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.