Most business speeches are very definitive. We did this, and it worked for us and you could do the same and also get similar results. Usually, we are asked to speak because we have had good results and have rich experience in our industry. The hosts believe that others will be interested in hearing what we did, so that they can take lessons from it and they will be able to pull a crowd. The problem is today we are in the Age Of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism.
If what we are offering doesn’t sound valuable or sounds dubious, then the audience loses interest immediately and lunge for their phones to hit the internet and escape from us. Once upon a time, listeners would sit there politely and absorb what we were saying and wait to reach judgement. Now we have to win them over from the very start.
They are also more sceptical than in times past and are constantly on the prowl for fake news. No wonder though, given the barrage of scams and fake information hammering us every day. I constantly get fake emails trying to get me to click on something that will allow them to take over my computer and clean out my bank account. The fakes have become more and more sophisticated and sometimes I have trouble telling if they are real or not. I have had to ring my bank or my credit card company to check that what I have received is legit or not. They are now that realistic. Little surprise people are on guard.
This combination of short attention spans and cynicism about what we are telling them makes it very much harder to advance our arguments when we are speaking. One approach is to use a couple of simple tools. One is the rule of three and the other is recency.
Basically, audiences cannot take in more than three points and remember them, so to prove our arguement, we should assemble the strongest three points we can come up with. The way to use these three points, though, is not to just list them and explain what they mean. This Age of Cynicism demands that we offer more balance. We should list the pros and cons associated with each point we are making. So as we go through them, we offer the pluses and minuses for each point.
I remember when I was an undergraduate student doing Modern Asian Studies at Griffith University in Brisbane, we had a guest lecturer come in to talk about the causes of the Battle Of Sekigahara. Tokugawa Ieyasu won that battle and set up a dynasty which lasted for hundreds of years and it was a major turning point in Japanese history.
He started by going through a long list of the usual explanations for the events leading to the battle, and it was all very convincing. I was sitting there in the front row busily making notes. He then proceeded to pull down each of these standard arguments and replace them with his own interpretation of events. It was a powerful intellectual example of providing balance and therefore becoming much more convincing than if he had just rattled off what he thought explained the situation.
We should do the same with the points we are making in our talk and provide balance. This invites the audience to observe that we are not being dogmatic and that we are considered and looking for fairness in our argument. It is very disarming. We don’t present a static target to be attacked because we are demonstrating our intellectual flexibility.
Additionally, the recency phenomena is a key contributor to being believed. We all tend to remember best what we heard last. So, of the three points, the strongest recommendation should come last. We do the same thing with the pros and cons for each point. Finally, we offer the last point as our strongest recommendation for the audience. They heard this last, so it has the impact of being the most memorable argument and therefore more likely to be accepted.
Is running it last cheating? No, we are just adapting our order to best suit human psychology to have the best shot at convincing the listeners of our argument. We have shown balance by going through the pluses and minuses and we just order the points in a way which is the most convincing and effective.
So next time you give a talk, consider how you can introduce more balance in the argument you are making. If you do, the chances are much higher that you will be believed and well regarded as an expert in your field. This will advance your professional and personal brands.
I am not an American, so I cannot vote. I always tread the line of neutrality when discussing what is happening in America, turning myself into the Switzerland of speech giving advice. Previously, I have written about the presenting skills of both Biden and Trump. Now I move on to the new Democratic candidate for the US Presidency.
Republican politicians and Fox pundits criticise Kamala Harris for only being coherent and capable when she is reading her lines off a teleprompter. I have no idea if that is true or not, because I don’t see enough of her unscripted talks. Donald Trump, apparently, has trouble reading teleprompters and so he prefers to speak extemporaneously. He is often criticised for rambling and going off message.
Teleprompters are certainly part of the machinery for politicians and sometimes for captains of industry. I was coaching a German executive who headed up a large Japanese manufacturer here. He had an international keynote due to be delivered in English. The major Japanese PR company had brought in a single teleprompter for him and set it up to his left. Actually, I didn’t work well because the teleprompter was like a magnet and his ability to engage his audience was compromised.
Audience members on his left got all the love. Those on the right and in the centre got almost nothing from him. I suggested he drop the teleprompter or get one for the other side as well. In the end, he went with just his notes as prompts. This was so much better. He also wasn’t reading his speech word for word, which was a major blessing.
I read a funny story the other day about Barrack Obama when he was President giving a speech based on a written text. You can imagine how much vetting goes into a Presidential speech before it is delivered and how carefully the wordsmithing is considered. Midway through the talk, he turned the page over and he suddenly realised one of his staff had managed to miss placing the next page there for him. He had to wing it on the spot, which he did. So even written speeches can provide unnecessary excitement and potential heart attacks for the speaker. Remember folks, only we know what we are going to say, so we can wing it if we have to. The lesson for all of us though is to always check the pages are all there before we give the talk.
A couple of things I think we can learn from Kamala Harris are timing, creating anticipation and relaxation. I notice she has very good timing with her delivery when giving campaign speeches. Even if you are using a teleprompter, getting the right cadence is not easy. She makes good employ of pauses when she is speaking. This is smart because for most of us we get nervous giving a big speech and consequently, we can tend to speed up.
This happened to me. I was giving my very first public speech. It was in Tokyo and in Japanese to some unlucky Sundai Yobiko prep school students. I was terrified that my poor Japanese grammar would be totally unintelligible and a mess, so I wrote the whole thing out. I did this romaji which uses the English alphabet to reproduce the Japanese sounds for words. My Japanese tutor Ms. Higashi helped me to put the speech together, so I was ready for the big day, for my first public speaking debut. I looked down at my page the whole time, read every word and never engaged my audience in the slightest. It was a total disaster, which put me off public speaking for many, many years.
Originally, I was scheduled to give a twenty-five-minute talk. My hands were sweating, I felt red hot, my mouth was as dry as the Sahara desert, my pulse rate was pounding and so elevated I finished the whole thing in eight minutes. The point is that when we get nervous, we can really speed up. Kamala Harris doesn’t do that because she injects a lot of pauses to control the cadence of her talks.
These pauses allow the audience to diligently digest what has just been said and for each point to be clearly heard. Even though we may find ourselves speeding up, the judicial placement of some pauses enables us to control the pace, regroup and slow down. In her case, she often gets applause throughout her talk. Pauses allow her to avoid speaking over the applause. Now, this is unlikely to be a problem for any of us in business when giving speeches, but pauses are still a valuable tool for cadence and clarity.
She is also quite skilled at slowing down her remarks to draw out the anticipation of what she is about to say. The audience correctly guesses where she is going with her remarks and they applaud before she even gets there. We may not get any applause midway through our business talk, but we can use the same idea of building anticipation by slowing down. Let’s make sure we get the audience to mentally meet us where we are going with our points.
She is also very relaxed and looks like she is enjoying herself. I am struggling to think of too many CEOs here in Japan who I have seen in action looking relaxed and like they are enjoying the occasion. I see Japanese Presidents, in particular, utilising the corporate video so that they can reduce the amount of torture they have to endure, by cutting down the time they have to speak.
If we are feeling the pressure and are nervous, it is very hard to look relaxed and like you are enjoying yourself. As we get more experienced and add more notches on our speaking belt, the process improves. We can seem more relaxed and like we are enjoying the opportunity to proclaim our message. Until that happens, it is a good idea to fake it until we make it. A nervous presenter makes the audience uncomfortable. We all want to see people presenting who are bursting with skill and confidence.
Looking cool, calm and collected makes it much easier for our audience to accept what we are selling. Confidence convinces and bolsters the words we are saying. Try speaking with the face muscles relaxed, the body language congruent with the words being used and pay careful attention to gestures. Nervous people tend to get stuck in the same gesture and hold it for way too long. After fifteen seconds, that gesture loses all of its power and just becomes annoying to an audience.
So copy Kamala and be relaxed when you speak. Introduce well timed pauses and use anticipation. Enjoy the opportunity to deliver your key messages to your business audience and burnish your professional and personal brands.
As an Aussie, I can’t vote in the American elections, so I am a casual observer of what is going on. I was watching a very recent interview with Donald Trump and he briefly made mention about his public speaking approach. That got my attention, because I teach this stuff. Of late, I have been using Joe Biden as an hanmen kyoshi or teacher by negative example on public speaking, so let me now bring in Trump too.
You could make the argument that neither of them are relevant to those of us in business, but I think there are lessons to be learnt. Admittedly, as business speakers, we won’t have an audience of cult like followers, who hang on our every word. I would absolutely love that, but after giving 560 business speeches so far, that hasn’t materialised as yet.
When you see Trump rallies with the background of patriotic American flags, various message placards and sea of MAGA red hats, you know he has assembled the true believers and I doubt they are much aware of the intricacies of his public speaking techniques. According to the studies I have seen, he is most popular with non-college-educated males. That automatically impacts the content and his delivery mechanisms.
In business, here in Japan, we will be speaking to the very well-educated, most sophisticated international businesspeople, Japanese and foreigners. This requires we be operating at a very high level of public speaking, because the crowd isn’t going to automatically be with us and, in fact, may think we are just spreading fake news. What we say and how we say it becomes very important in these circumstances.
In the interview, Trump said he looks for a reaction in the crowd to what he says. If he reads from a script or a teleprompter or from his notes, he found that he couldn’t get the same reaction as when he speaks extemporaneously. That is why he is so keen to wander off topic and ramble along, looking for embers to convert into flames amongst the faithful. In his Convention acceptance speech, he couldn’t keep to the main points and started to wander off, looking for inflammatory content to rev up the crowd.
I agree with Trump that this direct engagement is the best approach to working an audience and owning the room. Now, ironically, as far as I know, he doesn’t usually employ a slide deck at his political rallies. Having said that, the slide deck is the only reason he is alive today. That assassin’s bullet should have penetrated his skull and killed him, but at the most critical moment, he moved his head to the side to look at a graph up on a big screen to his right. That screen saved his life without a doubt.
In business talks, we can usually use a slide deck or we may choose to not do so. The slide deck advantage is it creates the navigation path for us and we don’t have to remember the order of what comes next. If we don’t want to use the slide deck, we can just have a simple list of topics to talk to in front of us to keep us on track. Trump’s point about looking down and not engaging our audience is correct. A quick glance at the next topic, however, is certainly not going to be a crowd disperser.
What he has found is that the eye contact with the crowd and his observation of their energy has been central to keeping the crowd with him. If we are looking at our page notes or at a laptop screen or a tablet, we are not looking at the people in front of us and that is a big error. As business speakers, we need to be equally hard working to engage our audience. This means looking at their faces and choosing our words carefully.
When we see their energy or concentration flagging, we know we have to step it up and change the pace. We may do that by hitting certain keywords much harder or even much softer. It sounds counterintuitive, but dropping down to a conspiratorial whisper is also very effective. It forces your audience to lean in to what you are saying. It is also a pattern interrupt.
When there is a change in the proceedings, that pattern break is what jars with the crowd and forces them back to listening to us. If we hammer the audience with a full power download from start to finish, we exhaust them and they tune out. The highs and lows are what we need and that variety is what maintains the crowds’ focus on what we are saying.
Whether we like Biden, or now Harris, or Trump, there is always something to learn from the positives and negatives, if we take that moment to reflect on what is going on full faced in front of us. Most people just view the speech, but never bother to analyse what they can take away from it. I am agnostic about learning from the good and bad and will happily lift, pillage and copy all that I can to improve my own speaking abilities. I suggest we all be agnostic too and look for where we can find things to make ourselves more effective communicators.
Joe Biden gave a disastrous debate performance. His team floated the idea that he had a cold and that was why his voice sounded so weak and soft. There was also talk that his prior busy international schedule had also taken a heavy toll on him. Should he have gone on with the debate? Looking back, I am sure he regrets the decision to go forward with it, rather than rescheduling. What about for us in business?
Dates for events are set well in advance, but a lot can happen in the interim. If we get Covid, that is an easy one – there is no way we can turn up and infect the multitudes gathered to hear our pearls of wisdom. What about a cold, food poisoning, toothache or something a little less dramatic than the residues of the pandemic?
If you were a man brought up in macho Australia, you would keep going and “soldier on”, regardless. But is that actually the best policy? We have to keep in mind that like Joe, we are putting our personal and professional brands out there on public display. Does anyone seriously forgive Joe for his shambolic presentation simply because he had a cold or a flight back from Italy? I doubt it. We judge what we see in front of us, and we are all so sceptical and unforgiving today. We quickly jump to conclusions and we have no tolerance for underperformance or time for excuses.
It is tough in Japan, because the number of occasions we may have the opportunity to give a talk are relatively limited, even if you speak fluent Japanese. We may not want to miss the chance to speak. The organisers will expect you to turn up and deliver and we will feel obligated to make sure the show goes on regardless of how bad we are feeling. Often, the organisers in Japan are not expecting fireworks with the talk and their main concern is that the programme is completed in full and on time. If you give a reputation destroying effort, the hosts don’t feel any remorse about pushing you to perform as scheduled. They did their bit to pull a crowd and after that, it is up to you, to carry it off.
I would suggest that we take the long-term view. Your reputation and brand are inviolable. Once you create doubt about your professional competence, it is hard to win it back. That is what Joe Biden is finding. He cannot mount enough capability to overcome the train wreck and by the time this podcast gets released he may be out entirely. Bad news moves at a fast clip and good news travels along on the saddle of a sloth.
We may compromise our relationship with the event organisers, but in most cases, we are speaking for no pay and just for glory. If Joe had said I am unwell and can’t debate on this particular date, then the whole thing would have been rescheduled, despite the inconvenience to everyone. After a day of headlines, everyone would have forgotten about it and would be focused on the new date.
Hardly anyone will remember that you cancelled your talk. However, everyone there watching will remember you were a disaster or were fundamentally unimpressive. And that is precisely what they will say about you when you name comes up. “Oh, yeah, I saw him speak once and it was dreadful”. Is that really the legacy we want to haul around with us as we move through this business life.
Making excuses doesn’t go down well either, once you do turn up. Telling the crowd at the start that you are unwell gets no sympathy vote whatsoever. Everyone expects you to be on top of your game and any excuses are seen as whining, weak, and pointless. Japanese speakers do this a lot. They start off their talk by informing us they are a terrible speaker or have a cold or didn’t have enough time to properly prepare the talk. This is all seen as tatemae – superficial truth – by the audience and as a weak flex to show humility. No one pays the slightest attention to the content of what is being said and expect the speaker to perform, anyway.
Our brand must be protected at all times. If we feel we are not going to be able to defend it, we are better to be like the ballad of Davy Crocket and come back and “fight another day”. Better to reschedule if you are not doing well and can’t pull it off. There is no upside for you to go on stage and a huge downside if you do perform and fluff it.