I am terrible.  I procrastinate about starting the assembly of my presentation.  Invariably, by holding off starting, I create time tension, which forces me to elevate the priority of the presentation and lift its urgency above all the other competing demands on my time.  I should start earlier and take some of that tension out of my life.  So, everyone do what I say, don’t do what I do!  Start early.

The first point of departure must be working on the clarity needed around the key message.  What is the point we want to get across?  There are always a multitude of these and it is quite challenging sometimes to pick out the one we want to work on.  Part of my problem is perfectionism immobilising me.  So let’s all suspend perfectionism and just be happy to get started, knowing we can finesse what we are doing later.

Once we have settled on the key message, we need to make sure that anyone would care about that message.  It might be intoxicating for us, but it may not motivate anyone else to get excited.  A reality check is in order before we move forward.  Will there be enough traction with the audience we are going to be presenting to?  We should have a fairly clear idea about who will be interested in our topic and what some of their expectations will be.

After the reality check, we start to construct the talk.  Counterintuitively, we start with the end.  We settle on the actual words we need for our conclusion, because this is a succinct summary of what we will talk about.  Getting that down to a few sentences is no easy feat.  It is simple to waffle on, but it requires skill to be brief and totally on point.

Next, we plan out the chapters of the talk to deliver the goods to prove what we are saying in our conclusion is true.  In a forty-minute speech, we can usually get through five or six chapters.  Here is a critical piece of the puzzle.  We need to rehearse the talk and carefully watch the time.  It is very difficult to predict accurately the required time until you run through the talk. We may find we are short on the content or too long and we need to make adjustments.  We certainly don’t want to discover that on stage in front of an audience.  We all feel cheated when the presenter start rushing at the end and the slides go up and come down in seconds. You simply can’t follow what they are showing to the audience and that leaves a very negative impression at the end of the talk.

Now we plan our start.  This is the first impression of our talk.  Well, that is not quite true.  The audience will be making critical judgements as to how we command the stage and how we get underway.  Juggling slides on the deck is a bad look at the start. That should definitely be left to someone else, so we can get straight into our opening.  Don’t thank the organisers at this point, we can do that in a moment.  We don’t want to waste the opening with a bunch of generic bumf.  We need to grab hold of our audience at this point and then never let go of them.

The audience may be seated in front of us, but they are a thousand miles away with their collective consciousness floating above the clouds. They are focused on everything else but us and we have to induct them into our orbit and command their complete attention.  So, we need to plan this first sentence extremely well, because it will set the tone for the rest of the event.  Remember that fear of loss is greater than greed for gain, so we hit them with how they can avoid losses.

We might say something along these lines, “it is shocking how much the change in the market is going to cost us all and we are talking about serious money here”.  That start fits just about any talk subject and is a bit of a Swiss Army Knife of starters.  The market is always changing and invariably some will gain and others will lose. Our job is to point the audience in the direction of how to avoid losing money.

The cadence of the talk is we need to tell a story every five minutes to keep our audience with us.  Storytelling is like superglue and will bind the listeners to us until the end of our presentation.  That means we need at least five or six good stories which make the point we are selling.  Including people they know or know of, is always good because that technique is a great equaliser and connector with the audience.

We need to prepare two closes – one for our formal end to the talk and another for the final close after the Q&A has ended.  We need to brief the organisers that after the Q&A we will wrap it up and then they can bring the proceedings to a formal end.  If we don’t do that, they will just end the talk before we have a chance to drive in our key message for the last time.

We will know if the talk has succeeded by the faces we see in the audience.  If they are paying attention right through, that is a good sign.  If they are nodding in agreement, that is an even better sign and if they are engaged through their questions, then there is real interest. 

A sea of bored faces is not what we want to be looking out at.  If that happens, we really need to raise our energy and start getting the listeners physically involved.  We can do this by getting them to raise their hands in answer to a question from us.  We can’t overdo this or it quickly becomes manipulative and, it is obvious to everyone what we are doing.  But we need to raise our energy and their energy to keep them with us.

So don’t be like me and instead start the prep early!

I was in a recent debate with the Dale Carnegie organisation about approving the publication of my new book “Japan Leadership Mastery”.  There were concerns about copyright, because I was drawing on the Dale Carnegie curriculum for the book.  A book is a powerful content marketing tool, so excluding the Dale Carnegie oeuvre defeats the purpose.  One argument I made to them was I could rewrite the book and strip their content out and replace it with generic stuff summoned up from AI.  This is the problem we all face. AI makes originality very difficult to sustain when it is so easy to coagulate all that is currently out there.

I create these podcast episodes every Saturday morning and when you have composed over three hundred articles on presentations, it gets harder and harder to come up with something original. I try to find angles I haven’t explored before and to write them in a way which an AI prompt could not replicate.

When we are creating our public presentations, we face the same problem.  Any fool armed with AI can come up with a presentation which will assemble the best of what has been published already or at least what the machine could find from public sources.  How do we make sure that what we are presenting is not getting pushed down into the sludge to battle with what AI can churn out in under a minute?  How can we thrash our AI powered competitors within an inch of their lives?

At this point in time, we are lucky that most of the AI production for presentations is generic and sounds generic.  Originality for me means the choices of words like “thrash”, “oeuvre”, “coagulate”, “sludge”, and “churn”.  These are unlikely candidates to emerge from an AI prompt to create a presentation on any subject.  I have always tried to write like this anyway, to make myself stand out from the crowd.  Today that AI assisted crowd is surging. In fact, it is accessing the entire global production of text on every topic.

Don’t panic yet. Our experiences are sacrosanct turf, which protects us from AI mindlessness.  No AI prompt can capture what has happened to us and our recollection of it.  In our storytelling, we access those incidents and we use them in concert with our take on the lessons from what happened.  This is a guaranteed way to remain one step ahead of AI generated content.  Of course, AI can magically  bring forth a slew of stories of other people’s experiences, but as a presenter relating to an audience what happened to us is unbeatable for making that human connection.

I resisted sharing a lot of personal insights and experiences for a long time.  I am a very private person, an introvert in fact, who has to operate as an extrovert. It is always tough.  People who know me would never know that because I push myself in public to be outgoing.  When I finally got over myself and started including more things about me and my family in my talks, I noticed that I connected more powerfully with the audience.  AI won’t know that level of detail and so can never match us in a live situation.

The other arena in which to slay the AI dragon is when we are on stage, standing there in front of a live audience.  Our rival presenter may have been fed a steady diet of homogenised content from AI in prepping their talk, but can they rock the audience like we can? 

This is where knowledge and execution diverge.  It is the same with technical presenters.  They have all the data, statistics, details, etc., but they speak in a monotone and murder their listeners.  They are dull dogs, with way too much micro data plastered all over their one slide, which in fact should have been spread over six slides.  They are unable to create some buzz with the crowd. They have no clue how to penetrate that invisible barrier between speaker and those being spoken to.

They don’t know how to bring gesture, voice tone, body language and eye contact together in an unstoppable vortex to completely capture the room and drive in their message. No amount of AI prep will help them.  This is where the AI powered speaker runs out of gas.  They can put up the bare bones of the AI generated presentation, but they don’t have the ability to flesh it out and make it a triumph.

When you know what you are doing, you can dip into elements of AI for help, but for presentations, you have to be able to stand up and cut it. This is the Age of Distraction and Era of Fake News and we only have one shot. These days, with the micro patience of audiences we face, you don’t get any margin.  If you sound boring, they will immediately lunge for their mobile and depart from you and your message.  They will escape straight to the internet, to much more intriguing worlds like their email, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.

AI is only a problem if you are a crap presenter.  For the rest of us, let’s give AI powered presenters a sound public thrashing and blow them out of the water.

Almost 100% of presentations that I see in Japan are one directional.  The audience sits there passively and the speaker presents to them.  There is no interaction with the audience.  I was watching an interview with Clint Eastwood in his approach as a movie director.  He was talking about his famous Western “The Unforgiven” and talking about how he shot some key scenes, such that the faces of the actors were in the shadows and not fully revealed.  I can’t remember exactly how he expressed it, but he said you don’t have to show the whole face with full lighting, because the audience is intelligent. They can fill in the gaps.  I thought that was a good metaphor for presenting.

As the presenter we don’t have to show everything in full lighting from our side.  We can create some gaps and allow the audience to fill in the blanks themselves from their imaginations and their viewpoint.  We do this to some extent already when we use rhetorical questions.  These are questions which we pose to the audience but we are not actually asking them for an answer – we provide that after a suitable hanging pause. 

What about if we actually make it a real question and source the answer from the audience?  Now we cannot be doing this every five minutes, as that will be massive overkill, but we can drop some questions into our talk. We might plan to use these questions to overcome flagging energy and declining interest from the audience.  This is why you never want to be lowering the lights when you are presenting.  You want to be able to study the faces of the people arrayed in front of you for any signs of distraction, boredom, or tiredness.

When I did my TED talk, the audience was in complete darkness because all the lights were blazoning away hitting me up on stage and making it impossible to read any reactions.  It was very unnerving, especially when you are used to being able to study the audience reactions to what you are saying.

Now when we ask a question to the audience here they are confused.  Firstly, they are not trained for this and they are not sure if this is a rhetorical question, which we will answer or whether they actually have to answer. 

The next line of confusion is who amongst the audience should answer this question.  In Japan, no one gets any prizes in life for going first, so it almost guarantees that everyone will be holding themselves back. 

The third line of confusion is fear.  They worry if they get the answer wrong, they will look like a fool in front of everyone.  They also fear that someone else will come up with a much more intelligent answer than theirs and they will look stupid.

So casting a question before an audience here is bound to get no immediate answer.  We have to help them by setting it up.  Just blasting forth with a question is a bit shocking, as this is not how things are normally done.  We need to say something like, “In a moment, I am going to pose a question, because I am very interested to get your experiences and ideas on the issue”.  Now we have fired off a warning shot, so that when the question is unloaded, no one is surprised.

We help them even further by using our eye contact and gestures to indicate to an individual or a group of individuals that we want to hear their answer.  By holding out our hand gesture palm up, it is very unthreatening.  If we used a pointed finger instead, that is very aggressive and will drive a shudder of fear into an audience with its power.

We simultaneously use our eye contact and look at a member of the audience we are indicating to, thus requiring an answer.  It is always good to pick those who were seated on the same table as you, if it were a luncheon or breakfast event, or someone you were chatting with at the start, as you will have established some rapport.  Depending on the relationship, we can call out their name as we ask the question, “So Suzuki san what has been your experience with….”. 

We should immediately thank them for contributing and start applauding and inviting the rest of the audience to join us in recognising them.  We might even say, “let’s thank Suzuki san for sharing her experience and let’s also recognize her professionalism to volunteer her answer”.  This opens up the floor now to call on other people.  We don’t do too many of these at the same time.

It can become a distraction. It can also suck up a lot of time.  Not everyone is able to be succinct and get to the point.  You may also inadvertently discover some people who have a lot of pent up need to talk and they will hijack your presentation.  Now you are on the back foot trying to regain control of proceedings, and that is not a good look for the presenter.

At the very end wrap up of your talk you can again recognise those who contributed their ideas and get everyone to applaud and thank them.  They leave feeling a mile high and the rest of the audience feels you did the right thing by the volunteers.  It ties a nice bow on the presentation and ends it elegantly.

TikTok, Reels, Shorts, etc., are video snippets training everyone to micro absorb information and stimuli.  If it doesn’t grab our attention in three seconds, we are off that screen and scrolling forward to find something more interesting.  The modern instrument of torture for the presenter is the mobile phone. It whips our audience away from our message and us, to the siren calls of the internet.  Presenters must understand that how they start the presentation is that same three second space which will determine whether the audience pays any further attention to us or starts reaching for their phone.

When we are called up to start speaking, the uber judgmental audience assesses us for reasons to flee.  The worst mistake we can make is to dive straight into the laptop screen and get bogged down in the logistics of getting our slides up on screen.  Either have your slides up ready to go or get the event hosts to remove their holding slide and replace it with your slide deck and your first slide.  Do not become the mechanic and have your head down under the hood.  Your body language is screaming “I am ignoring my audience”, while you tap away on the keyboard, looking totally absorbed by the screen.   

Instead, walk to the center of the stage facing your audience, command the room and add in a dramatic pause of ten seconds before you start speaking. You need guts to pull this off, because ten seconds of silence is long. Silence creates a vacuum, which confuses audiences used to feasting on constant stimulation.  It creates a postive tension in the room which stops people chit chatting and being absorbed with each other. 

It forces everyone’s attention to the stage and they mentally begin asking “what is going on?”.  This is good, because they are focused on us now and we can use our body language to project, “I am so confident, I can hold all of you in silence, before I choose to start”.  This confidence is convincing and sets the right platform for us to launch forth from.

There are physical and mental barriers separating the speaker from the audience.  We must shatter that barrier. We do that with our stage positioning, body language, eye contact, gestures and how we direct our voice.  Depending on the venue, the stage could be at a distance far from the audience or we could be able to walk inside the audience area. 

If we are far away, we need to work on projecting our ki – our intrinsic energy - to reach the farthest members of the crowd.  We should be pushing our ki all the way to the back wall and sending our energy to the audience members in the cheap seats at the rear. We can also move to the apron of the stage and stand as close as possible to the audience, towering over them to bring more physical presence to our talk.  People talk about having “Executive Presence” and this technique is that “Presence” on steroids. We can choose to move to the wings of the stage and standing on the apron, work on those members seated to the sides as well, to bring them into our web.

When we are far away from the audience, we need to make the most of our gestures to bring energy to the point we are making.  You cannot get this effect if you have your hands behind your back, in your pockets, arms folded across your chest or hands coyly protecting your groin from the audience. Open body language must communicate, “I am not afraid of you. I welcome you close to me to receive my message of hope. Come to me, come to me”. 

The gestures add to this openness by using inclusiveness through open hands and the wide spreading of the arms.  Many speakers in our training are afraid to use big gestures, yet once they use them and review them on video, they realise it doesn’t look too much as they feared. In fact, they can see it makes for much better communication of the points of their message.

We add to the power of the gestures by locking our eyes with each member of the audience, one by one, to drive in the message. The objective is the eye contact is so intense that they feel we are speaking exclusively to them and there are only the two of us in the whole room.  An important point is to lock on to just one eye of the person you are looking at and not split the power of your gaze.

By moving from one audience member to the next every six seconds, we use the power of our eye contact to fill the entire space in the venue.  In one minute, we can make direct, intense eye contact with ten people and in ten minutes we have covered off one hundred audience members. If the talk is forty minutes long, we get to repeat this engagement intensity four times for each individual. We will fill the entire room with our presence when we do this.

If we are at floor level amongst the crowd, we can use our physical proximity to connect with the people seated, by standing over them at close range, to drive home a key point.  We can’t stay there though, because the pressure is too strong.  We must retreat to a more neutral location to reduce the intensity. We don’t just do this once - we go back in again and again and take a series of bites like a shark in a feeding frenzy.  It is like a blast of unassailable energy, which we choose to release whenever we want to make a strong point and drive home our message.

Body language, in combination with our full delivery onslaught, makes for a differentiated, powerful, memorable brand building presentation and that is what we want, isn’t it?