan from going to sleep. We can uses pauses for emphasis and to build anticipation. The key is to get a good start and then maintain the energy. Our speaker started small, stayed small and finished small. The whole thing was muted, flat, unremarkable and infinitely forgettable. Don’t be one of those speakers.
Action Steps
Is How I am Dressed Important When Presenting?
There is an old saying about lies, damn lies and statistics. An often misquoted statistic in the presenting world is that 55% of your impression on an audience is based on how you are dressed. Some coaches are advising on this basis and it is only partially true. Professor Mehrabian’s research at UCLA did nominate that particular percentage, but he did so with an important caveat. When what we are saying is not congruent or matching with the way we are saying it, then the audience gets distracted and starts focusing on how you are dressed 55% of the time. When he published that research there were no uber powerful thermonuclear distractors like we have today, in the form of smart phones. These instruments of presenter attention destruction are rapidly connecting us with the internet and whisking us away from the speaker.
If we are doing our job properly as speakers we will not be losing our audience. One of my team attended a presentation I gave recently and she reported to me that the audience members were listening to me all the way through. That is what I thought too, because the entire speech had me focused like a hawk on my audience, to make sure I was holding their attention. I don’t mention this to say what a smarty pants I am, but just to highlight how difficult it has become for all of us to hold an audience today.
My style of presenting is extremely high energy. My karate training background has taught me how to harness my “ki” or “chi” and channel it to the audience. I still have pretty good tonal variety so I can really work on keeping the audience with me. The downside of all of this is that I generate a lot of heat. Often when we are presenting on stage there will be spotlights trained on us and these can make us feel very hot as well. When I am getting dressed that day,
I always make sure of a couple of things for my presentation. A white shirt is an absolute must. I love my blue business shirts, but what I found was the heat generates sweat around the neck area, especially when wearing a tie. That lovely light blue shirt can become two tone. The collar becomes wet and changes to a darker blue. This is distracting for the audience who are sitting there saying to themselves, “Oh look at that, he has a two tone shirt now!”.
The other thing I pay careful attention to is never doing any presenting unless I am wearing a jacket. There are probably few things as unattractive as a speaker wearing only a shirt, lifting up their arm to reveal a very sweaty armpit area, that runs right down the side of their body. Most unappealing and again very distracting to an audience. I keep my jacket on, buttoned up, the whole time like a suit of armour. I know that my shirt is soaked during the speech, because of all the heat I am generating. It goes without saying, that an ill fitting suit creates a poor impression. The way the collar of the jacket sits on the neck tells you everything. If there is a wide gap between the two, this creates a sense of pattern interrupt and your audience gets distracted by it. Also save your bright coloured jackets for a party. A bright red jacket works well for a magician, but not so great for a speaker. Always look for ways to make your words conspicuous, rather than what you are wearing.
Sometimes we are asked to be a speaker on a panel. This can be tricky. We are usually seated up on stage in front of the audience, so there is nothing separating us from the viewers. When men cross their legs, if they don’t know what they are doing, we get a very unfortunate close up of their hairy ankles, shins and calf muscles. Short socks work when you are standing, but are a danger when you sit. I always wear long socks right up to the knee, to spare my audience the brutality of my hairy legs.
I am quite daring when it comes to wearing bright ties. I leave them at home though when I am presenting and select something a bit more muted. Such a bright colour sitting right next to your face is bound to be an unwanted competitor for the attention of your audience. I do like pocket squares, but I make sure they are also very discreet. A puffed up large pocket square may be a dandy’s delight, but like a bright tie, it sets up competition for the attention of the audience. Be careful with cufflinks too. I have some very bright colours in my line up, but I go for the less flagrant when I am presenting.
One of my pet peeves in Japan are the number of guys here who wear their tie, such that there is a gap between the top of the knot and the top button of the shirt collar. They allow it to loosen off and the gap appears without their knowledge and again this is distracting for the viewers. You also come across looking like a kid, who can’t dress himself properly.
I also purposely shorten the length of my ties when I am presenting. Men’s dress rules say the tie should only extend to a point midway down your pant’s belt. What I find though is that the closed button of a single breasted suit always has an opening between that button and the bottom of the front of the jacket. The consequence is a tie worn at the correct length, will actually be peaking out from under the jacket, again distracting my audience. By making it a bit too short the protrusion problem is lessened. Again, I never take off my jacket, so my major tie length faux pas is hidden away.
The shine on my shoes should be mirror like. Standing up on stage everyone can see your scuffed, down at heel, miserable excuse for shoes. This says “slob”, “poor quality control” or “poor self awareness” pretty clearly. It is not helpful for supporting a professional image. The belt should match the shoes so brown for brown and black for black. Pretty simple right, so how could you mess that up? Yet, I see guys with a brown belt and black shoes. This says you are “clueless” to your audience, so if you even can’t get this right, why should we believe anything else you have to say.
I always place the nametag holder I am given by the organisers on the table where I am sitting or on the lectern. I don’t wear them because they are usually plastic and as I move, they catch the lights focused on stage. Without knowing it, you are sending out Morse Code signals every time you move, as the plastic flashes the audience.
I have only referred to men in this piece on dressing for presenting, but many of the same things, for the most apart, apply for ladies too. I don’t have the guts to do a specific commentary on how ladies should dress when presenting. My only hint would be don’t confuse fashion outcomes with presenting outcomes. Make the focus your face, rather than the clothes. Don’t dress in any way which draws the audience away from looking at your face. Our face is the most powerful tool we have. It is much stronger than whatever is on the screen and our voice. Don’t allow anything to compete with it.
Senior Executives In A Public Speaking Competition Was So Revealing
Speech contests and debating contests are usually for younger people at school or university. It is not often you see the most senior people from major corporations going head to head in a public setting. I was at an event where there was a vote to take place for some prestigious seats on the board of a non-profit. If the number of applicants equals the number of seats, then it is a perfunctory competition where the winner’s names are just announced. In the case of more hopefuls than places, then things hot up.
Each person had two minutes to make their pitch. Now remember, these are very experienced and senior people, in some cases heading vast organisations. I was fascinated to see how they would fare. With one exception, English was not their native language. However, they have been in international business their whole lives and many have lived in numerous foreign countries running the local business for the multinational parent company. Language skill wasn’t even a factor.
As you might expect, some were better presenters than others. However, overall they were pretty underwhelming, given the types of big jobs they were holding. They knew they would have to speak and compete for places with each other and that they only had two minutes. They had the opportunity to prepare, to rehearse what they would say. This was not a spontaneous idea on the part of the organisers. The first thing I noticed was how poorly they had all prepared. Talking about your resume and how big your big corporate is, is fine but there was no thought given to what the audience wanted to hear. Everything was presented from their own point of view.
A few minutes spent planning and preparing would have come up with a fine list of audience expectations of this board. They would have found which hot buttons they needed to push. This is not hard stuff. They will represent our interests on the Board and so what would our member interests be? Having divined that, we should then craft our message to present around how our experience, organisational muscle and personal attributes will deliver for the members. We only have two minutes so we have to prune hard to fix upon the most high impact points that will resonate with the audience. We then need to rehearse to make sure we can get this inside the strict two minute limit. We don’t want to be rushing it or confusing our audience with too many varied points. If we do that they have no hope of keeping track of what we are on about.
Now when we deliver our talk we have to engage with our audience. We will be going one after another, so we have to break through and override the message of whoever preceded us and implant our message, such that the successor speaker cannot root it out. Sadly, none of this was happening and they were not engaging their audience at all. What are they like when addressing the troops back at the office I was wondering? Going by this effort not much chop!
The common thing I noticed that was missing from all the speakers was eye contact. They were not using their two minutes to physically engage with enough people. Using six seconds of one on one eye contact, we can directly engage with at least twenty people in the audience. Toward the rear, because of the distance, the people sitting around the target person also believe the speaker is talking directly to them as well, so we can increase that twenty number quite substantially.
Delivering your resume in a monotone means you are missing the opportunity to hit key words for greater effect. Now when I say hit, I mean that in the sense that you can choose whether to add voice strength or withdraw voice strength to gain variety in your delivery. Our gestures are another way to bring power to what we are saying. Some of the speakers chose to speak while holding their hands behind their backs, denying themselves the opportunity to use gestures. When we don’t show our hands, we are triggering a deep mistrust in the audience. This is because since we lived in caves, we have learnt not to trust people whose hands we cannot see.
It was all pretty bad. Corporate leaders need to be excellent communicators and that includes giving professional presentations. This is not something we are born with. We learn it and we further develop it, over the course of our careers. There was a lot of personal, professional and company brand damage done the other day, at the face off for the Board seats. When It is your turn to speak, be ready and blow your competitors out of the water.
Facial Animation Needed For Presenting Success
We have all seen it. The presenters face is expressionless, wooden, devoid of emotion or life. It is usually well paired with a horrific monotone delivery, to really kill off the audience. Presenting is a serious business, so these presenters present a very serious physiognomy. Scowling is thought to be good too, to show the gravitas they bring to the occasion. These are powerful people, who by definition, must look powerful. Technical people in particular love this no frills approach and smiling is definitely off their list of possibilities.
To be fair, there are presentations where levity, smiling, frivolity are inappropriate. A remembrance ceremony for the fallen heroes and heroines in battle, would be an occasion for an austere face. Losing all the shareholder’s value through some idiocy would be another. A serious face however, doesn’t have to be an expressionless face. Recalling lost loved ones in a heartbroken community, can see the presenter’s face stricken and tortured with pent up emotions. When I read the eulogy for my mother at her funeral, my face was ashen and pained.
In business though, for most cases we can use our faces as an additional communication tool with our audience. We are using tonal variety in our voices, our hands for gestures, our eyes for audience engagement. We should also be using our faces too. A raised eyebrow can speak volumes. It can indicate curiosity, incredulousness or doubt. Turning our face to the side and tilting our head to go with it, can show scepticism or cynicism. Pursing our lips together then pushing them forward in a pout shows disagreement or disapproval. Pulling our head back from the neck shows shock or surprise.
When you think about it we are incredibly active using our face in normal conversation. If we filmed you speaking and played it back you would be amazed at how much facial expression you are employing. Stand you behind a podium or put you on stage in front of an audience though and maybe all that natural communication ability sails out the window and is replaced by wooden you instead.
When we look at theatre performances, television, movies, comedic acts we can see facial tools being well employed to drive home messages. I enjoy the popular drama from Italy, Inspector Montalbano and the Italian culture really makes great use of the face to communicate emotions. They are just talking, but it looks like they are arguing and of course the gesturing is on fire. We should stop watching these shows just for the entertainment value and start re-watching them for what we can learn about how to employ our face when presenting.
In the same way when we are speaking we hit key words with a louder or softer volume for effect, we should start employing our face to do the very same thing. When you want to raise doubt about some proposition someone else is putting forward, look for a suitable facial expression to back up that message. When you want to appear sceptical of some idea, then bring your best sceptic face to the fore.
This is very hard to coordinate when you are starting out. These days I have so much going on with my voice, eyes, gestures, body language I am not even aware of it. Watching myself on video with the sound turned off, I can see how much natural variety I am bringing to the talk. It wasn’t like that at the start. My very first public presentation in my life was in Japanese to the Sundai Yobiko cram school students, where I managed to finish a 25 minute speech in 8 minutes. I am sure my face was not only wooden but also bright red from all the stress I was feeling.
Like anything to do with public speaking this facial involvement takes practice. Presenting in front of a mirror is a good chance to see how animated you are. Video is better though and these days everyone has a smart phone with a very good quality camera lens included. Try doing the same piece with repetition to see if you are bringing your face into the communication. Also check you are doing it congruently with the content you are addressing. Over time, you will start creating appropriate facial expressions for that piece of the content without even noticing it. To be a more effective public speaker, get your face more involved!
Why Japanese Presenters Fear Q&A
Obviously we all have some trepidation when it comes to Q&A, but Japan is quite far behind the rest of the advanced countries when it comes to public speaking. The level of presentations here is abysmally low and excuses abound. People here talk about a “Japanese style” of doing public talks. What they actually mean is they speak in a monotone, with a wooden face, use no gestures, make no eye contact, employ no pauses, Um and Ah with gay abandon and are supremely boring. They kill everyone with 8 point sized font, four different font types and five garish colours, turning their slides into a psychological weapon of war aimed at decimating their audience. Because everyone is so bad, this is thought to be a “style”, obviously different from “Western” presentations. It isn’t a style. It is just bad.
Not being properly educated in how to give professional presentations, the trickier bits like Q&A are even scarier territory. For any speaker, once the bell sounds for Q&A, the struggle is on. As the great American philosopher Mike Tyson once said, “everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face”. Relatively speaking, Japan is a kindergarten for Q&A compared to Western audiences. The ferocity of questions here is kids stuff. So you would think that everyone would be very chipper about handling the Q&A, but that is not the case. Here are some areas of the concern we found, when we polled our Japanese students of presenting.
The chances of having a lifetime of speaking to familiar audiences would be statistically impossible, I would say. The inference here is that it is less daunting to speak to a “tame” audience who, because they know us, won’t unleash fury upon our heads during the questions component of the talk.
Unfamiliar audiences should be the considered the norm. The way to deal with that is to be well prepared and to have rehearsed beforehand. I would guess 0.001% of Japanese presenters have rehearsed their talk.
Japanese society is very polite, so that is why until recently, you would be lucky to get any questions at your talk at all. The thinking has been that it is impolite. The nuance is you are saying the speaker wasn’t clear enough in their oration. Also I don’t think any Western audiences would even consider the possibility that it isn’t allowable to ask the questioner to repeat their question. In Japan, that request implies the questioner wasn’t clear enough and is a veiled criticism, repeated in public, so there is a possibility that the questioner will lose face.
Definitely and politely ask the questioner for clarification on their impenetrable question. Japan is a polite place, so ask politely and put yourself at fault and not the speaker. You might say, “Thank you for your question. I really want to answer it correctly, so would you mind repeating it once more for me?”.
This will happen to all of us. I do a lot of public speaking here in Japanese and I always find the Q&A the most difficult. This is not for the ferocity of the questions, but because of the fog of the language. Japanese is a highly circuitous language and vagary is a prized achievement. Sometimes, I have no clue what they are asking me.
If we can’t answer the question then we are human. We cannot always be the font of all knowledge and there will always be occasions where we just don’t have an answer for that question. We should apologise and fess up straight away. “Thank you for your question. I am afraid I don’t know the answer to it at this point. After the talk let’s exchange business cards and I will do my best to come back to you with an answer after I do more research on that topic”.
Most talks in Japan are supremely dull, so naturally the audience escapes to a more interesting place like their smart phone. Suddenly the Q&A springs up and as they haven’t being paying attention, they have no idea what to ask about. The call for questions goes unanswered, so there springs forth this painful, embarrassing silence, as everyone carefully scrutinises their shoes, ensuring zero eye contact with anyone. The speaker is left high and dry and the talk finishes on a low note of disinterest. It feels like all of the oxygen has been sucked out of the room and the speaker deflates and then in short order, departs.
If no questions are forthcoming, ask your own question: “A question I am often asked is….”. This will often break the ice for someone else to muscle up the courage to ask their own question. If nothing is still forthcoming, then repeat this once more, call for more questions. If none emerge then give your final close and finish the proceedings.
Here are two basic rules for answering any question. Always repeat the question if it is neutral, to make sure everyone in the audience heard it and to give yourself valuable thinking time before attempting to answer it. If it is a hostile question, then paraphrase it by stripping out all the emotion and invective and make it sound neutral. For example, “Is it true you are losing money and that ten percent of the staff are going to be fired before Christmas?”. “Thank you, the question was about current business performance” and then you answer it.
We will face Q&A when giving our talks. Changing our mindset about welcoming the opportunity is a good place to start. We can add more information, we couldn’t squeeze into the talk. We can elaborate on a theme. We get a chance to engage more deeply with our audience. When we shoot down a vicious, brutish, hostile question and destroy it, this makes us a legend of pubic speaking and adds serious lustre to our personal brand. Bring on the questions!
Why Do You Need To Bother With Presenting
As usual I got the venue early. I was doing what I teach others in sales to do, get to the venue early, check the nametags of who are attending. This way you can put faces to names of people you know and you can see if there is a potential client in the room who you would like to meet. The speaker was also there nice and early setting up. This is a very good practice and allows you to fix any technical issues which arise. Sure enough the stand microphone was not working properly and she could not be heard at the back of the room. So a pin microphone was called for. While waiting, I was chatting about whether she did much public speaking. I was a little bit astonished by her answer.
She said she did not and that this would be the last one she would do. She mentioned she got a lot of invitations but declined them. Now as a strong advocate and preacher of doing public speaking to grow your company and professional brands, I was aghast to hear this sacrilegious viewpoint. She dug the knife in deeper and twisted it when she asked me how many of her competitor CEOs in her industry I had heard talk. Actually, she was right. I could only think of one and that was a long, long time ago.
Now I would have thought that this was a tremendous advantage and would be praying that my competitors stayed as silent as the tomb, so I could go around shooting my mouth off at every opportunity. Interestingly, in her industry the herd instinct seems to prevail over differentiation. If they don’t do it then I shouldn’t do it either.
That seems totally crazy to me. She could use these speaking spots to build up a positive image of her company. She could make sure her firm was top of mind in that competitive high end of the market. Even if we didn’t all become consumers of the brand, we would become fans of the brand and would recommend it to everyone over her rival’s alternatives. She has risen to a position of consequence in her job. She is the first female CEO in Tokyo in that industry. What a fantastic chance to grow her personal brand as well. I can’t imagine her current employer or any future employer would look askance at her efforts to promote herself as the face of the brand.
I asked her why she was reluctant to speak and again her answer floored me. She said she didn’t think there was any point running around telling people how great XYZ company was. She believed they needed to experience the quality of the service to appreciate it and her telling people about it wasn’t effective. I must be too deep in the public speaking world to have these types of thoughts.
I said to her, “Nobody is here to hear about XYZ company. They don’t care one iota about XYZ company. They are here to learn what you are doing, your successes and failures, so that they can apply those in their own businesses”. This would have seemed obvious to me, because I do a lot of speaking, but I could see this struck her as an entirely new idea. I explained that in providing value to her audience, her worth and her company’s worth become further enhanced.
So it would seem she didn’t understand her audience and what they wanted. I had read all the name badges, so I knew exactly who was in the room and what companies they came from. This was a gathering of people hungry to learn something new. She could just as easily have asked the organisers who was attending, so that she could tailor her remarks accordingly. She was accompanied by her head of PR, who should have done that for her, but sadly the PR person though charming, appeared clueless about using pubic talks to grow the brand.
One thing I will praise our speaker for was flexibility. After listening to me giving her my mini Master Class in speaking, she did switch gears during her delivery and try and give more audience perspective to what they are doing. It could have been so much better though, if she had planned the talk with that at the forefront of her mind, when she and her team started work on the talk.
The realisation of things I take for granted, not being the common perception, was a good wake up call for me. They say a fish is the last thing to discover water. I will make a bigger effort to promote the idea of public speaking as an absolutely indispensible arrow in the quiver of business and we must learn to become master archers in our field of endeavour.
Dealing With Questions When Presenting
Japan is quite interesting in the sense that you often don’t get any questions after your presentation. Screaming silence at the end. Before the presentation, we often spend our time thinking what would happen if I can’t answer the question or what will I do if I get a tough question? Japan has the opposite issue where the talk falls flat on its face, because there are zero questions for the speaker. The whole construct collapses into anti climax. Having no questions has the inference that the topic wasn’t interesting or that the speaker was a boor, rather than it was a brilliant presentation, which answered everything perfectly and comprehensively. After calling for questions and then being left stranded high and dry, it feels quite embarrassing. On the other hand, getting questions you can’t deal with is also tricky. This is either because you have no idea how to answer them and look a fool or because the question feels more like someone is trying to inflict grievous bodily harm upon you.
The no questions outcome is in fact, a result of lack of planning from the outset. The speaker has prepared a talk where they are focused on transmitting information to the audience. The crowd received it and that was that, game over. We need a different approach. In the planning stage, break your talk up into brackets of around five minutes. At each five minute point, we need to liven things up a bit. We should anticipate our audience might start flagging. We know their attention spans are increasingly microscopic and audiences are so easily distracted today.
Asking a rhetorical question is a good way of dragging everyone back into the room with you. This works because they are not sure if they have to actually answer it or not. Normally we allow the tension to build a little, before we spring the trap and answer it. Sometimes we can just leave it there, hanging and not answer it at all. If you are worried about facing a sea of blank, silent faces at the end of your talk, this is a good seed to plant, to inspire the audience to ask you later about the answer. You have tempted them with your question. However you didn’t sate them with the answer. They are vaguely dissatisfied as a result and may raise it in the question time, because you have sufficiently piqued their curiosity.
We can also pose a straight question to the audience and ask them to consider their thoughts on the subject. We don’t answer it ourselves and we don’t extract any answers from them at that moment either. This is another seed planting expedition to inspire them to ask their questions or make a comment. Or we can invite them to go deeper on a topic or specify we can have more clarification during question time, if there is an interest.
Being the first to do anything in Japan or to volunteer, pushing yourself forward is frowned upon. That is why deathly silence sweeps the room when we get to the Q&A. Therefore as the speaker, we have to create some momentum ourselves. After seeing there are no hands going up, we pose our own question and then we answer it. We can say, “A question I am often asked is....” Having answered our own question, we may find the coast is clear enough for one of the members of the audience to ask their own question. We can also use a sakura or a plant in the audience, to ask the first question, if we worry the atmosphere will collapse when no one puts their hand up. I am sometimes asked by event organisers to ask the first question, if they think the crowd is a bit shy. My job is to get the ball rolling and in all instances it has worked.
In some cases, the question will be outside your scope of understanding or knowledge. Don’t try and bluff your way through it or give some half baked answer to make it seem as if you know the answer. Just say you don’t know and if the questioner will exchange business cards with you later, you will do your best to get the answer. Move on quickly and smoothly, by saying, “who has the next question?”.
Now nasty, hostile, angry, smarty pants questions are a different matter. Either the audience member thinks you are full of crap or grossly mistaken. They think you need correcting and they are just the person to do it. They want to draw your attention to all the other possibilities you have neglected. Sometimes in internal meetings, they may be an ambitious, competitive colleague who wants to take you down. Their aim is to make you look like a numbskull in front of everyone. Or they may be trying to take the whole conversation off piste, on to a mad tangent. They try to highjack the proceedings.
What do we do about that?
We need to understand that the distance between our ear and our mouth is too close. We need a circuit breaker, an injection of rational thought to ward off the default emotional reaction. This is almost impossible to do once the chemicals in the body kick into gear. So we have to get in early to regain control of our brain and mouth. We will usually have some words already formed in our mouths, poised for release. We need to stop that process and switch to another tack. We want to make an initial quite bland, vanilla, neutral statement, which neither extinguishes nor encourages the incendiary question. In the few seconds time it takes for us to make that short filler statement, we can mentally regroup. This allows us to move on to our second or third possible reply. These will always be better thought through than the first one that just bolted out of our mouth.
One little bonus tip.
When you do get around to answering the hostile questioner, maintain direct eye contact with the instigator for six seconds and smile. Then continue with your answer while make eye contact with everyone else in the audience, one person at a time for six seconds each. Never ever give the nasty question originator any more eye contact after that point. Ignore them completely from then on. They were smug, arrogant, narcistic. They were secretly saying to everyone, “look at me, look at me. I asked a zinger question because I am so tough and smart”. They want everyone’s attention, to be the star of the show, to eclipse the speaker, to trample over your presentation. We can’t have that. After that first six seconds of direct eye contact with them to face them down and show you are not scared of them or their zinger question, you simply blank them. Take all the air out of their sails by not giving them any more attention whatsoever, throughout the remainder of the Q&A session.
Action Steps
How Do You Follow On From Really Bad or Really Great Presenters
One of the most painful experiences as a presenter is watching the speaker before you put the entire crowd to sleep with their dull, monotonous monotone delivery. I don’t know which is worse, but the opposite problem is when the speaker was legendary and you hear your name being called because you are up next. Either way, what is your plan? Oh, I see, no plan! Maybe that is not a very good approach.
Often when you are invited to speak at certain events, there are a bevy of presenters and you are one of them. You might be in the Green Room watching on monitors or hidden back stage, waiting to come on. If the current speaker is just droning on, you can literally see the audience wilting. In Japan the wilt factor is high and the wilt speed is quick. There is no social remonstration here about sleeping while the speaker is on stage.
In 1979, when I first arrived in Japan, I was amazed, well actually shocked, to see how Japanese university students felt no compunction about sleeping right in front of the Professor. The good Prof would be warbling away and those in the back rows just checked out. They would fold their arms on the desk, rest their head on their arms and then off to sleepy byes. In Australia, that would have been unthinkable, considered the height of rudeness and you would have been called out for it during the class.
Having attended a huge number of speeches and given hundreds here myself to Japanese audiences, in Japanese, I have seen this time after time. The fatal error is to dim the lights for the slide show and bingo, a good chunk of the audience has just fallen asleep. There are no digs in the ribs with a sharp elbow by neighbours to prod some semblance of respect for the presenter. Everyone just carries on regardless.
I have also been in the nasty position of having to follow on from a speaker who has murdered the audience. By the time I turn up for my talk they are all certifiably brain dead. What can you do to retrieve the situation? Well the concept of this being a distinct possibility in Japan needs to be established in the planning phase. Most people neglect to consider this untoward turn of events if they are one of a number of speakers.
The easiest thing is to pause and not start immediately. The hum of the previous speaker is like a sleeping draft for many in the audience, a bit like white noise in the background. Their brain has adjusted to that low hum and off they go, dropping into blissful slumber. By injecting silence into the room, you break the pattern and pattern interrupt is a key to grabbing attention. The silence also builds anticipation on the part of those still compos mentis. Thirty seconds of silence seems like an eternity and those imagining it is all over now, will emerge from their little nap, to discover you are there on stage ready to go.
This is when you hit it hard with that first sentence. Crank up the volume and be loud without being a screamer. Again, add a slight pause after the first outbreak of hostilities to create more pattern interrupt. Now you have restored everyone’s attention to the speaker, give a truly professional talk, engaging your audience with tonal variety, eye contact, gestures, pauses and great content. Trying to get an audience in Japan to engage with the speaker through raising their hand in response to a question, often generates zero reaction because nobody wants to stand out in the crowd. “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down” in Japan, so forget any physical refreshment for your audience through speaker nominated actions. Stick to engaging the audience through photographs, especially featuring people. Use storytelling to draw them into your message.
What about the opposite issue when the current speaker is really rocking it? The audience are laughing, clearly enjoying themselves and hanging on their every word. They depart the stage to a rousing ovation with a clearly satisfied reaction. Now they are calling you up. Fortunately you have a plan for such an occasion. You start by turning to face the direction the previous speaker took when they departed the field of battle and you compliment them to your audience. “Wasn’t that a fabulous talk. Thank you very much Suzuki san, that was really great”.
You have now joined the team compact between that star speaker and the audience. You have identified with the audience and they like you, because they agree with you. There is no shame or loss in credibility to praise the other speaker. In fact, it shows just the opposite. You display what a broad mind you have and that you are totally comfortable in your own skin. Not intimidated in the least and simply oozing confidence.
Do not open with an apology ever. Don’t talk about you won’t be as good or tell them you feel really insecure after listening to that speaker. That screams out “loser”. After a slight pause between bonding with the audience as part of previous presenter fan club, you launch right into your talk with a really good question. You know it is a really good question, because you have designed it to be that way. Or you might hit them with a famous quote they all know, from some worthy they all respect.
What you are doing is another version of pattern interrupt. They were tuned into the previous topic and now you need to redirect their minds away from what they have just heard, to listen to what you are going to say. Be professional in your delivery, be valuable in your content and be the best you can be. You may not overpower the impression of the star speaker, you may not vanquish their memory, but you will have shown you are a serious, competent person too.
The key is to have two plans. One for the audience decimator and one for the superstar. No matter what happens you are ready. That will show in your presentation and so your personal and company brand will be enhanced.
Subtly Selling Yourself When Presenting
We have all been there. The speaker gets up to speak after they have had their resume read out by the MC or they do it themselves once they get started. Sometimes the MC makes a mess of it and other times they read out the content without any enthusiasm whatsoever. This is mainly because they are poor public speakers themselves. We should always supply our introduction to the event organisers. This is our personal brand here and we need to make sure we are being represented properly. It doesn’t always go according to plan though.
I hate it when the MC can’t be bothered reading out my carefully crafted, deeply thought through introduction for this audience, on this topic. They decide to abbreviate it or summarise it or wing it in their own words. Invariably this is a substandard product and does nothing to build the brand. I would rather they were incompetent speakers and read it exactly as I wrote it, than if they were extraordinary presenters who just ad-libbed their way through it. We want 100% control of how we are presented to the audience. The MC has zero idea of what we are trying to achieve in our personal branding efforts, so we cannot leave it to their whim on the day.
As the speaker, we should insist that the MC follow our script to the letter. We should instruct the organisers that this is a requirement, because often the organisers and the MC are not the same person. Their job is to tell the MC to toe the line and not stray from the script. In this regard, the organisers will have more influence over the MC than we will have. Nevertheless, we should not rely on the relay of instructions logistics between the organisers and the MC. On the day, we need to speak to the MC directly. Have no hesitation in telling them, “Please read my introduction precisely as I have crafted it, as this is how I wish to represent my personal brand”. This may seem a bit presumptuous, bolshie and pushy but this is your brand. You need to protect it from anarchists, idiots, dilettantes and do gooders.
In the vast majority of cases for business presentations, the organisers have invited us to be fonts of wisdom and impart pertinent insights, deep analysis, and sterling advice to the audience. What they don’t want is blatant self promotion and selling our stuff from the platform. If we break this rule, we won’t be invited back and our reputation will suffer. We also look crass, grasping and opportunist to the audience.
So how do we sell ourselves, when we have that captive audience of possible prospects right there in front of us? Obviously, we are not going to run through the typical laundry list of when our firm started, what our company does, with the usual boring facts, that are immediately forgotten by everyone. Our first step is to get there early, check the venue, the equipment, the arrangements and stiff the MC on their role in contributing to our glorious career. We make sure they know they need to follow the script on introducing us and that they can forget any independent adventurism. As the audience wanders in we start working the room. “Thank you for coming. I am today’s speaker. May I ask what attracted your attention about this topic?”. We engage in some small talk, exchange business cards for follow up later and filter and fillet the participants, to see if there are any potential buyers in the room. If you have other team members with you, they can do the same with the people you may not be able to meet. This way, you have the followup option in play for after the presentation. We need to do this because these days, the organisers are reluctant to share the list of participants, because they are worried about privacy issues.
The second step is to position what you say in a way that represents value to the audience. It gives them useful information on the “what” and the “why” but not too much detail on the “how”. The how bit is what they need to pay you for, once they engage your company. This is a tricky balance between providing substantial value, without providing too many tools for the audience to do it by themselves without you.
We can use a case study formula of (1) client problem, (2) solution and (3) result to show what we do works. In the problem and result part, we can be quite detailed. We are looking for people to identify with the issue, because they have the same one and to impress them with the result, because they want that too. The how part can be described in less detail. For example, “We worked with ABC company to uncover the changes which needed to be made. We did this through using our brainstorming methodology. The beauty of this method is that it works really well in Japan. It eliminates all hierarchy of age, stage, position, rank and delves deep by engaging the quick thinkers, as well as the deeper thinkers. It produces practical, implementable ideas very fast”. In this example, we have outlined how great the method is, without revealing the mechanics of how it works in practice.
The third area for emphasis is when we have done original research. Our global CEO Joe Hart visited Japan in 2018 for the 55thAnniversary celebrations of Dale Carnegie Training in Japan. For his speech to the American Chamber of Commerce he was using original research created for that speech on “AI in the Workplace”. This is a good way of demonstrating that your firm is at the cutting edge and can provide relevant insight into key issues affecting companies in target industries. If you cannot produce original research, then curate the latest and greatest findings which may not be know to the audience. You didn’t make it, but it shows you are well informed and up to date on that subject.
The fourth option is referring to items which are highly complex or involved and mention you can’t go into details right now, but explain that you are happy to speak off line with anyone who has an issue or an interest. This is the lure in the water, set to make the fish bite. You show this shiny object and then take it away, so that the audience want to follow it. This gives you the chance to have people line up after the talk and exchange business cards to get more information. The real object of the speech is to be sitting in their office a few days later, talking in depth about their problems, to see if you have the solution.
We provide value first and foremost. This adds to our personal and company brand. We tease and tantalize the audience, rather than sate them with too much detail. The What and the Why are covered completely, but the How is kept in reserve for a conversation in their office after the event.
Hey, Stop Fidgeting When Presenting
It has never been tougher to be a speaker. We live in the age of hyper distraction, with instant gratification felt to be too slow. In fact, “slow phobia” is rampant everywhere and hand held digital device escape hatches abound. Migrating away from all that distraction, to get people focused on your presentation is hard enough. Things become more desperate though, when our nervousness starts the chemical adrenaline pumping through our veins. We feel the elevation of our breathing rate and we notice our hands starting to shake.
One of the nasty byproducts of all of this internal pressure and nervousness, is we begin to distract our audience by fidgeting. Professor Albert Mehrabian’s famous and usually misquoted research, says that we run into problems when what we are saying and how we are saying it don’t match up. The “how we are saying it” bit is broken into three distinct parts. The actual words, which Mehrabian depressingly found only accounted for seven percent of our communication success. Body language contributed to thirty eight percent of the messaging and finally how we were dressed and how we looked made up the other fifty-five percent. Often these numbers are misquoted. Mehrabian’s important caveat about incongruity is not mentioned. That is to say, when what we say doesn’t match with how we say it, the audience is easily distracted away from the message.
Our words may be painstakingly composed, delivered in a well paced, clear tone. We may be magnificently turned out for the occasion, just dressed to kill. Our fidgeting however, is overwhelming everything else. The message radiating out through the fidgeting body language is contradicting the words coming out of our mouth or at least distracting from them.
One of the main culprits in the fidget field are our legs. We shuffle about aimlessly on the spot. Or we start striding around the stage looking highly strained and nervous. We might well remain anchored to the spot, but we are not content with that. We feel the need to sway our hips about like a mad captain on a rolling pirate ship. We are rocking and rolling from side to side, all the while drawing attention away from our messages.
In the same vein, we also fail in the “looking confident” arena. All of this movement is competing with the words and we don’t want that. That swaying itself is telling the audience “I am not rock solid about what I am saying, I am unsure, I am nervous about it”. Rather, the legs should be kept straight, with just a slight relaxation behind the knees to unlock the joints. Feel like you want the top of your head to push up into the ceiling. This will make you taller, straighter and give you more physical gravitas.
Another favourite of the failing presenters is to shuffle the direction of their feet around. When they want to look at the left side of the audience, they shuffle their feet around in that direction. When they want to look at the right side, they shuffle their feet all the way across to the right. Again, all of this fidgeting, this moving around, is distracting to the audience. Why do it that way? If we want to look left or right, we should keep our feet anchored and just swivel our neck. If we felt the need to go for more engagement, we could turn from the hips and have the upper body facing to the left or right, without moving our feet at all.
When we do move our feet, it should be for a clearly defined purpose. When we are on stage, we can move to the very apron of the stage, closest to the audience. We do this to get physically closer to the front row, to add to our voice and gesture strength with our physical body presence, to underline a point we are making. Now, we shouldn’t stay there too long though, because the proximity will become too intimidating to the person closest to us. They are thinking “psycho axe murderer” as we tower over them. Also, the power of our physical presence starts to dilute very quickly, if it is just held in that same position. So there is no point holding it there for too long.
We should retreat to a more centered, neutral position. From here we can step back and make a more macro point. We do this to engage the entire audience, if the point we want to make is an expansive one. Now that we are standing more toward the rear of the stage, we need to use our arms in a bigger fashion than normal, to signal we are making a macro point. Again we can’t stay there too long because the power wanes. We need to move back to the middle, to the more neutral position. None of this is random or fuelled by nervousness. It is thought through and planned, with the impact on the audience in mind. We are not shuffling about through neglect, nervousness or negligence.
Our hands are another trap. We might be holding them in front of our body, twisting them together because we want to form a protective barrier between us and the audience. We might be tapping our thigh with our hand or even worse slapping it, making a noise. This competes with what we are saying, for the attention of the audience.
Another favourite is using one hand to squeeze the fingers of the other hand, as if we were ringing out a towel. Playing with our tie knot trying to loosen the compression, because we are feeling hot under the lights or to lessen the intrusive gaze of our listeners is another tick.
Thrusting hands in and out of trouser pockets, highlights the conundrum we are facing about what to do with our hands when presenting. Because of the adrenaline, we are unable to even keep them there, so we fidget, thrusting and withdrawing, thrusting and withdrawing, driving our audience crazy.
Shuffling papers on the lectern is a break from our usual rigid gripping of the edges of the furniture. We align the sheets together left and right. We then push the bottom of the pages together, banging them on the lectern, to get them into a more disciplined state. All the while, this is competing with what we are saying and how we are saying it.
Video yourself and you will be shocked by how much you are fidgeting. Instead, choreograph your movements carefully so that nothing is haphazard. You move because that will add to the strength of your message. Your hands are monopolised by considered gestures, to add weight to what you want to say. You stand straight and tall, engaging your audience left and right with minimum distraction. Remember, we want the audience focused solely on our face and our words. These are powerful communication tools to help us isolate out our message. That is the only place we want the attention to be directed.
The Presenting Persona
Be authentic, be yourself, be conversational - all good advice, except the presenter does have a distinct role to play though. When we are speaking in front of others, it is no longer an intimate one on one conversation. The talk has a purpose, there is an audience, there are expectations, time limits apply. We have to rise to the occasion.
Telling ourselves that the people are gathered here for the information and not all that fluffy stuff that goes with presenting is self-delusion. Today, everywhere you turn people are hammering you with video of themselves presenting something or other. The technology is such that you don’t even have to click anything yet the video is off and it has subtitles, so you don’t even need the sound. Live video on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram etc., is another no safety net new innovation that is merciless. Social media has unleashed a monster of constant content deluge and high wire danger.
Once upon a time, you didn’t have to concern yourself much with self promotion, but in this day and age of endless outmuscling the competition, everyone is a self proclaimed expert. The flood of exposure makes it hard to remain relevant. Your competitors are perpetually pumping out an array of content to reinforce their personal branding, to make sure they, and not you, are top of mind. Imagining that your inherent wonderfulness and righteousness will be discovered is wishful thinking.
When we get up to speak in front of others we are being judged. The audience is questioning whether we have the goods or not? Do we know what we are talking about and are we bringing value to them? Most of us spend 99.9% of our time speaking with others at a distance of under a meter apart (unless you are in the countryside, in which case I will be two meters!). This is a case of using everyday conversation where we don’t need to project our voice or body language.
When we are on stage as a presenter, we have a different role. We need to radiate credibility at distance and a big part of it is the amount of energy we pump out into the audience. This is known askior chi- the intrinsic energy we possess. I have studied Tai Chi for ten years and Karate for 47 years, so I have seen and experienced it. I know it is a fact. People who are low energy, quiet, softly spoken types struggle with this projection piece. They are fortunate though, that the microphone technology today is so very good, that you can project quite well, without having to have a big voice or shout yourself hoarse.
The energy projection to the audience part however, is a bit harder because there is no technology to help with that. Strong and big gestures though can accentuate a vocal point we are making. The tendency with a lot of speakers who are untrained, is to use no gestures or to use them quite low, around waist or hip height. Holding your hands protectively in front of your groin or clasped behind your back, kills the opportunity to add gestures to the mix of your communication catalogue. Using gestures held too low means, they are hard to see, invariably small in scale, not very dynamic and totally fail to engage the audience.
Get them up and around shoulder level and make them larger than you think they should be. From our point of view, as the speaker, it seems we are getting wild with our gestures, but from the onlookers viewpoint, it looks congruent with what we are saying.
The voice strength is the same concept. We need to hit the words that bit harder than normal. The power we put into the words translates to the audience as credibility and trust. We sound like we are convinced and the audience wants to see that from us. We don’t want to be hitting all the words at the same power.
We need a solid stream of strong vocal delivery, from which we vary our strength, either up or down, for variety. A monotone
puts people to sleep, so we need vocal change to break through and grab attention. Counter intuitively, an audible whisper is very effective to draw attention to the point we are making. This works particularly well when we combine it with the body language of whispering a secret, something just between the audience and ourselves.
Mentally we need to get into a different space when we are presenting. Our persona needs to switch up from normal everyday interactions. We are now in the realms of showbiz and we have to exaggerate things a bit more than normal. Pausing for effect is more powerful than just delivering a constant stream of words. We need to give the audience thinking time so that the ideas don’t just crash over the top of each like a succession of wild waves in the surf.
Using our facial expressions, in combination with our words, is more theatrical than normal conversation, but it is very effective. A quizzical expression when we mention something we doubt, just adds to the power of doubt we want to foster in the mind of the audience. If we watch plays, then we see this usage all the time, because the actors are restricted to face, voice and body to get their message across. We don’t have to be manically melodramatic but we can up the tempo quite a bit by using the same techniques when we are presenting.
Part of the problem is self constraint on our willingness to do this. We mistake normal conversation as the base of reference when we are a presenter. Our starting point should be the stage and what actors are doing. It is also too much. We need to wind it back from that, because that is too exaggerated for business. Having said that, we do need to lean in a bit harder in that direction, more so than in the direction of a corridor conversation.
Mentally, we need to see we are now in a different role. We are there to perform for the audience, to lift them up through our information, our passion, our belief, our commitment. The delivery of the information is critical and there is no escaping that some things work better than others. Speak in a tiny little voice and you will rapidly become totally invisible to your audience. Start striding. around the stage like a berserker, left to right, left to right and you will distract the listeners entirely from what you are talking about. The bigger the audience, the bigger the venue and the larger the persona you need. We have to step out of our everyday selves, to step up. We need to project if we are going to get cut through. Shrinking violets have no place on stage.
Dealing With Feedback When Presenting
We can receive feedback in the rehearsal stage and after the actual presentation itself. Both can be very dangerous. Asking your loved ones at home for feedback is tricky. They may love you, but they may not know much about the subject itself, the subject of presenting and techniques for giving feedback. Pretty toxic cocktail right there, with potential to create domestic issues at home, if you don’t have enough already.
“What do you think?” is a bad move in the feedback game. When you are practicing, you cover many aspects of presenting and asking such a broad and unfocused question, invites in irrelevant comment which is unhelpful. Rather than asking such a combustible question, start by sitting down and creating your own checklist.
You can break this up into a few categories. You might nominate the structure of the talk. In this way, you can isolate out the sections of the talk, looking at the potency of the evidence you presented in each section to back up your point. You can nominate other areas, such as the transitions between sections, the opening, the first close before Q&A, the second close after Q&A, Q&A itself. In this way you are dissecting your speech. You are breaking it down for the person listening, to consider before they give a comment. You might have them score you on a simple scale, just to get an idea of what resonated with them. Remember though, this is an audience of one and you have to consider how expert they are and how representative they are of your audience.
In another section of the review sheet you are creating, you can include aspects of the delivery of the speech. How was your posture, speaking speed, degree of clarity, pauses, eye contact, gestures, vocal variety. They can score on each of these to give you a guide on how you were doing.
By having various people observe your speech you can get a variety of viewpoints. One big problem in Japan is no one here wants to give you critical feedback or even constructive feedback. They will just try to flatter you and are fairly useless when it comes to the feedback game. This is especially the case if you are their boss. They won’t be so willing to tell it like it is. If you are giving the talk in English then there is the additional curve ball of their ability in English to fully understand the nuances of language you might be using.
Feedback can also be fear producing. This is especially the case when all you are getting is what was wrong with your talk. This is the natural flow for people giving feedback. They want to tell you what was wrong and so your confidence gets killed as a result of all this tough love. Actually, you don’t want critique. What you want is for the feedback to focus on only two things – what was good and how can you make it better. If you start to get critique, stop them right there and redirect them by asking for good/better feedback.
During the actual presentation, you can gauge how the audience is reacting to your talk. If they are falling asleep that is a bad sign, although in Japan that is fairly common behaviour, so don’t beat yourself up too much. That is why we never let the organisers turn the lights down to see the screen more easily. Within one minute, you will lose a big chunk of your Japanese audience. Keep the lights up so you can see their faces and check how they are reacting to your talk. If you get people nodding to your points take that as a win. The more of those the better obviously.
If you get mild or vicious questions, then you can interpret these results as good or bad depending on the purpose of your talk. You might want to be provocative and want to outrage some in the crowd. Or you want to win everyone to your way of thinking, so you are looking for questions that enable you to convince others, to adopt your preferred position on the topic.
Asking people you know or your staff, “How do did it go” is just a waste of time. You want your feedback sheet selectively distributed before the talk, so that you can get additional feedback to what your eyes are telling you during the talk. I would count people coming up to you after the speech and saying how great you are as flattery and of doubtful value, unless they are an expert in the topic or on the subject of giving speeches. I know it sounds a bit harsh, but almost no one is going to approach you and feedback to you that you were crap. So be wary of praise and look long and hard at who it is coming from.
For both rehearsal and for the talk itself, video is the best method of evaluating how you went. You have your checklist so you can be very diagnostic on the video review component. If you have your coach there during the practice, that is ideal and also important to have them in the audience as well, to give you the good/better feedback. If you don’t have a coach, what are you thinking? You should get one, because this speaking lark is a brand builder or a brand killer. It is never neutral. You are either winning or losing and don’t kid yourself otherwise.
How To Prepare With Your Coach For Your Big Speech
There is a major event looming on your schedule and as President, you will be expected to deliver the keynote address to a very important audience. This was the situation recently when I was coaching a major corporation’s President for his speech. I realised that the people around the President, don’t have a clear idea of what is needed to properly prepare for the big occasion. The time allotted is also never enough. It is made worse by the flunkies around the President, trying to cram other superfluous information into the briefing for the speech. Superfluous from my point of view anyway. The President’s time is at a premium and the key need is to focus on delivery practice with video review and massive coaching.
Here are some ideas to make the whole process more effective for the busy Presidents who are called upon to present in high stakes occasions.
Before getting to the session with the coach, go through the speech. I recommend not reading it to your audience, if possible. Having key points to hit in your own words is enough, especially when it is going to be interpreted into another language. All that crafty crafting of words and wrangling with semantics of expression in English gets lost the minute the interpreters get hold of it.
If it is a speech you need to read, there is a strong possibility a speech writer will have been employed to work on it together with the munchkins in your organisation. Don’t use this for the delivery practice sessions. Get hold of it before hand and start reworking it. What you are looking to do is add more of your authentic voice to the content. Get things expressed the way you would normally express them. This process will cause you to own the words and they will be much easier to recall and deliver as a result.
I was looking at the speech provided in this coaching occasion and it was average. The biggest weakness was the start. It was totally mundane and boring. Nothing to grab your attention. Nothing to smash through all the detritus of the day up until that point. We all have so many things on our mind today, the speaker really has to work hard to break into that mental flow and grab our attention as a member of the audience.
Craft a powerful statement or use a great quote to start the proceedings. Then you can introduce who you are and the name of your company. It is a simple thing, but the impact is entirely different. For example, I could introduce my speech like this, “Thank you for coming today, we are very happy you could join us, my name is Greg Story, I am the CEO of Dale Carnegie Training Japan”. Or I could start like this, “Corporate education is going to change more in the next five years than it has in the last fifty. Thank you for coming today, we are very happy you could join us, my name is Greg Story, I am the CEO of Dale Carnegie Training Japan”. In the second case, I have grabbed the attention of the listeners and they are wondering about what these miraculous changes are going to be. They are concentrating on what I am saying so that they don’t miss anything.
If you are using a teleprompter, with the see through glass type mounted on a stand on the podium in front of you, this presents a few challenges. This was the situation recently during the coaching session. One problem is that you don’t want to have your hands anywhere near the podium, as the vibration will make the teleprompter images shake and the words become harder to read. Also the position of the teleprompter to the left or right drags your gaze to that side of the audience the whole time. If you have had the opportunity to craft the speech you can divert from the script or remember parts of it, so that you can engage with other sections of the audience.
Ideally, you will have two of these teleprompters, one on the left and one on the right mounted on stands in front of the podium. That improves the audience engagement quite a bit, but the danger becomes you forget to talk to the people seated in the middle of the venue. Your head is constantly swiveling from left to right and back like a puppet.
Watching the playback on video does take time to do and as mentioned time is always at a premium in these situations. However, the video review and coaching from the instructor are very helpful here. You can see the way you were doing it before and then after the coaching you can see with your own eyes how big a difference it makes. This makes it easier to stop your old, bad habits and create new, better habits. Seeing is believing.
Give lots of vocal and gesture energy to key words or phrases in the speech. This becomes especially important if you are having your talk translated. The audience sees you deliver it and then hears the words in their own language. Your gestures and energy though need no interpretation, so in that sense, you can appeal directly to the audience, without any intervention from someone else. If the words refer to something with scale, then show big arm movements to match. If a target was achieved that was high, show “high” by pushing up one arm as high as possible, to make an imaginary measure. If it was a good result, then have a big smile and a lot of gesture strength to back that up.
The idea is to take this coaching and then project it further with additional practice. You can do this on your own, using video or have people there to give you good/better feedback. Running through the speech numerous times will be so beneficial and will create the momentum to make this speech a triumph. I saw one of those quotes you get in diaries attributed to a Japanese proverb, which said “More sweat in training, less blood in battle”. I have never been able to find the Japanese original of that saying, by the way, nevertheless the idea is perfect for speech preparation. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.
Designing Your Presentation On The Head Of A Pin
The head of a pin isn’t much real estate is it. The metaphor for presenting is to have pin point accuracy around what you are presenting. Going straight to the slide deck production component takes us too broad. This should be the last element, rather than the first. The temptation though is to get into thinking about different visuals, graphs, statistics, etc., we can show, to back up our argument. There is the rub. Just what exactly is our argument? What is the one key message we want to get across to the audience. Often we have a number of things we want to get across and we go too broad in our approach. We want to think about getting that one thing on the head of that pin.
A good way to start is to brainstorm all of the elements of that subject area which are most relevant to the audience. There is a dilemma here between what we want to say and knowing what interests our audience. Starting with the audience in mind though is a good discipline. This is because designing something for ourselves runs the risk of alienating our listeners and delivering a talk to a totally bored bunch of faces. This experience is plain painful.
Get the ideas out, taking the audience perspective. Get them out visually and then start to rank them by priority order. This ranking process forces us to make judgments about which elements are considered more important than others. Is this easy? Absolutely not. Does it have to be perfect. Not really, because the audience themselves are not united on agreeing what they think are the most important items. As long as we can isolate out what we believe will be of the most interest to the audience and we address those, then we are in a good place as a presenter.
Before we start assembling the argument, we need to write down in one sentence, what is the key point we want to get across. This type of wordsmithing is important to help us get clarity around where we need to go with our supporting arguments. Getting the key point into one sentence then allows us to drag in evidence to back up what we are saying. We have a limited amount of time in which to speak, so we need to pare down the possibilities we can cover to only the most rich and powerful arguments. This paring process is like choosing between your children. I am often hopeless at it, because I tend to fall in love with too much material for the time allotted. It is painful, but I have to toss stuff out and sometimes that process kills me to do so.
Once we have selected the most convincing evidence to back up our case, we need to arrange those points into chapters of the talk. This is the main body of the presentation. We have already created our conclusion when we were refining our key point. We need to elaborate a bit more on that and work on Conclusion 1. Following that we design Conclusion 2 which will be what we will use for after the Q&A. We don’t want to lose control of the talk, so we decide how the presentation will end and what will be the last words ringing in the ears of the audience. Our words.
Now we are ready to design the opening. We need to achieve two things in the opening: grab the attention of the audience and introduce our conclusion. The grabbing attention part might be a famous quote like “when you are going through hell, keep going” or “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country” or “the teacher appears when the student is ready”. These are recognisable quotes that gives the talk some credibility and smoothly allows us to transition into the key point we want to make.
We might start by telling a story on the basis that we are all designed from childhood to identify with storytelling. It gets us in and we want to hear what is the point of the story. For example, “It was early Sunday morning and the doctor attached the portable x-ray machine to my chest. I was barely conscious, fighting for every breath coming through the plastic tubes delivering the oxygen. The results showed the lungs were down from three quarters filled with fluids to two third full. I knew at that moment that I would live”. Hearing that you want to know why I was in hospital in that condition. This is the power of storytelling.
We might use a surprising statistic. “Power harassment claims in Japan have increased by 320% over the last ten years”. Our audience will want to know why that is and what does it mean for them. We can move into our main point for this talk now that we have their full attention.
The success of our talk comes from having a clear focus on what the audience is interested in, combined with a very clear “write it on the head of a pin” statement about what is the take away we are going to deliver during our presentation. The rest is mechanics around the Conclusions and the Opening. The slide deck is the heavy artillery we bring into back up what we are saying with visuals to get the message across concisely and quickly. The discipline required to start well will carry us forward to the end of the talk and we will be successful with our presentation. This builds our personal brand and our reputation.
Presentation Visuals Mastery Part Seven
We continue with part seven concluding session of Presentation Visuals Mastery.
Last week we talked about when presenting, you need to transfer your energy to the audience. However don’t have your energy levels at the maximum volume all the time. That just wears an audience out and wears you out too. Instead, you need to have some variation. Very strong and then sometimes very soft. And I mean drop it right down. Remember to have that in the voice range. Sometimes say your point in an audible whisper.
I remember when I gave a presentation in Kobe. It was at a university summer school for students who had graduated and were going back to their home countries. I was giving this uplifting talk about how they could use the experience they had in Japan back in their home country. It was powerful, a very powerful presentation. It was an urging my comrades to “man the barricades” type of speech. The speaker after me was a Korean professor. Maybe because of the way I presented, I don’t know, but he spoke very quietly. He spoke in a very soft voice throughout the whole presentation. It really forced you to lean in and listen to him, because you had to work a little bit harder to listen to him. So he got peoples’ attention by having a softer voice. At the time, I thought, “wow look at that”. That was very effective and I realized, ah, just operating at one power level all the time is not going to work. I need to have variety in my voice, so I should have times when I am very powerful and other times when I am very soft. So just watch yourself that you are not getting into too much soft or too much strong mode. Variety is the key.
I said before gestures are very important. Be careful about getting your hands tied up with things. If you are saying one thing is important, hold up one finger. If it is the second thing, hold up two fingers. This is important. When you hold up your fingers like that, hold them up around head height. Don’t hold gestures around waist height. It is too low and people struggle to see it. Get your gestures up high in a band from chest height up to around head height. That zone is the key height you want for showing gestures.
When you want to show a big point, open your hands right out. Don’t be afraid of big gestures. Use gestures that are congruent. Be careful about waving your fist at your audience though. It looks aggressive. It looks unfriendly and combative. Use the open hand rather than a closed fist. And don’t hit your hands together, slap them together or slap them on your thigh. That activity creating noise becomes distracting. Just use the gestures by themselves. As I said before, 15 seconds is probably at the maximum you want. You can walk around on the stage, but be careful about walking around too much, especially pacing up and down. That makes you look nervous and either lacking in confidence about your message or lacking control over what you are doing. Try and hold the main center point of the stage and move because you have got a good reason to move.
Using the names of people in your audience is a great thing to do. If you get there early, meet some of your audience. Have a conversation with someone. It is a nice connector with the audience to refer to that person and say, “I was just chatting with Jim Jones over there before and he made a very interesting point about current consumer trends. In fact, Mary Smith made an addition to that point, when she said “blah, blah, blah…” Suddenly you have both people very much proud of being recognized and involved in your talk. They have been recognized by the speaker and they like it. The audience now feels that you have a stronger connection with those listening. Refer to people by name. It is very, very effective. Don’t leave it to chance, try and look for those opportunities to engage with your audience.
Let’s concentrate on the basics. What is the point of your presentation? Who is your audience? What is the point? Be conversational and customize the delivery to your listeners. Have exhibits or have demonstrations or whatever that are custom-made to match that audience or match the point that you are making. Don’t just bring out a set off the shelf points you recycle for every presentation.
You might have an existing basis for a presentation, but think about who are you talking to? What is the key point and then take it and re-work it, re-package it up, customize it. I have given 530 presentations in the last 20 years here in Japan. I have never given the same presentation twice, ever. Even with the slides, I will always have some small variation. Certainly the way I present it will be different every time. This keeps it fresh for me, as a speaker. And it also keeps it fresh for an audience.
If I feel stimulated and interested in what I am talking about, then the chances are that is how the audience will feel about it too. They will feel stimulated and interested as well. Be wary of receiving the presentation pack. You often see the CEO had some munchkins out the back preparing the presentation for him or her. Often, it will be the first time that they have even seen the presentation. Sadly, it is obvious that it is the first time they have seen the presentation. They don’t know what’s coming next and they struggle through it. This is really killing the brand. It is killing the brand and the organization. It is killing the presenter’s personal brand. You don’t want that. Get it, customize it, make it yours, then present it.
So there we have some ideas on how to present your visuals when you are giving your presentations which are based on our training called High Impact Presentations, where we teach people over two days how to become a high impact presenter and how to learn a number of different structures. It’s really the Rolls-Royce of the presentation skills. This is where Dale Carnegie started in 1912,teaching people how to be persuasive. If ever you have a chance, after listening to this, to do that particular course if you haven’t done it before, grab that opportunity because it is a powerhouse course. It’s a game changer of a training course. I have taken it myself and I strongly recommend it.
So best of luck and remember, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Do not be consumed by the construction of the materials. They are secondary to you. But when you do construct your materials use these ideas, these hints and you will give a much, much better presentation.
Presentation Visuals Mastery Part Six
We continue with part six of Presentation Visuals Mastery.
Where we stand is important. But as a presenter where should we stand? If it is a big venue and the screen takes up the whole background, I like to use the front, left and right side of the stage for a bit of variation. I try to stand as far to the front as I can, on the very apron of the stage. I try not to fall into the audience. Although I have come close to that a few times, by getting a bit too close. Often the stage is curved at the very front and if you walk in a straight line across the stage, you can find yourself in the orchestra pit, if you are not careful. It’s good to be close, because then you are physically close to your audience. You can have more impact and more body language power when you are up close and personal. That’s always a good position to be in.
Sometimes you’ll have something on screen you want to refer to. Use your arms to reach back to what’s on screen pointing there, but keep looking at your audience. Your arm actually indicates where you want your audience to look. That’s very good so they see they need to look at the screen now. Or, we need to look at this part of the screen now. Use that gesture to very effectively to make the audience focus on the thing you have selected. Use it for audience focus but don’t keep using it all the time. Be sparing with this technique
Tell people where you are going with your presentation. Set it up so people are aware of what is coming up. “Now we are going to talk about so and so.” The next screen comes up and they know what to expect, rather than being surprised all the time about what is coming up. This keeps them focused. Using your bridges or your transitions in your talk about your key points, you bring them visually into the next section of your talk. This works very well.
As I said before, the worst thing in the world is you are in light and the audience is in darkness and you can’t see their faces to gauge their reactions to what you are saying. In Japan I’ve noticed that Japanese audiences, if you turn the lights out, are very quick to lose focus. I think it’s probably true around the world, but because I do a lot of presenting here, I probably notice it more in Japan. Don’t turn the lights off the audience. Keep the lights on the audience and allow yourself to read the reaction to your voice and what you are saying. Look at their faces. How many are nodding? How many are just looking dead bored? How many are now on their iPhone checking email because you have lost them. You need to be able to see them to be able to keep the focus on your audience, to then switch gears.
Now if you need to get your audience back in the room, ask a question, a rhetorical question. They don’t know though whether it’s a rhetorical question or a real question. But by asking a question, you get their attention back in the room. You have to get them back from wherever they have escaped and you have got them again and you can keep going.
In the majority of cases, the way we present should be in conversational language. Storytelling is very good. We all relate to storytelling. It takes us into the context, the why of what you are talking about very quickly. And congruency between what you are presenting and how you are presenting it is very important.
I can’t remember the comedian. This is going back 50 years ago now. I remember I heard some American comedian and he was talking about being a graduate of the so and so school of speed reading. But he spoke in this really slow voice. “My. Name. Is… I. am. A. Graduate. Of.The.So and so.School.Of.Speed.Reading.” Speaking like this as a graduate of the school of speed reading was funny because it was so contradictory. It was for a joke. It was comedy. But it worked because there was no congruency. He was not matching the way of delivering the words with the message.
The same thing for us. If it is a very serious point, then you shouldn’t be laughing, you shouldn’t be smiling. Your face should look serious. If it is a lighthearted point, if it is something that is good news, don’t look unhappy. Don’t look serious, look happy. Use our faces for highlighting. Something surprising, requires a surprised face. If it is a very great piece of news, show a really happy face. The voice, the face, the body language, everything matches up with the message. So we need to make sure that the content is matched by the way we deliver the message. We must be congruent.
Speed is something that we use for variation in our voice. Speeding things up, or slowing them down for emphasis. Putting the power in! Taking the power out. These are all controls we can use for variation. We have modulation in our voice, where we are going up and down as well, which gives us power, gives us variation as a speaker.
We can add in gestures and about 15 seconds per gesture is about the maximum that you want to hold a gesture. The power of the gesture dies after that and it just becomes annoying. So turn the gestures on, then turn them off. And use your body language too, using your intrinsic energy. In Japanese we talk about the “ki” as in the martial art of Aikido. The energy, the power we have inside us, we use to project that power, that energy out to the audience. You give the audience your energy, you give them your power. In this way, you can bring their energy level up so that they are more receptive to your message. So if your energy levels start dropping through the process of giving your presentations, you’ll notice that your audience’s attention level will start to drop too and they will start to become distracted. So be prepared to keep your energy levels high.
Next week we will conclude this series with part seven of Presentation Visuals Mastery.
Presentation Visuals Mastery Part Five
We continue our series on presentation visuals mastery.
Using visuals when presenting helps us to relay the key messages. However, sometimes you don’t need to have things up on the screen at all. You can show the visual and then disappear it. You do this because you don’t want to have the screen images competing with your verbal message. Just hit B. Then the whole screen will go black and there is nothing to distract your audience. They have got to listen to you and look at you. And you can get the screen back up by just hitting the space bar. If you want to go to an all-white screen, rather than black, you can just hit W. It might be a dark room and you want to have a bit of light. Hit W for white. I you want to black it out then B for black.
Remember, your own visuals can be a distraction from your message. Make sure they are relevant. Make sure they are not overpowering you. Think of how the visuals will look on the big screen when you are creating them. Make sure that the audience is looking at you, not what’s on the screen. Design it so in two seconds they can get it, then they can come back to you to hear commentary on what is on the screen.
Be careful about waving your hands around with the projector in front of you and the screen behind you. We can start feeling like shadow puppets. People get easily distracted by the shadow of your hand on the screen, so be careful about that. That’s something you don’t want happening. You might be speaking in a relatively confined space, so without knowing it, your shoulder is casting a shadow on the screen. Cut these distractions down be being self aware of your body positioning and always try to give yourself some space around you.
Be careful of other distractions. Don’t hold your notes in your hand. When we are teaching people how to give presentations, sometimes people want to hold the actual document they’ve prepared in their hand. The rub is they give their talk and don’t even look at it. Actually, we tell them they don’t need it. Leave it on your desk or leave it somewhere close. You can look at the notes, but don’t hold them in your hand. Waving notes around becomes a competitor for audience attention. We want to eliminate as many distractions as possible from our message.
If you do have an exhibit or something that you want to show the audience, that’s great. Pick it up, use it and then put it down again. You don’t have to hold it the whole time. After about fifteen seconds, the power of the exhibit dies and it is now restricting you from employing gestures. Also don’t have things in your pocket. If you must have them then bring them out, show the audience and then just put them away so it is not distracting.
Power is also a tricky thing because the power supply can go down. This can happen. Suddenly you lose the screen entirely and your whole visual presentation is gone. All those great graphs, photos, key points for you to follow in your talk. Soldier on. Your laptop was not connected to the power supply and then your laptop battery dies, just as you start presenting or part way through. “I was sure I had plenty of battery power”, you say, as the panic sets in. Check all these things beforehand so that you are on track to have power. As I said, if you do lose power, charge on. Keep going. Don’t worry about it, unless you have to evacuate the building for some reason. But keep going. If power fails, be prepared. Have a Plan B in your mind, about what you are going to talk about. Be prepared to wrap it up a little early if you have to. Don’t look stuck, don’t look lost. Keep going. Even smart people forget this rule to their peril.
Michael Bay is a top director in Hollywood, famous for the Transformer series of movies. He was presenting for Samsung at a promotional event in Las Vegas. The power to the teleprompters suddenly went down, about ten seconds in. He had no plan B. He was unable to continue. He left the stage with his tail well between his legs, totally humiliated. Look for it on YouTube and see the whole catastrophe. It can happen to you too, so always be ready to carry on with no visuals if something goes hopelessly wrong.
Mysterious things do happens to us too. I was giving a presentation recently. I got there early, fortunately. I went through everything, checked my visuals, it was all working like a charm. And then suddenly, suddenly the visuals were not working. No matter what I did, I could not get the computer to work. I do not know to this day what was wrong.
I had to reboot the computer and reset it. You know it takes time to go through the whole process. Test everything and always give yourself some time margin. In that particular case, with about ninety seconds to spare, I got it back up again and we were away. Here is the key point though. I could have presented without the visuals. It wasn’t a big deal, I wasn’t stressed, I had my Plan B. I could have done it without the visuals, but it was more powerful with the visuals, giving some extra buzz to what I was talking about. But these things do happen, so get there early and check, check, check.
Remotes are useful for clicking through the presentation slide deck. You can move away from the podium or the laptop and use the stage to your full advantage. I have a bit of a love-hate thing with visual remotes. Often they don’t work or stop working. I try to hold it in my hand in a way that it is not obvious to the audience, that I’ve got it. I want to use my hands for gesturing. I’ll try and put it down if I don’t need it, so both hands are free for getsures.
Laser pointers are dangerous. Some people go nuts with the laser pointer. The worst thing is when they point the laser at the audience. We have all seen that. Let’s zap a few corneas with that laser beam. No, don’t do that. They lack self awareness and are whizzing the laser beam around all over the place. It’s like they’ve forgotten that the laser is on, so the laser is doing some sort of laser light show in the venue.
Or they try to use the laser beam to indicate something on the screen and they are whipping it around at a very rapid pace, all over the place. No. If you are going to use the laser, go to the word or the section on screen and use the beam slowly. Move it very slowly, if you are going to circle something or move it across something that you want to underline. Very, very slow movement is the key.
Next week we will continue with Part Six of our series on Presentation Visuals Mastery.
Presentation Visuals Mastery Part Four
We keep with our theme of dealing with all aspects of the visuals part of your presentation.
I have seen lots of people get lost with their notes. They have copious notes and then they start reading them to us. Don’t. That’s my advice. Don’t. Don’t read your notes. Have your points, sure. Have some points, have some notes. That’s fine. No one will begrudge you looking at some notes to trigger the next phase of what you going to talk about. But talk about it. You are the expert. Talk to what your topic is about. You have designed the talk. It’s your presentation. You know what the purpose is. Talk to the points and don’t read the points. It just takes away from what you are doing and what you are trying to achieve. You want to be seen as a professional, an expert, an authority in your field.
I forget where it was, it something I saw, someone actually reading a presentation. They did a reasonable job of reading it, but it would have been so much more impressive if they had not read it, if they’d actually spoken to it. And you can, you know, you’ve got points you can talk to. That’s enough. So try to avoid looking down and reading to us. It’s not effective. You are not going to have maximum impact with an audience when you do it that way.
Lecterns or podiums are a bit of a trap. Again, people who set up venues, tend to set them up without thinking. So they’ll put the lectern there on the stage with some sort of stand mic. You are now limited in what you can do, because of the positioning of the mic. Try and use a pin mic rather than a stand mic, so you can move around a little bit. If you can, move the lectern out of the way or get rid of it entirely.
If the lectern is just a platform to put your laptop on, fine. But move it out of the way. Put it to the side, so that yes, you can have the laptop there if you need to look at the screen. If you are not particularly tall, then you should definitely be very careful about being trapped behind a lectern. Often the lectern is a bit high and consequently all we can see is your head. It is just framed slightly above the lectern. Not a good look.
If you have to use a lectern, then get organized, get something to stand on, so you are going to be higher above the lectern. That is why we must get there early and correct all the errors the venue set up team have devised to make our presentation fail. If you can get rid of the lectern then do so because that way, we can see your whole body. We now have all your body language available to us. This is great for getting messages across.
If you are stuck with a mic stand, then take the mic out from the stand and try and move away from the lectern. Even if you can’t move the lectern then try and stand in front of the lectern, in between the audience and the lectern. Or stand to the side of it if you can.
Definitely check out the room. Room layout is very critical. Often uninformed people lay out rooms the wrong way. Crazy things happen. I’ve been to venues where the room organizers obviously never give presentations. They set up my speaking position directly in front of the projector. Right in front of the projector. Now I am going to become the screen. Just crazy stuff, so get there early if you can. Actually, go the day before. That is even better. Then you can check out how it is going to look. What is the room like? Make any needed adjustments. Certainly the day before is best because you have more time.
If that is not possible for whatever reason, then definitely get there early on the day and check everything because crazy stuff happens. As I have previously noted, the people who are the most ignorant about presenting, are given the task of setting up for the speaker. In almost 100% of cases, they won’t set it up correctly.
With the positioning on stage, if you can, always try and stand on the left of the screen. By that I mean audience left. We read from left to right, so what we want is the audience looking at us and then they read what is on the screen. Look at our face, then read the screen. Look at us, read the screen. It often happens that the people putting the presentation together or hosting it, will set it up so that you are on the audience right side of the screen. There will be power outlets, cables, equipment etc., arranged that way.
They will have the laptop stand there, they will have the mic set up there. Again, if you can get there early enough try and move it. If you can’t, well okay. You have to present from the right side to the audience, but it is better if you can present on the left side of the screen.
Also check on where you are standing, in terms of audience lines of sight. Sometimes if you are on the same level as the audience, you might actually be blocking the view of the people on the far extremes of the seating. So be careful that you’re not standing in front of the screen, such that they cannot see it.
Now sometimes you may have a stage platform and those huge screens behind you. You might be standing in front of the screens, so you are actually blocking part of the bottom of the screen. That’s okay. The power position is at the center of the stage. But don’t stay there, move. Walk slowly across the stage from the left and talk from there. Come back to the center. Move slowly across to the right. Then come back to the center. In this way, you are not entirely blocking what is on screen, all the time, for every slide. And with most slides it won’t matter.
Microphones seem to scare people. If you have a big venue or if you have a reasonably large audience size, say more than 30 people, microphones are good to use. But if it is a small venue, only a small audience, you don’t need a microphone. However, some ladies have a soft voice and they can’t get their voice to carry. A microphone is definitely recommended.
I personally don’t use a microphone in a small audience, because it leaves both hands free for gesturing and I don’t feel restricted. But if it is a big venue then yes, I definitely use a microphone. When you are nervous, there is nothing worse than having a microphone obviously vibrating in your hand when you are speaking. So a good way of getting around that problem is grip the microphone with both hands and then hold your hands to your chest. Tuck your elbows in too. So now your body is anchoring the microphone and it will not sway, vibrate or show you are nervous. It is not the greatest thing because it restricts our gestures, but it’s much better than having the audience fixated on, “Oh look at that, that person is totally nervous. Look at that vibrating microphone. Wow they look really scared.”
No don’t have that. If you have got the calmness to hold it in one hand, great, do that. Swap hands so you can use both hands for gesturing. Also, don’t hold the mic right up to your mouth. Now this is sometimes funny at things like the Academy Awards. You see so called professionals dealing with the mic stand on the dais. The stand height is too low. So they bend down, leaning right over to speak into this little mic. Microphones are so sophisticated today, they catch the sound. You don’t have to lean down. You should be talking across the top of the microphone not jamming it up in front of your mouth. Hold it away from you and speak across the top. It will catch you just fine. If you can’t pull the mic out of the stand, then pick the whole thing up and speak using the mic.
We continue with part five next week.
Presentation Visuals Mastery Part Three
We are continuing our in depth series on mastering presentation visuals.
When you have a presentation to give, always get to the venue early and run your slides through their projector, on their screen, in that venue. You can spot trouble immediately and make any final adjustments you need to make there and then. Often the environments are different in a way that is not helpful. This happens when you are using different computers. For example, at work I am using a Windows environment but at home I have a Mac environment. When I do things on PowerPoint on my Mac and then I take it to my desktop at work, it looks different on screen to my expectation. Something in the formatting processes changes. It is a mysterious thing to me, as to why it changes, but it changes.
So be very careful when you are shifting formats through using other people’s computers. Particularly if you are taking a USB, a disk, etc., and you stick it in the venue’s computer and then suddenly, boom! All your formatting has changed and you’ve got no time to do much about it. So always go early if you are going to use their computer, with your USB or whatever, and check, check, check.
The visuals must have some relevancy to what you are presenting. Make sure it is not surplus or distracting or competing with the message. If you have something that is really exciting on the screen, very interesting, make sure you, the presenter, doesn’t get lost in the proceedings. Particularly if you are presenting video, be very careful that the video doesn’t overrun what you’re doing. Don’t allow the video to take over the whole presentation. Use video sparingly.
It’s sad for me to see CEO’s, of major corporations, get up there and go straight to the video. They always start off their talk very passively, because they know they are just there to introduce the corporate Propaganda Department’s efforts. They miss such a huge opportunity to build a dynamic first impression, to connect with their audience, to really put their stamp on the talk. They go straight to the video, because they don’t like presenting. Or they’re not confident. Or they think somehow, that sort of dross corporate video is going to be so riveting for an audience, that the video alone is going to sell the whole message. No, no, no. You sell the message. That is job number one or the speaker. The video is a slave. The video is a servant to you. Use it as an adjunct, as supplement, not as a substitute for you. There is no substitute for you actually. You are the main thing and make yourself the main thing.
Electronic backup is good. Depending on the event, it is not a bad thing to have a second laptop there, primed and ready to go. Because things do go wrong. Have a back up USB with the presentation there. Things do go wrong. Recently I was at a presentation, and the actual IT guy himself was doing part of the presentation and he couldn’t get his presentation equipment to work. So now we audience members, have got a semi sparse balding pate confronting us. His head is crouched down over the keyboard, like a mechanic under the bonnet of a car, trying to fix the engine. His patchy, balding pate is facing us, as he is trying to get the computer to work. Not his best look probably. Things do go wrong, even for IT people who are experts in this area. So don’t think it’s always going to be perfect. Arrive early and be ready for trouble.
Don’t let the visuals capture you. Capture your audience instead. How do we do that? With an audience, there are lots of things we can look at. We can turn around and look at the screen behind us. We can look down at our screen on our laptop in front of us. We can look at our notes on the lecturn. Don’t do that. We should not be looking much at any of those things. We should be looking at our audience.
We should be breaking our audience up into pockets of six sectors. Baseball has the answer. You’ve have left field, center field and right field. So there’s three basic brackets that you can break your audience up into. Audience on my left, audience at my center, audience on my right. I’ve also noticed they have what they call the inner field and the outer field. So that inner field might be the front half of the venue. The back half is my outer field. So now left, center right. I’ve got front and back. That creates six pockets.
The key is to try and involve the audience members sitting in all six pockets. Don’t just look continuously at the left side of your audience. Similarly, don’t just look at the right side of your audience. Don’t look at the front row and ignore everyone else. We have all seen speakers do this and they are disenfranchising large swathes of their audience as a result.
Take your eye contact and involve every single group throughout your presentation. Try and look at an individual sitting on one of those sectors, for about six seconds. Less than that means it looks like fake eye contact. Too much more than that six seconds and it gets a bit intrusive. So six seconds is a good enough period of time to be making a comment. You have been looking at an audience member in one pocket and then you switch and look to another pocket. Don’t do it by numbers like a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in order, left to right. Break it up. Look left to right randomly. Look for different sectors so it is not predictable.
Keep that audience eye contact and occasionally glance at the screen, but keep the main contact with your audience. Remember, the audience is the key thing. Your monitor of your laptop will tell you what is on screen, so you can refer to it without having to look backwards at the big screen. Although, sometimes for me, I prefer to present without glasses. I will sometimes use the big screen to just check what is being shown rather than my monitor on my laptop. But I try not to spend too much time looking at the big screen. Just glance at it and talk to my audience.
We will continue on next week with Part Four.
Presentation Visuals Mastery Part Two
Here we are back with Part Two of the exciting journey into how to use visuals when presenting. Given how straight forward this is, you wonder how come so many people make a mess of it? Let’s keep going with some guidelines to help us stand out in the crowd, as the special few, who are professional and know what they are doing.
Bar graphs are great. They make it visually easy to compare items. For certain, heavy numbers focused presentations, you want to compare different variables using bars.
Line charts are also clear, quick to understand and show change over time. When you want to compare two or three items over time, it is very easy to see this one is up and that one is down, these are flat. Try to avoid more than three lines though, because it gets very confusing very quickly. Simplicity rules when dealing with numbers.
Pie charts are also fantastic for showing the parts of a whole. What is the share of something? As long as there’s not too many slivers, then a pie chart works well. When you have too many slices of the pie, it gets very hard to fathom the relativities between items. For that task bar charts or line graphs are better.
People still manage to get this wrong. The real key is to only show one big graph per slide, if possible or two graphs, if a comparison is needed. As soon as we put up more information on the slide than that, the information becomes very small and the mind is assaulted by too much data at one time. Keep it minimalist and clear.
With lighting, be very careful when the room gets set up. Get there early is the rule. Honestly, I am yet to meet any people who set up the rooms, who also do presenting themselves. They are just told by their boss, “You set up the room. Put the chairs here. Put the lectern there. Put the mic there”. Particularly at hotels, I notice that a lot of times hotel staff, very unhelpfully, will turn off all the lights in the room. The whole stage area is black and the screen is the main light source. No, no, no.
You want the lights on that audience. You want to see your audience. You want to be looking at their faces. What is their reaction to what I am saying? Am I boring them? Are they with me? Are they nodding? Are they shaking their head? Are they distracted, looking at their phones? You must see your audience.
So keep the room lights up on the audience. Do not let anyone turn it down. If they do, then stop immediately and request they put them back on again. If you have to turn it down at all, turn it down very, very little. Try and keep the room lit. Around the screen area itself, it’s good if you can actually have the lights off just above the screen. Then the screen becomes easier to read. But definitely leave the lights on you. When they shut the lights down, you are now in darkness, so you are invisible to an audience. Just a minor voice in the dark. No, have the lights on you, spotlights on you, so the audience can see your face. Your face has got so much power of persuasion. You can add so much more credibility to the message, through using your face, your gestures, your body language. Don’t miss the opportunity, make sure that the audience can see all of that.
I am struggling to think of too many venues that manage to isolate out the lights above a screen. But today with most projectors, the screens are pretty good, even with all the lights on, so it’s usually not such a big deal. And again, if you design your visuals with that in mind, you’re not going to be too dependent on too much information on the screen. When we have a particularly bright room, there might be a lot of natural light. Then often you have a slide with light background with very dark text as the contrast. That works very well. So the contrast of dark fonts on a light background in a light room can work. Or sometimes in a dark room you might go the other way and have a dark background with white and even white bolded text on a screen to really stand out and have the contrast.
Colors on screen are tricky. You rarely see people using them well. Colors like black, blue, green work very well on a screen. They are the best colors. Stay away from orange, grey and particularly red. Black and blue work together well as a contrast. Green and black also work well together as a contrast. They’re good colors to mix and match on the screen: black and blue, green and black. Red can be hard to see. In fact, I was at a presentation not that long ago on marketing. Quite good content and reasonably well delivered, but the screen! Dark blue background, red on dark blue. No one could read it very easily. So avoid red. It is hard to read on a screen.
Also don’t go crazy and try and have some sort of rainbow federation going on. Putting all the colors up there. It is too distracting and too confusing. Remember, you are the message. You. Your face, your body, your gestures, your body language, your energy. You are the message, not what is on that screen. The screen must be a slave to you. It is a servant to you. Not the other way around.
So when we are preparing, one of the tricky things is we often sit around in front of a screen. We are at a very close distance when we are preparing the visuals. Then off we go to give the presentation and we are in a big room, a big venue, with a big screen. And somehow it doesn’t look like it did when you was preparing it. And you go, “uh oh”. Usually that is too late. When you were preparing your computer has a presentation mode function. Go to that and then run your slides through that and see how it looks.
We will continue to go deep with this topic in Part Three next week.
Presentation Visuals Mastery (Part One)
Today we are going to look at the proper use of visuals when we are presenting. Many people ask us at Dale Carnegie, what should I do with preparing my PowerPoint or my key note presentation? What about visuals? What’s too much? What’s too little? What’s the best way to make this work for me? Well there’s a couple of things we need to consider at the very beginning.
What about the types of visuals that we need to use? How many visuals are required? Some people have very few. Some people have a lot. I once gave a five minute presentation and I used for that, I think, about 90 visuals. Now you might be thinking, 90 visuals in five minutes? Are you nuts? Well that particular presentation was a warm up to a keynote speaker. We’d sponsored the event and for that we got five minutes of stage time. Now I remember a quote from Abraham Lincoln. Something along the lines of, if you want me to give a three hour speech I can get up and give it right now. But if you want a 20 minute speech it will take me three or four weeks to prepare it. And that’s right. To give a very long speech, rambling speech is relatively easy. To give a very concise sharp speech is very tough.
Five minutes is a really tough time period in which to speak, very hard to have impact. So in that particular case, I used 90. I was using a visual every two seconds. As I was speaking, behind me on a big screen, lots of visuals were just hitting the audience because in that five minutes I needed to get something across about Dale Carnegie Training Japan.
I wanted to give some visual stimulation, because I didn’t have many words in five minutes to really get in front of that audience with very strong ideas. So I was using that as a technique. For that particular case it worked very well.
Generally speaking, I usually want to use too many visuals, because I am too greedy and I see all these great things I can show people, and I want to show them. But I really have to pair it down. I have to really discipline myself to really cut them out. Oh, I really want to use that graph. Oh that’s a great visual. No, no, no, no. Cut it out. Cut it out. Try and keep it in some sort of range that works for you depending on what the purpose of your presentation is. Degree of permanency is something you need to think about. It might be better to use a handout. It might be something that is too complex to put up on the screen.
Unfortunately you often get this. I worked in the financial sector for a number of years and had to sit through countless presentations of spreadsheets up on screens with numbers that were so tiny, the person standing next to the screen giving the presentation had no clue how to read it themselves and they would say crazy things like, “I know you can’t see this but…”. Well of course we can’t see the thing, it’s too damn small. Get those sorts of visuals in the hands of the audience, rather than try to see it on the screen.
As for the size of the audience, for a very big audience, the visuals may be more important than a small audience. Think. Does it back up the content of what you are saying? How much time have you got to prepare? Where I think a lot of people make a mistake is they put all the time into the PowerPoint or the key note or whatever it is that they are preparing and no time on the rehearsal.
So the whole balance flips and instead of having a case where you get the presentation structure, content right and then spend time on the rehearsal, delivery practice, it’s all sucked up into the visuals preparation, which is the wrong balance. Be very cautious about spending all your time on that and not allowing enough time on the actual physical stand up and deliver and practice. And finally the cost. Sometimes there might be a cost to buying visuals or sourcing visuals. That may not be something you want to do.
Here’s some guidelines for using visuals. As it was mentioned before, sometimes less is definitely best. On a screen, try to avoid paragraphs. Try to avoid sentences. If you can, single words, bullet points. Single words can be very, very powerful. Just one word or even just one number can be very very impactful. You can talk to the number, or you can talk to that word. Or just put up a photograph or a simple visual and you talk to the visual. You don’t have to crowd the screen with stuff that we can read ourselves.
What you really want is the audience to be focused on you, the presenter and not what’s on the screen. This is very critical. We don’t want the screen competing with us so the less you have up there the better, because people look at it two seconds, they’ve got it and then they come back to you. Which is where you want them. And I mention that two seconds because I believe that the two second rule is a key rule.
If you are putting something up on screen and an audience cannot see that and understand that within two seconds, it’s probably too complicated. Two seconds-that’s not long. But if it’s more than two seconds it’s probably too complicated. So think about reducing down the volume or breaking it into a couple of parts or maybe just leaving it out and replacing it with something you can talk to. Don’t try and have people try and make their way through something very complex on the screen.
Generally, the six by six rule means that again, less is best. Six words on a line. Maybe six lines maximum on a screen is good. Again, keeping it very minimalist. Six lines or less per visual is probably good. And then six words across each line probably max.
With fonts, try to make fonts easy to read. You might use for the title 44 font size, and for the text a 32. Large font so it’s easy to read if you are at the back of the hall. In terms of font types, sans serif fonts like Arial are very easy to read. Whereas serif fonts like Times, Times Roman, which has got a lot of additional fancy work done to them, can be a bit distracting. Try to use something like Arial or Sans Serif fonts that make it easy to read. And again, be very very very sparing with all uppercase. It’s actually screaming at your audience; it’s shouting at your audience when you use strong uppercase like that. You can use it. But use it very, very strategically and very practically to make a strong point. So upper and lowercase is much more balanced. Be very careful about using a lot or too much of all upper case.
For visibility, be careful about the overuse of underline. Yes you can use underline, but use it sparingly. Bold, yes you can use bold, but the same thing, occasionally. Italics, yes, but very rarely with italics because again it’s not so easy to read. You can use them but use them very, very modestly.
With things like transitions and animations, sometimes it’s good to reveal one concept at a time, because there is only one idea on the screen and then you can talk to that, so you are not competing with a lot of words on the screen. Try and keep it consistent and simple. So if you start like that then maybe continue like that.
Or sometimes maybe have it all up on the screen at one time, but try not to have it jumping around too much because then people get very confused. If you are going to have animation where it might be wipe right for example, as you bring in something, then have it wipe right all the time. Don’t have one wipe right then the wipe up and the next one is wipe left, next one is something else. It’s very confusing for an audience. And wiping left to right is good because that’s how we read. That makes a lot of sense for people.
And if we are going to indent on a visual, do it maybe just once on that page. Don’t have a sentence and a couple of words and a whole bunch of indents. Just try and keep it as simple as possible. If you’ve got that much information, whip that over onto another page.
Pictures are great. Pictures have a lot of visual appeal and as we say, a picture is worth a thousand words. And a nice, nice photograph of something that’s relevant, of a book or picture or whatever. Nice and people can look at that. Very simply, they get it. Two seconds, they’ve got it. Now they’re ready for your words to talk about the relevancy of this visual image, this picture, to what your talk is about today.
Next week we continue with Part Two of the correct use of visuals and look at graphs, colours, room lighting and some technical nightmares to avoid.
Um, Um, Um, Er, I, Um, Ah, Um...
My former colleague was a notorious “ummer” and “ahher”. “Um, I, um, would, um, like to um, say um, thank you, um, for um, this um, opportunity”. Listening to him was seriously, seriously painful. Time seemed to freeze over, as it took forever for him to get to the point, which was mostly lost due to dreadful syntax. Your brain basically goes into meltdown mode and you miss the content because you have switched off. The ability to stand before others and express oneself clearly is a basic skill that sadly, is still lacking in many people.
Rambling, mumbling, zero focus on the audience, no power of persuasion, and “I Am the Brand” suicide continue to stunt careers. This is bad enough but some people decide to take it to extremes and really wipe out their career prospects. When we ladle in constant ums and ahs to our sentences, we have a recipe for disaster on our hands.
My colleague was a world champion, winning the gold medal in this oral hesitation department. I wasn’t as bad, but I wasn’t a clean skin either. I found that it was a habit that I didn’t need and which didn’t help me as a professional. The problem for most people is they don’t know what to do about it. I found a way out of this mess. I will now share with you a guaranteed formula to end this reign of verbal terror you have potentially been raining down on audiences your entire life.
Experience tells us that off-the-cuff remarks are more likely to produce hesitancy in speech than a prepared presentation. Makes complete sense doesn’t it. It forces speakers to think on their feet, which triggers the dreaded filler words to bridge the gap between getting the brain in gear and cogent words emerging from the mouth. It seems that for those hard-core ummers and ahhers, it makes little difference whether it is a prepared piece or something spontaneous. Reading a prepared speech should be easier, because what you have to say is written down there and all you have to do is follow the lines and read it, without having to first think what it is you want to say. Even so, some people make this another form of torture for an audience, by relentlessly umming and ahhing all the time. This should be avoided at all cost. No wonder people rate public speaking higher than death in surveys about their worst fears.
These filler words like um and ah give us time to think, but why do we need them? If we know what we want to say, we should just be able to get right into it. The problem is the way we prepare for speaking in front of others. Usually, readying a presentation means working on PowerPoint slides for 99.9% of us. Herein lies the first mistake. Slaves to PowerPoint will never become effective communicators, because the focus is on the data, rather than the messenger. We know from research that how we say something is more important than what we say. Please absorb that sentence again, as I am sure for many people that sounds ridiculous, outrageous, bogus, outlandish and total rubbish.
You may think, “Surely content is king and people will pay more attention to the message than smoke and mirrors used for the presentation”. But this is not the case. When a presentation’s content and delivery are incongruent, only 7% of the message is heard and 93% is lost due to distraction, caused by how we look and sound. Professor Mehrabian’s famous study came to this conclusion and in this age of distraction, it is more true now than ever before. How we say it includes how we use our facial expression, voice modulation, eye contact, gestures, posture, pauses etc. No wonder presenters who devote 99.9% of their time to PowerPoint content, at the expense of rehearsing their delivery, are dull, dull, dull. If listeners are only getting 7% of what we are saying, that does not constitute very effective communication. PowerPoint is not a substitute for good communication — it is merely an aid.
It is not only the dreaded slide deck. The president of a firm, who at their public presentation immediately launches into a corporate video, joins the ranks of “presentation scoundrels”. This happens more often than it should. The PR or marketing department, have been coopted to rescue the big boss from actually having to speak much to their audience. Videos should never take the place of strong communication for key messages. Like PowerPoint, they are just for support, so use them sparingly and make your face the key communication tool, followed by your voice, gestures, pauses and posture as noted. Using notes, either on paper or through the mechanism of the order of the slides, is perfectly acceptable. Reading those notes is not. Especially if you insist on reading them from the screen to us and doing so with your back toward the audience.
I attended a presentation where the speaker was well dressed, well groomed, the whole package — until she proceeded to read entirely from her notes. You could hear the entire air of her credibility being sucked out of the room, the moment she started reading. If you know your stuff, unless it is incredibly detailed and technical, you can get by without having to read notes. It was obvious she had not been trained and was not knowledgeable about public speaking. Don’t be relegated to the dustbin of totally forgettable speakers like her.
We should allow our notes to spark the messages we wish to convey. Prior to delivery, practice, practice, practice! No one expects perfection, so incorrect pronunciation or pauses to consider subsequent remarks are natural and acceptable.
On top of these issues, we make things even worse when the speech delivery is so annoying and therefore distracting, because of all the ums and ahs. The use of filler words is permissible a few times in a presentation, but the higher the frequency, the tighter the hangman’s noose is being tied around the speaker’s own reputation and personal brand.
Here is the Dr. Greg Story’s rule on avoiding filler words: Practice before you deliver in front of your audience. Here is how you need to practice. Decide the first word of each sentence and hit that word hard. Allow no other noise to escape your mouth, before continuing with the next word in the sentence. Once you get to the end of that sentence, SHUT UP. It is very, very important to purse your lips together at the end of that sentence, so that no sound can escape. Keep repeating this process and there is no possibility of filler words ever being uttered. It takes hours of practice, of course, but I guarantee you this works.
I wasn’t quite in the league of the erstwhile colleague I referred to at the beginning, but I did give him a run for his money at different times. We all do these ums and ahs, because we are trying to fill the vocal vacuum, while we think. We can think in silence. We do this during pauses between the points we are making. Pauses are a natural thing and a better alternative to our ums and ahs. Like me, everyone I have taught this method to has eliminated filler words almost entirely. They followed this simple technique until it became habit — a positive habit. Pursing, pausing and practicing are the keys to success.
Naomi Osaka’s Public Speaking Lessons
Congratulations to tennis star Naomi Osaka for winning the Australian open and rising to Number One ranking globally. Japan loves to see Japanese athletes doing well, so this new ranking is a first for Japanese tennis and a big deal here. I looked at her press conference and her acceptance speech and what a contrast. In the press conference she was asked totally ridiculous, moronic questions from some of the journalists, starting from the first one (!) and it didn’t phase her in the slightest. She was very comfortable with herself and who she is, so she sailed through those rough waters extremely well. What a contrast though to Naomi on the podium. There she was obviously uncomfortable, umming and ahhing, struggling to get through it. She mentioned in the press conference that she was panicking up there on stage. What does this mean for the rest of us?
We can think of what Naomi is doing with what we are doing in our work. Her life is filled up with technical work. These consist of the various shots required in a tennis match and hours a day are poured into perfecting these shots. However when she is required to receive the trophy and say a few words, she admits herself she has received no training for this component of the work and she is panicking as a result. This win isn’t the first time I have seen her mentioning that she isn’t very skilled at public speaking.
We might be doing the same. The technical skills we are working on don’t include tennis groundstrokes etc., but will include law, medicine, engineering, IT, accounting, etc. Technical people are also prone to neglect to get public speaking training and similarly are thrust into the limelight, when they have to represent their expertise, section, division, firm, industry etc., at some event. Like Naomi, they have been concentrating on the technical aspects of their work and have not prepared for this foray into the world of giving presentations and consequently have come up short.
Usually we don’t have such greatness thrust upon us at the tender age of 21 like Naomi, but it will come. Maybe in our late twenties or in our thirties we will have to stand up and speak in front of others. She has the luxury of many years ahead of her to get comfortable with public speaking as a tennis star but the rest of us are a bit older and the need is more pressing. What are we doing about it?
Public speaking training has so many benefits, such as taking the stress out of the occasion. That is one of the key benefits Naomi would enjoy because clearly she is feeling the stress. It diminishes her capacity to enjoy her big moment when they hand her the massive trophy. The game itself and the joy of the win have all fled from her mind. All she is focused on is how fast can she get out of this situation, so that she can feel more at ease.
For the rest of us it is the same. If you have to present in front of others, it can be stressful, uncomfortable and a burden. Looking at all those beady eyes staring back at you is disconcerting. You are not enjoying any of this and mentally are looking for the nearest exit. If you know what you are doing however, it can be extremely enjoyable and a pleasure. Once you get to that stage you want more opportunities to speak. The first time I experienced a crowd lean into to me when I was speaking was a tremendous feeling. Wow, I have this audience in the palm of my hand. It was exhilarating. I cannot imagine how rock stars calm down after hours of fans screaming at them and pushing out so much energy toward the performers. Anyway, the times I have tasted just a small sample of that “lean in” energy, it has been unforgettable. It is like a drug – you want more.
Technical knowledge is no suit of armour against audiences when speaking, so we need to be forearmed by accessing training. We need to know our subject matter competently and well, but we also need to access a professional capacity to present it to an audience. Our personal brand is tightly linked to how well we can do this. Naomi is a superstar because she is number one in the world, yet she is leaving so much opportunity on the table, because she doesn’t know yet how to build an even bigger support base, through her ability to get her message across clearly and confidently.
We are doing the same, if we just rely on our expertise in our subject area and we don’t go and get training on how to present properly. Imagine you need some engineering work done. You go to a presentation on a technical subject and there are two engineers speaking. One is bumbling and spluttering, while the other is professional and articulate. You will go the one most capable on stage, when you want engineering work done. This is the same for all professions and yet so many professionals deny themselves this opportunity to get an advantage over their rivals. The key is to get trained and add this professional capability to your existing areas of expertise. The best time to do this was yesterday, and the second best time is to day.
How To Handle Killer Questions From Your Audience
We have probably all been on the receiving end of it or have been a witness to it. The presentation is completed, after which come the questions; some are fact finding, some seek clarification, while some are just plain really nasty. Perhaps the questioner is not trying to be mean, but the result is the same. All eyes in the room burn a hole into you as everyone waits to see how you are going to handle this incoming missile, that is thinly disguised as a question.
Some presenters splutter, nervousness sapping intellectual and verbal powers, while some give such a pathetic response we can see their credibility sail right out the window as they speak. Some get angry, assuring everyone there that they are not fit for higher responsibilities, because they clearly can’t control their emotions.
Do these questions come up? Yes, so there is no point imagining that we won’t have to face the meeting room moment of truth. It could be from an ambitious colleague, elbows out, trying to push past you to get the top job. It could be from a member of the board, totally underwhelmed by what you have said, or from a member of the audience, who takes umbrage at your line of thinking.
Do we usually prepare beforehand, in the event that someone might decide to go after us? In 99% of cases the answer is “no”. The missile catches us off guard and we simply flounder. Trying to think on your feet, when your brain is on fire from nervousness is very hard. We put ourselves in harms way unnecessarily.
This is an embarrassment that can be easily fixed. Below are a few steps that will trounce your rivals, diminish your adversaries, and show everyone what a true professional you are.
Most preparation prior to any presentation generally focuses on the content and not the delivery. Taking questions, by the way, is part of the delivery and not something tacked on to the main proceedings. When preparing a speech or presentation, we are in control of the direction. However, once the questions start raining down, sadly, we are no longer in command of the situation. We have to recognise that reality.
The first step before the meeting is to imagine what trouble may lie ahead. Who will be in the room? Who has a vested interest in seeing you go down in flames? Who are the potential troublemakers and their acolytes, possibly beavering away at creating problems for you? What have been some of the historical issues between your section and other parts of the organisation? Will there be someone in the room still smarting over you getting his or her’s money for last year’s project? What are some of the current burning issues that have a lot of money or prestige attached to them that would invite someone to slice you up in front of the assembled masses? Is your topic likely to engage strong opinions opposed to what you have to say?
Having identified the issues that are likely to become “hot” during the questioning period, let’s design some positive messages. Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State, gave a great piece of advice once when announcing at a press conference, “Who has questions for the answers I have ready for you?” It is an amusing display of raw honesty from a speaker, but also very smart.
Rather than moving straight into damage control, which can often appear weak, squeamish, shifty and dishonest, be ready to go on to the front foot. Be ready to put forward a strong positive message about the benefits of what you are proposing. Have at least two or three of these up your sleeve, for each issue that you have designated as potential trouble.
As a side note, be aware of your body language when doing this. Albert Mehrabian’s book, Silent Messages, has become well known for noting the disconnection between what we say and how we say it. If the two don’t match up, your message (your actual words) get lost, while 93% of everyone’s attention is focused on how you look and the style of your voice.
Thus, a positive message needs positive body language, facial expression, tone of voice, and strength to back it up—preferably with a steely eye that glints with confidence. Even if you don’t possess one of those, try to fake it until you make it, because no one in the audience will be aware of how you really feel.
Focus on preparing four response options that will help to provide a strategy when questions come assailing you.
• Immediately deny what others say when it is factually incorrect, misinformation, rumour, hearsay, or when you have been misinterpreted. Be strong, brief and have clear evidence to support your denial.
• Admit you are wrong when there has been a misunderstanding or mistake. This is disarming and leaves the questioner with nowhere to go. The wind has been drained from their sails; you look honest and reliable.
• Reverse negative perceptions by turning them into positives. For example, when dealing with competing priorities within the organisation, you might say: “I understand that going through this reorganisation is costing us a lot of time right now. The fact that we are dedicating this time now to the issue should save us all time later by having a more efficient structure”.
• Explain in more detail by providing further background and facts. The reason behind a decision or position is often news to the other party who may not have the same grasp of the details as you. Give them more context of why you believe what you believe.
Now here is a vital piece of the puzzle about how we start the process of dealing with nasty questions. The distance between our ear and our mouth is way too short! We blurt out the first thing that comes into our mind when we encounter trouble. We need a verbal cushion to slow down the response process. Our first response is rarely our best one, so delay our full response slightly.
We can do this by paraphrasing, into neutral terms, what someone else has just said. This has a double benefit because you are now in control of the language of the question and you have given yourself some thinking time.
The question might be: “Is it true that the company is going to start firing people next month?” Your paraphrase might be: “The question was about future staffing”. This takes the bite out of the incoming missile.
Other cushions might include phrases such as: “Many people we have talked to have expressed similar concerns”; “That is an important issue, let’s focus on that for a moment”, and “Thank you for bringing that up so we can address it now”.
Our brains work very fast, so we only need three or four seconds interregnum to get to a second response option, which will always outshine and outperform the first bluster that comes out of our mouths. Calm, considered, pre-planned responses, cushioned for effect, and delivering positive messages in a confident manner, will disarm any nasty boardroom big bosses, enemy colleagues, wannabees, riff raff and general hoi polloi pirates who are trying to scuttle you.