Bonseki is a Japanese art creating miniature landscapes, on a black tray using white sand, pebbles and small rocks.  They are exquisite but temporary.  The bonseki can’t be preserved and are an original, throw away art form. Speaking to audiences is like that, temporary.  Once we down tools and go home, that is the end of it.  Our reach can be transient like the bonseki art piece, that gets tossed away upon completed admiration, the lightest of touches that doesn’t linger long.  Of course we hope that our sparkling witticisms, deeply pondered points and clear messages stay with the audience forever.  We want to move them to action, making changes, altering lifetime habits and generally changing their world.  In the case of a business audience, we are usually talking to a small group of individuals, so our scope of influence is rather minute.  How can we extend the reach of our message?

Video is an obvious technology that allows us to capture our speech live and ourselves in full flight.  How often though, do you see speakers videoing their talks?  It is not like people are constantly giving public speeches in business. Apart from myself, I don’t recall seeing anyone else doing it.  You need to tell the audience this is for your own purposes and they will not be in the shot, otherwise you have to get everyone to give you their written permission to be filmed.  You may get criticism about being a narcistic lunatic for wanting to capture yourself on video, but the only people who make that type of comment are idiots, so ignore them.

With video, instead of a standard business audience of under fifty people, you can broadcast your message to thousands.  The video is also an evergreen capture which allows you to keep using the content for many years.  Video has the added benefit that you can cut it up and create snippets to take the content even further. You can have ten videos sprung from the original.  This again extends the ways in which you can use the medium.   People have different appetites for information, so some may want to feast on the whole speech, whereas others want the digest or just the part on a particular topic of most interest. 

Video has two tracks – the video and audio components and these can be separated out. Very easily you can produce the audio record of the talk.  Everyone is a firm multi-tasker these days.  I sometimes hear people pontificating that you cannot multi-task, blah, blah, blah.  What nonsense. Walking, exercising, shopping and listening to audio content are typical multitasking activities.  Busy people love audio because it saves them time and allows two things to be done at once.  Now your audio content can be accessed by even more people. 

Did you know that in August 2019 Google announced that in addition to text search they were employing AI to enable voice search too.  This will take a while to roll out but this is the future and audio books have recently overtaken e-book sales.  The audio track can become a podcast episode and be on any of the major podcast platforms.  Also we can produce a transcript of the talk.  There are transcribing technologies that are very good today which can reduce the cost and time of this exercise.  Now we have a text version, we can project the value of the content further.  It may go out as an email, a social media post or be reworked into a magazine article, or it may become a blog on your website.

 Repurposing of content is the name of the game.  The video and or the snippets can be sent out to your email list, put up on social media and always sit there on YouTube.  The same can be done with the audio track.  Now what was a simple, ephemeral interlude in a room of fifty punters, has developed a life of its own and is being pushed out far and wide.  The same message and messenger, but a vastly different impact and duration.  If our object is to influence, then we need to make sure we are supporting the effort to give the speech with the tools available to maximise the results.

This requires some planning and some expense.  But as I mentioned, we are not leaping to our feet every month giving a public speech to a business audience.  This is something we would be lucky to do two or three times a year.  When you take that into account and consider how much we can leverage what we are doing, we get a lot more bang for our buck.  We are going to give the talk anyway, so all the preparation is the same, yet the influence factor can be so much grander.

Think about the business presentations you have attended over the years.  How many speakers were really engaging you during their talk.  How many speakers can you even recall?  One of the problems is that most business presentations are the “inform” type and are downloads of a whole bunch of data about the topic they are covering. 

Numbers don’t have to be dry and boring.  The mantra is “Stories need data and data needs stories”.  Do we get any stories though?  No, and that is why we cannot remember the person or what they said. 

There is another problem with why we can’t remember the person, which when you think about it, is a disaster from the presenter’s point of view.  What a waste of time to be a speaker and no one remembers what you said or you yourself.  That means that their personal and professional brands are not being built through this activity.

To get engagement we need to use the Persuasion Power Vortex.  We combine eyes, face, voice, gestures and “ki” or our intrinsic energy and we focus all of this power on one point of concentration - on the single, left eye of the audience member.  Here is what we are aiming for:

1.        Eyes

Normally in Japan, we don’t make eye contact, but our role as a presenter gives us permission to do so.  By staring straight into the left eye of the listeners we create a powerful bond with that person, such that they feel there are only the two of us in this venue and the speaker, the authority power figure in the room, is talking directly to me.  We choose the left eye as a single point of concentration, because looking at two things at once is difficult and because most people are right-handed. The right side of the body tends to be the most powerful, so we choose their softer side to concentrate our power, to have the most impact.

The intensity of the eye power is such that we can only turn it on for around six seconds at a time or it is too intrusive. Longer and we make the person we are looking at feel very uncomfortable.

2.        Face

Our face can be a million watt power source because we can project our emotions.  Sad, surprised, shocked, happy, inquisitive, puzzled, excited, dubious, opposed, in agreement – the list is long and we should be using these expressions during our talk.  The secret is to match the facial expression with the content of what we are saying, so that we are congruent. When we combine one of these expression with a direct look into the eye of the audience member the impact is strong.  That facial expression doesn't have to look mean and scary - we can lock on with a warm smile – it just depends on the congruency with the content of what we are saying.

3.        Voice

We don’t have to have that silky smooth, deep baritone DJ voice to be an effective communicator.  We go with what we have regardless of how unhappy we may be with it.  My husky voice is the product of thousands of karate kiai over five decades of training in the dojo.  I can’t change that, so I ignore how I feel about it and just get on with it. You should do the same thing too.

The tool has power when we know how to use it.  Most people have one setting – the monotone and so the tool is ineffective.  Like classical music we want to employ crescendos and lulls to create variety.  Too soft or too strong all of the time defeats our aim of capturing the attention of our audience. 

When he hit the audience member with a power stare straight into their left eye, combine it with a strong facial expression and then use our voice to emphasise key words, the effect is instant and tremendous.

4.        Gestures are silent, powerful amplifiers of what we are saying.  We know that any gesture held longer than 15 seconds loses all power, so like a faucet, we turn the gesture on and off to have the most effect. When I gesture directly to you in the crowd, lock on to your left eye with my power stare, coordinate my facial expression with what I am saying and then hit a key word at the same time, you will really feel the power of what I am saying.  The hitting of the key word doesn't have to be loud – it could be a conspiratorial whisper and still be highly effective.

5.        Ki – intrinsic energy

When we are presenting, our aim to is to project our body language energy right to the back wall, rather than letting it get trapped within our body.  We create an electric current with our ki energy and we zap our audience members, one at a time, as we move our gaze around the room, covering ten people a minute.

Hitting someone in the audience with this amount of ki energy, and combining our six second power stare, strong facial expression, voice coordination with the key words in our message and indicating directly to them with our gesture, brings everything to the single vortex of their left eye. They get zapped and feel total engagement, almost hypnotic, with us and what we are saying.  We will never be forgotten by the people in that venue, as a powerful and professional speaker.  This is what we want, isn’t it?

At different times, I have done both formal and informal one-on-one coaching for people who want to improve their presentations skills in Japan.  Most people can understand the concepts of voice modulation, gesture usage, posture, movement on stage, energy projection, design elements, slide deck build rules, rehearsal importance, etc.  The one area where everyone seems to struggle is with the use of eye contact to engage their audience.
I was coaching the Japanese President of a huge company with branches all over the world.  I only had an hour because of his hectic schedule, but we got through the basics for the presentation he was going to be giving. We worked on the six pockets and six seconds rules together.  The six pockets is an exercise where we grid the audience.  Imagine a baseball diamond configuration.  They have a left, centre, right, inner, outer field breakdown, which gives us the six pockets.

The simple idea is to engage those audience members sitting in these six pockets during the talk.  I am sure you have seen it, I certainly have, where the speaker only looks at one half of their audience and just blanks everyone else.  This is not the way to engage people.  The reason for this is their incorrect foot placement. Our feet should be pointed straight at 90 degrees to the audience and we use our neck to turn in the direction we want, without moving our legs, hips or shoulders.

When we break the audience up into six pockets, we are conscious that we need to be including the entire crowd in our talk.  There is no advantage to organise the six pockets, but then select one and spread the eye contact across the whole pocket, at the same time.  I am sure you have seen this too, where the speaker scans the crowd and gives eye contact to everyone simultaneously and therefore to no one in particular.

This will not improve audience engagement.  Instead, we need to select one person sitting in one of those six pockets, look them straight in the eye and hold their gaze for six seconds.  Less than that is fake eye contact and longer becomes psycho axe killer intrusive. After giving that person the full six seconds, we now switch gears and pick up someone sitting in one of the other pockets, and do it at random.  This is important, because we must stay unpredictable. We don’t want the audience to relax and just switch us off. Keep them on their toes, so that they are concentrating on what we are saying and not secretly glancing at their phone.

In one minute, we can make a direct one-on-one connection with ten people scattered around the room.  For those seated at the back, at that distance, the ten people seated around the person we have selected, all think we are making direct eye contact with them.  In this way, we can really amplify the sense of personal connection.

Now I went through all of this with the President.  He really nailed the posture, energy projection, gestures, voice modulation, but the eye contact was always fleeting and lasting only around two or three seconds.  This is not enough to grab the person you are looking at.  He also did a so-so job working the six pockets. Actually, I would say he got to the people sitting in the centre and pretty much ignored those at the extremes or in the cheap seats down the back. Later, I was thinking, “why is this eye contact thing so hard for people?” Intellectually, he got it, but he didn’t have the patience or discipline to apply it properly.

My conclusion is the lacking ingredient is correct rehearsal.  In our High Impact Presentations classes, if we find someone isn’t getting the eye contact completed long enough, we ask everyone in the class to stand up and stay standing until they receive six seconds of sustained eye contact.  Making eye contact and then looking away and resuming eye contact once again doesn’t come under the term “sustained”, so it doesn’t count.

We actually worked on this sustained eye contact with the President in rehearsal, but the time we had together wasn’t enough.  My recommendation is to find a partner and then in Round One, practice holding eye contact with them for one minute, until it feels more comfortable.  To take it to the next level in Round Two, stare at them intently with a strong gaze for thirty seconds and no looking away or breaking off the eye contact. In Round Three, maintain that powerful eye lock and keep it for six seconds, then relax. Previously, you had done a minute and then completed thirty seconds, so you will find that a measly six seconds feels like nothing.

Like everything, creating new habits takes time and effort.  Make the time to practice because, as I have outlined, this ability is not within the grasp of most people. In this regard, it is relatively easy to stand out amongst other speakers and presenters.  In most areas of business, this is extremely difficult. When we get to the world of presenting, because most people are so hopeless, there are many chances for us to shine.

Recently, I was asked to coach the President of a 100,000 person company with a long history for his presentation. What I noticed was how difficult it was to do a good job of promoting the firm, without it sounding like a blatant commercial for the business. Many of us in business are asked to give public presentations and these are excellent opportunities to promote our personal brands, professional brands and company brands.  The only problem is that as soon as it sounds like propaganda, the audience just us switches off.

Here are some ideas on how to bridge this tricky divide.

1.        Tell Stories

Get straight into a story about the firm and keep sprinkling stories throughout the talk.  In the case of the President, he mentioned that the firm was a venture business when it started decades ago with just three people.  They came up with a breakthrough technology for the audio business which made this firm a household name and we all owned their products. 

He could have done a lot more with this.  Why were there three people at the start? Who were they? What did they do to build the business?  In particular, we needed to hear about their struggles, which set up the basis for their ultimate triumph.  There is bound to be a tremendous amount of drama hidden away in there. We are all trained to absorb drama, which is why we have favourite movies and TV series. The drama remained well hidden by the President, so the opportunity went begging.

Their breakthrough technology was overtaken by new technologies and they had to exit that business.  Here is a treasure trove of stories about how they made that pivot, all the problems they faced, and the struggles they went through.  Nothing from the President about these details, but this is the type of drama we thirst to hear more about.

2.        Provide Insights

As the audience, we are seeking insights and guidance on what to do and not to do.  We are seeking hints, lessons and direction on what we can do with our own firms for when we face the same struggles.  Yes, the details about what happened in the stories are great, but we have to move things up to a higher level and get into the take aways for the audience.  Tell us what we can learn from what they did wrong. Inform us of the pitfalls to be careful about. Warn us about the hidden dangers lurking in the shadows which could bring us down.

3.        Provide Valuable Data

Not all data can be shared publicly, but wherever possible, expose the numbers, tell us about the key data and results from the actions which were taken.  Even if we can only talk in terms of percentages, rather than raw numbers, these are great indicators for the audience to latch on to in order to add colour to the story.

“Data needs stories and stories need data” is a good mantra to work off. Usually at business talks, all we get is the data and no stories or insights.  This tells us that there is a tremendous opportunity to build our brand, because it is so easy to differentiate ourselves from all the other boring, mediocre, unprofessional business speakers.

4.        Engage Through Questions

Rhetorical questions are a gold mine for speakers.  They allow us to really engage the audience and get them on our wavelength.  If their concentration is flagging or they are distracted by their phone, tossing out a question to the assembled masses is a great way to get them back and focused on us.  The power comes from the fact that nobody, except the speaker, knows this is a rhetorical question which the audience won’t have to answer and only the speaker will provide the response. That tension acts like an attention magnet for us to grab our listeners and hold them tight

5.        Third Party Endorsements

Saying we are great doesn’t fly, but quoting a reputable third party who says we are great is well accepted. We think our Dale Carnegie Course is terrific and if we say that, for the audience, this is a “so what” moment.  Instead, we can say, and this is true, that Warren Buffett thinks the course is terrific and it changed his life.  This is gold.  Warren is the most impressive investor of all time and he is well respected.  His endorsement carries a lot of credibility.  Who can you find as a third party authority figure to add lustre to your firm’s story?

We should promote our companies when we have the chance to speak in public, but in a ninja way, which doesn’t provoke scepticism or disdain.  The line is clear about this and we have to navigate that divide with great caution and be adept at making the most of the opportunity without blowing the chance.  Remember, people don’t recall what you said in detail, but they do recall you.  Always start your talk design with how you want to be remembered by the audience and go forward from there. The upside is unbounded because the competition is so lacking and unremarkable.  Our time to stand tall and shine.