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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To get your free guide “How To Stop Wasting Money On Training” click here ( https://bit.ly/4agbvLj )

To get your free “Goal Setting Blueprint 2.0” click here (https://bit.ly/43o5FVK)

If you enjoy our content, then head over to www.dale-carnegie.co.jp and check out our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules and our whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story, President Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training

Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

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

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

He publishes daily blogs on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter

Has 6 weekly podcasts:

1.     Mondays -  The Leadership Japan Series,

2.    Tuesdays – The Presentations Japan Series

Every second Tuesday - ビジネス達人の教え

3.    Wednesdays - The Sales Japan Series

4.    Thursdays – The Leadership Japan Series

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

5.    Fridays - The Japan Business Mastery Show

6.    Saturdays – Japan’s Top Business Interviews

Has 3 weekly TV shows on YouTube:

1.     Mondays - The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

Also every Second Thursday - ビジネスプロTV

2.    Fridays – Japan Business Mastery

3.    Saturdays – Japan Top Business Interviews

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

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

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

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

I was recently reminded of the importance of openings and transitions when presenting watching a new speaker in action. They were using the occasion to establish their business here in Japan.  Like this speaker, most of us face an audience who don’t know us when we start speaking.  They may have glanced at the blurb from the organisers listing our accomplishments and background, all proving we are a legitimate expert, someone people should listen to.  Regardless of the massive self-promotion we passed across to the hosts of the event to send out to everyone, we still have to deliver the goods. 

The audience enters the room thinking about a lot of things, but thinking about us isn’t the highest priority.  They have that day at work to process what has happened so far. They also think about things they must do after our talk and what is coming up later that day or the next day.  In other words, mentally they are pretty busy and then we turn up.

Usually, the MC will introduce us and set the stage for us.  The quality of these introductions is scarily various.  Some MCs are arrogant and won’t be guided by the carefully hand crafted, elegantly wordsmithed script we have laboured over. We have been working hard to marshal all of our key selling points, aiming to stack high our massive credibility.  Whenever one of the MCs goes off piste, it is rare that they do a better job than what we have put together.  They often get the facts wrong and miss the key selling points. 

As the speaker, we should “insist” to the meeting hosts that the MC read out what we have prepared and not ad lib, freestyle or indulge themselves with our entry point to our talk.  Be firm with this.  Most people don’t give talks and don’t put their personal and public brands out there. They have no idea how important these small details actually are.

In this speaker’s case, the MC did a great job of selling them to the audience. What comes next is very important.  We have to say something which grabs attention and sets the stage for the main points we are going to make.  Remember, the entire crowd are fully obsessed with themselves and not us, so we have to smash through that mental preoccupation they have with their world and bring them into our world. 

We should have received a list of company names and their positions before the talk.  This is a big help.  It allows us to gauge the temperature in the room.  Are they experts or amateurs or a mix?  Depending on who is in front of us, we construct our opening.  We know they are all self-interested, so if we can open with something which appeals to that obsession all the better. 

In this speaker’s case, the opening was all about them and not about the greatest interests of the audience.  That was an opportunity missed.  We need to connect us with what the audience is most interested in and typically with the thing they fear the most.  We are all risk averse and we gravitate toward our fears before we head for our pleasure points.  That means scaring the hell out of your audience is always a reliable starter to make sure they have forgotten all about the day and are now solidly with us in the room. Think about the hottest topics with the greatest sex appeal at the moment.  Talk about that. 

Always avoid controversial elements like politics and religion, though.  As Michael Jordan famously said, “Republicans buy sneakers too”.  We do not want to create hostiles in the audience, if we bag Trump or Biden in our opening.  There are plenty of other scary topics to choose from and something closer to home is always best. 

For example, in Japan, we have a major decline in population underway.  That is an abstract idea for most of us. We just see the media headlines.  We don’t really notice the decline though, because it is gradual. The trains seem just as crowded as ever, when we are going to work.  However, if we can connect that to our own futures, we can bring that scary topic alive. 

We can say, “It is good that we have a Government run pension scheme in Japan that we all contribute to.  It is a worry though, that probably by the time you are ready to collect, your money may not be there.  That scheme works based on the younger generation paying into the scheme, so you can get our money out when you are older.  If there are not enough young people contributing, there won’t be enough money for you when you retire.  That is what declining population means for most of us.  Are you going to be okay when you stop working?”.

 After hearing that opening, the audience will be all ears to hear what we have to say on the subject.  They are expecting we come with a solution and they are ready for it.  That staff meeting they have after this talk or them picking up the dry cleaning is now completely out of their minds and they are fully concentrated on us.  This then sets us up the transition to the main talk where we outline our key points, backed up with evidence which is unassailable.

Our speaker didn’t manage to pull that off. Basically, they focused on themselves and missed the chance to really snag the audience’s fears and therefore their full attention.  We can hit the listeners right between the eyes with our opening and then inject a short piece about ourselves before we transition to the main body.  That is a much better approach, than jumping straight into talking about ourselves.

When we are planning our talk, we have to decide what is the purpose of this presentation?  In business, typically, we most often deliver the “inform” type.  We will pass over information we have come across in our travels and research for the edification of the audience.  They have turned up to learn something they didn’t already know and expect value for the time and money they have invested.  It might be the “motivate” talk to bolster the fandom numbers for our brand.  We extoll the virtues of our firm and our widget and get the listeners excited about buying our offerings.  If we give an “inspire” talk, then we are appealing to the audience to become the best version of themselves and maximise their potential.  This is often the “rags to riches” type of encouragement, using our own example as a source of inspiration.  If we could do it, then the audience can also do it.  If we are giving the “entertain” talk, this will mainly be a light presentation between the arrival of the next rounds of heavy red wines after a big dinner.

Regardless of the type of talk, we face a problem of too much information for the time we have to present.  I am sure you have made this fatal error like me.  Before doing any serious planning, we plunder other presentations for interesting, relevant and cool slides to add to this talk.  We start from the wrong point and before you know it we have fallen in love with a lot of content.  We have missed the viewpoint of deciding our central thesis and then going around and matching the proof and evidence to drive home our conclusions.

This bottom-up approach usually means we have way too many slides and certainly many more than we need to make our point.  What we think is adding power and strength to our argument is, in fact, weakening it.  The problem is one of dilution.  If we give the audience too many things to consider and take in, then they don’t gain a strong central message from us. 

I notice this tendency when we are teaching the Magic Formula to give talks.  There is a period at the beginning of the talk to set the stage, to draw out the context, explain the background.  Then we recommend an action and we follow this up with the benefit of taking that action.  It is a very simple and tight formula.  What always happens though, when we do the roleplay, and the coaching is people go off the track. 

They need to nominate the one central, most important action they want the audience to take.  That instruction is fairly easy to understand, but most people manage to get it wrong.  They wax lyrical about the many great and wondrous actions the listeners should take.  They also pile on the benefits of the various actions.  For the listener, it is overwhelming. They cannot remember any of it.  If the audience can’t recall what we said, then we will have to count that presentation as a failure.

The idea of three things for your audience to work on is not new.  However, common sense is not common and established, proven ideas have to be re-discovered every generation.  For any talk, there will be three main elements which are the most powerful components of supporting the argument we are making.  Within each of these points, there will be three key aspects which prove our point.  We are already at nine points and we haven’t added in the start and close of the talk yet.  In a forty-minute speech, we will be bumping up against the time limit.  Remember, we also have a ton of sexy slides we want to use, which will blow the time out completely. We need to exercise great discipline in our selection of what to keep and what to discard.

Forcing the Rule Of Three on ourselves is a very good way of making sure we get the key point fully supported and convincing, without confusing our listeners about what it is we want to say.  I would like to say it is more complex and difficult than this, to make myself look more “presentation guru” like.  The reality is that simple is always best when presenting.  Confusing people and therefore distracting people from our key message makes no sense. However, often we do a good job of doing just that by overcomplicating the messaging.  Next time you put a talk together, apply the Rule of Three and see what you can trim to make the key ideas shine more brightly.

Navigation is critical in presenting.  This is how we keep the audience with us and keep reinforcing our key messages.  Years ago, I attended a speech by a serious VIP.  He had jetted in from the US to visit Japan and made time to give the Chamber of Commerce members the benefits of his insights.  It was a seriously meandering and confusing talk.  I was left befuddled and bemused. Later, speaking with others, I found I wasn’t the only one struggling to understand where he was going with his messaging. What was the impression he left with me – negative, unimpressed, insulted.  He did serious damage to his personal and professional brands that day.  Here we are years later I and I am still recalling that catastrophe.

Recently, I was asked to provide a review of a new book and because I am always time poor, I thought listening to the audio version would give me more flexibility to work my way through it.  I have narrated my own book on “Japan Sales Mastery”, so I know how tough that recording process is. Interestingly, apart from being reminded how exhausting doing the narration was, I was noting the importance of navigation in that medium. 

I was trying to scan the subject matter to be able to cobble together a review which captured the breadth of the topic and the point of view being offered.  This meant I had to stabilise a lot of information in my mind and draw on that to pull the threads together. Actually, I found it hard to do and had to listen to the audio a second time to get the overview I needed. So much for saving time!

You only have voice on the audio and that is very similar to our presentations.  Of course, we can add visual stimulation through the slide deck and that mechanism also adds great navigation possibilities to keep the listeners with us.  Nevertheless, I was thinking about those occasions where you don’t or can’t use slides and what were the learnings about navigation, when all you have to work with is voice.

This is where signposts come in.  As trainers, we are taught to set up the phases of the training.  For example, if we are going to go into small groups to discuss a point, we don’t just say, “break into three groups”.  We will say, “In a moment, we are going to break into three groups to discuss XYZ”.  The reason for this is we need navigation for the participants during the class. They need to mentally prepare themselves for the pivot from what they have been doing to what is coming in the next phase.

Our presentations are like that too.  We will have certain topics in the speech providing the points we want to make and the evidence to support our position.  Generally, in a forty-minute speech, we will have a limited number of “chapters” for our speech.  We have our overarching key point we want to make and then we back that up with sub-points arranged as chapters and then surround those sub-points with proof.  There are a series of pivots, from one chapter to the next, throughout the talk. We need to make sure we are guiding our audience to come with us, rather than making a pivot and losing them on the turn.

We might bridge from one topic to the next if the theme is related, or we may need to make a sharp turn to a new topic.  Either way, we need to announce it to the audience.  For example, “we have been talking about the economic ramifications of this change in regulation.  Let me now talk about the HR dimensions of these proposed changes”.  The regulatory changes are the common issue and we are slightly elongating the topic to cover another different but related angle, so the transition is easy for our listeners to follow. 

If we are making a major pivot, then we need to set that up.  For example, “we have been talking about the economic ramifications of this change in regulation.  Let me switch gears and talk about a new topic, which we will all have to deal with in the next six months”.  In this way, the audience understands that regulatory issues as a topic is completed and now we are moving to an entirely new subject.  When we warn them that this switch is coming, they mentally adjust their concentration to deal with the new direction.

If we don’t do this, we are changing topics and listeners are left to their own devices to understand if these two topics are related or different and what is the connection between them, if there is a connection. You can see how easily we can confuse the crowd when we pivot subjects.  So, let’s leave some breadcrumbs so the listeners can stay with us, as we move around the topic and make our main points during the talk.   If we do this, they will be with us at the end, rather than lost and reaching for their mobile phones to find something infinitely more interesting than us.  We can’t have that now, can we!

Does introducing emotion when presenting mean sharing a good weep with the audience?  No, that is way over the top in a business context and would be the death knell of the speaker’s credibility.  We are not turning up to your talk to see you burst into tears, carried away with your lack of emotional control. 

We are there with you for one of four reasons.  1. Most typically, we aspire to be informed about some relevant aspect of our business.  2. We might be there to be motivated to take some action, which we have procrastinated on and have you convince us to swallow the frog and go do it.  3. It could be to gain inspiration about you, your brand, your organisation and we become fans. 4. Entertain us.  This could be an after dinner speech, where over copious great food and grog, we desire your raconteur wit and repartee.

In all four cases, random or spontaneous tears, are not on the menu.  When I talk about emotion, I am referring to stopping the Easter Island statue impersonations you have been pulling off.  If you have ever seen photos of these statues carved out of stone, the faces depicted are hard, unrelenting, and never changing.  This could be you, by the way, when you are presenting.

I was reminded of this phenomenon the other day when teaching a class on presenting.  The difference it made when the speakers smiled rather than being stone faced while presenting was remarkable.  Why were they stone faced, like their ancient kin on Easter Island?

This is our problem as speakers when we are concentrating on the content of what we are going to say. Because of this, we are not conscious about the delivery of how we say it.  Professor Albert Mehrabian cleared this point up in the 1960s during his research.  He is often misquoted. If you ever want to defrock the credentials of someone claiming to be an expert on public speaking and presenting, see if they get his facts confused. 

You will see the following numbers thrown around with shallow abandon and they are wrong.  Dubious presentation teachers will tell you how you dress is 55%, your voice quality 38% and your words 7% of the ratio of how you make an impression on an audience.  So dress well and sound nice. I was watching some “expert” on LinkedIn Learning sprouting these numbers with firm conviction.  Run far and fast when you encounter these fake people.

The good Profs research point was these numbers are only relevant when you lack congruency between what you are saying and how you are saying it.  If you said the words “the gap was huge” but you were holding your hands only a few centimeters apart to show the gap, that action wouldn’t be congruent with your words.  If you were relaying some good news, but your face was projecting a dark, unhappy scowl, that wouldn’t be congruent with the words. 

As per Mehrabian’s research, when we are confused by your lack of congruency, we wander off and start noticing how you are dressed or how you sound and we are distracted 93% of the time from your message. That is a very bad result for a speaker.

Rather than having only one expression on our face when presenting, we should have a constant barrage of expressions unfurling, each perfectly matched to the message we are delivering.  If it is good news we are purveying, then we should smile.  If we proffer bad news, we should look concerned. If something is puzzling us, we should look puzzled.  If it is a bit odd, we should look curious.

As speakers, we want to connect with our audience and there is no better guarantee of failing in that regard than having the wrong face for the message we are conveying.  If we have one constant “serious” face throughout our talk, it will be unlikely we can connect with the listeners.  We need to relax our face to be more approachable and to engage with the audience.

Sounds simple, except if you are nervous or deep in concentration on what you are going to say next, all thoughts of audience connection can sail out the window and we are left with your best Easter Island statue impersonation.  Like any activity, repetition teaches us how to relax when we are doing it. 

When we first learnt to ride a bicycle or to drive a car, we were tense and stressed.  Our face can be as hard as stone and our body contorted with stiffness.  After many repetitions, we are able to relax and ride the bicycle and drive the car while multi-tasking (certainly not recommended folks).  The point is, we learn how to relax and this happens when we do a lot of speaking repetitions.

Our face is the most powerful tool we have, so vastly superior to any monitor and slide deck.  We need to access this power and work on matching the congruency of our words with what is on our face when we present.  The best way to check your face is to video yourself. It can be shocking at first to realise the distance you have to bridge, but now you have awareness, you are a long way closer to being able to engage your audience.

I was reading an interesting LinkedIn post about how at the start of your presentation in Japan you need to have slides on your background and credentials to get the trust of the audience.

Let me quote from the post, so that you can get the flavour: “Most of the presentations I’ve seen by Japanese professionals tend to start with a detailed profile of the presenter’s career and professional accomplishments. Yes, a lot of these slides are information heavy and (no offence but) not aesthetically pleasing, but the average Japanese user is thinking “this person has many qualifications. I trust this person.” It’s not their fault, but Japanese people culturally tend to be wary of foreign brands and companies. The best you can do is try to break that barrier by listing all your accolades and making it clear that you are a trustworthy professional”

This post has attracted a lot of discussion so far and I added my two bobs worth as well.  The point being made was that Japanese doubt what they are being told unless they trust the person making the presentation.  Fair enough. The suggested way to gain that trust is to provide a lot of data on who you are, what you have done, where you have worked etc., at the start of proceedings. The author noted that, “a lot of these slides are information heavy”. I disagree with this approach if you want to engage your audience.

First impressions are critical and the first one minute of our talk is the decider for a large portion of the audience.  My biggest concern isn’t that they won’t trust what I am saying.  Today, we all have to worry that they will vote with their hands and grab their phones to escape from us to the internet.  They stop listening to our message.  It would be extremely rare that a Japanese audience would have people actually get up and walk out while the speaker is presenting.  I have never witnessed that. No one is that bold or rude.  Rather, they will just grab their phone and disappear in plain sight, right in front of you.

My suggestion in the LinkedIn thread was to try to get that biographical detail into the blurb advertising the talk.  We could also have it as a handout, which the audience can reference.  The idea of telling people who you are and why they should listen to you is a good idea.  This is especially so in this Era of Cynicism and fake news and I don’t see this as solely a Japanese issue. My suggestion, though, is to not waste the start of the talk with this type of heavy background detail.

We are vying with so many distractions in the minds of the audience sitting in front of us.  We have to grab their attention right from the start.  That means not tinkering around with the slide deck if we are switching it across from the previous speaker or from the host’s introduction.  We should get someone else to load up our slide deck, so that we are free from the start, to engage our audience. 

There are two favourite strategies I apply.  One is to find some really shocking statistic or piece of information which will scare the pants off the audience.  We all react to fear and loss, more so than gain and greatness. I saw one the other day in the Financial Times.  There was a statistic that from 2010 to 2020, Japanese companies on average were paying over the odds to acquire foreign companies to the tune of a 34% premium. Also, between 1990 and 2014, twenty-five percent of Japanese M&A acquisitions were failures and had to be written off.  This compared with only 5% of US deals ending in failure. 

If I was using this information, I would start, “Japan should immediately halt doing foreign M&As. Demographics are driving Japanese businesses to go offshore and buy businesses, but this strategy is super high risk. Japanese buyers of foreign companies are overpaying an average 34% premium to acquire businesses, but one in four fail and they are losing their investment. Are you ready to lose money too?  Let’s find out what they should do”.

With a start like “Japan should immediately halt doing foreign M&As”, and a finish with “are you ready to lose money too?  Let’s find out what they should do”, no one in a Japanese audience will be focused on my credentials.  They will be worried about losing the investment and attracting potential blame if things go wrong.  My aim was to seize their attention and that opening will do it.

As far as gaining credibility goes, I need to back up my statements with provable facts and data.  Statements are just opinion and the audience needs to know where I am getting this information.  In this case, the Financial Times is owned by the Nikkei and is considered a reputable journalistic source.  Our main body of our talk needs references to proof of the points we make to sustain our argument.  This is where we prove our credentials as a speaker, because we show we are an expert who have assembled the needed information to back up what we are saying.

The other technique I like is to tell a story.  By the way, a personal story is the best.  It needs to take the audience with me back to the point when I discovered this truth I am telling them. By taking them back to the context, they will probably draw the same conclusion I have reached based on the same data.  If I have it, I might relate the gory story of a foreign M&A deal that nearly bankrupted the Japanese company and weave in the FT statistics.

If you still feel you need a biography slide, then please, please, please make it able to be understood in two seconds. Don’t force people to wade through the slide deck swamp you have created on screen.  Just include the strongest points to gain the credibility you feel needed. Absolutely don’t make this your first slide or the start of the talk.  Get the attention grabber opening working first to grab the audience and then you can unveil your most powerful credentials. Pour on the proof in the main body to get acceptance of you and your message and deliver the talk competently. This protects your personal and professional brands.

 It was a big affair.  Many supporting organisations had promoted this expert dual speaker event and the large audience filed into the prestigious venue.  I was sold on the advertising too.  I was intrigued by the pairing of topics and according to the blurb, the speakers’ backgrounds looked the money. The MC kicked things off and handed the baton off to the first speaker.  Things went off the rails immediately.  The initial thought was the microphone wasn’t on, but sadly it was.  The speaker just wasn’t on. 

This was a rookie tech mistake. I didn’t expect to see that from a very senior guy in his sixties.  Here is a side note for the rest of us - always get to the venue early and test the microphone set up.  Often the venue sound system is also a problem and there need to be changes made to the volume controls to get more out of the system.  It was a good reminder to me to not trust the given equipment as it is.

 Also, often in business venues, the people organising the talk are great at moving tables and chairs around, but less expert when it comes to the getting the sound system to work properly.  This was an evening event, so the tech people have long departed and we amateurs are the only ones remaining. That is why we need to get there early and check everything before we are ever handed a microphone in public and expected to perform.

This gentleman’s frail, wispy, low energy voice was speaking to us, but I really struggled with hearing what was being said.  I was sitting in the front row, but even at that distance, the voice volume being generated was insufficient to follow the thesis being presented.  For the next twenty minutes, I had no idea what he was saying.

Actually, it was worse than that, which was already bad enough. Our speaker was an expert from the finance sector and had held many leading positions here in Japan, including Country Head and President of a number of big name brands.  You would think with a resume like that, he would know better, but he  spoke in a monotone. 

This meant that each word was delivered with exactly the same strength as every other word in his sentences.  Now we all know that words are not democratic.  Some have more importance and prestige than others, and so need to be lofted above the hoi polloi.  We need to hit those words harder or alternatively much softer to create variation.  This variation is a simple pattern interrupt, which is what keeps the listeners with us.

 The problem with a monotone delivery is it has no pattern interrupt and so makes the audience sleepy. That is precisely what happened to me.  I couldn’t for the life of me follow what on earth he was saying, so I became drowsy.  The speaker was not an English native speaker and so there was a slight accent. However, he has spent almost the entirety of his career in international finance, so his English was very good and not an issue for him to deliver this talk. This foreign language aspect is definitely not an excuse. I am convinced he would have delivered the same talk in his own language, in exactly the same way.  This is how he speaks in public, period.

He also spoke his monotone sentences in long bursts, sans pauses.  I have this trouble too when I speak in Japanese, because I tend to speed up.  This means that the words become jumbled and are hard to dissect.  There are no “brain breaks” to allow us to digest what we have just heard.  When you combine an accent with a fast clip, it makes it more difficult for the audience to follow you.  When I speak in Japanese to a public audience, I have to keep telling myself to slow down and inject pauses, to help the crowd stick with my message.

Combining all this with a complete lack of energy made his speech a serious pain.  Speaker energy is infectious.  We create an electricity in the room which envelops our audience and transports them to the place we have decided to take them in our talk. When a speaker doesn’t project energy, the audience has to mount their own energy sources to get involved in the speech.  If the talk is gripping, even if the speaker isn’t generating a lot of ‘ki” (気) or intrinsic energy, we can meet them in the middle and stick with the talk.  But a wispy voice, devoid of energy, speaking in a monotone, with an accent, is the coup de grâce for a public speaker’s reputation, no matter how senior they may be or how grand their resume is .

 The other two weapons in the public speaker’s arsenal were also sheathed.  He was using a podium to hold his notes.  This meant that the height of the podium came up to his waist level, hiding his body from the audience.  You often see speakers resting their laptop on the podium when they are using slides.  In both cases, you don’t need to stand behind the obstacle.  With slides you can have a slide clicker and stand anywhere you like.  Just using his notes, he could have stood to the side to use more of his body language to bolster his words.  It makes such a difference and you will notice how much the next time you see a speaker come out from behind the podium.

Eye contact wasn’t being employed either to engage the crowd.  He wasn’t trying to connect one-on-one with the audience, as he could easily have done.  When you stare straight into one eye of an audience member for around six seconds, they really feel the close connection with you.  For them, it seems as if time and space have been suspended and it is just the two of you in the room, having a private conversation.  It is so powerful and as speakers, we definitely want to employ our eye power. 

Gestures were also absent.  Part of the problem was he was holding the microphone in one hand and resting his other elbow on the podium, thus ensuring the free hand wasn’t being used, either. What a wasted opportunity. The vortex of voice, body language, eye contact and gestures all zeroing in on the audience members, one by one, is what makes a speaker have real impact.  That much concentrated energy coming at you is irresistible.

Now here is the rub.  He has been working away for over forty years and he has always been like this.  That means he has been destroying audiences with a toxic regularity stretching over decades. It was obvious he was totally oblivious to how much damage he was doing to his personal and professional brands.  His time past cannot be reclaimed, and that is sad.  What is even sadder is he will keep going like this for the rest of his career.  Don’t squander your working years like he has – get the training and make presenting a powerhouse support for your career and brands.

I hesitated to use this title, because it smacks of click bait, doesn’t it?  To hell with it, live dangerously, I say! What flagged this question for me was an article in the Financial Times by Anjli Raval about Wall Street earnings calls.   She mentioned that researchers from the University of Bergen and Said Business School analysed the question-and-answer sections of earnings calls from 2993 American listed companies between 2010 and 2019. 

They were looking at a term I had never heard of before, called “uptalk”.  This is a common thing with women, who sometimes end their sentences with a rising intonation.  It comes across as open, friendly and not being domineering or pushy.  All good.  However, it also can sound as if they are not convinced of what they are saying. That rising tone sounds like the statement is morphing into an unstated question conveying uncertainty.

The research showed that whenever they used this uptalk element in their speech, male analysts made less buy recommendations when female CEOs were doing the earnings calls. The academics noted, “Analysts respond negatively when female executives use unexpectedly high levels of uptalk”.  The study showed that this did not apply when men used uptalk in the earnings calls.

Raval also captures some dilemmas facing women executives when she writes, “They must be vocal but not deemed ‘shrill’.  They must be confident but not perceived as arrogant; empathetic but not so much that is shows weakness; they should smile and be enthusiastic to not appear ‘threatening’ or ‘hostile’ (words rarely used for male counterparts). And they shouldn’t complain”. Whew.  That is a tricky path to navigate for female executives.

What about Japan?  In my experience, there is definitely an expectation here about how women are supposed to speak.  Television panels, talk shows etc., here usually feature the woman as a charming appendage to the male.  He is the expert and the center of attention.  Her job is to not say much, listen intently to what he is saying and make him look good.

I should point out though, that sounding hesitant using “uptalk” style of speech is a fixture of the culture in Japan, for both men and women.  It is a means of sounding polite, humble and non-aggressive. These are welcome attributes in a country which values social harmony.  Having said that, I feel there is greater pressure on women here to restrain themselves in what they say and particularly in how forcefully they say it.

Infamously, ex-Prime Minister Mori, when he headed the Japan Olympic Organising Committee, complained about women wanting to talk too much at the meetings. That caused a huge furore and very, very reluctantly, he resigned his position after holding on to it until the bitter end.  What I think he was saying was that the women on the committee should sit there and listen to men like him, and say nothing.  They should be guided by the senior males in the room, so their opinions weren’t required.  “If you need an opinion, I will give it to you” type of approach. 

Ex-Prime Minister Aso is also a reliable source for faux pas regarding the place of women in Japanese society.  There is even a dedicated section on Wikipedia titled “Controversial Statements”.  I wonder how many Japanese people listed in Wikipedia have such a dedicated section?  In 2014, he talked about women who didn’t give birth being “problematic”.  In 2018, he said “there is no such thing as a sexual harassment charge”.  January 2024, he called Foreign Minister Yōko Kamikawa, aged 70, an “obasan” or old lady, and commented that she was “not particularly beautiful”. 

By the way, he is 83, light years distant from being handsome and grew up with a massive array of silver spoons stuffed into his mouth. Being male, his looks don’t enter into any calculations. In that same speech, he also said she was a “new star and could inspire new stars to emerge in politics”.  Some serious mixed messaging going on there from Aso.

 So should women in Japan even bother with public speaking, given the male dominance of business here?  There are many excellent foreign female speakers here like Helen Iwata, who is a friend and a graduate of our High Impact Presentations Course. She is really skilled and teaches public speaking for women.  What about skilled Japanese females?  I am sure they must be out there somewhere and maybe I have missed them over the last 39 years living here. In reality, I don’t see many female executives giving public speeches and I am struggling to think of someone who would be a really good role model? 

 I quoted Raval earlier on the difficulties for women to navigate the right tone when speaking. Japan is no different and perhaps even less open to the idea and certainly less tolerant as well.  What we see in our classes, though, is that there is no problem for women to become excellent public speakers.  That, I believe, is the difference.  Regardless of gender, when we get the training, we know how to navigate all the obstacles to getting our message across. 

What often happens, though, is women in business are left to work it out through trial and error.  In companies, men get the training quota, and the women don’t. You need regular speaking spots to make that trial-and-error algorithm work.  Executives in Japan just don’t get to give that many speeches in a year. Also, the number of speaking spots for women here is a lot less than for men.  It will take female executives a long time to work it out by themselves.  I suggest women in business (actually everyone!) get the training, so they can speed things up, improve the process and secure the needed outcomes.

 Pasedena, January 31,1993. Michael Jackson performs at the Super Bowl.  He suddenly pops out of the smoke on to the stage and strikes a dramatic pose facing right.  He holds that pose for one minute and eight seconds, not moving a muscle.  He makes one change and looks left. He holds that same pose for another 20 seconds before he takes off his sunglasses and then starts singing and dancing. Imagine a whole football stadium with nearly one hundred thousand fans there and a viewing audience of 91 million.  You have to possess tremendous guts and self-belief to hold that monster crowd in the palm of your hand and stand there motionless for over a minute.

This is an extreme case and none of us would dream of walking up on to a stage in front of a business audience and just standing there motionless and not speaking for over a minute.  It would be considered weird and we would lose credibility with the crowd.   

What could we do though to build some anticipation for the things we are saying? Often, when we are nervous we speak too fast and too much, so there are no breaks to allow the audience members to digest what we are saying.  It is like the rolling breakers in the surf, each one crashing over the top of the previous one.  We crush our audience with our information, as it hits them in waves and overwhelms them.

I saw a demonstration of great anticipation many years ago at a business presentation.  The speaker was not on the front of the stage when he was announced.  There was a pause of around twenty seconds after that and then when we heard his voice he was nowhere in sight.  The reason for that was he was at the back of the hall behind us and he started speaking out of our vision.  People were craning their necks and looking around for the source of the voice.  Slowly, he made his way to the front and continued his talk.  It was quite effective to build some anticipation and to differentiate him from just about every other talk we had attended up the that point.  It also worked in a business context and wasn’t considered weird or strange.

Usually, when the speaker is announced they head for their laptop on stage and start playing around with it, to get the slides up.  Once the slide deck is visible they start their presentation.  No anticipation going on here, only annoyance on the part of the audience for the delay in getting proceedings underway. 

What if we switched things up a bit and made sure we were not the one doing the mechanics on the slide deck? We can get someone else to organise that for us and make our way straight to the center of the stage.  In this way we are creating our first impression as a professional.  Rather than starting immediately, we could hold the audience in anticipation of what is to come.  Not for over a minute, like Michael Jackson, but 15 seconds is quite a long time to hold them there before we start. 

When we do this, our opening has to be a blockbuster because we have built the expectation by driving up the tension from the beginning.  A very mundane greeting such as thanking the organisers for the chance to talk will not suffice.  We need an opening that is so powerful, that the audience is now fully concentrated on us and are eager to hear more of what we have to say.  It could be a quote, a statistic, and fact or a story.  Whatever it is, we have to make sure it really connects with the audience.  The worst thing to do is build up audience expectations and then let bring everyone down.

Doom and gloom is a great content piece and superior to hope and a bright future.  We are more moved by fear than we are by gain, so appealing to everyone’s risk averse nature is a good place to begin.  For example, we hold the crowd for 15 seconds than unleash, “In the next ten years the very fabric of Japanese society is going to be torn and shredded”.  At about the ten second mark, they are wondering what is going on and why we are not starting straightaway. That pattern interrupt followed by such a brazen headline, will have the whole room hungry for the explanation.

It depends of course on the theme of your talk, but look for something seriously gloomy and scary to kick things off.  That “fabric of Japanese society” start could lead into a talk about the breakdown of cultural harmony here as poorly educated foreigners from third world countries flood in to fill the jobs Japanese can’t or won’t do.  We could talk about consequent rising crime, the spread of drugs, intra-foreigner tribal violence and a whole host of other scary topics.

During our talk, we can slightly elongate our pauses for effect.  Great comedians are known for their comic timing.  They have memorised their script and their talent is in the art of the release of the punchline.  We have to take a page out of their book and look for the pause, before we lower the boom with our release of the various punchlines, we have arranged for the topic.  Some major ramification or danger sign or new development or whatever we are focusing on for the presentation. 

Generally speaking, we need to be hitting some high point every five minutes in the talk to keep the audience with us.  That means being able to use pauses and hitting key words or phrases like a maestro.  The pause creates the vacuum for the key word or phrase to fill.  If there is a pause both before and after, it really lift the power of the word or phrase we have chosen. Those variations in tone and strength is what creates the interest on the part of the audience, to keep listening to us.  A monotone delivery or a single constant voice strength delivery are too boring to keep the crowd with us. 

We can learn from Michael Jackson’s guts and adapt the idea to our business world.  We grab everyone’s attention and we keep the delivery in a business context which only adds to our personal and professional brands.

It is very common to see panel discussions at business events.  There is danger lurking in the shadows, though. The hosts invite a number of experts, usually around three to four, to interact with the MC.  The idea is that a range of views will emerge and a richer resource of information will be provided this way, compared to the single speaker model. Sometimes, there will be a hybrid, where you might be asked to give a short burst on your subject and then join the rest of the panel for the discussion component.

The danger here is your personal and professional reputation is being put up for public evaluation.  This is not just against an absolute standard, but also in a comparison with the other panel members.  Some colleagues up on stage can be quite competitive, but you didn’t get the memo. Your insights may come across as paltry, when ranked against another panellist’s sterling efforts.  Or you might struggle to give a meaningful reply to the MC’s questions and come across as a “fake” expert.  The other end of the problem are those panellists who just talk way too much and lack self-awareness.  Technical people can often be like this. They ramble on and on and the MC has to publicly reign them in. This is not a good look, so be succinct in your answers.

When we are asked to give a talk, hopefully we prepare well for the occasion, and we should rehearse what we are going to present.  With a panel discussion it is a bit illusory, because it doesn’t seem to be a “presentation”, but in fact it is. It is certainly judged that way by the audience.  They don’t say to themselves, “Oh, this is just a panel discussion, so I will suspend my usual cynicism, high expectations and unrealistic standards accordingly”.  No, they are in full beast, critic mode, as per normal.

Thinking of the panel talk answers as your own personal mini-presentation is a good starting point. This will drive you to prepare properly.  What does that mean, though?  We should know what the MC is going to ask us in advance and prepare our answers ahead of time, so that we are not struggling to come up with a response on the spot.  It is always good to check with the MC on the day, because things may have moved since they sent you the email on the questions they were planning to ask.

 We also have to be on the ball with paying close attention to the comments of the other panellists.  The MC may suddenly ask us to match our comment to their remarks.  If we are concentrating only on what we will say next, we may miss the cue and look frazzled. As the discussion moves, we have to be ready to make an unprepared comment and so we should be mentally manufacturing possible answers to any questions which may arise.  We need to be constantly adjusting to the flow of the conversation in real time.

Being able to sprout statistics, references, quotes on the subject really adds weight to our reputation as an expert in this area.  Normally, if we have a slide deck in a presentation, then all of the data is there and we don’t have to remember any of it.  On a panel, though, being able to quote the information from memory is very attractive and impressive to an audience.  Opinions are cheap, but knowledge has to be gained and we need to demonstrate we have this subject firmly in our grasp. 

Now having said that, it is not a bad thing to refer to some notes if the content is complex or challenging to recall.  Don’t worry, the audience won’t rise as one and denounce you as a fraud for checking your notes or quoting from your notes.  However, being able to unload the data unaided, elevates your level of credibility to a very great height.  This is particularly useful if you are the only one of the panel who can pull off this magic trick.

I was chatting to a panellist before the action got underway and he was telling me about the public speaking training he had received at his legal firm, so I was expecting a good performance.  Well, it was pretty average.  Why?  He ummed and ahhed his way through it and had negative vocal mannerisms such as saying “you know” way too often.  That detracted from the believability of his comment content.  What we say and how we say it matters. 

The other big error was he ignored his audience.  I could see he hadn’t been on too many panel discussions.  The MC was seated at the end of the row of experts. Our panellist would receive a question from the MC and, while solely looking at the MC, deliver the response.  Amateur mistake.  He had an entire audience there to speak to, but he chose to ignore them.  He could give a six second blast to the MC and then work his eye contact on individual members of the audience. 

In one minute he could make six seconds of direct connection with ten people each in the crowd. Generally, our answer takes three to four minutes, so there is a possibility of strongly engaging 40 members of the crowd per answer.  That is a totally different result to ignoring the audience and just answering the MC’s questions.

One other thing is posture.  Women have this worked out, so they rarely ever make rookie mistakes. However, some male panellists slump in their chairs and look simply unprofessional.  Guys, never kick your legs out like you were watching the sports on TV at home.  You might think that wouldn’t happen, but you will see it.  I recall an MC himself doing this during the discussion. I couldn’t believe it, but there he was, in full sight destroying his reputation. 

Also, please spare us a ringside view of your hairy shins, because your socks are too short.  When we are up on stage, we are elevated, so the eyeline of the audience is looking up at us and hence the brutal calf exposure no one needs to see.  Sit up straight and tall, keep your knees together and remove all distractions from your message. Don’t forget to use gestures which include the audience in your answers. 

Remove the risk and danger from being a panellist and instead turn the opportunity into a triumph of personal and professional brand building.

The education system in Japan from the early stages, right the way through varsity to most corporate training, is based on the lecture model.  The instructor provides the information, and the participants write it all down.  It is a very one directional, passive approach.  When we are presenting, what do we do when we are using the “inform” model?  Where are we supposed to draw the line between just passing on valuable information to the audience and trying to engage the audience?  Are these two aims mutually exclusive?  Isn’t the reason we are invited to speak is because we have valuable things to impart to the audience?  Isn’t the reason the audience has turned up is to gain insights, perspectives and information they don’t already possess? 

I am sure we all agree that the speaker has to provide value to the listeners otherwise what is the point of them paying the dough and investing their time to attend?  The question becomes how to provide the required value?  Can the speaker have excellent experience, clear insights, rich data and be engaging at the same time?  The answer is yes and let me use a local example to make the point. Jesper Koll is a well-known economist here in Tokyo and he does a lot of public speaking.  I am a fan and have attended maybe twenty of his presentations over the years. To my mind, they always hit the right combination of excellent experience, clear insights, rich data and are kept engaging. 

What is Jesper doing which is working so well?  He is always high energy, humorous, provides high quality statistics and data and most importantly, he has an intent to engage everyone in the crowd.  Speaker intention is a key asset to be successful. He doesn’t see his role is to just dump a lot of data on his audience and imagine his work is done. He is going for much more than that. He wants to get a strong reaction from his audience and he is always successful in that aim.

Storytelling is an asset for Jesper.  Rather than just giving everyone a download of facts, he wraps them up in stories. This makes the information much easier to absorb, digest and recall. Think about what stories you have to thread your data through.  The story sticks and therefore so does the data.  Here is a simple example.  Say the data showed that the number of young people in Japan aged 15-34 has halved in the last twenty years and is going to halve again in the next thirty-five years. 

We could just state the facts or we could wrap it up in a story like this: “It was a snowy day in Tokyo and I was visiting my client in Otemachi. It was really miserable outside, so I was glad to get out of the cold and into the warmth of his office on the 23^rd floor.  We were sitting in their expensive, well-appointed leather and walnut Boardroom with his HR team and we were discussing the problems of recruiting and retaining staff.  I didn’t know these numbers, but on the huge monitor on the wall, his head of HR Ms. Inoue put up the demographic projections for Japan.  In the last twenty years we have halved the number of people age 15-34.  What was highlighted to me was that the projections showed we would lose another half again over the next 35years. I was silently wondering where we would find the staff we need to expand the business in the future”.  By using storytelling we have taken the audience to a place in their mind’s eye, where they can see a snowy Otemachi, a gorgeous Boardroom, and a huge monitor showing the statistics.  Threading the numbers into the story makes it more likely we will retain the data well after the talk and as speakers that is what we want isn’t it, to be remembered as someone providing value.

Jesper also uses rhetorical questions very well.  He will come and stand right in front of someone in the audience, towering over them and lay down the question.  The victim is usually paralysed by fear at this point because (a) they think they have to provide an answer in public and (b) they don’t know the answer.  Just in the nick of time Jesper wades in to the rescue with the answer. At this point, the victim realises that this was a rhetorical question after all and not something they were obliged to answer.  Floods of relief abound at this point.

The upshot is that he keeps his audience on their toes and engaged with the proceedings.  Trust me, you don’t want to be daydreaming when he is speaking, so he keeps everyone paying close attention to what he says.  He is using his eye contact constantly with individuals in the crowd.  This personalises the talk, rather than leaving it as the spray the eye contact everywhere, at the same time, alternative.  That method engages precisely no one.  Watch Japanese politicians. You will see they are masters of fakery, looking like they are making eye contact with the crowd, swivelling their heads to and fro, without managing to make any engagement with anyone.

Why is the lecture style of speech here so popular?  As I mentioned this is the model most people have been exposed to since birth, so this has become the default standard. Anything else looks like heresy in a culture where conforming is the best path to safety.  You get along in Japan by going along and so no rocking the boat.  Does anyone audit the results of these lectures masquerading as speeches?  No, so the crime against humanity continues from one generation to the next.

The reason this style of speech has reached its end use date is because of technology.  The mobile phone instantly connects everyone to the lure of the internet. With advances in AI you can access data so quickly, we don’t need to be told stuff anymore. Just data by itself isn’t enough.  We need insights, fresh perspectives, guides on how to apply the data and access to the experiences of others. We want to learn what we should do in a similar situation.  

In the past, the moment the speaker looked boring, that is to say, started lecturing, the Japanese audience’s traditional remedy was to fall asleep.  I have seen plenty of that in my 39 years here. However today, the listeners are now wide awake and on their phone accessing the internet.  The competition for mind space is relentless and getting harder, as concentration spans shrink, and distractions abound. 

The speaker has to thread the needle between imparting valuable data and information and keeping the audience engaged and with them, so that the listeners can receive the key messages the speaker is trying to convey. As mentioned, we need to be energised and highly proactive to secure their engagement. Fresh data, insights, rhetorical questions, eye contact, voice modulation and storytelling are excellent tools for achieving that outcome.

At the start, I asked the questions, “When we are presenting, what do we do when we are using the “inform” model?  Where are we supposed to draw the line between just passing on valuable information to the audience and trying to engage the audience?  Are these two aims mutually exclusive?”.  The clear answer is they are not in opposition to each other.  Take Jesper’s example to heart and there will be no reason why we can’t all have both. 

There is a famous speech construct which we have all heard; “Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you just told them”.  Basically, this says open the talk by flagging what your central thesis is, expound on that thesis and then, in the summary, revisit the key points.  There is nothing wrong with that approach, except that it is a bit basic and boring.  Apart from that, it is fine!  Given the bombardment we all face every day from the media, social media and advertising, we have to rise above the deluge and stand out or be washed away with the mass effluent.

How do we do that?  Here is a simple formula we can use when constructing our talk.  We can create our talk and involve some central characters.  There will be the villain. It could be a person or a system or an issue or anything which is a danger to our getting done what needs to be accomplished.  Also we need to add a bur under the saddle of the audience.  We need to outline how bad things will become if we don’t take the action we are suggesting and take that action right now.  Make the audience the hero of this talk.  For ourselves, we play the role of the wise sage, the guide suggesting what would be the best approach to overcome this issue. We outline the call to action and we clarify the plan. Finally, we need to make clear the benefits of the outcome we are suggesting.

A good place to start is with the villain.  We need to open the talk in a way which will break through all the competing messages inside the mind of our listeners.  Today, they have a lot going on. They are worried about things they cannot control which happened in the past.  They are anxious about the things they need to be doing right now. Additionally, they are projecting forward to drag in concerns which will appear in the future.  In the midst of this maelstrom, we innocently turn up to give our little talk.

The opening is designed to smash through all the noise and grab the audience by the throat.  We need to force them to put their phone down, stop thinking about something else, and give us their full attention.  Bad news sells.  We know that because look at what we are served up by the media all of the time.  “If it bleeds, it leads” is a classic headline filtering exercise by newspaper editors.  So let’s start strong with a big downside.  For example, “We in business are all doomed, because we won’t be able to recruit the staff we need due to the shortage of workers here in Japan”.  Hopefully, that start will set off a hundred “thuds”, as mobile phones hit tables in the room and all eyes are fixed on you. 

Having grabbed their attention, we now go into detail on how bad it is and will become.  We must make a strong case that if we don’t take action now, then Armageddon is just around the corner.  For most people, doing nothing is thought to be a zero cost option, but we destroy that notion.  The implications of no action have to be laid out in full. At this point, we need data, statistics, evidence, proof to make our point.  Opinions are interesting, but so what?  We want to know the facts to make up our own mind and this is when we give them to the listeners.

We make the audience the hero and we appeal to their better selves to make the right decision.  Don’t leave this to chance. We try to control their reaction to what we are saying by setting it up during the talk. Our explanation will include statements like, “I am sure now that you have heard the numbers you can see that….” and “Based on the data, I am sure we will all agree that….” and “I hate to be a bearer of bad news, but I am sure we would all prefer to be forearmed and forewarned for a difficult future. So you can see why I am giving this talk now and I invite you to take action today.”

We as their wise guide come with the solution, outline what action they need to take in detail and save them all the work needed to fix the issue.  Our plan is outlined comprehensively, and we include some “what if” scenarios.  Do this because we must anticipate what the pushback will be from the audience before we give the talk. Don’t allow any doubts or concerns about what we are saying to fester while we are giving the talk.  We go after them during the talk. Try to completely crush these objections and do that inside your talk before you get to the Q&A.

The success they will have from taking our advice has to be concrete, simple and presented in a way which will make it doable for the audience to adopt.  We try to have them visualise the changes they need to make inside their firm to adapt what we are outlining to make it their reality.  Get them to see the benefits in their mind’s eye through using word pictures. 

When we parade these central characters in the story and arrange the talk using them, we create a presentation which will grip everyone’s attention.  We can do this despite all the temptations of the internet, which, by the way, is within easy grasp and only a few clicks away for everyone.  Old formulas for talks are fading fast as audience attention spans shrink, patience disappears, and time is in shorter supply.  As presenters, we must lift our game and go harder to breakthrough all the barriers to our messages.  If we do this, then we will stand out from the crowd and our personal and professional brands will be not only protected, but enhanced.

“I want to be perfect when I speak”. No, you don’t! Let me tell you a tale of two CEO presenters with different approaches to addressing their audiences.  One CEO used recent movies as his navigation for his speech.  Actually, I had watched none of them, but he added enough context for me to get the point he was making about his own journey as a CEO, in a tough industry, in tough times.  Actually, we all love a talk about hard times and woe, followed by ultimate success against the odds.  This type of speech gives us a mix of empathy for the presenter and hope for ourselves.  By the way, which version of a talk would you be more interested in – “How I made $20 million” or “How I lost $20 million”?  Most of us would probably be more interested in the latter, because our risk averse natures are always looking for clues as to what we should avoid doing.  The other CEO speaker was just perfect.  The speech flowed beautifully, it was carefully crafted and manicured. The navigation was exact and it had no delivery blemishes.  It simply failed.

Part of the difference was in the storytelling aspect of the two talks. The first CEO got us hooked on his struggles, his despair, his tale of redemption.  He opened up the kimono to share his vulnerability, his imposter syndrome, his raw fears.  It was painful and real.  We had a context to gauge his ultimate success, because he took us to the bottom, to the depths. He helped us visualise, through his word pictures, his challenging ascent back into the fiscal black.  The other speaker told a tale of solid progress, a stable journey onward and upward.  It was hard to hear, because it sounded too foreign, too far removed from the reality of the last couple of years of struggle. 

The delivery styles were also diametrically opposed.  The first CEO stumbled over his words at times, had a foreign accent which frankly challenged my ears to comprehend certain terms.  He used the movies selected as navigation and spoke to the point each one represented and stitched his own story into the narrative to make his points come alive.  His hands were empty for gestures. He was relaxed and concentrated on engaging his audience by looking at us throughout the talk.  He used the stage area to cover the room to the left and right, but he wasn’t manic and aimlessly wandering around free range without purpose, like so many crazed speakers you see.

The second CEO sent a chill through my spine when I noticed he was bringing his iPad with him to the podium. Uh oh!  Sure enough, he read that perfectly constructed speech to us all.  He was a much more fluent speaker of English, had no pronunciation flaws and the construction of the talk and the navigation was excellent.  He had clearly labored hard over the text to whip it into shape and make it as perfect as possible.  That was the problem.  It was perfect, but it lacked authenticity. He didn’t feel engaging as a speaker.  It was a canned speech and by choosing to read it to us; he disconnected himself from his audience.  He looked down at the iPad to give that talk and that meant he wasn’t 100% concentrated on his audience, unlike the first CEO.

 We are not perfect when we speak, mispronouncing words and stumbling over cartain phrases.  We have flaws and that is why we are appealing to our listeners.  They know themselves that they are like that too. We forgive the speaker for our common flaws.  There is a limit, though. Anyone who has had the misfortune to hear a speaker um and ah their way throughout the entire talk, says to themselves, “end this torture now please”.  That is at the other extreme of flaws which surpasses the audience's ability to bear the unbearable.  By the way, if that is you, constantly uming and ahing, then please do the rest of us a favour and stop speaking in public, until you can string two words together without destroying our souls. 

 Counterintuitively, when the delivery is too perfect, we struggle to feel any great commonality with the speaker.  They are a different animal to the rest of us. Reading the talk guarantees perfection, but it comes at a severe cost.  It can easily become a lifeless, moribund and boring exercise. 

My guess is that this second CEO speaker spent the entire preparation time working on the crafting of the text.  Effort was spent on shuffling words around and working hard on the flow of the document.  There seemed no idea in play of “how can I deliver this talk and really engage the audience when I read it?”.  Our word emphasis, phrasing, pauses, eye contact and gestures can still be employed when reading the text to bring it alive as much as possible.  We can depart from the text to tell a side story or make a key point.  Let’s engage in eye contact with the crowd, so that it feels like we are talking directly to them.  We have all the tools at our disposal and we need to be drawing on them.

My advice though is to avoid perfection and go for authenticity. Concentrate on your audience.  They will forgive your few flaws and will gravitate to you when you speak.  Think about it. It is exceedingly rare that someone reading a talk can hold the audience in the palm of their hand.  Have you ever witnessed that phenomenon in actuality? Our first CEO achieved that breakthrough, because he made us the centerpiece of his talk, not his carefully crafted text, like the second CEO did.  You don’t need perfection – go for being truly authentic.  If you are going to read it to me, word for word, then send it by email – that would be better.