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THE Presentations Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

THE Presentations Japan Series is powered by with great content from the accumulated wisdom of 100 plus years of Dale Carnegie Training. The show is hosted in Tokyo by Dr. Greg Story, President of Dale Carnegie Training Japan and is for those highly motivated students of presentations, who want to be the best in their business field.
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THE Presentations Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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Now displaying: 2020
Dec 28, 2020

Primacy refers to the beginning of something, as it enters our brain. This new entity has a powerful impact on our memory and our concentration.  To muscle itself into our existing brain thought stream, takes a lot of mental energy. If successful, the new direction grabs us more powerfully than continuing with the same existing thought pattern.  Recency is focused on the last thing we have heard.  One of the narky criticisms of some people is that the thoughts we share with you are the result of our most recent conversation. We tend to remember the last thing we heard.  That makes a lot of sense doesn’t it, but what does this mean for speakers?

Are we only able to have our audience remember our openings and closings of our speechs?  Yes, the audience will certainly most easily recall the first and last pieces of information.  They will also strike an impression of us, on the basis of our first and last visual and vocal touches.  Obviously, we need to plan for and control the delivery of all of this opening and closing business, but we can go beyond that.  There will also be numerous other opens and closings going on during the audiences’ busy day. How do we shove all of those completely aside and dominate the minds of our audience.  We want them to absorb our message and to exclude all other competing thoughts?

 

Why do we have only one opening and one closing?  Could we break the talk up into chapters?  Each chapter is given a gangbuster opening and closing for that particular thought or point we want to convey.  Could we bring some physical action to the fore to differentiate the chapters and lift the audiences’ engagement with us?  This is only possible if we switch up our thinking about what is achievable with a talk.  The speaker’s normal fare is the same as everyone else’s normal fare.  We are immediately at a disadvantage to stand out from the crowd.  Sadly, we are at one with the speaker push, fitting in with standard operating procedures and methodologies.  We become another grey automaton lined up with all the other robot speakers.  Let’s stop doing that.

 

In a forty minute talk, there will be room for around seven to eight chapters, an opening and the first close before the Q&A, then the final close.  Let’s change up the opening at both the mental and physical levels.  We want an opening statement, question, quote, testimonial or story that rocks the audience back into the folds of their seat and makes them take note that they are strapping in for a major ride here today.  This shatters everything that came before for them up until that point. We must extinguish their previous thoughts and proclivities.  This is especially so, if you are one of a number of speakers tumbling along one after another, launching forth on some worthy topic.

 

Let’s organise some crew, instead of always going solo. If there is a switch between you and the MC or the previous speaker, there is always some dithering around with the tech to get the laptops exchanged and your slides up.  This drains the lifeblood of your first impression and the energy in the room simply tanks.  The MC roars, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the incomparable, the amazing, the stupendous Dr. Greg Story. Please welcome him to the stage, because he is going to totally rock our world today”.  You scramble up on stage and are immediately bent over like an old, old man, head down, trying to get the laptop hooked up to the projector.  This unwanted intrusion into the opening segment continues while you are zipping around with your mouse, looking to boot that slide show up.  This lull in proceedings has cratered the impact of that powerhouse MC introduction. It has now effectively been driven down to a pathetic whimper.  People have whipped into scrolling through their Facebook, LinkedIn or email, ignoring you while you get your act together.  The opening’s marvellous, magical momentum has melted away.

 

Why not get someone else to handle the logistics, so that you can get straight into your talk?  They set it all up while you are already speaking to the audience.  At the right moment they leave the slide advancer for you on top of the laptop, gracefully glide off stage and leave you to continue solo.  This way we float directly onto the power stream of the MC and then take the audience even higher with our own energy.  Yes, we need to have a lot of energy at the start, because remember there are two bodies on stage. We want to monopolise the audience’s attention for ourselves.  We purposely stand on the far side of the stage, to draw everyone’s looking line away from the tech God and have the audience focus on us instead.

 

In Part Two, we will go deeper with our entry and exit points of the chapters and then how to choreograph the big crescendo for our polemic’s sparkling conclusion.

Dec 21, 2020

Bruce Springsteen’s song Glory Days lyric, “Boring stories of Glory days yeah, they’ll pass you by” pops into my head sometimes, when I hear a speaker reminiscing about their glorious past.  I was sitting there at a chamber function when the speaker began to talk at length about his start in sales and his experiences.  It was fascinating for him no doubt, but it made him sound dated. He seemed to have become covered in dusty cobwebs too all of a sudden.  Talking about ourselves is great and dangerous at the same time. 

 

Usually when we speak, there will be our introduction done by the hosts.  If we are on the ball, we don’t place ourselves in their hands, so we write what we want them to say.  That doesn’t mean they are on the ball and can carry out a simple task.  If we make it too long, the hosts usually manages to murder it by dropping bits or getting things wrong.  I am always astonished that they cannot successfully read a piece of paper with words on it.

 

The audience is also on danger alert because they know the propaganda offensive is about to hit them.  It is hard to write about yourself though, because there are so many things you want to include.  Why is that?  We are desperate to establish our credentials with the audience, so that they will become more accepting of what we are saying.  We believe that volume is important so we should cram as much in there as we can.  In fact, we are defeating our own efforts because either the host mangles the text or the audience switches off.

 

Avoiding the chronology approach is always a good start.  Sometimes these details are included in the programme flyer and you don’t need to mention them at all or you can organise your own flyer for the attendees.  This is a good tactic and not hard to do.  When we are speaking about ourselves, we should focus on the key points only.  These are the things which relate to our expertise on this specific topic.  I am a 6th Dan in Shitoryu karate, which is wonderful, but probably doesn’t have anything to with a topic like presenting.  I could instead say this is my speech number #342 and that would be congruent with establishing I am a real world expert of the dark art of public speaking and have the experience required to tell others how to do it.

 

Often we are using powerpoint, so we can bring up some slides about our company.  This should also be brief.  Simple clear slides are what we want and the selection of information should be limited to the most powerful USPs or unique selling points of our firm.  Slide after slide makes an audience restless.  They are sitting there thinking, “enough already, get on with it”.  When I worked for a long established Australian Bank which was rather unknown in Japan, I would show a photograph of the establishment of the first branch back in the 19th century.  It was a black and white photograph with people dressed in the fashion of the Victorian era and it oozed with longevity.  I also attached the date in the Japanese Imperial reign format, rather than the Gregorian calendar, to make it seem even more ancient and venerable.  That one photo showed my Japanese audience we had stood the test of time and could be trusted with their money.

 

The CEO cowardly public speaking escape route of reliance on the souped-up corporate video at the start of the talk should be avoided at all cost.  These videos are rarely a good match with the specific topic for that day, because there is usually only one video. It has to be the Swiss Army Knife of propaganda videos, to travel around the world boring people of every persuasion.  If there is a particular section in the video which is really powerful, then just cue that part and don’t bother with the left over detritus.

 

Giving our own examples is a good idea in the talk, but again, we have to steer away from too much recalling of our glorious triumphs.  The audience is only interested in how what you are telling them will result in their own glorious triumphs, now and into the future.  We have to get a balance struck between talking about ourselves for effect and not for the stroking of our own massive speaker ego.  Where possible, use client examples of what you did for them, rather than droning on about what you did.

 

It is a tricky equation of how much is too much, which bits are more important than other bits and how much time should I allow for it.  Err on the side of caution and go minimalist, recalling Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, “less is more”.

Dec 14, 2020

In the public arena most presentations follow a set formula. I speak, I stop, you ask me questions and then I finish up and leave the venue.  Inside of companies though, there will be different types of presentations.  We may be creating a new project, getting the team members together and taking them through what we need to do.  It might be a report on the progress of the section, where we are with revenues and clients etc.  In some cases, we will be leading a discussion on where we go from here or how we will approach the project. We want people to buy into the direction, by helping create it.  We might be doing a SWOT analysis as a group, to gauge where we are and what we need to be.

 

In these cases, we don’t want to be doing all of the talking and we want others to get involved.  One of the problems though, is that people are hesitant to speak up in meetings.  They do have great ideas and good insights.  However, they keep them to themselves and leave the room with these little gems still stashed away out of sight.  People are not stupid.  They have been taught the dangers of speaking up by bad bosses or evil colleagues.

 

At some point it has happened to them directly or they saw it happen to a peer.  An opinion or comment is shredded on the spot and humiliation is being handed out in big gobs.  Once you experience that for yourself or witness the shredding, you are cautious about what you say and who you say it to.  Never forget, that the people in our building are up against a bunch of people in another building somewhere in town.  The quality of our ideas and our execution of those ideas, is what determines who wins in the marketplace.  If the ideas of our team are being traumatised at birth, then the other crowd will win.

 

In any meeting, the same confident three people will dominate the airwaves and all of their ideas will be adopted.  There will be others sitting there with better experience, insights and ideas who are never heard. There are also cases where the politics is so rife, that jealousies and petty quarrels impede the development of an all team approach to beating the competition.  We are too busy for them because we are fully occupied squabbling amongst ourselves. Or the boss is so dominant, no one dares to speak up, so the whole meeting becomes a monologue, with the boss talking talking, talking. This is where the facilitator’s role becomes important.

 

Often it is better to bring in an outside facilitator who has no axe to grind, no revenge to extract, no agenda and no dog in the fight.  They don’t care about the past or hierarchy and are focused on getting the most out of the group in front of them.  They are strong and can shut down any crap that some people want to pull, when trying to drag the proceedings back into the usual quagmire.  I often play that role for senior executive groups, so I have seen all the typical shenanigans up close and personal.

 

If you are using the DIY approach, then set yourself up for success. Set some clear ground rules at the start or some of your colleagues will try to hijack control away from you and engage in their own agendas.  Control who gets to speak and for how long.  This is important because if you want to suppress the few noisy ones, you have to have the authority to tell them, nicely, to shut up and let others speak.  Sounds good except when the person who is talking too much is the boss or one of the senior heavyweights, who enjoy throwing their weight around.  Bit of tricky situation there for your career.  If you do the right thing, you may be in the big shot’s bad books and future retribution is headed your way.

 

Set the rules and get everyone to agree to them up front, including the corporate nobles as well as the hoi polloi.  When you want to shut them down, you just cut them off while they are droning on and sweetly say, “thank you for your insights and I want to follow our agreement, that we will seek enough time for everyone to contribute, so let me ask you to please finish your current point and then I will get some other comments”.  You won’t get fired for that one!!

 

The other problem is getting people to speak up, without someone else trying to destroy them, because they disagree with what they are saying or because they have a grudge or whatever.  We set the rules that any comments will come in two forms – what you like about what they just said and your suggestions for taking their idea to a further and better place.  Also, that except for you, no one else is allowed to cut anyone off, when they are speaking.  It will happen and then angelically, you say, “Thank you Tom, and please allow me to play my role as facilitator and note that I am glad you are ready to weigh in.  Also please let me allow Mariko to finish her point first, then you can tell us what you liked about it and then how we can make it even better”.  You won’t get fired for that either, if Tom is one of the big bosses!!

 

Make the meeting rules the sole arbiter of correct behaviour, rather than yourself.  Get everyone to agree before you start. Be an exemplar of tact, good manners and humility, when you assume the regal crown of controlling the meeting. Internal facilitators are walking around in a mine field, so always nobble the boss before you agree to take the role. Get their support and agreement to allow you to shut them or any other worthies down, if you have to.  This facilitator gig is not for the faint hearted.

Dec 7, 2020

For many people it may seem we are getting into oxymoron territory here.  “Public speaking…enjoyable?  You must be kidding mate”.  Many are called upon to speak and reluctantly they give their talk without talent, enthusiasm or particular motivation.  A duty, an unavoidable pain, like going back to the dentist for that root canal. As we rise in our careers, the necessity to speak in public goes right up in frequency and length.  Unfortunately, no one tells you this is what is on the cards for future you, so you are perpetually unprepared.  If we knew this was part of our unescapable future, then we would all get the training and end the misery right there.

 

Even for those who are sufferers, do they seek relief through getting training?  No.  They just continue blundering forward, reeking havoc wherever they go, destroying their personal and professional brands. This includes those who are devastated by nerves, quivering, pulse racing, hot flushes sweeping over their body, faces going bright red, knees knocking, stomach queasy and throat parched.  Do they get training?  No.  They just lurch from fearfulness to fearfulness, whenever they are required to speak in front of others.

 

What do we need to fix this.  Obviously training is one part and so is repetition.  Most speeches though are one offs, a one and done affair.  The speech has been used up for that audience, on that day and then it is shelved forever.  So how do we get repetition?  We may not get the chance to repeat the content, but we can give more talks.  To do that though we have stop hiding from the chance.  As a child in Brisbane, I watched the Three Stooges on black and white television and one of the jokes would be two of them would step back when asked to volunteer, making it appear that the other one had stepped forward, wanting to do the task.  Reluctant speakers are mentally doing the same thing.  Whenever the chance to get some repetition going comes up, they step back and let others do it.

 

Even if the chance to present to an audience is a one time thing, that doesn’t mean the talk is a one time thing.  If we are smart, we are giving this speech numerous times.  We do these without an audience, in private, as a rehearsal for the big event.  I competed in senior level Karate competition for many years and would never dream of going on to the mat and doing the kata or prearranged patterns, once only just for the judges.  I would be practicising for months in the Dojo, rehearsing that kata, over and over again until I dropped.  Why would putting your reputation out there in business require anything less?

 

By the time you hit that stage you are well practiced and confident.  Consequently your brain doesn’t release masses of chemicals preparing you for battle with a sabre toothed tiger, where you either run away or stand your ground and fight.  Consequently, come showtime you are not so nervous.  Some nerves yes, but not debilitating.

 

The other mental shift is to decide who this speech is about.  Not what it is about, but who it is about.  For people who hate speaking in public or become crippled with nerves, the speech is all about them.  It is about their mental trauma, induced by how they feel they will be judged by the audience and their deep fears of imminent, unmitigated disaster, about to  humiliate them for the rest of time.

 

We must switch the focus to the audience.  We are giving each person six seconds of eye contact, inducing that feeling in them, that they are only person in the room.  Hawk like, we are scrutinising their reaction to what we are saying.  We are judging if they are with us or do we have to push harder to bring them on board.  We are pumping out our ki (気) or intrinsic energy into the audience, to maximise our body language.  We are using congruent gestures to add lustre and power to our words.  Tonal variety, variations in speed and power engage the audience, such that they are eschewing their mobile phone’s siren call to escape to the internet.

 

In response, some will smile, nod, laugh at your amusing asides, follow you through the navigation of the talk.  After a while, some will start to lean into you.  It will only be a few millimetres, but what a rush that feeling is. When twenty, thirty, fifty, one hundred people start doing that at the same time, there is a powerful energy in the room. It hits you like a drug racing through your veins and leaves you looking for your next hit.  This is when public speaking surpasses duty and becomes a real pleasure.

Nov 30, 2020

Experts, pseudo experts, amateurs, believers, sceptics, supporters, enemies make up that sea of faces in front of us when we get up to speak.  We can get some basic data from the organisers about who is in the room.  What industries, companies, gender, age configurations are arrayed in those venue seats.  What we can’t tell are the information assimilation biases of our audience members.  This means we have to plan for a spread of reactions to what we are going to say.  By plan, factor that into the content and the delivery of our talk.  How do we do that?

 

There will be four basic personality styles in that random selection of individuals gathered to hear our talk.  Obviously we can’t easily satisfy four different demands at the same time.  During the course of the presentation we have to input elements which will appeal to all four, at different times.  Usually speakers don’t do this at all.  They plan and deliver based on their own preferred styles and to hell with the rest of the room.  Actually, it isn’t that nuanced.  It is not a conscious decision and more of one by neglect.

 

Content needs to have evidence.  The degree of granularity we can go into however will be linked to our knowledge base and also to the time available to cover the topic.  If we just bludgeon our audience with numbers for forty minutes, the Analtyicals in the room will be euphoric and everyone else totally nonplussed.  They love the detail, the proof, the evidence through numbers and 0.0001 is a fully acceptable number for them.  They don’t care about us speaking in a monotone or being fully boring, as long as we keep coming with more valuable data. They will ask us incredibly detailed questions about what we presented and will be carefully checking to spot any contradictions or errors in the numbers or the assertions.

 

Amiables are very conservative and low key.  They don’t like bombastic outbursts.  Radical ranting and venting don’t go down very well with them.  Calm delivery, in not too a loud a speaking voice is appreciated.  They like plenty of reference to people.  Who was involved, what did they do, how did they feel about it, are all curiosity factors for them.  They generally won’t raise their hand to ask a question, because they prefer to keep a low profile.  If we are low key throughout the talk, then the Analyticals and the Amiables will be fine with that, but not so other key types in the audience.  We need to have periods of calm interaction with our audience, to keep these first two groups happy. Focusing on data and people tends to go down well.

 

Expressives  are bored with all of that data and hate that low energy stuff speakers get up to.  They want some action, flamboyance, excitement, passion, enthusiasm, pizzazz and entertainment.  They don’t care too much for the nitty gritty detailed evidence. They want to see some powerful belief and emotional commitment to what we are saying.  They like the towering rhetoric of the motivational speaker.  If really moved, leaping out of their chairs and being supportive would be no problem for them.  We need to provide some big picture speech elements for this group.  At specific moments we can unleash our passion for our recommendations, get very powerful in that advocacy and really push out the volume and the energy.

 

Drivers are very outcome focused, so what value can you bring to me?  What can I learn that will make me better so that I can use it to improve what I am doing now. The “five key things”, the “ten steps” are all super attractive frameworks.  They want to know the why, the what and the how. They don’t need the cheerleader, because they want the takeaways.  They are their own cheerleader, so they search for new knowledge they can apply.  Your passion is appreciated but the viability of the information in concrete usage terms is more appealing.  Having lots of energy is fine but having very little is not.  Be powerful at times but come laden with gifts of guides to doing better.

 

In our talk we need to have phases that provide value to all four groups.  We cannot favour our own style or one other style exclusively, because we have effectively excommunicated the rest of the group. This is a delicate act to pull off, which is why it needs careful thought and planning beforehand.  You can't make this stuff up or get the balance right on the fly.  We have to start with the premise that we have a range of people in the room. We need to give them all a taste of wonder, defined by how they see that playing out.

Nov 23, 2020

In our High Impact Presentations (HIP) course, we do a number of presentations over two days of training.  What I love about teaching this programme is that you see the results immediately.  If we are teaching leadership or sales, it is very hard to see immediate results and those programmes are multi-week efforts.  Day One we have the first presentation which forms the marker for the programme.  I challenge everyone to give me their very best, knock it out of the park, most spectacular presentation they have ever given in their life.  When we get to the end of Day Two and they compare the last video of their presentation with this first one, everyone has exactly the same reaction “oh, my God” because they have made such vast, almost unimaginable improvement in just two days.

 

People who are already quite good, become more polished and sophisticated in their presenting.  The real eye poppers are those who are shy, panicking, timid or inaudible through fear.  Two days later they are unrecognisable from what they were the day before.  I was looking at some of this amazing progress being made and I was thinking to myself, what has made this huge difference?

 

Kiai is a key factor.  Kiai (気合) is a Japanese word made up of two characters ki ( 気) and ai (合).  Kiai means to bring your life force to a point of convergence.  In karate terms, this means the blow is delivered with a total commitment at the point of impact.  Your whole bodyweight, mind, breath, voice are all layering on top of each other, to register an explosive outcome inside the body of the opponent. Your middle body area from the hips to the rib cage, are compressing like a vice. All of this is being done at hyper speed as well, to create the maximum amount of power.

 

The first time I heard a kiai was in February 1971.  With other beginners, I was waiting outside a door that led to our first karate class and we could hear all this crazy yelling going on inside.  I peaked through the gap in the door and saw many people dressed in these white pajama looking get ups, leaping around and making a hell of racket.  I didn’t know then that for the next 50 years, I would be doing the same thing.

 

The same phenomenon is not limited to martial arts. If you have ever watched competitive weight lifting for example, you will hear the kiai when the lifter drives total concentration to the point of the lift and exhales with a strong breath at the same time.  This is what we do in karate and what we need to be doing in our presentations. Instead of grunting and exhaling, we are using our vocal delivery range to bring impact to our message.

 

The students I was teaching presenting had no kiai when they started the HIP. Their words were just words, spoken at normal conversation level, as if they were chatting with the person sitting next to them.  The presenter has permission to lift their speaking voice to a much higher level than is normally the case in polite conversation.  Remember, we are standing up in front of others seated in a venue, so we have to project our voice to the back of the room.  If we are presenting online, it is the same thing.  Video has two nefarious impacts on us.  We appear to have gained three kilos in weight when on camera and our normal voice strength is down by about twenty percent.  That means we have to raise the speaking level twenty percent online, just to get to a normal level, let alone going a bit harder because we are presenting.

 

In the course, I explain that we have to speak with more power.  We have to hit the words harder than normal.  We also have to mentally project our energy into the audience.  So it is not just the voice range that is important.  As I mentioned, we are focused on the kiai, the convergence of our life force.  We push our body energy toward the people sitting in front of us through our body language.  The breath is being exhaled with the delivery of the words and the energy output level is extremely high. Our gestures are also being added in to provide even more physical presence to what we are saying.

 

I always need to encourage the participants to go bigger with their gestures.  This helps to raise their energy level and to add more power to their presentations.  When I am telling them to go bigger, they never go big enough, so I have to really push them. They think this looks completely crazy and is making them come across as totally out of control.  Every single person coming back from the Review Room having looked at themselves on video say that even though they thought they looked over the top, it didn’t look like that on the video and in fact it looked completely  congruent with what they were saying.

 

When we are speaking using more kiai, the audience feels our presence.  They feel our passion, commitment and belief in what we are saying.  This is very attractive to the listener and they are more likely to accept and support what we are saying.  Bring your breath, physical energy, gestures and voice to a point of convergence when you speak and you will have real impact as a presenter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nov 16, 2020

Sometimes the organisers of the presentation event ask us if they can distribute our slides before the speech.  They are thinking that this will help the audience to follow what we are saying.  Especially in Japan, audience members are probably better at reading than hearing the content.  So having the slides at hand to refer to during the talk makes a lot of sense.  Never do this!  Ignore the supposed sage advice of event organisers, who themselves rarely if ever give public presentations.  There are very few occasions when you need to be handing out bits of paper to support your talk.

 

The only exception to this rule of mine would be if there are numbers involved and they are locked into tiny cells in a spreadsheet.  I am sure you have suffered the ignominy of sitting in an audience and struggling to make sense of the numbers being shown on the screen.  The speaker gracefully moves through the spreadsheet, pointing out various gripping correlations and conclusions. Of course, they have added an important caveat before their pontifications about what we are all looking at, by saying “you probably can’t see this but….”.  Naturally we can’t see it.  The tiny number squiggles are unable to be claimed from the cells on screen, because the presenter has not considered the needs of the audience. 

 

I could arrange for just those spreadsheet numbers to be distributed before the talk, so that people can read along with my explanation.  This is giving verity to what we are claiming because the audience can check the numbers themselves.  I am still reluctant to do that though.  As soon as I refer people to the sheets of paper in their hand, I have lost my connection with them.  They are now looking at bits of paper and not at me.  I can’t see how they are reacting, because their faces are looking down.

 

I would prefer to treat the spreadsheet numbers like wall paper on screen.  They form a backdrop, but I don’t expect anyone to plumb the depths of numbers they cannot see, let alone read.  Instead I would use some animation and blast out key numbers in huge font in a call out emerging from the background.  Now everyone is looking at one huge number and I would explain the importance of that statistic or number.  The wall paper in the background is a type of proof that we have the numbers, we are not hiding them.  We don’t need to show every number in the collection though, because there will be some numbers more important than others. 

 

We just keep repeating this animation process for every key number.  We can make the sheets of paper available at the end, for anyone who would like to go more granular.  In this way, all eyes are kept on me as the presenter. I can also read the faces of the audience as I present these key data points.  I am scanning their faces for resistance.  Am I going to get any pushback during the Q&A?  Are they buying my argument?

 

If we distribute the entire slide deck before the talk, then what is the point of the talk in the first place?  We may as well all stay at home and just send everyone an email with the attachment and they can read through it all at their leisure.  Once the audience has that document, they are reading page eighteen while you are explaining page one.  You have lost control of the narrative.  They are now processing what they are seeing in the document and somewhere in the background, they can hear some white noise.  That white noise is you, by the way, droning on about your presentation.  They are not fully listening any more and as the speaker you have effectively lost your audience.

 

As the presenter, we must never become second fiddle to the slide deck or the spreadsheet.  We must control the flow of the argument.  The story is meant to unfold in a certain logical order, a build that pushes ever onward, toward a powerful conclusion.  We are here to sell our argument and that means we have to get right behind it all the way.  Don’t delegate the point of the talk to the slide deck.  Get out in front where you can dominate proceedings and where you can read ever nuance of your audience’s reaction to what you are saying.  We must be the star of the show, not the cells in a spreadsheet or masses of text on screen.

 

So, when the organisers, those never presenters, insist we need to distribute the talk beforehand, cast them a steely glance. In an icy voice of shivering indignation refuse their idiotic offer.  Others are allowed to be unprofessional, but we must be the island of insight, knowledge, intelligence and experience.  That is the path of the real presenter.

Nov 9, 2020

Donald Trump has made this technique of “many people say….” famous for dealing with opposing views.  This is not an exercise for or against Trump. Rather, it is just looking at different ways we can head off opposition to what we are saying.  We should have a point of view when we speak and therefore we should also be prepared for opposing points of view.  Getting to the Q&A to deal with pushback is okay, but it is better to deal with it inside your presentation.

 

Most of us are one dimensional when we prepare our talks.  We are thinking of ourselves and what we want or need to say.  We don’t give much thought to how others will receive it.  In Japan, it is unusual for anyone to go after you when you are speaking.  Good manners requires that everyone be stoic and put up with annoying counter opinions.  No one should lose face in a public arena.  This is fine, but those who disagree may not bark, but they do bite.  They will do it afterwards, rather than in public.  They will criticise your failings to others and you will go merrily on your way, never realising that the audience thinks you are a total light weight.  Better to grasp the nettle in the moment and end it then and there.

 

The key is to first design your talk in the first draft.  I don’t mean write the whole thing out word for word, but to design the two endings for before and after the Q&A, to create the key points with evidence and finally design the blunderbuss opening to grab everyone’s attention.  Once you have this framework start looking for your points of view interventions.  There will be a few of these in the speech.  These are the things you want us to believe or to do.

 

Now isolate these out and think about the opposite point of view.  What would be the strongest arguments against your point of view.  If you say there aren’t any, then a big reality check on your self awareness sounds like it is in order.  Take the lawyers approach of preparing the brief for the other side in the argument.  What would they say, how would they refute the points made, what counter evidence would they proffer.  You might not think the evidence is comprehensive but that isn’t the viewpoint of those holding those ideas. Also consider what questions would they ask to find any holes in your proposition?

 

In the talk, you can draw on the Trumpian technique of putting up a stalking horse argument and then disposing of it comprehensively.  You might say, “there is an alternate viewpoint that says XYZ.  Most experts however believe that ABC is more convincing and better supported by the evidence”.  You have said that not just you, but the experts are opposing this XYZ viewpoint and what is more, they have looked at all the evidence and concluded that what you are saying is more accurate.  Third party interventions from experts makes it harder for people in the audience to disagree with you.

 

“Japan is different” is an all weather counter for just about everything that people base their views on.  Japanese people disregard any surveys or research presented unless it includes Japan in the comparisons.  It doesn’t matter what it is, unless there is a Japan component involved, they conclude it doesn’t apply here because, well, Japan is different.  We can say that normally we would expect EFG to apply, but because this is Japan then we get UVW instead.  This is hard to argue against because it is well accepted here that this logic makes sense.  Of course, we have to have good evidence that this is how Japan does work in this case and that usually isn’t hard to muster.

 

Another method is to mention that the evidence is not complete yet, but that the trends seem to be pointing to whatever it is you are recommending.  This is allowing that later research may refute what you are saying, but as far as we know up to this point, this looks to be true. Again, we make ourselves a small and elusive target for counterattack. 

 

Mentioning this is your experience allows other to have had a different experience, which is fair enough. You are not saying that you are the sole guru on this subject, but everything you have seen so far, tells you this viewpoint seems to be the best case.  You are open to other’s experiences and this comes across as a very even handed and balanced approach.

 

The key is in the planning, to know where the hot buttons will be pressed by people in the audience and to head them off at the pass, before they get going.  Taking other opinions into account will make your talk seems more rounded and less dogmatic.  You come across as knowledgeable on the subject and an expert who should be listened to.  It is hard to argue against and your talk will go very smoothly when you get to the Q&A.  The Q&A is the graveyard of many a good talk by the way, because the speaker didn’t plan ahead for pushback.  We won’t be in that category anymore, going forward.

Nov 2, 2020

“How was it?” is a pretty lousy survey question a presenter may ask of acquaintances, friends or their staff immediately after speaking.  Unless they are your sworn enemy or a sadist, they are not going to tell you what they really think if you stink, because of the relationship you have with them.  We need to make sure we are growing and improving as presenters, so objective feedback is crucial to achieving that aim.  How can we grab ourselves some of that good oil?

 

I always talk about the importance of eye contact with your audience.  The reason is simple.  This is the key factor in getting objective feedback in real time.  By engaging in eye contact with as many people in the audience as possible in the time allowed, you have a greater chance of reading the reaction to your words.  We want the lighting in the room to be up and not darkened, so that the slides can’t dominate you as the speaker.  This is because we want to be able to clearly see the audience. 

 

If they are leaning in or leaning back, there are two completely different messages there.  We get the lean back posture in our training classes from those individuals who were  told by their boss to “go to training”.  It is a common posture of sceptism, reluctance, irritation and disbelief. The same applies when speaking.  There is no greater feeling when presenting than to have a large audience lean in to you.  It only has to be a few millimetres but when done on mass, it is like a drug.  Once you have experienced it you want that feeling every time.

 

Facial expression in Japan is a tough one.  The serious “I am really listening to you” face and the “this is crap” face look exactly the same here.  I was giving a speech in Japanese to 150 salespeople in Kobe and there was a gentleman seated about half way down on the left.   Right throughout my talk his face oozed with the “this is crap” reaction.  At the end, he sprang out of his seat and bolted down to where I was standing exchanging business cards with some of the audience.  I thought my karate training was about to come into play here because he was going to hit me.  Instead he was pumping my hand in the handshake and telling me how much he liked the talk.  I was silently reflecting that I wished he had told his face he was enjoying it.  Most people will have a positive or at least neutral facial expression but don’t assume a serious face is a negative reaction was the lesson for me.

 

Nodding the head up and down is a sign you want to see.  It says the audience is in agreement with you.  When you start to get this head nodding going on across a lot of faces it is a powerful acknowledgment that you are doing a good job selling your message.  A way to train your audience to do this, is to nod up and down yourself when you make a statement you want people to agree with.  They will mimic what you are doing and get this head nodding habit of responding that way to other things you say which they like.

 

Japanese audiences have zero conception that they are expected to take any action during your talk.  We have to get them physically involved which helps to get them supporting your key points.  We can’t go crazy and overdo it, but in a 30 minute speech you could get them to raise their hand twice and that wouldn’t feel like it was too much.  Beyond that however and resistance will emerge.  So, to increase engagement you can ask a question, a rhetorical question.  That is good because it forces everyone to concentrate on what you are saying, rather than allowing their minds to roam around. You can also ask an actual question and raise your own arm up to model what you want them to do.  The question you ask has to be delivered in such a way that the only possible answer is a “yes”.  This makes it as easy as possible for them to raise their hand. For example, “Raise your hand if you are getting tired of Zoom meetings by now?”.

 

 

If you have someone with you when you make the speech, don’t ask them what they thought about it.   Ask them to tell you what they thought went well and what could you do better next time.  Having some helpful friend start canning your talk is not going to make that speech a positive experience for you.  We have to ask them very specific question too, as far as possible.  For example, “Did you find the speech opening grabbed your attention to stop thinking about other things?”; “When I mentioned the names of a couple of people in the audience I met before we started, did that help to make a deeper connection with the audience?”; “When I summed up again after the last question, did that help to recall what my main point was?” etc.

 

Some speech host organisations do surveys of the event and their response rate is usually microscopic and so of little help.  You can always distribute a flyer to every table, with the QR code access to a site, where they can answer a few short questions.   You can do this during the speech as you are wrapping up.  It is not great timing, because you are asking people to divert their attention from what you are saying. However, if you wait until after the talk has finished very few people will bother to do the survey. 

 

Instead say “please take one minute to do the survey using the QR code on your tables and then I will go through the final bonus slide for you”.  Stop speaking for that minute and just wait. After the bonus slide has been covered, we sum up again to make sure our key message is the last thing they remember. In this way, we will get a much better survey of the crowd and the feedback will help us to focus on the areas needing more work.

 

Oct 26, 2020

Whether we asking to give a talk or asked to present, we need an audience.  The onus is on the meeting hosts to take care of the logistics of the venue and the associated tech needed to carry out the presentation.  We cannot leave everything to them though, because our personal brand is tied up with the success of the event.  Now “success” can be defined in many ways, but having a venue space for fifty people and having five people turn up, wouldn’t strike too many people as a triumph. This would be more like an embarrassment.  We naturally want to get our message out to as many people as possible and so we want to maximise the audience size.

 

There are a couple of hooks for us to pull an audience for our talk.  A key one is the title of the talk.  This can sometimes be a talk title which must be approved by the organisers or you may be free to choose the one you prefer.  If we look at newspaper, magazine or any media advertising headlines, there is a real skill in getting these titles to grab people’s attention.  Most speakers are not trained copywriters. They never imagine they need to enlist the help of a copywriter to help with creating the presentation title.  So we are all in the DIY school of speaker copywriting.

 

The best title selection will revolve around a number of factors, such as the content of the talk or the nature of the audience.  Think of the title as a hook, to snag interest from potential attendees.  What title would locate the sweet spot of both appealing to those interested in the topic and a compelling offer, to inspire the punters to turn up to the speech.  The title cannot be too long, in the same way that headlines are kept brief.  How can we get the explanation of the content and the hook, into as few words as possible.

 

Last week, I talked about how to use the Balloon Brainstorming Method to create your speech content.  The construction of the talk I explained, starts with the punchline, crafted in as few words as possible, in order to drive clarity.  I also went through how to create the base content sectors, which are the bones of the talk.  Having done all of that, we then create the opening piece. This is there to smash through all the clutter in people’s minds, when they enter the venue, to hear our talk.  The title is often best taken from that opening piece.  We don’t use it word for word, but we look for the strongest hook therein, to finally create the talk title.  We only have a few words available for that, so each word must really outperform for us. 

 

I was recently asked to give a talk, but received no great guidance on the topic.  The host wanted to pull an audience. So I thought about what is a common topic that would attract as many people as possible to attend.  I chose “public speaking” because this freaks most people out fairly universally, across all cultures, ages and gender ranges. 

 

I also have a lot of experience and am an expert on this topic, so I have supreme confidence to talk to an audience about it.  This sounds like bragging, but we must have expertise and real confidence to stand up in front of others and pontificate.  If you don’t have that, then please spare the rest of us the train wreck masquerading as your talk.

 

I used my Balloon Brainstorming methodology for the content creation. Finally I had to create the talk title.  I had come up with 15 subtopics, which would be too many for the time allowed to cover, so I needed to trim that down. 

 

I decided to go with twelve topics, because it is a substantial number, but doable in the time granted to me.  So, I started writing out possible titles, to see if I could find one that would resonate.  In the end, I came up with a title using alliteration as a means of grabbing attention.  The hook was The “Terrible Twelve” Typical Errors That Presenters Make And How To Fix Them.  I was pushing the boundaries on title length, but I liked the alliteration of “The Terrible Twelve Typical” components in the title.  Key words were Typical, Twelve, Terrible, Presenters and Fix. Anyone reading that title would have a clear idea of the value of the talk. If they had an issue with presenting, they would feel this would be a talk providing substantial value, through its clear coverage of the topic. 

 

The next step was to flesh out, in a few sentences, the content of the talk giving the audience a taste of what will be covered.  This will be the text to accompany the title, when the hosts advertise the talk.  Again, we only have a few sentences to work with, because there are always space limitations when advertising the talk.  We should have some word count indication from the event sponsors, of how much we can say, when we are writing this piece.  This overviewhas to reek with value to the audience and should cover the key pain points associated with the topic. 

 

Finally, we need a customised Bio to go with the talk.  It also will have a limitation on length, so only the highlights associated with your being an expert on this subject can be covered.  It is not a job application, so don’t send in your modified CV.  This has to be crafted by you as power text, not a shopping list of bullet points.  We want to build our personal brand and establish our credentials to talk on this subject.  Remember many more people will read about you, than will ever be able to attend the actual event. This is a free kick, advertising you to the world.  So, what do you want people to know about what a legend you are?

Oct 19, 2020

A request came to me recently asking me to speak to an audience.  So my first question was, “what would you like me to speak about?”.   The answer was fairly broad.  Actually, that is good and bad.  Good, because there is plenty of scope to tackle various subjects, but bad because it is rather vague and obtuse.  Where to start?  I absolutely won’t be searching for previous slide decks on related subjects or thinking about the slides I could create on the subject.  In this regard, I am in the minority of presenters.  This is the minority you want to be in, because that slide first crowd is categorically not the group you want any part of.

 

When we are tasked to give a talk, how to do we work out what to speak about?  A technique I always use when brainstorming about anything is the idea balloon brainstorming method.  I will have a problem I need to solve.  I need a system that generates the best possible ideas I can come up with and at hyper speed.  Maybe someone else has better ideas, but they usually aren’t around when I need them, so I have to work it out by myself.

 

The first step is to use paper and pen.  This is old school I know, but there is something about the creative process for me that works best on paper.  I am also a visually oriented learner, so being able to “see” the ideas on paper works well for me too.  This is me and you may be different.  My point is to know what does work for you in the first place and try and master that system, rather than just fumbling around in the dark.

 

I write the key word or phrase in the middle of the sheet and draw a circle around it, an idea balloon type of look.  Then I think about what are the related elements to this subject.  This is at a high level in this first instance. Say I was going to give a talk on presenting.  The center of the balloon would be the word “presenting”. Each element related to this topic would be written and then a circle drawn around it, creating idea balloons, with connecting lines drawn back to the center balloon.  Elements might include “topic selection”, “preparation”, “delivery”, “audience analysis”, “common mistakes”.

 

Each of these elements would then be transferred to individual separate sheets of paper and each word goes in the center of its page and the process repeated.  The order is important. For example, I need to understand who I am talking to before I plan anything.  So I start with “audience analysis”, then drill down to the elements related to that which might include new sub-balloons such as, “gender split”, “expertise level”, “age demographic”, “industry”, “language fluency” etc.  These would be points I would ask the organisers about, before I even started the speech preparation.  I need to know at what level to pitch my talk – are they experts or amateurs or a mixture. This selection would normally be enough information and I wouldn’t need to drill down any further.

 

For other elements, I would want to go deeper though.  For example, “topic selection”, would be the next logical step. I would place that in the centre of a new page and then start adding the sub-elements.  This would include topics such as “topicality”, “data availability”, “my angle”, “my expertise”, “audience value factor”, “audience interest”.  Taking each sub-element, I can go deeper again.  On a fresh sheet of paper, I could place “topicality” in the middle and start building up ideas circling them into balloons on the page.  For example, “Covid-19 health concerns”, “business disruption”, “working from home”, “isolation”, “staff retention issues”, “mental health”, “suicide increases”, “leadership issues”, “productivity”, “cash flow”, etc.  As you see the list can grow very quickly for some sub-elements.

 

The beauty of this system is the combination of breadth of the topic possibilities and depth achieved with each topic, all being done again at a rapid clip.  In ten minutes, you have multiple sheets of paper with a lot of ideas created from which to start making some selections.  The next stage is tougher however, as you have to start making decisions on what you will select from the numerous possibilities.  The talk has a time limit, so there has to be a sieving of the gold nuggets, that will have the greatest impact on the audience and provide the highest value.  Remember, these are our personal and professional reputations we are putting on the line every time we present.

 

Once the topic is decided, I need to write a single sentence or phrase, which encapsulates what I believe about this topic.  This is the punchline and should be completed in as few words as possible. I am forced to be clear.  This is usually quite difficult, but the effort put in will help to make the conclusion we craft well worth it. The next step is gathering evidence to support the conclusion.  There will be sub-chapters inside the talk, to arrange the evidence into a flow, that is easy for the audience to navigate.  We need to remember that every five minutes we must switch up the presentation content, to keep our audience in our grip.

 

The last thing we design is the start of the presentation. This is where we build that all important first impression with the audience.  In this Age of Distraction and Era of Cynicism this opening has some heavy lifting to do.  We have to establish our credibility to deal with the sceptics and smash through all the clutter clogging up the brains of our assembled audience.  It has to be powerful or the masses will be scrambling for their phones to escape from us.

 

Outlining our presentation is where we start.  The assembly of the slides we will use comes last.  It is important to get the order right.  Do so and you will always come across as a polished professional when you speak.

Oct 12, 2020

This recent debate is a hot button topic. Let me set the record straight, I am an Australian living in Tokyo, so I have no dog in this American presidential brawl.  I am approaching this topic from the point of view of what we would do, if we were under attack in public, rather than to rule on the rights and wrongs of politicians’ strategies.  Imagine it was you up on that stage getting hammered, what would you do? As a presenter, it is unlikely you will ever face a Trump when you are speaking to a business audience.  A political debate is a different animal to the cultured world of business, as we urbane professionals give presentations on worthy commercial subjects. Nevertheless, we can come under attack when presenting and there will be no moderator there to try and rein in the provocateur.  Biden and the moderator Wallace were clearly rattled by the constant interjections and disdain for the pre-agreed debate rulebook.  In public presentations in business, there is no rulebook.

 

Heckling speakers has been around forever.  The political world especially, has this from top to bottom.  Watch the British parliament in action and there is the moderator, the Speaker, struggling to get the interjecting honourable members to shut up.  In business, the heckling most often occurs at town hall meetings of the staff and shareholder gatherings.  The employees or the shareholders have a beef with management and they are unrestrained about arguing with what is being said.  They don’t have the floor when heckling, so they are limited to a few words or a short phrase.  This was much the same as Trump’s tactics during the debate.  They major in the short sharp barb that is very hard to parry.

 

If we are under fire when speaking, what should we do with these interjections, usually voiced with venom?  This exchange has to be understood for what it is.  This is not an intellectual engagement where the full issue can be argued at length and in depth.  This is a vicious Iron Mike Tyson left hook to the jaw, aimed to disable, humiliate and provoke into error.  In any audience, there will be a cross section of people listening to the verbal fisticuffs.

 

One group will not approve the tactics, because it is outside public decorum boundaries, but will sit there in silence not wishing to get involved.  A smaller group enjoys blood sports and they have discovered that public speaking is a new category for them to enjoy, so they like the spectacle.  There is another minority group in hot agreement with the heckler and will feel emboldened to get involved directly themselves or to just utter shouts of agreement with the heckler.  This aggressive group will not be converted to agreement in a public forum by you, because your differences are often ideological, financial or procedural and can’t be breached very easily.

 

Actually, we don’t need to try and win the debate, because we can never win them over.  What we have to do is preserve our dignity and appeal to the basic fairness of the silent majority.  When people yell out during our talk, we have a few arrows at the ready in our quiver.  We can invite them to debate with us at a different time and place, as we need to go deeper on the subject, well beyond the time constraints of this event’s schedule.  We can ask them to agree to disagree.  This is disarming because we are saying we don’t see any resolution of opinion here, so let’s accept that fact and move on.  We can appeal to fair play and say we should be allowed to make our point and mention there will time at the end for questions, so ask them to please hold the interventions for the moment and let’s have the debate at the end of the proceedings.

 

When we feel our antagonist is trying to slam verbal shivs into us, we can hit back hard.  We have to do this in a way though that doesn’t end up in a verbal brawl that diminishes everyone, like we witnessed with the presidential debate.  We can say, “That sir (or madam) I believe is an outrageous untruth.  Having said that, I respect your right to hold a different opinion to mine, so let’s take this debate off line and you and I can argue the case at the end, after the event is formally concluded.  I look forward to it. For the moment, let’s continue with proceedings”.  This approach dismisses the heckler’s point as untrue, but in a way which seems balanced and fair.  Of course, the heckler and their entourage won’t be satisfied with that approach, but we are not trying to win them over.  We are aiming to appear elegant, in control, considered and above the rough affray.

 

If they continue heckling, we just say, “Thank you. I accept your right to disagree with me and I have already stated that I am happy to debate with you at the end, so let’s leave it until then”.  After which you just pick up where you left off and continue with your talk.  If the heckling still continues, it now moves outside the bounds of acceptability and their argument and they themselves are both diminished.  Either the silent majority will become less silent and tell the hecklers to be quiet and leave it until the end or the organisers will be forced to take action to shut down the mob.  You don’t care, because the key objective is to emerge from this verbal punch up looking in control and professional. Name calling, arguing the point, counter heckling, telling people to shut up etc., means you are now in the blood and the mud wrestling with them.  Once they drag you down to their level, you cannot get back up again. Your own credibility is compromised.  Avoid this at all costs. 

Oct 5, 2020

You see it.  The presenter publicly self-immolates. They might butcher the start, get lost in the weeds of their content or be put to the sword at the end in the Q&A.  They can’t engage with their audience, are incoherent and quivering the whole time.  It is a train wreck on display. Reputations and credibility are flayed alive.  Here is the irony – they chose it to be like this. They made a series of poor decisions about this presentation and then reaped the whirlwind of total humiliation.

 

Rehearsing the presentation takes time.  Time which could be devoted to adding massive content, multiple fonts and gaudy colours to the slides.  This is why failures fail.  They ignore logic and decide that practicing on their audience is much more efficient.  It is not terribly effective though. The long term damage from short term decisions is substantial when you thrust yourself into the public eye. If you don’t have big brackets of time available, then just work on pieces at a time, over time.  That means start early, so there is no mad rush at the end. 

 

I made a genius decision once to prepare my presentation on the flight from Osaka to Sydney.  No sleep and subsequently plenty of irritability upon landing made for a combustible cocktail. When someone in my audience had the temerity, the audacity, the gall to challenge my assertions in the presentation, it didn’t go well. I vowed NEVER to try that exercise in efficiency ever again.

 

Turning up just before kick off, to find there is some technical issue with your slides or the laptop or the audio is a life shortening experience.  Always make the time to go early.  I was giving a presentation to the Japan Market Expansion Competition and dutifully brought along my USB to plug into their laptop.  Their Microsoft environment didn’t like my Mac presentation layout, so it changed the whole thing.  I arrived early and found myself sweating like a maniac, as I tried to fix every single slide before the start.  I finished with one minute to go, but I was a nervous wreck.  If I am not using my own laptop, I go even earlier now.

 

First impressions start from the moment the organisers advertise the event and include elements of your bio.  People are forming biases and opinions about you, which they are going to size up against what they see in front of them.  Get there early, check the tech and then gracefully mingle with the punters.  Do your best to be charming.  Being an introvert, that is no easy task for me.  Do your best to schmooze people in the crowd before you start and build supporters in the room.

 

Don’t eat too much at the lunch or dinner prior to your talk.  Try instead to engage your table colleagues, again building rapport.  You can always eat later if you are starving.  When they call your name stride confidently and effortlessly to the stage.  Have zero interaction with the laptop – don’t even touch it. Instead get straight into your opening.  You don’t need any slides to begin with, so concentrate of creating a powerful and positive first impression.  Once you have done that, then you can look down at your laptop and start the slide deck rolling.  By the way, many balding presenters proffer a brilliant view of their sparse, patchy pate, as they lean forward over the laptop, fiddling with the machine.  Don’t be one of them.

 

Start off with a power opening to grab attention. Remember, we are all self-focused and supremely interested in what happened to us this morning, what we need to do after the talk and what is coming up for us tomorrow. The speaker is competing with all of these high value items in the minds of the audience.  We need to supplant all of that inner-focus with our ideas, views, suggestions and recommendations.  Make sure to raise your voice tone from the get go, to set the energy level at the right point to carry through to the rest of the proceedings. It is very hard to start soft, then work your way up, so start strong then vary the tone from there.

 

Keep your eyes on the crowd the whole time.  Read their faces.  Are they buying what you are saying, are they bored, are they surreptitiously or furtively looking at their phones under the table, are they nodding in agreement?  This is why, if some helpful venue flunkey turns the lights down, so that you are dominated by the screen, you should stop speaking immediately and ask for the lights to be brought back up.  In my experience, the moment those lights go down, a big proportion of a Japanese audience is lost, because they are sleeping.  It seems to be a bit like the rhythmic rocking of the trains here, that induces slumber.  Lights go down and off they go Pavlovian like, to the land of Nod.  I have seen that scenario play out a number of times here.  I find stopping speaking for about ten seconds interrupts the pattern and then resuming with a powerful burst of energy and voice volume wakes them right up again.

 

Keep the main body to around three major points in a thirty minute talk.  Pile on the evidence though, because we are always speaking to a room full of sceptics recently force fed a diet of “fake news”.  Save the heavy detail for the Q& A, if you need it. Keep the points clear and accessible, pitched at the level of expertise of your audience.  Forego all the acronyms and jargon which appeal to the cognoscenti, if the audience are mere mortal ordinary punters.

 

Don’t get into arguments in the Q&A.  There may be hot questions hurled forth by provocateurs, self-aggrandising show offs, flouting their knowledge in front of the great unwashed.  Answer them to the best of your ability and then say sweetly, “let’s continue this discussion after the talk.  Who has the next question” and move on, giving them no more eye contact or recognition for the rest of the talk.

 

Always prepare a second close after the Q&A, so that you dominate the last item to linger in the memory banks of your audience.  The conversation triggered by a final question can be completely tangential or even totally unrelated to what you were there to talk about.  Don’t let someone hijack your purpose. Seize back control of the point of this presentation, by unfurling your final close.  Thank the audience and then elegantly descend from the stage to mingle with the masses.  Leave everything on the podium and pack the gear up at the very end.

Sep 28, 2020

It was a strange feeling.  I was back in the Super Safe Classroom after 7 months of teaching solely LIVE On Line.  In the online world, we are engaging our audience every two minutes.  Remember, this is the Age of Distraction. Audiences are weaponised at home with unseen devices to escape from our grasp and our message.  They will be multi-tasking like demons on speed, given the slightest pretext. We have to be very, very focused on keeping them engaged.  Teaching live in the room, I had to suppress the urge to say “give me a green check”, or “give me a smiley face” to keep them active and onboard with me.

 

It led me to think about how much engagement I was getting previously with an audience.  Occasionally, I might ask them to raise their hand in response to a question.  This is a bit of a tricky thing.  You can very quickly wear out your welcome with this type of request.  There is that creeping feeling of being manipulated by the speaker.  We are in the eye of the storm right now between the pre-Covid and post-Covid era, as presenters.  This whole schmozzle will probably take at least a year or more to clean up, once vaccines become widely available. What will be some of the differences around giving presentations, when we get back to some semblance of normality?

 

In the good old days, I would be looking for some head nodding to let me know if the audience were engaged or not.  Is that going to cut it anymore? Our body positioning can be very dynamic.  I was at a talk in my hometown of Brisbane, where the presenter took this to another level.  The speaker was introduced by the MC, “Ladies and Gentlemen please join me in welcoming our speaker today, Mr. Brown”. There was no Mr. Brown. The stage was completely bereft of presenters.

 

Suddenly he started. We could all hear his voice, but he was nowhere to be found.  It was quite startling. We all sat there perplexed, craning our necks around left and right frantically searching for the origin of the voice we could hear.  He then very slowly and deliberately walked up the middle aisle from the very rear of the hall, to the stage speaking all the while.  It was a spectacular entrance, I have to say and quite bold to do it that way.  I haven’t had the guts to try that yet, but maybe now I will give it a go.

 

As I previously mentioned, we would teach students not to overdo the hand raising bit, but what about from now on?  Will live audiences be more comfortable with getting more involved in the talk?  Let me make an important clarification here. I am not talking about those diabolically dreadful dross webinars, where the speakers are captured in tiny boxes on screen, like an assortment of cheap omiyage chocolates in a tacky box.  These are very sad and boring affairs, with all the talking heads just droning on and on. 

 

I am talking about LIVE On Line, where there is tremendous interactivity.  “I am unmuting you Tanaka san, so please come on camera and share with us your thoughts” or “Let’s go to Suzuki san for some comments on this issue. Suzuki san come off mute and tell us your ideas please”. “Give me a green check please, if this has been your experience too?”.

 

Will we be calling on people for their comments on some issue?  We always have a chance to get there early and meet a few of the punters as they arrive.  We remember their names or maybe we made a note on their meishi. We take the opportunity to have a conversation on the topic before proceedings get underway.  We could say, “Tanaka san, earlier we were speaking about this very issue.  You had a very interesting take on it and would you mind sharing it with everyone.  Can we get a mic for Tanaka san please?”.

 

Will we be walking into our audience more?  Using our body language to get up close and personal.  Jesper Koll is a well known speaker here in Tokyo and must the most entertaining economist in captivity.  He will suddenly lurch forward to where you are sitting, in the first or second row, tower over you and hammer you with a rhetorical question.  The problem is you have no idea if this a question you have to answer or whether he will answer it himself.  Trust me, when he swings your way with that question, you break into a sweat because usually these are questions for which you have no good answer.  He has your full attention.

 

The LIVE On Line rule is you must have interaction every two minutes.  For the in-person talk that would be too much, I think.  However, as audiences have been trained to accept more interaction with the speaker, maybe we have to lift our game and get them more involved than we did in the past.  Let’s try it when we next get an opportunity to present in a real, rather than a virtual room.

Sep 21, 2020

Speaking is easy, so being clear should be easy too.  Well that sounds good in theory, but there is more hope in play here, than actual technique going on.  Imagining that your usual conversation style is sufficient for presentations is another exercise in hopeful thinking.  Wait a minute, people say that we should speak in a conversational style, so isn’t this confusing or contradictory?  What is meant by “conversational” is that the feeling should be relaxed, familiar and inclusive rather than aloof, stiff and hierarchical.  Being clear when speaking to audiences is no accident.  Careful planning is needed and so is a pair of pruning shears to trim the excess from your discourse.

 

We have a common tendency in casual speech, to spend a lot of time saying something which can be communicated much more economically.  Often, we begin by making a reasonably clear statement and we are doing well in the speaking clearly stakes.  Then we spoil it, by adding a lot more content to the same point.  In one of our speaking exercises called the Magic Formula, the action step the speaker is recommending and the benefit of that action, both have to be communicated in five seconds each.  How hard can that be, you might be thinking?

 

In our training classes, I hear the participant punch out the key point clearly and in time, but then they just keep adding and pilling on the words. They begin to waffle. This is a habit we need to kill, when making more formal presentations.  Today’s audience of thrusting multi taskers have no patience with dross.  In fact, they have no patience period. They lurch for their mobile phones and seek refuge in the internet, to escape that white noise in the background.  That white noise is you by the way, taking too long to get to the point.

 

Being clear revolves around having a crystal central message, which has been constantly worked on until you can write in on a grain of rice.  Okay, that's an exaggeration, but the point is to get it down to as few words as possible.  This requires massive effort to get clarity of the message you want to convey.  Once you have sieved the nuggets of your speech, then you start looking for the framework to hang the speech on.  You need a structure that arranges the point being conveyed wrapped, bound tightly by evidence. A great example of evidence is to tell the background as a story, involving events, people, places, seasons and times.  Evidence can also be statistics, examples, data – anything that will satisfy the logical types in your audience, who only believe in facts.

 

This main body of the speech is where the key arguments are made and it has to be tight, tight, tight.  We arrange the argument, point then evidence, point then evidence, all through the main points. We do so while employing brutal brevity.  Get out those razor sharp pruning shears. If the content isn’t strongly supporting your key points with muscular evidence, then tighten it up or cut it out. Getting each key point down in size, gives you greater scope to add more salient points.  Usually, in a thirty minute talk, you will get through around three to four main points.  Three main sections of the speech packed to the gunnels with waffle and fat with fluff, destroys your credibility.  Instead compare that to five major points supporting the argument, all lean like a racing greyhound. We should be keen to glean the dynamite points from all the material available and make room for as many of those power points as we can manage.

 

The flow between the points should be silky smooth, with the end sentence of one setting up the start of the next section of the points and proof you are putting forward.  We need a bridge between the sections rather than lurching abruptly from one point to a different point.  Doing it this way will be baffling our audience.  Often this is what happens though.  The speaker wanders all over the place, frothing up three or four main arguments and leaving a trail of confused punters in their wake. Waffling on is the mantra of the graduates of the Hopeful School of Public Speaking.  We don’t want hope, we are going for clarity and surety.

 

Speaking speed is a tricky balance.  We don’t want to kill our audience by bludgeoning them with a monotone, lifeless delivery. We want to speak with a lot of energy and naturally we tend to speed up in the process.  The more passionate and engaged we become, often the faster we go.  We need to maintain the passion, but adjust the torrent flow. More pauses, shorter sentences and a good cadence are best.  If you notice you are speeding up, then stop speaking and create a small pause, so that you can regroup and continue at a better pace.   Concentrate your passion and energy on key words which you want to emphasise.  Doing this will mean they stand out in the mind of the audience.  All words are not equal. We choose which ones to give more power to, making them stronger.

 

Speaking powerfully, clearly and with passion is a brilliant combination.  This is the result of planning not hope.  The other key success ingredient is to practice. Getting the cadence right only comes through practice.  Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech wasn’t the first time he had delivered it.  He had given it many times refining it and practicing it, until he had a sufficiently large enough stage to make it a beacon for racial equality.

Sep 14, 2020

I have the opportunity to give a number of presentations each year.  I video them as well, so I can study where I can improve them further.  What I find very interesting though, is that I am a poor model in some ways for others, who don’t have that chance to present publically so often.  I was teaching some presentation skills classes recently and the students are probably a better fit for most people as a model.  They are in the class because they need to become more persuasive and more professional when they speak.  Our High Impact Presentations Course is the Rolls Royce of presenting, so allow me to encapsulate some of the big breakthroughs I see in our classes, as tips that you can immediately adopt for yourself.

  1. Stand up straight.

Well come on, you may be saying, is that a tip?  How hard could that be?  Surprisingly many people can’t stand up straight.  They put more weight on one leg than the other, kick out one hip and so look way too casual.  Others are swaying about the place from the hips, like a drunken sailor.   This swaying makes them look like they lack confidence and conviction about their messaging, which is extremely bad, but simply fixed.  Stand straight and don't’ sway about.

  1. Turn your neck

 Do not turn your shoulders or feet, when looking at people in the audience sitting on the sides.  Amazingly, some presenters even half lean over toward someone who is sitting off to the side of the speaker.  Or, even more fascinatingly, they do this cute little soft shoe shuffle with their feet to face that person.  You look clunky, way too casual and unconvincing.  Stand up straight on the one spot and just simply turn your head to look at people to the sides of the audience.

  1. Start strong

It is very hard to build up the energy after you start.  For whatever reason it is easier to start strong and then adjust the strength later.  When you begin softly you tend to get stuck there.  Remember, this is the Age of Distraction and we face the toughest audiences ever created. When they hit that room to hear your talk, their brains are chock full of stuff already.  We have to break into their brain and open them up for our message.  A strong start cuts through the crowd noise and grabs immediate attention. 

  1. Use gestures intelligently

The gesture needs to be congruent with what we are saying.  A simple way to understand this is, if I was saying, “this is a huge global project” and had brought my palms together in front of my body facing each other only a few centimetres apart, showing a very narrow range, the words and hand position don’t match.  For that sentence, I need to have my arms up around shoulder height and stretching wide, almost at 180 degrees to my body. 

What many people miss is the opportunity to pair the gesture with the concept.  Use your hands as a measuring stick to indicate high, low, big, small etc.  When the students do this type of gesture in the class, they feel a bit shy, as if it is too exaggerated.  However, once they get into the review room with the other instructor, they see themselves on video and realise it looks very natural and normal.

  1. Eyeball your audience

If we want to persuade our audience we need to engage them.  The most powerful way to do that is give them eye contact.  Politicians are geniuses at getting this wrong.  They do eye contact quick sweeps of the assembled punters, effectively connecting with no one.  This is fake eye contact. 

We want to pick up people in the crowd and give one person solid uninterrupted eye contact for six seconds, then immediately move to the next person at random in the audience and give them six seconds of eye contact.  We just keep repeating this throughout the entire talk.  Six seconds is long enough to engage without becoming intrusive.  Depending on the size of the audience, you may have been able to personally connect with everyone there.  That is powerful.

  1. Use your voice

Speakers speak with their voice, but many are not really using it properly.  Using it properly would be to select certain key words in a sentence and either hit them harder or make them softer than the surrounding words.  It might be used to slow----things----down or SPEEDTHEMUP when we speak.  Also we can go high and low in modulation for more variety.

  1. Turn the energy switch on

We speak with a certain energy output, when we are having a normal conversation.  We cannot transfer that same energy to the stage or to the online world when we are presenting.  We need to really ramp up the energy output. 

We have a different role when we are in the limelight.  We need to project our confidence, our belief in what we are saying.  An easy way to do that is drive up the energy output and radiate that to the audience.  We need to vary the power of course, throughout the speech, but the baseline will be about 20% higher than what we would experience in normal conversation.

If you start adopting these seven tips into your next presentation, it will be remarkably more effective.  Are any of these tips especially hard?  Not at all.  What is required is self awareness and the ability to adjust what you are doing to make it better. 

A bonus tip is to rehearse.  Don’t experiment or practice on your audience.  Don’t spend all your prep time on beating the slide deck into submission.  Allocate time to practice the talk and if possible video it for review.  You will be better at getting the time limits of the speech correct and will be so much more confident when the big day comes for your talk.

Sep 7, 2020

Waffle.  This is the enemy of speakers and presenters.  Ums and Ahs are obvious fillers.  We all recognise them when we hear them and we know we have to do a better job to eliminate them.  The more insidious waffle sneaks into our talks wholly uninvited and assassin like.  The impact on the audience is immediate. They are lunging for phones to escape from you to a better place.  Waffle camouflages our key message.  It hides it like those fleshy vines you see in documentaries, which have engulfed and overwhelmed an ancient city, deep in the jungle.  Yet we are oblivious to it.

We teach the Magic Formula for persuasion success.  It requires the discipline to get your key action recommendation and the benefit flowing from that, down to five seconds each.  Five seconds is a pretty unambiguous number, with zero wiggle room. Yet in the role play practice sessions we hear fifteen and twenty seconds action calls.  Why is that?  The direction was get the key point you want us to act on down to five seconds.  Waffle is the human tendency.  We are draw like suicidal moths to the flame of unnecessary elaboration.

Why do we limit the action and benefit statements down to just five seconds?   Why not make them ten or fifteen seconds?  The five second goals is a force of nature, that pushes you to become more succinct and much clearer.  We are all babblers and just keep talking and talking.  Usually, long after anyone continued listening and beyond making any intelligible crucial point.  You have to winnow your words, to filter out the non-essential, to drive to the heart of the matter.

This is the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism, so that people are now jointly poised to stop listening to you and to stop believing what you say.  It is getting harder and harder to hold an audience’s attention, so we must get to the point quickly and in a way which is credible.  Does that mean we should start with our action and benefit from the get go?  It is a really great idea if you love to debate with your listeners and you enjoy the cut and thrust of fencing with critics.

The modern brain is deadly.  Combined with our Darwinian education system of promoting winners and vanquishing losers, audiences have become demonic.  As soon as you unfurl your conclusion, you will now be facing an army of arm chair confounders, discombobulaters and critics.  They become totally deaf to the many and good reasons backing up your recommendation and their brains are on fire with the million reasons why this is a lousy idea.  They may be rivals within the firm, flaky colleagues, bosses, picky clients or just smarty pants types who love to demonstrate how much smarter they are than everyone else in the room.

The genius part of the Magic Formula is that you don’t have to serve your own head up on a platter, to the raucous, uncouth and great unwashed mass of disparagers.  Before you tell them your recommendation, you spice things up with context, background, evidence, testimonials and experience.  I can disagree with your conclusions drawn from the context, but I cannot easily disagree with the context itself.  This is very handy, because it forces everyone to get the background, before they run off half-cocked dissing your idea.  The key is not to waffle on and on in the context explanation. 

The background needs to be tight, to the point, rich in evidence and perspective.  If not, those business school types who confuse written communication with oral offerings, will go after you saying “get to the point”.  True, an executive summary  comes at the start of the written document.  Just don’t re-produce this B-school model in your presentations. That is a guarantee of disaster.

Give them the background first, tight, taut, and terrific.  Then tell them what they should do next and why it is good for them.  This disarms critics.  When you are telling the context, these overactive thrusters will be racing ahead to their own conclusion from the evidence.  This is when you ambush them with your call to action. Most likely it will be the exact same conclusion they came to, based on the same context, background and evidence.   What a sweet feeling to take the wind out of the sails of enemies, wannabes, nasty bosses and picky buyers.

Aug 31, 2020

Trapped in a small screen in the corner of the monitor has become everyone’s reality when we have group meetings. I have been holding training sessions online now since March, as well as participating in numerous public webinars.  There are some things that clearly don’t work, but here we are about to go into fall and no one seems to be making any significant changes, to up their online game.  It is not for a lack of insights.   I have been writing about these issues for months, as I am sure have others, so obviously the messages are not getting through.

The monitor screen saps our energy levels, as they appear to others.  We might think we are showing lots of energy, but the reality is, it is less than we imagine.  In a recent training session, 19 people had to give their presentations one after another.  The contrast was striking.  Those who were more highly energised were more credible and appealing than those who looked lethargic and tired on screen.  The attendees of the training were all highly engaged and they were giving their presentation of their own creation, so the buy in factor to the exercise was 100%.  They were not tired, but they appeared that way, because they were not maximising the use of their energy for the small screen.

When we are presenting, we want the audience to buy what we are recommending or suggesting.  Even if it is just an “inform” style of presentation, we still want the viewers to believe in the value of what we are proffering.  Reactions to presentations are heavily biased in favour of those who seem to believe what they are saying, as opposed to those who seem to be just going through the motions.

The impression we receive, to a great extent, is determined by the amount of energy the speaker is putting behind the words they are saying.  We hear that the speaking volume is high without it being too high.  The audio systems the major online platforms use, do not handle shouting terribly well, so we have to up the volume, without it going over the top. Hitting key words in sentences, bringing our energy to them, really accentuates the messaging and is a very effective use of our voice.

One of the speakers was terrific at adding in facial expressions to increase the power of her messages.  Combined with a strong, confident voice, she was a winner. Most of the other speakers were holding a neutral expression on their face, regardless of the words they were saying.  In these cases it is diabolically easy, for the audience to escape. 

Dr. Albert Mehrabian’s oft quoted research mentioned that if you are incongruent when speaking, ninety three percent of the time, you don’t get your message across.  What he meant by incongruent was that the words and the way we are saying the words, have to match up.  If it is a happy event, then we look happy. If it is a serious affair, we look serious.  Having no facial expression at all, means there is no energy coming out of the muscles of our face to support our key messages.

Gestures are tricky on the small screen, particularly if you are using a green screen background, to deny the viewing audience the inner workings and secrets of your household.  Gestures are powerful though and they can really light up a presentation.  If you are revealing the shambles of how you live to the audience and have no green screen effect, then you are free to use gestures of any variety, as long as you keep them in shot, based on your distance from the camera lens.  It is a good idea to practice gestures on camera, to see where the limits are.

If you are using green screen backgrounds, then any gestures going wide will suddenly see half your arm disappear, like a magic trick.  Try to keep your hands in front of you and move them toward the camera. There is less chance of them getting chopped off that way.  The scale of the gestures in this case, are a bit more contained, but you can still bring additional power to your words with gestures.

There is no doubt, that adding energy to our presentations on screen is important.  Also, whatever you think is enough energy output, add another 20%, to actually come across as you imagine you are doing. 

Aug 24, 2020

We have all grown up in business watching internal presentations at our firms.  It might be a big announcement, a town hall, a shareholder’s meeting or just a weekly meeting.  Then we have those cases where we go outside the company and present to clients, industry groups, Chambers of Commerce etc.  The sad thing is that rarely are any of these presenters any good.  How can that be?  None of the things I have mentioned are new items.  These types of presentations have been given, in one form or another, since we had things called companies.  The people giving them are not stupid.  They are invariably well educated, well experienced and talented.  Not too many companies want useless, stupid people speaking in front of others or representing the brand.  So why don’t we see scintillating and sizzling business presentations as the norm?

There are cultural norms.  In my experience, America seems to have an education system and society, where speaking up is encouraged and blowing your own horn is not an issue.  As an Australian, that is an issue.  We have a thing there called the “tall poppy syndrome”, which means that any poppy flower that tries to get above everyone else, gets cut down to size.  Japan, interestingly, has the exact same concept with the “derukugi” (出る釘は打たれる) idea, where the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.  Every other country falls somewhere on this scale of self-aggrandizement with America and Japan, probably being the bookends.

When you make a presentation you are thrusting yourself forward.  This can be a booster for your career or a career limiting disaster, or something in between.  The interesting thing is very few people are able to make it a career booster.  Part of it can be self-limiting beliefs about your ability to actually stand up in front of others, without quivering like jelly, from head to toe.  Another part of it can be possessing no concept of the importance of the act of presenting and its solid link to career building.  Companies promote people who are articulate, clear and persuasive, because they know these are the requirements for leaders.  Many specialists imagine their technical ability will carry the day and they can get a free pass on being capable as a presenter.  That is possibly true but only up to a point.  If you can’t be persuasive, your technical abilities are not a substitute when firms are considering who to promote into leadership roles.

So we could expect that people who are motivated to push forward in their careers and get to the top echelons of the company, would all be rushing out to get trained on how to be a professional when presenting.  Rarely the case in fact.  Well why is that?  Part of it can be the concept of “good” is the enemy of “great”.  They are smart enough to do a good job and have concluded that is enough.  Or they may still be clinging to the belief that being a great lawyer, doctor, engineer, architect, accountant, dentist, etc., is the first and only order of priority, as far as building a successful career goes.

When the people around you are equally talented and knowledgeable about their profession, how do you stand out?  There was a little known Senator from Illinois who projected himself to national attention at the Democratic Convention, eventually becoming America’s 44th President and the first African American to do so. Barack Obama did that by giving a great presentation at that Convention, in a political world packed to the gunwales with thrusters, self-promoters and self-aggrandizers. 

Business is fiercely competitive, be it winning the client or winning the promotion.  Changing our mindset about presenting and facing the reality of being able to present well, in order to advance through the ranks, is a necessary starting point.  Next we need great training to stand out amongst the crowd. Even though most business presentations you have ever seen have been boring, you don’t have to join the ranks of those dud presenters.  With the right mindset and training, you can quickly advance to the top 1% in your field as a presenter. 

Look around you and quickly realise, it is not crowded at the top.  Idea application is all, so take action and get properly trained.

Aug 17, 2020

“Don’t round your back”, “Stand up straight”, “Pull your shoulders back”, are common parental commands when we were growing up.  Kids do tend to have rounded shoulders and don’t stand up straight, but so what?  Why are parents worried about their kids deciding to have a rounded rather than straight posture?  The concerns relate to health based on a straighter posture allows better breathing to take place and better aligns the spine.  The concerns also relate to public perception.  A confident person has a straight back and stands tall, ergo anyone slouching around, obviously lacks confidence.  We have all seen those studies that correlate height, with those in leadership positions.  This leads to an idea that being taller and therefore standing straighter to enhance our height is a good idea. Now this may or may not be true, but there is that perception.

A speaker whether striding across the stage or plonked down in front of their laptop on screen, has to be sure they have the right posture.  As speakers, we are trying to convince others to buy our philosophy, ideas, decisions, direction, strategy or suggestions.  We want to marshal all of our resources behind that aim.  Standing up straight and holding our chin up, so that we are looking ahead, rather than looking down is a good idea, if you want to instil confidence in you from the audience.  We may choose to drop our chin and even lean forward toward the audience if we want to make a strong assertion, as we literally point our body language at the audience.  That is a conscious choice, as opposed to a posture achieved through habit, that is permanently leaning forward.

When we get older, we start to lean forward from the hips.  We can no longer stand up straight, as our backs become bent over.  We basically look physically weaker compared to younger people standing up ramrod straight.  Consequently, there is a mental linkage to poor posture and weakness in the common mind.  As the presenter, we don’t want to appear to be weak, as this will negatively impact our credibility.  So straight posture becomes associated with trust, reliability and respect. 

When we are presenting online we have to be conscious of posture as well.  I was on a webinar recently with multiple expert speakers, talking about how the current Covid-19 crisis has impacted their businesses.  Two of them stood out, but in a negative way.  One speaker had excellent, straight back posture but no clue on how to align the camera lens.  He had the laptop on the desk and the lens was pointing up at him.  He looked distant, superior, disdainful and aloof, because of the way he was engaging the camera.  If he had raised the camera lens to eye level, he would have been projecting a completely different image, as a respectful, knowledgeable businessperson.

Another speaker had better height control of the camera lens, but was rounding his shoulders and leaning down and into the camera.  It really stood out on the broadcast, how his rounded posture compared with everyone else.  He didn’t look confident or knowledgeable.  He also did a lot of umming and ahhing as well, which didn't help his cause to appear an expert member of the panel.  So the speech hesitation, combined with the posture hesitation, added up to a big loss of credibility on what he was saying.  

We need to get that camera height up to eye level.  If we can stand up when presenting all the better.  One of the speakers did just that and he was much better able than the others to use his body language to support the points he was making.  He had the most authority amongst all of the speakers, just by how he presented himself.  When presenting online, we need to sit up straight and keep looking into the camera lens.  We have to maintain that posture throughout the session.  Absolutely never sink into the back of your chair or slump into the back support.  It looks way too casual when presenting.  Sit up and a few centimetres away from the back support and try to be as vertical as possible in front of the camera.

Perception becomes a bigger factor when we are on the small screen of webinars.  We have limited ways of expressing ourselves and so we have to make the most of the tools available to us. Getting the correct eye line and straight back doesn’t cost anything or take any great preparation.  Having the right posture can make a huge difference to how we are perceived and how well our message is received.

Aug 10, 2020

We have all migrated back to our homes, waiting for the great pandemic to subside, so that when the coast is clear we can scuttle back to the office in safety.  Or maybe, we have concluded that we don't need to be at the office as much anymore or at all.  The end result is that we have been relegated to a low tech environment, with almost zero tech support.  If we were presenting in a meeting room, we would have the crowd right there in front of us.  Perfect communication conditions, where we can marshal all of our persuasion capabilities and let them loose on the audience.  We would have a big screen with our slides up there for all to see.  If the room was big enough, we would have a high quality microphone at our disposal.

Meanwhile, back at home, we have our laptop and that is about all.  I was on a webinar which featured some heavyweights from the public and private Japanese financial sector, as well as other worthies.  No one on that call had a clue about how to arrange their laptops so that the camera angle was correct or so that the lighting was done properly.  If we want to get our message across we have to show up in a way that has credibility, visibility and reliability.  Of course, everyone was seated when doing the calls, which meant their body language was truncated.  I didn’t see much animation in the faces or much tapping into body language going on either.

If we are just an attendee at an online meeting or a participant in a webinar presentation, as one of the audience, then just sitting there makes perfect sense.  Nothing better for multitasking when boring presenters are on screen than sitting down to easily access all the tech escape routes.  Unfortunately when it is us on screen presenting, we want none of that to be occurring.  We want everyone hanging on our every word, diligently taking notes of the gold nuggets, we are delivering and exercising total absorption in our message.

The cameras in the laptops are invariably wide angle only.  If we are going to be presenting regularly online, we should consider buying a separate attachable camera and look for one which has a narrower range of field.  We want to be in closeup mode as much as possible, in order to diminish the competition in our background.  We also should invest in getting some better lighting arrangements, so that we are in full shot and not too much else.  I was watching a webinar a few days ago and one of the participants, who I know quite well, had so little light on his face, he looked like an extra in a horror movie, as he wafted into shot emerging from the gloomy darkness of his home.

We should also arrange the height of our laptop so that we can stand up.  This of course means wearing a suit, including the trousers, as we will be getting an almost full body shot.  We will still be very close to the camera, so we are still going to be clearly visible for the audience.  If you think about a presentation at a venue, the speaker can be anywhere from three to thirty meters away from the audience.  We will seem much closer in our onscreen version, than what a typical audience sitting in the cheap seats at the back, would experience.

Standing helps us to release our body language and particularly our gestures.  The seated non-use of our hands is one of the biggest presenting mistakes in this current online meeting universe. When we are seated, we are also very much constricted in terms of how much energy we can put out.  Standing will enable us to seem more powerful, dynamic and persuasive.  It is also a lot more relaxing to be standing, I have found, because of the freedom it supplies. 

As always, the key is to keep looking at the camera lens and not the faces on the screen.  If we have slides, then we should do what we always do and use a slide advancer of some configuration.  It might just be a cordless mouse or something a bit more elaborate. You can also ask your producer to relieve you of all the tech related duties, so that you can concentrate on your message and your audience. As speakers, standing is a more natural situation and one which has been presenter normality until recently.

This work from home situation and therefore, present from home reality, isn’t going away anytime soon.  Short term thinking, employing jerry-built solutions, is what amateurs do.  The professionals understand the situation and adjust accordingly.  Which one are you?

Aug 3, 2020

“Don’t waste a good crisis” is the sort of advice you don’t really wish to receive.  Who wants a crisis at any time?  The pandemic however has certainly created economic and social turmoil.  It has also created instant experts, charlatans, wannabees and plenty of dodgy advice.  I have been watching webinars on how to present online by people so incompetent it is breathtaking.  I admire their pluck, front, chutzpah to have a go, but am less convinced of their questionable sense of civic duty, to help out during a crisis.  When things get tough, I like the competent to get going, not just the tough.

 

Individuals with no track record of ever delivering anything online are now self inducted experts on the “how to” bits.  This extends from the equipment salespeople all the way up to the various Chamber captains of industry.  The tech is the most fun because it is the simplest.  Just get the gadgetry, the whizbang and away you go.  Live streaming is great as long as you are great when “live”.  That would automatically cancel out most people.  Being able to string two words together, with no editing fallback, means you are up on the high wire with no safety net.  You need to be an expert in your field, lucid, confident, articulate and practiced.  That wipes out most “self proclaimed experts of online presenting” right there. 

 

A high tech rendition of you umming and ahhing is no help.  The audience will soon lose focus and in this Age of Distraction will quickly move on to more interesting things.  The camera technology is so good today, it is mind boggling.  A great close up, crystal clear of you struggling is fantastic for production values, but no so great for persuading anyone of what you are saying.  If the live video is later worked on, those ums and ahs can be edited out, but depending on your frequency of usage, that may mean a lot of transitions in the final video.

 

The real bug bear with the tech is the fact that most people are not in a studio, surrounded by tech heaven.  Fundamentally, we don’t want to travel to the studio.  We are bundled up at home, at the mercy of the lens in our laptop and the dubious lighting in our room.  At the beginning, everyone thought we would all be back to normal – “the boys will be home for Christmas” before the slaughter started type of Phony War.  So, don’t worry about the sound or the lighting, but here we are, with no end in sight.  So, we do need to get a little excited about upping the ante on our tech and technique. 

 

Buy the light you need for when you are on camera.  Get the lens up to eye level so you are not shooting up your nostrils.  Look at the lens rather than the faces on the screen.  Wear a headset with mic, so you have access to the clearest sound.  If you find you need a separate mic then get one.  This global isolation ward we find ourselves in is destined to continue for some time longer.  Accept that none of the platforms are reliable, so have an emergency crew on hand, ready to rescue people swept overboard from the webinar into sound loss hell.

 

Lift your energy by 40% at least, to compensate for the draining effect of the camera.  Be much more animated than normal.  Move your head angle, so it is not always simply one dimensional, straight on to the camera.  If you want to know what I mean, just watch the professional broadcasters on television.  They have realised a static head position is dull and leads to people switching their attention to all of the other multitasking goodies they have at their fingertips.

 

The good thing with these platforms is that you can record yourself for review.  Here is a pro hint – do that before the broadcast, not just reviewing the carnage, after the fact.  You can experiment with angles, heights, lighting, fake greenscreen backdrops, content and delivery. See how you will look on the small screen.  You will also have time without pressure, to learn how to share your screen, get your slide deck up and control what the audience can see.  Get your first impression nailed.  Your online buddies may be a mess, but you don’t have to join them in that regard.  It might be a bit disarming to learn how boring you are on playback.  Better to adjust to that truth before the curtain goes up and then make the necessary adjustments beforehand.

Jul 27, 2020

Maintaining the audiences’ attention presumes you actually have their interest in the first place, doesn’t it.  Gaining and keeping attention are no simple achievements in this Age of Distraction.  One of the interesting findings of online meeting studies is the miniscule number of people who are attending, who are NOT multitasking in the background.  This means that the content and the delivery are not sufficiently gripping, to keep a grip on our listener’s attention. 

We know that most people who present are pretty boring in the first place.  This has been the case in the face to face world.  So it is no surprise that these nefarious time wasters and energy sappers, should be up to their same old tricks on whichever semi-functional platform we all forced to struggle with.  Escaping to a better place then is the easy choice and we tune out and check email, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Tik Tok, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram or just surf the internet.  In other words, we are not short of choices if we get disinterested in you as the speaker.

To grab interest at the start when in the room with the audience, we need to pare down every possible distraction, hesitation, segue, diversion or interruption possible.  That means getting there early checking on the equipment, testing the microphone, ensuring the MC will do a proper job of introducing us to kick things off.  We get right into a strong start, with a teaser of some sort to break through all the clutter in our audience’s minds.  Then we can move on to thank the sponsors, start launching our slide deck, introduce our company and set up the importance of the topic.

In a thirty minute talk, we will break things into five minute segments, so we are dividing the delivery up into six blocks.  In each change of blocks we need a transition, something to wake the audience up they have started to drift.  It might be launching a rhetorical question. 

Jesper Koll, a well know economist and speaker here in Tokyo, is an absolute master at this.  He is very flamboyant. He will boldly wander into the forward tables of the audience, stand over the top of you and hit you with his question.  You are now diverting your full attention to him, because you imagine you will have to answer this little doozy he has proposed, and do it front of all these business people assembled in the room.  Everyone else is nervous too, in case he switches to another member of the room. 

Just as you break into nervous sweat, he sweeps in and answers the question he posed. With a silent, private sigh of immense relief you realise, “oh, that was a rhetorical question, so I don’t have to front up with an answer”.  To keep us all on our toes, he sometimes does expect an answer, in case we regular Jesper speech attendees think we can start gaming the system.

We might change the pace of the energy we are expending to lift it up to much higher heights, for a short burst of adrenaline transfer into the crowd, to keep them with us for a bit longer.  We might tell a fascinating story that grabs interest.  Or it might be the supply of some stunning, unknown facts or hot off the presses data, that will be deemed valuable and make everyone happy they attended the talk, because they feel they are getting value from investing their time to be there.

In the online world, we should keep everyone out of the room, until it is time.  This way they don’t see the presenters for who they really are – tech novices, totally out of their depth with the platform, having side discussions in public about what they are going to do and who will be doing it.  When it is time, be ready to go and go hard from the start, to kick things off well.

In the online world, we can’t apply the five minute rule.  The distraction factor is nuclear, so we have to apply the two minute rule.  Every two minutes, we need to be doing something to keep people with us.  That means fifteen things have to be pre-planned, for a thirty minute speech, before you go live.  It can be the things already mentioned or doing a poll, getting a raised hand, a green check, a red cross, entering something in the chat or calling on someone to unmute and share their thoughts on the subject.

In person or online, the secret is in the planning.  Expect total distraction and then work back from that possibility, minute by minute, as to what you have to do, to overcome the gap between where you want the audience to be and where they can wind up.

Jul 20, 2020

In Parts One and Two, we have covered the mentality needed to be a professional presenter, how to structure the talk and how to deal with hostile audience questions.  Now we turn to the delivery components.  In the online world and in person, our voice is such a powerful communication tool.  We hear those deep throated DJs on the radio or actors in the movies and realise we don’t have the same instrument. 

 

Actually, no one cares.  In business, we are all amateur presenters, because that is not our main job.  If we want to be a full time professional speaker, then that is a different question.  Our day to day job is running our section or the company or battling away in our defined professional field.  We speak in front of audiences as a subset of our main tasks.  So we go with the voice we have. 

 

I have a rather husky voice. This is the product of 50 years of kiai or the yelling, that goes on in karate training.  I would love to have a mellifluous, baritone voice that harkens the angels, but that is not going to happen.  The chances are you are not going to throw your job in and become a full time DJ anytime soon either, so you go with what you have too.

 

What we can control is how clear and concise we are.  Many people think out aloud.  What escapes from their lips is the short form version of that internal conversation, in the form of ums and ahs.  To eliminate this habit, learn how to purse your lips, ever so gently together, so that no sounds can emerge.  When you speak, you open your mouth and when you are not speaking, your lips remain pursed.  You decide what you are going to say and you hit it straight away, with no hesitation, then purse your lips when you finish.  If you are thinking what it is you want to say, you do that while keeping your lips pursed.  Keep practicing this technique and you will eliminate ums and ahs from your speech.

 

Who we speak to is also important.  Now a lot of people speak fervently to their notes on the podium or their laptop screen or turn around and talk to the main screen in the room.  They are certainly not talking to the audience.  I remember Professor Walton teaching us about Pre-war Japanese history.  He spent every lecture staring into space, about three meters above the heads of his audience.  I don’t recall him making any eye contact with anyone during the whole lecture series in that semester and I would guess, in his entire career as an academic.

 

As a presenter, we need to speak to our audience.  Sounds simple, but so many people get this wrong.  In the online world, they are talking down to the faces on screen, instead of talking to the camera mounted at the top of the laptop.  In the real world, they are whizzing their eye contact around at lighting speed, effectively looking at everyone and no one at the same time.  There is no engagement going on.

 

Eye power is so powerful, so let’s use it.  Lock eyes with your audience, one member at a time and engage that person for around six seconds and then pick up the next person at random.  If you spend less time, it is not having any personal connection and if you keep burning a hole in their retina, it feels too intrusive.  Don’t connect with people in any predictable order – keep your audience on their toes, awake and with you throughout your presentation.

 

In person or online, watching your audience allows you to adjust for their situation.  If they look puzzled, then they probably didn’t get the point and you may need to rephrase it.  If they are looking disengaged, then you need to get them involved using rhetorical questions.  These are good because as the audience member, you don’t know if you are going to be called upon to answer it or not.  Getting people to raise their hands is good and probably twice is the maximum number of times, to use this technique before it feels manipulative.  If they are raising hands or giving you a green check when online, you can use this more often during the presentation.

 

Energy in conversation with a colleague or a friend is not the energy you need when presenting, whether online or in person.  Crank it up around 40% higher than usual and start pushing our your ki, your intrinsic power, to the audience.  Stand up straight, if in person and sit up straight, if online.  Also if you are giving a presentation online, then try and arrange it so that you can deliver it standing up.  It will bring a lot more physical energy to the audience and bolster your confidence and credibility. 

 

Use a headset when presenting online for the best audio quality possible and if using a microphone with a live audience, try to use a lavalier microphone, so that your hands are free for gestures.  Gestures are critical exclamation points in you talk.  They bring power to what you are saying, bolstering the power of the words.  Online still use them, although when seated, the range of movement is a bit more constricted, but still employ them for emphasis.

 

Online or in person, the basics are the basics and we must master them.  We make a few adjustments for the online world but they are not game breaking.  Practice remains the key and so rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.

Jul 12, 2020

In Part One we looked at the opportunity available for people who want to improve their presentation, persuasion and speaking skills.  We delved into why are we speaking at all and who are we speaking to, which will define the approach we will take. The planning part is an obvious, but usually overlooked, component of the presentations’ world

Ironically, we begin with designing the end of the speech.  How close can we get to compressing the key point of the talk into a single sentence.  This discipline really forces us to be clear and concise about what it is we are going to say.  So we start by writing the two closes of the talk.  The first close is for prior to the Q&A, assuming there is going to be Q&A.  The second is for after the Q&A. 

Many speakers just allow the Q&A session to define the whole presentation.  The issue here though is that, as the speaker, you have no control over what people will want to ask you.  It is always astonishing to me, to hear audience members ask questions which are well off topic and unrelated to the point of the presentation.  Why they do that is a mystery, but regardless, as the presenter there is nothing you can do to shepherd the audience toward asking relevant and insightful questions, to further tease out the gold from your humble offering.

This means the final impression from your talk, can be left dangling, wrapped around a remote and unremarkable subject, light years from the point you were making.  We must seize back control.  After the end of the Q&A, we repeat the key points we want the audience to have ringing in their skulls, as they file from the venue.

If you get a hard time during the Q&A, ranging from pushback to outright hostility, deal with it the same way.  Do not allow your mouth to advance ahead of your brain and storm forth with the first random answer that pops into your head.  Repeat the question in a substantially watered down form, which will suck all the invective and life power emanating from this incoming verbal missile. 

If they say, “This is outrageous, your argument has been completely disavowed by all of the top experts, and you have the gall to be repeating it here today.  In front of us.  It is an insult”.  You sweetly paraphrase, “The question was about expert opinion on this subject”.  That reply took four seconds. You continue to buy yourself some more thinking time, by making a bland filler statement, such as, “This issue has aroused a lot of interest in our industry”.  Another four seconds. Having eight seconds to think first is a world of difference to opening up your mouth and letting “whatever” pour forth. With these eight seconds, you are now fully mentally prepared to form your well considered reply. 

When you do so, hold the questioner’s gaze for the first six seconds and then blank them for the rest of the proceedings.  You show you are not afraid of them and then you spread your answer to all the other people in the room, engaging them with your eye contact.  When you ignore the hostile questioner thereafter, you quickly drain all their negative, invective power from them.

Back to the structure of the talk.  Having boiled down the whole brilliant concoction to a single sentence, we now work on the construction of the presentation.  We need around three key pieces of evidence to support our assertions.  Three is a good number, because it tends to make it easier for the audience to follow and yet also allows us enough room to go into reasonable depth.  We work out the logical flow of the argument, to get the three points into order and then we add in the sub points and evidence to prove what we are saying.  We have now framed the main body of the talk and this means it is time to work on the blockbuster opening.

The start of the speech has some key goals. We want everyone to stop multitasking and being distracted by their phones.  We must make them cease chit chatting with their neighbours and devote their entire attention to us.  Sounds easy.  Today though, we all seem to have the attention span of a gnat, unless we are binge watching some popular series on Netflix.  During lockdown, everyone was binge watching their hearts out, so their expectations have now reached stratospheric heights and here you are, about to present.

Unfortunately, as presenters, we can’t compete with these multi-million dollar, big budget extravaganza shows. We are left to our own devices to keep people away from their hand held devices.  As modern day speakers, we find ourselves marooned in this Age Of Distraction.  Therefore our opening has to be really well planned, to cut through all the mental clutter. 

Whatever you say, begin with a lot of energy and volume, to scythe through the white noise bubbling away in the back of the room. You will have been introduced before your talk, but modern audiences keep chatting away without compunction, so go hard at the start. Open with a vexing question, a pithy quote, a gripping episode from the front lines or a bald faced, semi controversial statement.  These are all good attention grabbers.

In Part Three, we will deal with the finer points of the delivery.  Many a great start faltered midstream and lost the attention of the audience.  People today are merciless about reaching for their phones, to disappear to a better world than sitting there listening to you drone on and on.  Find out how to avoid that disastrous fate in the next instalment.

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