Japanese culture is pretty specific about making eye contact with people.  In ancient times, a commoner might lose their head if a samurai felt they were making eye contact with them in an arrogant or disrespectful way.  Even amongst samurai, in the presence of superiors, you would only raise your eyes to make eye contact when invited to do so, otherwise your right place would be looking down at the floor with your head bowed.  Here we are in the modern era and making direct eye contact is still felt to be inappropriate.  The guidelines are look at the person’s throat or forehead or chin, but don’t make eye contact.  It is thought to be too aggressive and rude, especially if they are older or higher in status than you.  Okay, you might not agree with it, but so what, that is how we do things around here.

As a result, I rarely ever see Japanese presenters making conscious, specific eye contact with the people assembled before them.  I don’t see too many foreigners doing it either.  My old Japanese history Professor at University, had the habit of looking at the joint between the back wall and the ceiling behind us in the lecture theatre and looking there whenever he wasn’t reading from his text.  Zero eye contact and engagement with any of us plebs.   

Now “when in Rome, do as the Romans do” is ancient wisdom, so should we foreigners blend in with the locals and avoid eye contact with our audiences?  Absolutely not! This point can become contentious, but we are mixing up scenarios. Chatting with your colleague, boss or friends while not making eye contact is fine, if that is the appropriate relationship.  I had to retrain myself to make eye contact when I went back to Australia after studying here for the first four and half years.  I had automatically gotten out of the habit, which was treated with suspicion back home.  Why couldn’t I look people in the eye? Was I hiding something or was I a dodgy character you couldn’t trust?

As a presenter, we may be conversational in our delivery, but this isn’t the same as a chat over coffee.  We are on stage and we are the person commanding the attention of the room.  The formality associated with this speaker scenario is a lot more substantial than chatting together.  So we need to make eye contact, because we want to engage our audience. 

This audience engagement piece is where a lot of speakers fail.  They spray their eye contact equally over the whole ensemble.  They give everyone the same degree of eye contact at the precisely same time and in effect, make eye contact with no one in particular.    I am looking at you all, so I am making eye contact is the theme. This is fake eye contact.  You see it most often with politicians, who try to look like they are at one with the masses, but actually don’t engage with any of them.  They dart their eyes left and right, but they are not really looking at anyone.

One of the reasons it is hard to make eye contact is we are not taught how to do so when we are speakers.  We just take our cues from the people we see presenting and imagine that must be how we should do it.  With a large crowd of people peering up at us this can be confronting and make us self-conscious and nervous. Any plans for looking at people are now out the window, as we mentally retreat in fear.  The answer isn’t to look at the crowd as one entity but to look at one person at a time.  We need to break the room up into segments.  You will have those on the left, those in the middle and those on the right.  We can cut this in two and break the venue into those up front and those down the back in the cheap seats.  Our aim is to engage as many people as possible and the best way to do that is to cover each of these segments.  If we are too predictable, say going from left to right, the audience will realise it and will tune us out.  The element of surprise is a good one to keep audiences engaged. 

We take one of these segments and then we choose a single person and we make eye contact with them.  It is very confusing to look at two things at once, so don’t bother with that.  Select one of their eyes and use your two eyes to make eye contact with their one eye.  You will find this much easier.  We have also removed the fear of having a mass of people looking up at us, because we are only looking at a single person.  At a distance, the twenty people sitting around that individual, will think we are looking at them too.

In short order, we can cover a large amount of people in the crowd.  We are only engaging with them for around six seconds, so we can cover a lot of ground in a forty-minute speech.  In fact, we can make eye contact, one on one, with 400 individuals in that one speech.  If we have an audience of fifty people, we can do eight rotations during the forty minute speech and really personalise the occasion. 

Why six seconds and why not four or twenty?  Burning a hole in someone’s retina by making overly long one-on-one eye contact is a bit creepy, a lot of pressure and feels intrusive.  Six seconds gives us enough time to make close contact, personalise what we are saying and yet not be too oppressive for the audience member.  Four seconds just isn’t long enough and we meld into the fake eye contact world.

Engaging our audience is what we are after. Making eye contact, with one individual for  six seconds is how we do it and we try to interact with as many people in the audience as possible over the course of the talk.

It is a mystery why more people don’t bring storytelling into their presentations.  Technical subjects may seem to be oblivious to storytelling, because we are only dealing with hard data.  Absolutely not the case.  This type of dry talk really benefits from injecting stories into the presentation.  Numbers can be brought to life through telling stories.  Our minds are geared up to absorb stories much easier than a download of numbers, so it makes a lot of sense to introduce the stories behind the numbers.  One of the reasons presenters don’t use more stories is they don’t have any.  Or more correctly, they don’t think they have any, which is not the case.

Things happen and there is always a background and a context tucked in behind.  Targets have some basis, but usually we just get the number and not the explanation of the basis.  Strategic directions are set and we just hear the outcome, but we are not told the basis for the idea.  You get the picture.  Behind all of the things which happen in business, there are individuals and circumstances involved and this is where the stories can be found.  We hear about the direction of the new marketing campaign, but that is it.  We need to broaden out the WHY behind these decision and tell the story of how we got to this point. 

For example, if the new marketing campaign is going to be using more influencers we need to explain how that decision came about rather than just announcing “we are going to use more influencers”.  We could explain,  “In January this year Takahashi san and Suzuki san in the marketing department had received a tip off that our key competitor Z Corporation was having success by driving sales in e-commerce, due to recommendations from influencers in social media.  They have been gaining market share of late and initially we didn’t know why.  Suzuki san did some checking on the influencer costs relative to their return and the numbers stacked up very well and so a pilot programme was suggested to test it.  Over a three month period, the pilot programme showed a 27.5% uptick in e-commerce sales”.  

This little vignette is a lot more powerful in persuasion terms, than just saying “we are going to use more influencers”.  We have introduced characters who people will know – Takahashi and Suzuki in the Marketing Department, so this gives more credence to the talk.  We have a timeline – this January and a three month pilot period, so that the audience can plot the timing. There is the bogeyman of Z Corporation getting ahead of us by using influencers and the luck of the tip off, so there is a sense of heightened risk involved if we do nothing.  The outcome of 27.5% is a solid enough improvement during the pilot period to warrant continuing with the e-Commerce strategy using influencers.

All of this information was already available.  The difference is the presenter harvested this context to explain the strategy direction as opposed to just announcing the direction.  That WHY component is absolutely critical to getting people behind the effort.  Without it, all we have is a chorus of critics and naysayers, who want to argue the point based on opinion and no information, other than the announcement.  Once we feed in the background we redirect people’s brains and it is easier to get them to support the new initiative, which is what we want.

On top of the background detail there are other stories we can tell.  These might involve our own experience or the experience of others in the company.  For example, “When Takahashi san and Suzuki san first noticed this influencer strategy by Z Corporation, the Head of the Marketing Department Tanaka san, recalled how in her previous company there had been success using influencers and she encouraged them to investigate if we could match this strategy or not”.  This lends further credence to what we are saying.  Or we might reference something from research or from the media.  “Last year, Takahashi san had come across a broad based five year study on influencer’s impact on e-Commerce sales covering various industries.  The report concluded that for certain products and services there was a very positive ROI involved and that traditional marketing was ignoring this new trend at its peril”.

 We are all seeing reports in the media about trends which influence our markets, but we usually ignore them. We are not thinking that we can possibly use some of these in our presentations and that is a mistake. Keeping abreast of trends is a basic element of professional life. Researching what is out there around the theme of the talk will quickly bring up data which we can turn into stories to support our thesis in the presentation.  The key is to be looking for how we can translate information into stories.  Once we have that idea as a central plank in constructing our talk, we will find there is a rich cornucopia of information out there waiting to be scooped up and converted into stories for our presentation.

In some professions, there is a lot of media scrutiny on what the speaker is saying.  The organisation they represent also has very strict rules around who can say what.  This makes giving the presentation very restrictive and difficult.  Usually, the people in that line of work, are used to giving these types of presentations, so they are accustomed to be being very guarded in their remarks.  They also become very guarded in the way they deliver the presentation.  The danger is the message transmission is being killed off by the restrictions and rigidities of the content and their delivery methodology.

Sentences contain words and they deliver those words.  The problem is they are giving every word equal treatment.  Public speaking is not a democracy, but a dictatorship.  A world ruled by key words and phrases, which must absolutely dominate the plebeian words which link and connect the core content together.  These key words are handcrafted for special attention, with the view that their elevation during the presentation will drive home the key messages more effectively.  Our speaker was a democrat, as far as not granting special favours to key words by hitting them harder or softer than the rest.  He spoke in an even tempo, with the same power throughout the talk.

Given his profession, it was natural that he would read the document.  That document had to be cleared for release and many eyes would have scrutinised it for any irregularities.  It had been thoroughly cleansed of any potential controversy by the time it was presented.  There was also simultaneous translation going on and in fact the translator had the same text in Japanese to work from.  This is a golden way of ensuring that what is meant to be said, is coming across exactly as it should, in Japanese as well as English.  Freestyling is frowned upon because this is where things can be said, as an aside, which make the front pages of the media and cause the speaker to lose their job.  No wonder caution is the name of the game.

Does this mean that these types of talk are doomed forever to be dull and boring?  I have mentioned voice modulation, through word and phrase emphasis as a way of departing from the usual monotone delivery.  The latter is almost 100% guaranteed to put people to sleep.  Pauses also can add gravitas to what we have said, as we allow our audience a little time to digest the deeper meanings and nuances of what we have just said.  We can add gestures to bring strength to a point we are making, as we engage our body language and don’t just abandon our hands to the task of page turning. 

We can work the room with eye contact.  We can look at individuals in the audience, grab their attention and then read the next sentence to them.  They feel we are appealing directly to them, as we again direct our eyes to theirs, after we finish the sentence.  We cannot be satisfied with a broad sweep of the room with our eye contact, effectively looking at everyone at the same time and so therefore, no one in particular.  This is where pausing is so powerful.  By stopping what we are saying, we are forcing the audience to look at us, to hang on our next words in anticipation.  This is how we can funnel attention.  This means the speech has to be designed for this and not created as a mad rush to the end, to get it all done in the time allocated.  Less is more for us and we should build in pauses into the delivery.

Our facial expressions are so much more powerful that any slides on a screen. We need to engage our face and combine our expressions with certain key words and phrases.  It may mean becoming more animated in our expression, looking quizzical, upset, concerned, happy, excited, etc.

One notable absence from these types of rigid talks is storytelling.  The presenters are usually elite, powerful people. They can relate stories about well known figures. They can drop names and get away with it, because it is all congruent with the circles they move in.  The story can be cleared for telling and if necessary the name of the key person in the story can be hidden. The point can be attached to that individual, without identifying them by name and a strong connection made about the key message being communicated.  It also allows the message to be humanised and as an audience, that is very appealing because we may not be able to move in such stratospheric circles, but we love hearing about what they are getting up to.

Getting our slide deck functioning properly is another simple fix.  We don't compromise the approved content, but we can make it more accessible to the audience.  As with many others, this speaker often had three or four slides all combined into one, such that the individual parts were too small in size and so hard to see.  We should be aiming for one idea per slide and to make the content as large as possible on screen.

With a few tweeks, even the most rigid talk can be brought to life in the hands of a polished speaker.  Because it so rare to see this done, most people go through life squelching the life out of their super formal talks, in their attempt to conform to the rigidities the organisation demands.  If we know what we are doing, we can stand out and show how it should be done, no matter how restrictive the occasion.

We know that being formal and stiff creates distance between the speaker and the audience.  We also know that a “conversational tone” is ideal, as it creates a strong feeling of inclusivity between the presenter and those in the room.  That conversational tone means a relaxed style on the part of the speaker, but how relaxed?  We gauge people’s education and intelligence level by the way they speak.  So we want to sound smart, but we don’t want to sound snobby.  Where is the line?

If you speak with a regional or national accent, should you stick with that or should you OxBridge it up?  Typical Australians have very strong accents.  Educated urban Australians speak quite differently to rural dwellers and the further you go from the coast, the stronger the accent becomes.  Television presenters in Australia all spoke as if they were aping BBC presenters until the 1960s, when television commercials started adopting the lingua franca of the masses.  I have read that in the USA, regional accents are a barrier in many cases and as people move around for work, they have to change the way they speak to be better respected. So, when presenting should you present in a more highbrow fashion and change your diction or speak as if you would to one of your local neighbours?  

It will depend to a great extent on your audience and the topic.  If I was presenting to a room full of Aussies and I put on a posh OxBridge accent, that would be seen as fake and lacking in authenticity and would impact how my message was received.  If I was presenting to a room full of well educated Aussies, in a down and dirty local Brisbane boy accent, that would also have a negative impact.  If it was a highbrow topic, I would be seen as uneducated and therefore not seen as credible for that audience. 

In Japan, I often speak to national Chambers of Commerce.  Often these are mixed audiences of non-native speakers.  Generally, the international businesspeople you meet in Tokyo speak excellent English, no matter where they come from.  However, my Aussie vowels can confuse people at times.  I think I am saying “a” and they are hearing “I”.  It is always a surprise for me, because I thought I had moved on from that.  I have learnt to neutralise my accent for the most part, when speaking to these groups, in order to have the greatest shot at getting my message across. 

Am I being authentic, if I am not speaking as I would back in Brisbane? I think there is room for variation of our accents to give us the best communication vehicle to get the job done.  If I go all OxBridge though, then that is too much, because I am not British and not a graduate of either of those storied universities and now I am just faking it for effect.  If I put on an American accent, that would be ridiculous as well and I am not sure I could carry it off anyway.  I go for a neutral accent, which will give me the greatest access to the listener’s attention and will sound both natural and unforced.

What about the way we present? Should we be standing around in a relaxed fashion, as we would down the pub or should we be there ramrod straight and upstanding?  Should we put our hands in our trouser pockets or keep them out?  Should we be leaning on the rostrum as we talk or should we be standing with 50/50 weight displacement on our feet?  I think standing up straight with a 50/50 split is the most professional approach, but it doesn't have to be stiff and tense.  Just standing up straight with the knees unlocked is enough.  You look good without looking forced.  

Hands in the trouser pockets is usually the male speaker thrusting them in there, because he doesn't know what to do with his hands.  The most natural position is for the hands to just hang by the side of your body.  To find that magic spot, just raise your arms up to a 90 degree angle to the floor and then drop them.  Where they land is the most natural position for them when you are not employing them for gestures.  Hands in the pocket, behind the back, fig leaf in front of the groin, are all guaranteed to restrict your use of gestures and that should be avoided at all costs. 

We need our hands to add power to the point we are making and we want to treat it like a faucet.  We turn the gestures on and then we turn them off again.  We don’t hold the same gesture for longer than 15 seconds, because the power just dies after that point and it adds no value to anything we are doing.   Don’t forget about your hands and just allow the same gesture to linger long. People become self-conscious about where their hands are, but if you are using your eyes, face and voice to engage the audience, they won’t be paying any attention to your hands in the rest position.  Your gestures will come up in a natural way and the audience won't think twice about what you are doing, as it just fits in nicely with the whole flow of the presentation. 

Our audience and topic will determine how we choose to speak and how we decide to present.  There is a range we can adopt and we should use that range to suit our purposes.  The extremes of that range are where we will get ourselves into trouble and we should avoid doing that if want our message to get through.

There are facts, provable information, data, research results and opinions.  What is the right mix when presenting?  Should we just marshal the detail, lay it out for the audience and let them draw their own conclusions or do we need to direct them?  How expert do we have to be to start handing out advice to others?  Are we seeding the emergence of opposition to what we are talking about, because members of the audience don’t want some speaker lecturing to them?  Are we setting ourselves up for a very hot Q&A session, where some of the assembled masses are about to tear shreds off us?

These types of questions are difficult for those of us in industries where we have points of view and are recommending certain actions on the part of the audience.  The training industry is a hot crucible for advice and recommendations for others. We are suggesting things which we believe will help them do better in their companies.  Or it could be that through your own firm’s experiences, you have observed some things to be careful of and you are going to enlighten the audience, so that they don’t repeat the mistakes you made. 

There is certainly a demand for case studies, warnings, examples and the sharing of experiences, in order to guide audiences about where the dangers are and the traps are set.  Just stating our opinion though won’t cut it.  We have to set that up with some evidence, something relatable for the audience, so that they feel what we are saying is credible.  The best options are personal experiences.  These always have the most credence and authenticity.  The second best is the experience of others and the last is published, public information.  In Japan, any time you are tempted to use data to prove a point, you need to have the Japanese version too.  If it is only information collected in the US or in Europe, then Japanese audience members will just discount it, because as far as they are concerned, Japan is always different and the data won’t travel well. 

Often though, we start out with some data and we even raid previous presentations for slides brimming with graphs and diagrams, to use for the next presentation.  That data is too valuable to just leave for one presentation, so we want to recycle it.  Or we might have some recent survey data, which will be fresh for the audience and we want to impress them.  One of the dangers is we get stuck at the data provision level and we don’t relate this to the realities of the audience members.  Data by itself is good, but “what does it mean for me”, is always in the minds of the audience.

This is where we get into the advice business and we have to tread warily.  We have to remain the expert, without becoming the schoolteacher, bossing the audience members around and telling them how to fly straight. Extrapolating what the data shows is a good idea, but there is an element of prophesy built in and basically that is just our opinion.  Instead of getting sucked into the “listen to me now” business, we can approach it in another way.

Rhetorical questions are brilliant for this.  We can lay out the facts or the argument and instead of moving into the advice component, we can ask the audience what they think, without requiring them to vocalise an answer.  We frame the construct and let the question hang there unanswered, so that the audience has to draw their one conclusions.  When we want to add in our point of view, we can do so in a very small target way.  Rather than spruking the answer, we can cloak it in camouflage.

We can say, “there is a view that…” or “ a common conclusion has been….”, or “a perspective I quite like is….” or “most experts seem to agree that….”.  In this way we proffer an answer, without having to attach ourselves to it.  This reduces the friction with highly opinionated audience members, who may want to argue the point with us.  We come across as reasonable, balanced, open, flexible as well as humble. 

We can say, “I will leave it to everyone to make up their own minds on this one”. That is fine but often we are asked to speak because we supposedly know something about the topic and this may come across as a cop out and audience members may feel cheated.  They don’t want a lecture from us, but they are interested in what we think, and they want to hear about that.

Rhetorical questions and a small target strategy will go a long way toward setting the right frame for the talk.  Audiences will vary of course, but if you don’t know what you are facing then caution is a good policy.  You have assembled valuable information, given some guidance and have respected the audience to be capable of reaching their own interpretation of what it all means, while offering your humble insights.  That is a killer combo.

I was held up at the hospital, which those who live in Tokyo will know, is a typical occurrence, so I was late to the presentation. One of the speakers had just started, as I slid into my seat at the back.  The screen was hard to read, because the scale of the content was small.  The presenter was speaking in a voice range which was probably fine for those seated at the most proximate tables, but was hard to catch at the back of the room.  I missed the very start, but I could tell the speakers hadn’t tested the audio or the screen for visibility when they were doing their set up.  They just turned up and turned things on and away they went.  Not a great idea for presenters.

I always recommend to get there early and check for sight lines, audio quality and screen accessibility.  When we are using a screen or a monitor, we have to be careful where we stand, because we can be cutting people out, if they are seated in a spot where we are blocking their sight access to the screen.  We need to know where these invisible boundaries are before we get going.  That is a simple task.  We just go and sit on those chairs and see where the boundary will be for us, when we are standing and presenting.  The same with the size of the fonts and diagrams.  Go to the extreme corners and rear of the seating area and see how clearly those audience members will be able to see what we are presenting on screen.  In this case, there were a lot of small drawings and diagrams and at the back of the venue, they were hard to see.

The audio is another key point.  Speakers are not sound engineers, but they can have the tech team help them to get the volumes right.  In this case, the volumes were too low for the size of the room.  If they had checked it when they arrived, which I doubt, the room would have been empty.  We need to allow for the host of bodies in the room, which will weaken the spread of the audio, once the audience has filed in.  The volume control needs to allow for that and to be set a little higher than normal.  This is another reason why professional speakers always repeat the questions they receive from the audience, if there are no microphones being employed.  The speaker may be able to hear the question, but other members of the audience will have trouble catching what was being asked.  In this case, there were hand microphones for the questioners, so everyone could easily hear the questions.

The other issue was the size of the presentation.  By this, I mean how big were the speakers going with their voices, energy and gestures.  There were two speakers and in both cases they were very contained.  For those seated at the front, it was probably fine, but quite a different experience for those seated at the back.  We have to remember the importance of having “speaker presence”  and adjust ourselves to go bigger when presenting.  This is why sitting in the extreme distance seats at the start, before the audience arrives, is so insightful.  You realise that you are much smaller on stage, for those at the rear, than you imagined.

Getting the voice strength up is important, but often speakers cannot gauge how much stronger they need to be.  They somehow imagine that a normal chatting voice volume can be applied, when they are the presenter.  As presenters, we want to be conversational, but we shouldn’t misunderstand what that means.   We should be relaxed, but louder than in normal conversation. For those seated down the back, we need more energy from the speaker, in order to be able to connect with them.  We buy energy, passion, confidence, commitment and the voice is a major tool to project all of those things.  We don’t have to be shouting, but we do have to be projecting our energy to the far reaches of the room. 

Gestures need to become bigger.  They don’t have to be too exaggerated and massive, but they do have to become bigger.  One exception though, is that if you are ever presenting in a 5000 seat venue, then your gestures really have to be ramped up.  On stage, you are a peanut in size and it is super hard to connect with the people in cheap seats, right down the back.  Even if the venue isn’t that mighty, we still need to be conscious that we have to up our gesture game, to accommodate the audience members at the back.  We cannot be only presenting to those seated up the front. 

The output level of these speakers was at about the 75% range.  They clearly needed to do more to reach all of the people in the room.  If they had these thoughts in mind, when they arrived at the venue, then they would have made the necessary adjustments.  Like a lot of speakers though, they got there, made sure the slides were working and that was the end of it.  Just a little more attention to the venue considerations and the audience positioning and things would have been a lot better.

“You are too loud”, “You are too high energy”.  These were some survey comments following some training I was delivering for 60 managers for a client.  You can imagine that the venue to hold ten tables of 6 participants each has to be quite large and spacious and that was the case.  To project to an audience that size, in such a large venue, means you have to really lift yourself and pump out a lot of energy. The brief from the client was that many of these managers had lost their mojo over the course of Covid and the organisation needed lifting and these were the people who needed to provide that lift.  They wanted the first session to be a motivational speech to inject some missing mojo back into those in the team who were lacking in that department.

With some of those comments coming back in the survey after the session it was obvious that for some of them I was too strong, too powerful and they found that threatening.  Out of 60 how many do I think felt like that?  I would say two or three and as a trainer I would just ignore that group and go for moving the mass of the people and getting them fired up.  If I was the boss, I would look at replacing them with others to lead who would be more suitable for the task.  I would be asking, “if they can’t take a one hour motivational speech, how can they deliver as leaders to their teams?”.  Other comments were “powerful”, “motivating”, “enthusiastic”, etc., so you can see it hit the mark with the majority and as a trainer that is a good result. Training is one thing and presenting is another, but there are obvious overlaps, especially given that first session was a motivational talk.

Is there the danger that if we are too strong as a presenter, we will lose some of our audience, who don’t like all of that power close up and personal?  Also, how much power is too much?  Where is the line to determine we have gone too hard and too far?  A talk is usually around 40 minutes and there are 15 minutes for questions, so the amount of presenting time is contained.  Is it legitimate to go hard during those 40 minutes? 

There are a number of factors to consider.  Who is the audience and what is the point of this talk. The brief in my example was clear – restore their broken mojo and fire them up.  To do that I have to be fired up, high energy, driving, powerful.  If I want to lift them to 100%, then I have to go to 150%.  In a typical business speech we won’t be asked to perform that role.  The topics are usually more technical, we share experiences, explain how we got results and cover problem solving.  We are there to stimulate the thinking of the audience and get them on the road to success.  Do we need to go to 150%?  Actually we might in very short bursts, if we need to make an important point, but we are talking nano seconds here not minutes.

There is also the question of the brand we want for ourselves personally and professionally.  How do we want to be perceived in the market?  If we are coming across in a very mild, low energy manner, that may work for our brand and for some industry audiences, particularly technical groups.  If it was an audience of salespeople, it would be a total dud.  I am a trainer and a salesperson and if I presented in a highly calm, no energy manner, it would be the death knell for my business.  No one would hire me, because I wasn’t being congruent with what I am doing. 

Generally speaking, our talks should be a mixture of energy outputs.  There are certain words we want to highlight to lift their importance above the parapet and make sure they resonate with the audience.  We inject a lot of energy into those words mimicking the highs of classical music.  Classical music cannot just be crescendos or the audience becomes overwhelmed.  There must be lulls too and that contrast is what make both work so well and so it is with public speaking.  All soft or all hard are both bound to fail. 

Most speakers deliver their content to the audience in a monotone voice, which is a great formula for putting people to sleep.  We need to match our energy to our content. Professor Mehrabian discovered in his research in the 1960s, that if the way you are delivering the content doesn’t match the content, then that lack of congruency confuses the audience and they get distracted.  In his day, that distraction would be evidenced with the audience concentrating on how we look and how our voice sounds, instead of on what we are saying. Today the audience would be lurching for their phones to escape the speaker and get on to the internet to access their social media feeds. 

This means where there are points in the talk which call for more enthusiasm, we should raise our energy and voice and show more passion.  If it requires a calm demeanour, then that is what we need to be presenting to the audience.  We cannot have a Johnny One Note approach of one setting on the energy dial from start to finish.  Our variation in energy and output is the key.

 “I have been presenting since I was 17, but I am not good at engaging the audience”.  This comment from a man in his fifties was telling.  He was in a very technical area which requires a highly acute mind and he is a leader in that field.  He has a big job today for a famous brand name firm.  If he has been getting lots of practice presenting since a young age, why has he not been able to transition across to engaging his audience?  He made the comment to me unprompted, so he was aware of the gap and had not been able to bridge it yet under his own steam.

I told him that in one particular course we have, that stretches over two days, by mid-afternoon on Day One the participants start to stop focusing on themselves and really start working their audience and this just continues for the next day and a half.  If it is that quick, why can’t he get to that point by himself?  The simple answer is the expertise of the instructors and the coaching being handed out.

If you don’t know what you are looking for, it is hard to hit the target and by that, I don’t mean having some vague idea of what you want to achieve in audience engagement terms.  The instructors know what they are looking for and so they push the participants to rise to the occasion and start connecting with the people they are talking to.  The coaching shows the way forward and the repetition with feedback is the key to refining this part of the presenter’s arsenal.

The big breakthrough comes in a couple of forms.  One is the energy flow.  When we are just handing over information, we retain all the energy within ourselves and are just going through the motions with a major data dump.  We are putting the information under the audience’s noses and then just leaving it up to them to digest it.  When we want to engage the audience, we start directing our intrinsic energy known as “ki” in Japanese, into the audience.  Anyone who has studied martial arts will have a good idea of what I am talking about.

This requires that we are pumping out energy to those in front of us.  That sounds simple enough but a lot of people are very mild mannered and softly spoken.  Consequently they become invisible to their audience and nothing they present resonates nor retains.  We need to purposely lift our energy and then direct it to the audience members and we need to do that one person at a time.  Pushing the energy out en masse, means the energy is diluted and the spell is broken. 

For some people pushing out a lot of energy is something they don’t normally do, so they are resistant to increasing the energy flow.  They imagine they can address the audience just as they would their friend over coffee.  That is definitely not the case and presenting and chatting are light years apart in the galaxy of public speaking.

I saw this recently with a very senior person giving a talk.  She is a very mild mannered, softly spoken person.  That is fine, except if you want to have impact with an audience you need to increase the energy and particularly the voice volume.  For her, anything above a chat level of speaking would feel totally crazy, as if she was hysterical and was screaming at people.  Not true.  What happens is we feel your confidence and we feel your energy and we gravitate toward both. 

I know I could get her from totally forgettable to remarkable in thirty minutes of coaching, but mentally she is not interested in that, because she doesn’t value public speaking enough to want to make the change.  So be it, but the downside is, she stays invisible.  I think that is a bad idea.

By talking to the audience one person at a time, we can direct the energy flow straight to each person, one by one, and they immediately feel it.  We combine this energy direction with our eye power.  The usual formula is for the speaker to look at everyone and therefore no one. Our eye power is now diluted.  When we give six seconds of eye power to each person, we are making a powerful direct connection, which for the audience member is tremendously impactful.  They really feel we are talking to them only, in the room, for that moment and the link between us is palpable.

When we add in our gestures to the pot, we are now cooking up a magic broth, which really engages the audience.  There is the issue of knowing what to do, getting coached so that you can refine it and having the desire to make the necessary changes to accomplish this connection with the audience.  If the desire isn’t there, than no amount of professional coaching will work.  The problem for most people is all they have ever seen are presenters talking at their audience rather than speakers deeply engaging their audience.  When we see what is possible, it opens our eyes up and we realise the gap between where we are today and where we could be.  Get the desire and get the coaching.

How much is too much?  For the expert, the boundaries on this equation can be quite broad.  For them, we are only tapping into the very superficial elements of this worthy subject.  They have so many layers at their disposal and they can go to exquisite depths of complexity and nuance, within a heartbeat.  When they are addressing the great unwashed, the best laid plans can go astray.

I was one of the great unwashed, turning up to a complex subject in search of some better understanding and education on the topic.  The expert’s temptation is to try to cram as much material as possible into the talk and show both their tremendous expertise but also the depths of the beauty of the topic.  They are at the “art” end of the scale, while the punters in the room are more at the utilitarian end.  The bombardment of the depth of materials can cause brain whiteout, as our cerebral capacities are severely challenged by the concepts, the data and the complexity of the delivery.  Concentration spans take a hiding and we start to fade.

That was happening to me.  We all turned up at night-time after completing hard toil down at the salt mines, so as a group, we were already mentally taxed.  Naturally, a complex topic attracts experts in the field, who want to attend the talk to steal from the presenter’s materials or concepts and to gauge how big a threat they are as a competitor.  This emboldens the presenter to turn on the expertise faucet and to go deep on the subject to justify why they are the one standing up in front of everyone and presenting, and not one of these other experts in the crowd.

Tonight’s expert also made the typical mistake of pounding us with slides, which were packed to the gunwales with information.  We are talking beautiful slides, but so dense.  If you were in the front row, you had a shot at being to read the detail, but anyone else would have been struggling, because of the density and small font sizes being employed.  He also needed, like a lot of experts, to break his own slide into three or four slides. 

Slides are free, by the way, so we don’t have to be parsimonious about their usage.  It is better to have one idea per slide than lots of slides with too many ideas on each individual slide. Having complex configurations rarely works because the scale of the font and the micro-detail has to become too small, to fit it all in. Yes, he kindly supplied the slides after the event, but as a presenter, this is too late.  We have to deliver our message in that moment, with that crowd and get to them then and there.

He made the mistake of suggesting we could stop him whenever we wanted to during his talk.  I don’t recommend this, because you can so easily lose control of the time, because there are now no limits.  When you have presentation followed by the Q&A there is a time allocated for the later for a reason.  When we mix it up we are in danger of being distracted from our message or having to spend too much time on a relatively minor point to satisfy that questioner.  It is also a free for all, with who can ask questions and suddenly you can get into a group debate about a point.  This is very exciting, but it destroys your time allocation for the presentation and like him, race through the last 10% - 15% of the slides to finish on time.

One thing he did very well was to come across as an expert without being a pain and a know-it-all.  He could phrase certain things which said, I believe this to be true based on my current knowledge and experience, but I could be mistaken.  This is quite artful because he is making himself a small target.  When you come across as “I am the expert here” then you invite people to want to prove otherwise and bring your ego down a peg or two.  He did a good job being the legitimate expert and creating no enemies in the room.

As I have stated many times, it is always a good practice to get the list of who is coming to gauge how expert the crowd will be and also to get there early to suss out the interests of various people in the room.  Actually, he didn’t do either of those judging by his late arrival and his high-level approach in presenting his information.  I believe in these cases you can demonstrate sufficient expertise to convince the room you know your stuff without having to beat everyone into submission with a relenting “death by powerpoint” performance.  He could have shown less and had just as successful a presentation.  Less is more, as we say and a handy thing to remember if you are ever asked to give a presentation as an “expert”.

When we are giving a public presentation, it is rare that we will be given carte blanche by the organisers to promote our product or service.  That type of blatant self-promotion is frowned upon and your reputation in the market will be negatively impacted.  Great, but I want to sell more stuff.  How can we promote ourselves without seeming to be breaking the boundaries of common sense?  The hero’s journey is a popular Hollywood trope and it works equally well for us when presenting.

Let’s begin with laying out the situation in the market and at this point we are describing what has gone before and what has been accepted as normal.  Now we need to raise the stakes and jack up the tension for the audience, so that they feel what they are hearing is worthwhile.  We all love a warning about some impending disaster, because we feel more protected and bettered secured to weather the changes.  Most of us respond more easily to addressing our fears than maximising our opportunities.  As they say in the newspaper world, “if it bleeds, it leads”.

 Changes in the market can be good of course, but we need to zero in on the negative consequences of the coming changes.  We need to lay out what could go wrong and try to tie this back to the interests of the audience.  If they feel this isn’t going to affect them, then they have a minimal commitment to doing anything about it.  This obviously requires some pre-research about who will be in the audience and what they are interested in.  That should be standard procedure for any speaker.

 Storytelling at this point is a powerful tool.  We can use the example of another organisation and what happened to them, because they weren’t able to respond fast or thoroughly enough to the changes.  We need to set the scene and put the story in a timeframe based around a season and a place. If we can introduce characters into the story who they will know, even better.  Our object is to transport them to the scene which they see in their mind’s eye.

 If we can come up with a villain, all the better.  It might be an actual person or it could be a circumstance or a piece of technology.  ChatGPT is performing wonders for a lot of writers at the moment, as they blast our screeds of text full of doom and gloom and impending disaster.  It makes for graphic reading and we are all aware that this is a pivotal change but we don’t quite know the ramifications as yet.  That is enough to grab the interest of the audience.  This is a gift which will keep giving for a long time and so look for a constant flow of commentary on this subject.

 After we have engineered a good dollop of fear to spread into the hearts of our audience, we need to relieve that tension with a way out.  Now, we cannot just pound away with the negatives, because that causes the audience to lose hope. We have to balance it out with a way forward. At this point, we may refer directly to a solution which already exists and which is available.  That pivot though, is in danger of crossing the line of self-serving promotion.  It is better to talk about current research and progress in addressing the issue.  The fact that you have identified the problem and that you are actively addressing it, tells everyone you are the one to go to for help, when they need to work on fixing this issue. 

Referring to your research finding is much better than referencing the product or service.  It elevates the discussion to a point where your credibility is sky high and yet there is no feeling of a bait and switch going on here.  You lured the audience into this venue with a sexy presentation title and then when you had them assembled, you switched in a massive commercial for your product or service. We don’t do that. This is where the latest findings, complete with convincing statistics etc ., come to the fore. You are not seen as someone organising this presentation as a group prospecting exercise. Instead, you are seen as delivering a neutral exploration of things everyone should realise.  People like to know about a problem and even better, they like to know there is a solution at hand or under close development. When we outline the manner in which the problem will be dealt with, it gives off a tone of scientific breakthrough and we like science more than we like being sold to.

 Being able to describe the likely events we will face and also the likely solutions is comforting for people and they are keen to hear the detail.  That engagement is what we want as the presenter and we love it when everyone is hanging on our every word.  That is a rare event, of course, but if we craft the story well, then that is a distinct possibility.  We can paint a word picture of a future state with which everyone can identify.  The outline of a better future leaves everyone feeling relieved.  The journey from fear to freedom is important and we finish on this note, so that the whole presentation apparatus is felt to be positive and worthwhile.  We have sold them on our solution, without anyone feeling they were being sold.

This last week I saw two speakers who were presenting, but both managed to do so with absolutely no presence.  They could not command the room and they were both hard to hear.  One was hosting an event with experts assembled, there to gain more knowledge.  The other was leading the opening of a prestigious event to a very large audience in a big ballroom. I don’t think there was any great self-awareness going on with either speaker.  They had divorced what they were doing, from how they were being perceived doing it. When we stand up to present, we are putting our personal and professional brands on the line in public and we have to be aware of that. 

 The speaker hosting the expert event spoke very softly and was hard to hear, even in that relatively small room.  There was no energy behind the words, no pacing, no highlights, all lulls and no crescendos.  Some female speakers don’t change gears enough when they have to speak in public and don’t project with enough vocal strength.  They often have soft voices to begin with, but they need to switch gears and ramp up the volume and power.  Speaking with staff or with friends allows for a soft voice, because of the situation and the proximity involved.  Speaking to a group is an entirely different animal and has to be approached with a professional attitude and to realise this is a speaking spot which requires a different mindset.

 Our speaker didn’t employ eye contact with her audience and this was a big missed opportunity.  In such a smallish room, our eye contact can be very powerful and can personalise the talk so much more.  It has the effect of drawing the audience in toward the speaker and creating the feeling that the presenter is talking directly to each of them.  This engagement level is very high and makes the message accessible to the audience and that is what we want isn’t it – to get our message through.

 Gestures were also missing.  She was using a microphone and that tied up one of her hands.  Also the audio set up hadn’t been checked prior to the event.  I know that, because the speaker box wasn’t amplifying her voice very much at all.  A non-working microphone with a softly spoken person is a problematic combination.  If she had used gestures, even with only employing one hand, it would have driven home her points much more powerfully.  Her body language was also non-existent, so there was no feeling of attraction, charisma, or presence when she was presenting. Sadly, we were just left with a soft voice, which was hard to hear.

 The gentleman tasked with leading the toast at the large event was struggling with the roar of the confab down the back, as he tried to get everyone’s attention and get proceedings underway.  Clearly, he had no idea of how to tame an unruly gathering and just stood on stage looking lost.  This is extremely damaging to your personal brand, because it reveals you are clueless as a leader.  Standing up on stage looking lost isn’t a great brand builder either. I had met him previously and he is a well-educated, capable, intelligent guy, but he revealed he was totally clueless on what to do with his responsibility for that evening.  He is rather short as well, so he cannot use his frame to impose order on the crowd and get them to shut up and listen to him. There is a reason a lot of leaders are often very tall. Unfortunately, I am not in that group either.

 Regardless of our size though, we all have the opportunity to use our voice to still the madness. His choice of voice volume was for a close proximity, one-on-one conversation situation, as opposed to addressing the masses.  What he should have done was to speak very, very loudly to command to audience to pay attention.  Usually one outburst is never enough, because the alcohol is flowing and so is the conversation. People just pay no attention whatsoever to the proceedings and that in turn, means they pay no attention to the speaker.  Maybe others can suffer that indignity, but we cannot have that occur when it is our turn.

He needed to keep repeating “Ladies and Gentlemen, may I have your attention” in a loud voice, until even the most wayward conformed to shut up and listen to what was going on.  In my experience, it usually takes three or four renditions of this very loud opening to get people to quieten down.

His remarks when he finally got the room down to a low white noise background hum, were not well prepared and were not interesting.  He should have considered that his audience had many representatives assembled and used that to get people excited about the evening.  He invited the different groups representatives to come up on stage, but then he did nothing with them, so their presence was irrelevant.  He could have introduced each representative and then easily encouraged all the members of that organisation to give them a big cheer.  This sets up a competitive spirit which makes the occasion more fun and interesting.  He could have made some comments about the significance of the gathering and pump up the activity’s importance.  None of that happened and quite frankly, I cannot remember anything about what he said, because it was not gripping.  Remember, we are competing with the food and drinks and so we have to make it worthwhile for the audience to give us their time.

 His talk had no presence and he and his talk have already disappeared into the mists of time and both are already totally forgotten by everyone who was there.  He could have used this occasion as a platform for his personal and professional brands, if he knew what he was doing.  Clearly, he didn’t know what he was doing and the opportunity was completely missed.  When it is our turn, we need to seize the moment and plan the talk so that it is a triumph and not a fizzer.

The best personal branding is to say something useful and interesting in a compelling, professional way.  That is a snap right?  Maybe not.  What constitutes useful and interesting will vary, depending in who is in the audience.  If we pitch the content complexity too high, we may be over the heads of our audience. They will take nothing away, because they are lost and they will hate us for making them feel dumb.  If we pitch the complexity too low, they may become insulted. They feel we are purposely speaking down to them, to emphasise our own genius ability.

I have seen this occasionally where a speaker has taken no notice of who is in the audience and gives the talk the speaker wants to give.  Ironically, one of those speakers was talking about “personal branding”. Unfortunately, the context for the speaker was her own massive global organisation. She was intent on branding herself to stand out internally in that grandiose world of big egos.  If she had looked at the guest list for that speech, she would have realised straight away these were small to medium-sized companies and mainly people not yet very advanced in their company’s echelon.  I surmised that her speech was more for bolstering her resume with the title of "public speaker" than providing useful advice on how to create an individual brand for the audience.  Her own personal brand was utterly extinguished after forty minutes of her nonsense.  The lucky thing for her was that only those gathered in the room put a line straight through her name, to eliminate her as a professional “public speaker” and self-promoting “personal branding expert”.

 Regularly check the guest list to see who has signed up and then adjust your talk accordingly.  Usually the organisers will share that list with you, but even if they are rather bolshie about it and won’t for so called “privacy reasons”, then get there early and meet people.  In Japan, because we all use business cards, it is very easy to find out the rank of the person and the industry they are representing.  On the fly, we can alter the complexity of the pitch for our topic and tailor it to the level of the audience.

Useful, valuable, fresh, differentiated, rare information is a big attraction for the speaker.  We think that because what we have to say is so valuable, that the information itself will do all the heavy lifting for us and we can get a free pass on the professional delivery bit.  Not true.  I saw this trotted out recently with some visiting high-powered speakers.  I realised later that the talk we received in Tokyo was actually a dry run for them, for a speech they were going to give later in the Kansai region.  The ultimate intended audience were experts in the field and so the talk was pitched deep in terms of detail density.  The audience assembled in Tokyo, including me, were the great unwashed and not very expert regarding this area of speciality.  We needed a different version for us, but the speakers didn’t care about that.  They were selfishly giving the talk they wanted to give. We were not their target audience and were just the patsies for their practice run.

 What also surprised me was the unprofessional way they presented their information.  Obviously, their company’s global headquarter team had prepared the slide deck for them, so it was beautiful, properly fitted out and branded etc.  It was also obvious that the slide designers were not public speakers, because the beauty part was there, but the messaging part wasn’t.  When you litter a slide with too much unessential text and then add insult to injury by making the text font too small to read easily on the screen, you are killing the messaging. 

 Their industry is awash with data and so naturally we had to have a lot of graphs to illustrate the numbers.  That would be okay if they had observed one simple rule – one graph per slide instead of two or three.  The graphs were also drowning in a sea of micro accompanying text vying for our attention. The numbers on the graphs were simply too small to read, so the points were lost on the audience.  This is not how a professional presents their information.  The speakers were oblivious to all of this, because they thought they were cleverer and much better paid than those in the audience and that we should lift our game to keep up with them.

 I am positive they were being better paid than those of us in the room listening, but so what?  They were there to impart a brand image for themselves and their company and they failed on both counts.  I doubt the Kansai version for the expert audience went any better. All the same flaws we were presented with here in Tokyo, would have been transported by Bullet Train down there and given the same treatment. Their personal brands were diminished and also that of their firm.  Remember, we judge the entire company on the quality of the people we meet from the firm.  If we meet really capable, smart people we generously apply that idea to everyone down there. If we meet a dud, then we assume they are all duds down there.

 Certainly have great information.  The key is to make sure the way it is presented is suitable for the audience in attendance.  Also, it must be presented in a way which invigorates the message, not emasculates it.

“Greg is all style and no substance”, my erstwhile colleague happily told everyone who would listen, while I was on stage.  It was an occasion where each Division Head presented to the entire company on what they were doing and where they were taking their part of the firm.  He had preceded me and immediately felt his own inadequacy as a presenter, seeing me work the room.  His preferred option was to attack, to stitch his pathetic, wounded ego back together again.  When his remark was relayed to me later, I just outright laughed.  Not a shy, timid, embarrassed laugh, but a real “that is so pathetic, it is funny” laugh.  He obviously had no clue then and I would guess he still has no clue today wherever he is. Unfortunately, I have run into several versions of him since that time.

In these cases, the speaker is grappling with what they see as a two-dimensional choice between being “content heavy” and using “spurious techniques” to deliver the talk.  I was watching a group of engineers giving their talks to inspire the audience to vote them on to the committee of a prestigious volunteer business organisation.  If I listed up their firms for you, everyone would know them, because these were the representatives in Japan of serious brand name companies.  Initially, I was sold on the brand power. Sitting there, I was expecting some excellent five-minute talks on why they should join the committee.  They were mostly shockers, barely able to string two sentences together and seemed to me incredibly dull candidates for consideration.  Their technical education had not prepared them for this eventuality and it showed.

We also get this phenomenon in our High Impact Presentation Course classes, where the speaker is wedded to their content and just dismisses the importance of the delivery component.  Somehow, in their mind, the incredible quality of their information is all they need to be a successful communicator.  The latest statistics, in-depth findings from recent research, industry white papers, buyer surveys, referencing scientific papers etc., are seen as the Holy Grail for being an effective speaker.

It was hard enough for this concept to survive before, once the internet made the access to information and free information at that, so widely available.  When I was at University, the library stacks housed the limits of possible knowledge and the choices were made simple.  For my son, his educational experience has been different. He has spent his time trying to sort out which bits of the information from the internet firehose are the most relevant, as he drowns in readily available data.

Now ChatGPT and all the other AI driven information sources have made instant information and data more of a commodity than ever before in human history. Yes, some of it is fake news, like that dodgy American lawyer who recently used AI to do his research and it created legal cases and precedents which were completely fictitious. Reflect, though, that we are at the starting point of the AI charge and these systems will only get better.  Why do we need to be impressed by the fact you have data, when we can easily access it ourselves?  Insight based on the data is the value pivot we speakers need to make to elevate our content to make it powerful, relevant and attractive. We still need to deliver it in a way however which completely resonates, engages and persuades our audience.

There is an opposite problem, though. This is the fluffy talk delivered with tremendous verve and vigour.  I saw such a speaker, who was very good with the delivery. At first blush, it seemed impressive as a talk.  When I sat back though and reflected on what he was telling us, it was only then that I realised that his actual content was totally unremarkable. My metaphor is that the value of his content was more like drinking the warm froth on a beer, rather than enjoying the cold body of the refreshing craft ale, on a humid Tokyo summer day. 

So we have to be more than just one dimension.  We need to be both good at talking and good at content.  That changes our perspective about what is our role as the speaker.  When I tested ChatGPT on putting together the outline of a talk on leadership in Japan, it did a workman like job.  It wasn’t remarkable stuff, but if you were someone who wasn’t skilled in this creative activity, it would provide you with a base from which to further refine the content.  Even if it produced something truly brilliant, you still have to get up on your hind quarters and deliver it to the audience.

You can read it to me, of course, but in that event, just send it and I will read it for myself, so I don’t need you hanging around.  Much better would be studying how to be a competent speaker who can bring the content to life.  This is all knowable by the way and there are few mysteries involved.  Hard work in rehearsal with proper coaching will lift 99% of the speaker dross we are assaulted with in business to a much more digestible and impressive level.  Eye contact, voice modulation, gestures, body language, pacing, pauses, emphasising keywords and phrases are some of the key basics which we can and should master.

Getting the content to sing is our goal and we do this with the idea of building our personal and professional brands.  Regardless of what you do, you are affecting your personal and professional brands anyway, when you present, for good or bad and we must never forget that.  Given the choice, we should aim to bolster the quality of the content with an excellent delivery, based on coachable skills.  Make that the goal and you will never go wrong.

I gave a speech recently to a room full of managers, some foreigners and some Japanese.  It was an internal talk and the purpose was to get the leaders motivated and get their mojo going, after having been hammered by three years of Covid.  They recently passed across the feedback and it was quite confusing.  Some said, “love the passion, dynamism” etc., and some said, “too loud, too strong”, etc.  What do you make of this?  What I made of it was, judging by the faces when I was presenting, the vast majority of people were accepting of the energised style. For a small minority, it was too powerful. Okay, so what are we supposed to do with this feedback?

There are four purposes for our presentations.  In business, the Inform style is the most common one, where we provide extensive information about project updates, results, introducing new policies, and explaining overall strategic direction.  There are the Impress presentations. where we are selling our organisations’ capabilities and credibility.  We are trying to boost the brand of the firm and to encourage buyers to select us a trusted partner.  Entertain speeches are often given before the festivities or as a classic after-dinner speech to put everyone in a positive and happy mood. Then there are the Motivate talks, where we want the audience to take some action.  We have a powerful belief in what we are suggesting. Say we had the cure for cancer, through a particular regime, we would broadcast this far and wide and with a missionary zeal to convert people to the path we say is the right one.

The speech I was giving was in the Motivate category.  They had suffered a downturn in motivation and zeal and my job was to restore that commitment to the cause.  Naturally, this type of talk is going to feature a lot of energy, passion, commitment, belief.  My audience was a mixed group from all different divisions within the organisation, so there was a big spread of personality types.  The Amiable personality type is rather muted, reserved, self-contained.  I would guess the “too strong” comments came from people in this group.   

Should I have toned it down to suit this group?  I don’t think so. My mission was to motivate and to inspire, so energy and passion were needed for that purpose.  Clearly, some people didn’t respond to that. As speakers we have to try and seek the acceptance of the majority, rather than the minority.  You quickly realize that it's impossible to please everyone and be everything to everyone.  Do I want to spend my valuable time giving talks to Milquetoast audiences or do I want to talk to people who want to fired up? Clearly, with my personality, the latter is the correct answer.

So how dramatic can we be as a speaker?  I certainly added dramatic flourishes to my talk with varied voice modulation and big and powerful gestures. I used my facial expression to drive home points, used movement, where needed, to underline a key point.  Was it too much?  Clearly for some it was, but did I get my message across? Did I break through the clutter occupying the minds of my audience? Did I stir passion in those who wanted to be fired up again?  Yes, I did and if I was to give that talk again, I wouldn’t change anything about how I delivered it.

 When we speak, why would we give equal emphasis to every word in a sentence?  Each word has a different value and the way we deliver the talk should correspond to that unique value.  If there are keywords in that last sentence of mine, I should hit them harder or much softer than the other words, to highlight them, making them standout, elevating them above the others.  For example, I could highlight key words and phrases like this: Each word has a different value and the - way - we - deliver the talk should correspond to that different value.  When I use these phrases “Each word”, “the way we deliver” and “different value”, I need to highlight them by using speed and strength - either slowing down or speeding up, going hard or going soft.

When delivering the sentence, I can add more dynamism to the phrases with gestures and body language.  The combination of the word delivery, the appropriate gesture and the overall body language come together for a very dramatic combination of emphasis supporting the message, which will break through and grab the attention of the listeners.

What we want to avoid is sameness – all strong or all soft.  Either is guaranteed to have audiences leaping to grab their phones to elude us and succumb to the magnetic force field of the internet. We want them to get our message, so we need to mix it up and keep them with us.  I often use the example of classical music – it has tremendous variance and that is why we keep listening.  Our talks should have ebbs and flows, crescendos and lulls.

There are plenty of people delivering “Johnny One Note” boring, grey, uninspiring talks, so we don’t need more of those.  Try to seek micro areas where you can bring a bit of pizzazz and flair to the talk.  Not constant across the whole talk so it becomes tiring, but add flashes of drama and sprinkle these into the speech, to keep your audience with you.  Trust me - it is a lot more fun when you do it this way.

TikTok, Reels and all of the other super short form visual media are creating a nightmare for presenters.  Twitter started things off with the very limited number of words allowed per tweet, forcing people into tiny corners of the mind.  The trend toward short form rather than long form has meant that audiences are getting trained to absorb information in tiny little blocks.   

What happens though when we have a forty-minute presentation?  The audience become restless and their minds start to wander, because they are not getting mini-hits every minute.  The ubiquitous mobile phone with that drug like mainliner effect straight to the internet enables them to escape from us immediately.  They leave us for the lure and charm of something more interesting to pay attention to.

Is this going to get better?  “No” is the answer, so what can we do about it?  One thing I notice when teaching our High Impact Presentations Course is that presenters make things more difficult for themselves by offering up additional distractions to the audience.  There are a range of these, so let’s go through some of them.

1.     A soft voice

Speaking to a colleague or a friend up close and personal doesn’t require a lot of voice projection, so we tend not to raise our voice when speaking in these situations.  Presenting though is a different occasion. It requires us to engage our audience to keep their attention.  Adding volume to our voice sends out a strong vibration which commands attention to what we are saying.  We sound more confident and credible to the listener.  Coaching class participants to up the ante on voice projection often bothers them, because they feel they are screaming at their audience.  When we play back their video of their presentation they realise it isn’t too loud and in fact they see they are coming across as capable and competent.

2.     Pointless gestures

Any gesture maintained for longer than 15 seconds immediately becomes irrelevant and annoying to the audience.  This is a simple enough guideline, but we sometimes find the class participants may be using one hand to gesture, but they have completely forgotten about the other hand. They have parked it somewhere across their body, adding zero value to the proceedings.  We want our gestures to help us highlight words and ideas, such that they rise above the noise and register with the listener in support of our message.  If the hand is floating around somewhere and not being used, just “turn it off” and let it hang by your side, out of trouble. 

3.      Wooden faces

Professor Albert Mehrabian’s research has helped us to understand the importance of congruency when we speak.  His central thesis is that what we are saying has to match up with the way we are saying it.  For example, how many times have you seen the speaker maintain the one facial expression throughout their talk?  In that talk though there were probably areas of good and bad news.  Good results, disappointing results, opportunities, challenges are all being reported, yet their face doesn’t reflect any of that. Congruency would mean a smile or a happy face for good results and opportunities and a serious face for bad results and challenges.  Mehrabian found that when we are not congruent, the audience gets distracted by how we look and sound and they are only hearing the message 7% of the time.  That means 93% of the time what we are saying is not connecting.  That type of poor result should definitely warrant a “serious” face.

4.     Twitching and swaying around

When the body starts swaying around, we are setting up visual competition for our message.  The knees and hips are circling around as if to some soul music groove. Our eyes are drawn to the movement and we tune out the message from the presenter.

In addition, many participants will wander around on stage moving forward and then moving back to the same spot.  What was the point of the movement?  Actually it had no point and all they are doing is distracting us from their message. 

Sometimes the speaker will adjust their feet to face one side of the room and then do a little soft shoe shuffle, to move around and face the other direction.  All of this is competing with the words coming out of their mouth.  We have this wonderful thing called the neck and it can rotate enough degrees to allow us to plant our feet in one spot and yet be able to look at the audience members to our extreme left and right sides with no difficulty whatsoever.

5.     Rambling and using filler words

Puzzling audiences with the point of what you are saying is guaranteed to lose them in a split second.  I was listening to a podcast the other day and the guest was rambling away and for the life of me I couldn’t get the point of the message and I lost interest immediately.  Ums and Ahs and other filler words are another turn off as the speaker struggles to string two words together.  We abandon ship and desert the messenger.

The presenter’s job is only going to become more fraught and we need to lift our game as communicators, if we are going to have any hope of getting our message through. Let’s purge ourselves of these distracting habits we have accumulated and clean up our act.  The good news is all of the other presenters out there will change nothing and we will look like rock stars by comparison.

The vast majority of the time in our company we are teaching presentation training to groups of fourteen.  We have two instructors and we video everything.  We provide an enormous amount of one-on-one coaching during the training and the results are spectacular.  All good.  From time to time, we provide one-on-one coaching to company Presidents.  Usually, they have a special talk coming up and they need to really nail it. 

Being able to customise the training exclusively for them is a joy for the instructors, because we can go so much deeper.  Having more time with them makes an enormous difference.  The power of repetition comes into play and that completely changes their results.  Doing their talk once is the usual experience for most businesspeople.  Most don’t rehearse.  Well that isn’t quite true – sadly, they rehearse on their live audience.  Not the greatest idea in the world and to top it off, they only ever deliver that talk once.  This ensures there is no real growth associated with the activity. 

When we do one-on-one coaching, we help with the design of the talk and the crafting of the delivery.  This is where the expertise of the trainer really comes into play.  If the trainer is also an experienced public speaker, that is even more ideal.  Getting the design right for the occasion is critical.  As trainers and public speakers, we have a broad range of ideas to draw upon to help with the design phase. Most businesspeople don’t get that much practice to design their talks in a year, so they are always struggling to create the excellence the talk deserves.  As trainers, we have heard thousands of talks and have found areas where we can coach and transform them into something special.  Being able to see possibilities the client cannot see ensures we can add real value.  Also, because we are outside of the system, we can challenge what is being offered.  A subordinate will probably conclude they should not make any waves around the boss, but we are presentation professionals and we can offer our insights and perspectives freely.

The individual time with the speaker is simply gold.  We can have extended hours running continuously and really work on every aspect of the talk, from the design right through to the delivery.  Getting the visuals right is always a big point of improvement in the added sophistication of the presentation.  Most senior executives in my experience still get this wrong.  The most common issue is too much confusion on the screen. There are too many competing pieces of visual stimulation distracting the audience.  Being able to clean up the visuals on the spot is so valuable because the speaker can see the difference immediately and it makes their job of presenting the information much easier.

Sometimes the logic of the flow can be improved to make the points clearer and more compelling.  The author of the design can sometimes be too close to their material and everything makes sense to them, but to the uninitiated, it can lead to gaps in understanding which make the content hard to absorb.  Having that unbiased coach there to challenge the presenter’s assumptions is an excellent opportunity to catch any problems before the audience hears the talk.  There is often the problem of too much information for the time to present it and it is very hard to eliminate slides you have fallen in love with.  The coach has no such restrictions and can help to slim it down to fit the time slot. Often the President’s’ speech is created for them by their staff.  This can often lead to some pretty ordinary content being created, because the staff are not presentation experts.  The coach can weigh in at this point and work on improving the content coverage to further increase the professionalism of the presentation.

The delivery piece is where the real magic occurs. There is so much power in doing the same presentation over and over and over again, polishing every small aspect of the talk to make it perfect or as close to perfect as possible.  This is where you need time, because if it is forty-minute speech for example, doing a few repetitions really burns through the clock very quickly.  The ability to recast a part of the speech and then elevate the next rendition makes the progress tangible and permanent. Usually the engagement of the audience part is neglected because the speaker is concentrating on the content rather than the delivery.  This is a big mistake which the coach can work on getting the balance right.  The audience won’t remember the details on the slides, but they will remember the presenter and how they felt during their presentation.

It is what we say and how we say it that is key.  Small changes in cadence, word emphasis, pauses, gestures, posture and facial expression can have a dynamic impact on the way the audience receives the talk.  Voice modulation is how we keep the audience with us and how we don’t allow them to escape through distraction.  The repetition component is what we need to make this complex construct really work for the speaker.

If you ever have an important talk to give, don’t try to work it out by yourself – get a professional to work with you.  Never forget, every time we speak in public, we are putting our personal and professional brands out on display.  This is not something we can afford to get wrong, nor an opportunity to squander the chance to build both of those brands.

Most foreigner delivered presentations in Japan will be delivered in English and have a mixed audience of both Japanese and non-Japanese.  There is the tendency to imagine, because it is in English, that any necessary Japanese cultural components can be over-looked. The presumption is the presentation can be delivered, just as it would be, for a foreigner only audience.  Why would we imagine that?  The Japanese audience members may speak English in their firms, but often the language capability will vary and very, very few will be operating at native speaker levels.  If we are not clued in, we could lose a sizeable chunk of our audience. 

The speed of delivery is usually the first barrier we erect, to keep our Japanese speaking audience from getting our message.  We are speaking in English, so we assume we can speak as we normally would, without ever considering the needs of our audience.  It is extremely rare in my experience to listen to a presenter who is speaking too slowly.  In fact, I cannot recall anyone having that issue.  The opposite, though, is the norm and unfortunately, I am guilty of this too.  I get passionate about my subject and I start really leaning into it. Invariably I speed up.  The cure for this is to keep in mind that too fast a speed will lose a lot of the audience and that I need to keep a slower pace than normal.  Also, by using pauses, I can regulate the delivery in a way which will stop the speed from revving up.

Idioms are the nemesis of international understanding.  I grew up in Australia, so we were bombarded with American and English television programming.  In this way, we learned the dual languages and the idioms associated with them.  One of the tricky problems I have is to deduce which idioms are international and which are purely of Australian invention.  There is a surprising amount I found.  I know this because the non-Australians I am speaking to go blank when I let loose with one of these little Aussie specials and I realise my message is not getting through.  As a presenter in Japan, it is better to delete idioms entirely and find alternative methods of expressing the same idea.

Sporting references are the other barrier to communication.  Australia is a very sporty nation, so we have tons of these too.  Americans have their own favourites and many times I have to ask what they mean and I am a native speaker, so imagine how quickly you lose your audience of Japanese guests.  It is better to just cut these out of the presentation delivery entirely and look for more easily accessible expressions to convey the point we want to make.

In Japan, in normal polite society, we know that looking someone straight in the eye isn’t done and we have to look at their forehead, or throat or chin instead.  What about eye contact with our Japanese members in the audience – should we just ignore them to make certain they don’t feel too uncomfortable?  There is eye contact and there is eye contact.  Anything under 5 seconds is too short to make a connection and anything over six seconds is too intrusive. We can still engage our Japanese members in the audience with eye contact if we keep it within these bounds.  When we look at audience members, we are creating a one-on-one personal connection which is very strong.  We are saying, “You are the only person in this room and I am talking directly with you”.  Japanese guests are not used to this, so when it happens, the impact is enormous and they really gravitate to us.

Here is a hint – don’t worry about the expression on their faces.  Sometimes it can look like they are rejecting what we are saying, but in fact they are just concentrating hard on the content to catch it. What we see is their serious face, not their angry face, but it's hard to divine which is which for foreigners.  I had my breakthrough moment on Japanese physiognomy in Kobe, when I was speaking in Japanese to a hundred salespeople about Australian education.  Midway down on the left he was sitting there throughout my hour-long presentation, with the angriest look on his face, as if he was not buying one thing I said. 

When I finished, he leapt out of his chair and hurried down the center aisle to where I was standing.  I honestly thought he was going to punch me in the face and was getting ready to defend myself.  To my astonishment, he started double pumping my hand and telling me in Japanese what a terrific talk that was and how much he learnt about Australia.  Assume the Japanese guest is concentrating on what you are saying and don’t be put off what may appear to be a hostile reception to your message.

Don’t worry if Japanese don’t ask questions at the end.  Often, nobody wants to be the first in anything, so they are waiting for someone else to go first.  Also, there is a complex calculation going on in their minds about how they will be perceived by this question.  Is it a veiled insult to the speaker, implying that they were not clear enough in their talk?  Will others think they are stupid for asking this basic question?  Shouldn’t they defer to others who are maybe older or more senior or with women, defer to men to ask the questions.  If there are foreigners in the room, there is usually no shortage of people wanting to ask questions, but we should specifically encourage the Japanese to speak up.

We can say, “In my culture, asking questions is never seen negatively, it just shows an interest in the topic. I know Japan is different, but let me encourage our Japanese guests to ask questions they may have.  If you would like to ask me questions after the talk, I will be here for about fifteen minutes and would welcome questions you may have”.  This shows a great deal of sensitivity to those Japanese in the audience and they will feel much closer to you as the speaker.

There were three experts on the panel for this luncheon event.  One man and two women.  They were using microphones but that didn’t help in one case.  A very well presented, professional woman was adding her insights and point of view on the topic, but I couldn’t catch what she was saying.  My table was situated right in front of her but to no avail.  The man had a strong voice, as did the other woman expert and I had no problem gathering in their contributions. This other panellist however was beyond my ken.

I was wondering about why this was the case.  There were a couple of problems and one was microphone technique she was using.  Most of us don’t use a microphone very often so we are not always au fait with the tech.  Definitely her technique wasn’t working.  Waving the microphone around while speaking defeats the purpose and the audio engineering.  If she had held it a little higher, in the one spot and spoken across the mesh of the microphone, then we probably would have had a better chance of hearing what she was saying.  Here is a hint – don’t wave the microphone around folks!

The other issue is she had a rather soft voice to start with.  Many people have this attribute, which can be quite charming in a one-on-one situation, but generally doesn’t work all that well in a formal speaking situation.  It is often the case with women speakers also I have noticed, but men too can be speaking up, but their voices are not carrying.  I see it as a mindset shift which hasn’t taken place for the speaker, in order to be effective as a presenter.  When we are sitting with someone, one on one, we don’t need to project our voice.  They can hear us just fine.  Having said that, I have noticed many Americans can be quite loud in these same situations, so the whole conversation is audible, if you are sitting close by.  Being an Aussie, I guess that is a cultural aspect and probably Americans are not the only ones who do this, but I have noticed this aspect of their behaviour.  I would see that as a plus though because it means they are better equipped to go from a one-on-one situations to speaking to a crowd and adjusting their volume accordingly.

If we are not used to using microphones and we are softly spoken, then we need to make some adjustments when we are presenting.  Using the equipment, as it is designed, is a must.  Speaking more loudly is also called for, but this is very difficult for softly spoken people to them, it sounds like they are screaming.  I notice this in pour presentations training.  I am asking some of the participants in the class to raise their volume and they adjust it only microscopically.  They cannot imagine speaking more loudly and so they restrain themselves.  In these cases, I turn to the rest of the class and I ask them if they think the speaker is screaming or speaking too loudly.  They, of course, say no and I need to keep encouraging the presenter to go bigger with their voice range. 

Why do they need to speak more loudly?  Being a presenter is different to chatting with your mate or girlfriend over coffee.  You are there to be taken seriously, your personal and professional brands are on display.  We will make a judgement not only about you, but we will extend it to your whole organisation.  If you are a dud, we think everyone down at your shop is a dud.  If you are brilliant, we think the whole crew are brilliant.  By bringing enough volume to the presentation, you lift your credibility, because it comes across as more confident and considered.  Obviously, you also increase the odds of the audience actually hearing what you are saying as well.

We video the participants presentation and we have a separate coach in the review room analyse it and then coach them.  When we play the video back, they can hear the first coach in the main room asking them to increase the volume.  We ask them in the review room, “does that seem too loud or too crazy?”.  They always answer “no” and they start to realise that they can get out of their comfort zone and improve their presentations, as a consequence of making a few small changes in volume delivered to the audience.

It is always a good practice to get to the venue early and practice with the microphone to work out the right distance and elevation from your mouth, in order to make sure you are going to be heard and appreciated.  Getting it right doesn’t take long and will make a big difference in how you come across.  When you are tool loud the equipment tells you straight away with the static you produce but being too soft has no warning signal.

In general, we buy confidence and presenters who speak with a strong voice come across as confident.  If you don’t have a strong voice, at least try to speak louder than normal and if possible, always request a microphone to allow the tech to help you be understood by your audience.

When I exchange business cards in Japan, I select from the one designed for a Western audience and another for a Japanese audience.  Often, I will hand one over to a foreigner and then a different one to the Japanese person accompanying them.  This will draw a remark, “Oh, the back of the cards are quite different”.  I like to ask the Japanese person what do they think is the difference when they compare the two?  Some see it and for others I have to explain to them that the English one has the five core course we teach for the English version and the Japanese version has ten things we teach.  The reason being that Japanese are data vampires and they cannot get enough information.  For a Western audience, five things are about the maximum complexity they want to handle.  Actually three is probably better for them, but I push it a bit.  When I make this point about the data preference for Japanese, they respond with a nervous little laugh which says the “jig is up” and underlines the truth about presenting to Western and Japanese audiences.

This throws up a dilemma when presenting in Japan.  Who do we prepare the presentation for – ourselves as Westerners, who like simplicity, clarity, brevity or the massively data hungry Japanese audience?  The danger part in Japan is that when they prepare their presentations, they suit themselves and go all out for massive troves of data.  Just to really accentuate the cultural differences, they decide the smartest thing is to put as much data on each slide as physically possible.  To make it even more exciting, they leaven things up a bit with six colours and five different fonts.  It is a total mess. 

When we present we always have to begin with two thoughts – who is my audience and what is my main message for them.  If we have a Japanese only audience, then that is easy – we can go bananas on the amount of data we offer.  If it is a Western audience, we can be very zen like and chilled.  If it is a mixed audience that is a bit more complex.  What should we do? 

Whether it is a Japanese or Western audience, we should absolutely not make the mistake of going crazy and putting up too much information on the one slide.  The Golden Rule is one idea per slide and the clearer the access to the key information the better.  Slides cost nothing to make, so we can split information across five different slides, rather than the typical Japanese approach, of cramming all of the same information on to one slide.

For a Japanese audience, we need more data than we may think is necessary.  They want the references also to where the data came from, so we cannot miss that point, as it is critical for the credibility of what we present. Often audience members will check on what we say on screen and do it in real time.

I make a joke that data hungry people of any persuasion are comfortable and happy with three decimal places for numbers.  That would include many Japanese in the audience.  The usual Japanese approach though is to put the whole spreadsheet up on screen, even when there is a very small possibility that anyone seated in the room can actually see the numbers in the cells because they are so tiny.  We can put the spreadsheet up on screen, like screen wallpaper, to give the presentation some credibility.  We should then use animation and create a pop up cloud with a key number in it, which is overlayed on top of the spreadsheet.  Usually in a spreadsheet, there will only be a few numbers we want to highlight, so we select those out and place them in the animated pop up cloud, in large font, making it easy to see.  We can then talk to the numbers and make our point. 

One of the best ways to satisfy a Japanese data hungry audience is to take a two step approach.  Either have some additional physical materials prepared for distribution after the event or give them a URL, where they can access the data.  This makes the audience very happy to get the information. Never distribute the data before your talk though. If you do that, everyone will be focused on the data and not on you the speaker.  Hold it until the end and then make it available, so there is no competition with your message delivery.

One of the issues with data in Japan is that most official statistics are out of date by the time they are made available.  Usually they are three years old, so that is a big disadvantage when giving presentations, because as we all know a three year Covid period has completely turned everything upside down.  The only compensating factor is everyone suffers from the same fate with official figures.  The better approach is to look for recent industry sector surveys or more current private sector information releases, by research institutes etc.  It is very credibility sapping to see the speaker pop up data which is clearly out of date and expect us to believe what they are saying.  It happens all the time here, but let’s not be part of that crowd.

When presenting in Japan, always remember you cannot satisfy the need for more and more data, but you can present it in a way which maintains your professionalism and allows your key messages to break through all the clutter.

I was reading a post on LinkedIn by an American lady, who spilt coffee over her blouse, just moments before she was due to give a key presentation to a group of executives.  That got me thinking about how to handle these types of disasters which arise when we are presenting.  Most of them are tech related – nothing works, it partially works or it suddenly stops working.  Some disasters are down to the ambush presentations, for when we had no idea we would have to speak and suddenly we have to say a few words.  Some are things like black coffee over your nicely pressed white blouse or business shirt and it is totally obvious to everyone.

The key to avoiding ninety percent of disasters is to get to the venue early and check the tech.  If you get there early enough, there is a strong chance the tech geniuses on hand will be found and be able to fix it for you.  Often, with early morning presentations, the tech wizards are not in the building and so there is no solution – you are solo!  This is why it is always a good idea to print out your slides, as these are visible to you and form a navigation for you through the talk.  If you don’t have access to the copy of the slides, then just sit down and write down the main key words for each chapter for the talk.

I was attending a Harvard Business School week long course on Leading Professional Service Firms and one of the professors gave a three hour long lecture with no notes.  Well that is what it appeared to be, but the Prof was crafty.  It was one of those lecture theatres with tiered seating from top leading down to the bottom, where the stage was located.  As we were filing up the stairs out of the lecture theater, to go outside, I happened to notice a large piece of paper stuck to the back wall, with ten words on it.  Those ten words were his lecture notes and only he could see them.  It gave him the order and he just filled in the blanks with his talk.

We usually only get a chance to give our talk once and unlike the good Prof, we are not giving this talk every semester, so we don’t know the content cold.  It doesn't matter. Write down the key points you want to talk to and then use the list as your guide when giving the talk.  No one is going to jump to their feet and denounce you are a scoundrel and fraud because you are glancing down at your list.  They are in fact relieved that you are not reading the whole text to them and are only finding your place, as you proceed with the talk. 

Another thing is laziness.  I am inherently lazy and this particular talk was a packed lunch and a passport away in distance terms, so lugging my laptop that far seemed like a chore to avoid.  In a genius moment I thought, “I know, I will just take the USB and plug it into the host’s computer”.  I was an idiot.  What I didn’t consider was I use a Mac and they were using a different system and immediately the slide layout was thrown into chaos.  Fortunately, I do what I advise and I got there early, so I had time to reformat the whole slide deck.  I was sweating I can tell you and I got it done with fifteen seconds to spare! 

Rather than being ambushed, I suggest that you never let that occur because you are always prepared to speak at any event, with either a question or a comment.  We take anticipatory steps to protect ourselves. While you are sitting there, think what is a question you would like to ask and have that ready for the Q&A or in case some smarty pants MC decides to include you in the proceedings, without a by your leave.

If we have a personal presentation disaster such as the coffee incident, what do we do? This lady was vigorously trying to scrub the stain away, but it wasn’t working, so she had to present coffee stains and all.  I wouldn’t recommend just carrying on, as if everything was normal. I would acknowledge what has happened and then carry on.  Call it out and get it out of the way at the start.  I would say, “My apologies for adding a coffee stain to today’s proceedings, but let’s get going regardless”. 

If my brain wasn’t totally fried with nerves, shame and embarrassment, I might attempt some self-depreciating humour and say, “Today’s coffee stain on my shirt is sponsored by Blue Mountain from Kenya, it tastes great and wears exceptionally well.  Now, let’s get into today’s topic”. 

Humour is difficult at the best of times and being able to funny, when you have just spilt coffee all over yourself before a major audience is a big ask.  If you can pull it off, make yourself the target of the humor, rather than someone else.  Don’t say things like, “I would like to give a big shout out to the waiter for spilling coffee all over me just before I was ready to go on today”.  Take responsibility for your appearance, deal with it, then ignore it and carry on with aplomb.

In the end, no one cares.  Sure, you provided some light relief to their day, but they are all more focused on themselves, than on the fact you have coffee all over you.  Do a professional job and focus on engaging the audience with your key messages and your personal and professional brands will be safeguarded.

Presenting online is difficult.  Presenting in person is difficult. The new hybrid version is a combination of the worst of both online and in-person worlds for the presenter.  We teach presentation skills and one of the big breakthroughs for our class participants is the ability to get engagement with their audience.  In the online world of presenting this is almost impossible.  You become this tiny talking head, trapped in a tiny box on screen, every time you are using slides.  If there are no slides it gets better.  It also gets better if you stop the sharing function as you get a little more screen real estate. The trouble is this feature is clunky every time you want to go back to using the slides again and the interchanges are not very elegant. If you can have the speaker view only function working, then you get a lot of screen ratio focused on the speaker and that is good.  Usually though, we are using slides and so it is back to the tiny box for all of us on-screen.

The real dilemma with hybrid is where some members of the audience are sitting there right in front of you and the rest are scattered to the four winds, coming in via the hosting platform, be that Zoom or Teams or Webex or whatever.  There are issues with the camera angles, the camera zoom-in function and especially with the audio quality.  If the camera is mounted at the back of the room, then the audience on-line gets a wide shot of those in the room, as well as the speaker up at the front of the room. In this case, we are very remote from the people watching from home. This insignificance factor is intensified by the fact we are highly diminished on screen, stuck in that tiny little box and being presented at a distance to our audience.  Our facial expression power is greatly reduced and even our gestures are not having much impact, because they seem so small when on screen. 

I was giving a talk recently using the hybrid system and I realised this particular set up was for people who don't know how to present and actually favoured those who like to lecture.  By that I mean the speaker is there to convey information and isn’t thinking how to engage the audience.  The camera was mounted on a screen to my right, up high.  There was a distance between that camera and my face and if I moved toward my audience in the room, I found I was tracking away from the camera set up for those at home.  Don’t forget, for those viewing from home, I was doing all this while trapped in that tiny box on screen, because I was using slides.   

The set up meant I couldn’t move much from the spot and that spot was set behind a podium.  Now I don’t recommend moving around too much when speaking because it can be distracting from the message. However, being able to use your full body language is a powerful tool we don’t want to negate if we can avoid it and getting out from behind the podium is preferred.  In this case that wasn’t possible, so the audience in the room wasn’t getting full access to me as the speaker.

The easy out is to ignore the needs of the audience coming in online and just present to those in the room. For those at home the video presentation is like that for a third party. They are there watching remotely and there is zero connection and engagement with the person on screen.  If we go the other way, then we just engage those at home and don’t worry about those in the room.  That isn’t a very natural or an easy thing for a speaker to do, when all of these faces are sitting there and staring up at you in the room.

We have to accept that so far, we cannot easily get this to work perfectly when using two competing mediums.  Having said that, we can try and improve on it being a disaster by a couple of tweaks.  If the camera is close to us, then regularly switching our attention from those in the room, to those at home is possible.  We just look straight into the camera and we can speak directly to this segment of the audience.  We can make our point to this audience and then switch back to those in the room and make our next point.  The key is to look at the camera and not the screen.  We just treat the on-line camera as another member of the in-room audience.

Eye height is ideal for the camera mounting, so adjust it if you can, to get that perspective.  Make sure the audio quality is well served by having a good microphone set up, so that people online can hear you.  If the in-room audience is under 30 people, then you can get away with not needing a separate microphone for them. 

The better solution requires some preparation.  Have a monitor at the back so the speaker can see the remote audience and also themselves, with everyone equally trapped in their little boxes on-line.  The slide deck is also being shown through Zoom etc., so that the remote audience can see what is going on, while the live audience has a screen in the room they can see. Have the speaker fitted with a pin mic, so that they can move and not be trapped behind a podium or a desk. 

Have three video cameras set up.  One zoomed in on the speaker for a tight shot and one for a wider, more full body shot.  Have another set up at the front of the room to capture the shot of the audience. This requires a connection to a control box, where the camera angles can be switched easily by a controller.  The speaker now only has to engage the live audience. The camera angles are set up from the in-room audience perspective so that those at home get the same sense of the presentation as those present.  They are getting the video of the speech live and all the speaker has to do is engage by looking straight at the cameras while giving the speech, to help the remote audience feel included.  We spend six seconds each time looking at our live audience members and we just do the same with the two cameras facing us, as if they were also audience members.

The setup I had for my recent talk was not satisfactory and I felt both the remote and in-person audiences had been cheated.  I also felt my personal brand had been tarnished by this less than satisfactory experience.  When we are invited to speak we have little control over how the hosts arrange the venue and the equipment.  One of my take aways for next time was to engage the hosts more in depth on how they are going to handle this hybrid medium presentation.  If they are not going to do it in a way which builds, or at least maintains, my professional brand, then I would decline the offer to speak.  I might offer to give two talks - one for those in the room and do a separate one for those at home.  That isn’t always possible, but as the speaker, tasting the bitter ash residue of a failed, half-baked presentation isn’t great either.

Major money has been spent for decades by the Japanese Government, to improve the level of English in Japan and you would have to say with fairly limited success.  Japan faces a declining population and the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research estimates Japan’s population will decline by 21% to only 100 million by 2049.  At the same time Japanese companies are looking outside to grow their businesses.  This is good for Japan, except that when you become international, you need to deal in English.  Where are these English speakers going to come from?

Prior to the Lehman Shock there were over 80,000 Japanese students travelling abroad to study.  After the Lehman shock this number dropped down to 50,000 a year and has crawled back up to around 60,000. Lately, seventy per cent of those studying abroad only stayed for one month, which makes you wonder what they picked up in that short period.

Another worrying thing is that young Japanese are not interested in going abroad to study.  Over 60% of High School students said they would rather stay in Japan and over 50% of young people in general, said the same thing.  So where are the needed English speakers going to come from?

The answer is from inside our companies.  Larger companies will send their Japanese staff abroad to work and in the process they improve their international understanding and their language skills.  In the past, these returnees have been an alien force for companies, because they come back with a different mindset and the companies haven’t been flexible enough about integrating them into the mother ship.  This is getting better and where it hasn’t, these valuable employees jump ship to a better environment, that is to say our firms, where their talents, particularly language ability, can be fully utilised.

The general acceptance of mid-career hires has improved a lot in Japan too and we can all thank the 1999 collapse of Yamaichi securities for that. A lot of loyal, lifetime employees were thrown out on the street and were picked up by other companies, reducing the stigma attached to mid-career hires.  The Lehman Shock in 2008, the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor meltdown in 2011 and the pandemic since 2020 have all continued this trend of people losing their jobs through no fault of their own. Mid-career hiring has continued to be more accepted as a function of the modern world and this gives all of us better access to English speakers moving companies.

English language lessons are often prevalent inside organisations, as they work to help their staff do better in communicating with the outside world and with staff in Japan from overseas.  The problem for some of them though is no amount of English language lessons will convince them to speak up in meetings or to volunteer to present in English.  This is where they need additional help. 

When forced to present in English, the reflex action is to put all the text up on the screen, so that they can read it to their audience.  If that isn’t possible, then they print it all out and read it, word for word, while diligently looking down at the script, ignoring the audience altogether. “Painful” is the main word to describe this experience for those on the receiving end.  Why are they destroying their presentations in this way? 

The simple answer is perfectionism, driven by fear.  This is a country of no defects, no mistakes and no errors.  Making a mistake while speaking in English therefore is not possible, the loss of face unimaginable, so all manner of artifices have to be employed to avoid this inadequacy.  For the foreigners listening to mistakes made in English by Japanese speakers, this is usually nothing to worry about.  We are coming from multi-cultural societies and are used to non-native speakers making pronunciation errors and grammatical mistakes.  We just mentally rearrange what they said into the correct alignment and answer their questions or make our contribution to whatever they said, without missing a beat.  Basically, we are not demanding linguistic purity or perfection – this need is all in the heads of the Japanese when speaking English. 

We must help them by giving them the freedom to make mistakes, to free them from the chains of grammar, to overlook the butchering of certain words when spoken out loud.  We need to encourage them to concentrate on communication and not language. 

What I mean by that is putting their passion behind what they say.  To speak a little louder than normal, in order to sound more confident, which helps with the credibility of what is being said. To employ pauses to moderate their speaking speed, in case they get nervous and start prattling along.  To use the slide as a prompt and speak to the point with the English they have, rather than losing their audience by reading off the screen or script.  To try and engage their audience by making eye contact for at least six seconds and to try and make eye contact with as many in the audience as possible during the course of their talk.  In this way they can establish the feeling of a personal connection between speaker and listener which is completely independent of language capability.  To employ gestures to strengthen the point they are making and not to feel self-conscious about doing so.

We have limited access to those Japanese who have lived abroad and so have to make the most of those we have managed to attract into our companies.  Whatever level of English they have has to be worked on beyond English language classes, to enable them to present in a professional manner.  If this support is there, then they will become more comfortable dealing with foreign colleagues and speaking in English.  They will become fully functioning members of the team and able to work across borders and language barriers.

How could we lose track of buyers?  Unfortunately it is very easy.  That nice person we have been dealing with inside the company, the one with whom we have built a solid relationship, where the trust is brimming and the bonhomie is pumping, is transferred to another section or they leave the company for another job.  Suddenly we are left with nothing.  If it is an internal transfer, we may find there is a new person who decides they will put their own stamp on things. They bring in their own suppliers who are their favourites.  They have a competing established relationship or maybe they don’t like the cut of our jib.  If a new person is being hired in to replace the incumbent, then there will be a break in the traffic for a couple of months and before you know it, things have begun to drift and we have trouble making the connection with the new person. 

Maybe there is a global pandemic and everything shuts down for a couple of years.  The company has stopped spending on what we offer and when we go back to rekindle the relationship quite a lot has changed.  The people may be gone, the budgets may be gone, the strategy may be new and different.  Basically, we have to start again.  We know the history with the client, but often the new people we are dealing with have no idea who we are and we are basically doing a cold call to this company.  Some are working in the office and some are still at home.  Getting hold of people puts us in quandary. 

That iron wall of disinterest on the part of those answering the phone is there in all its confronting glory.  In Japan, if you don’t know the actual name of the person, you are almost guaranteed to never get through to the function you need to be speaking with.  “We will take a message and let them know” in my experience never translates into getting a call back, no matter how many times you call.  The junior person answering the phone fully believes their duty is to keep you as far away from their company as possible and they are incredibly diligent in that endeavour. If you ask them the name of the person performing that functional role they won’t tell you, as if this information was a major corporate secret and you are an industrial spy.

I remember there was a change of President in an international luxury firm here we had been dealing with and I tried to speak with the new President. Unfortunately, I didn’t know the name of the replacement and no matter how many times I called, the young woman answering the phone would block me and was most unhelpful.  Frustrating doesn’t even begin to describe the feeling.  I never did meet the new President 

What can we do?  If there is going to be an internal transfer, these usually take place every April in Japan, as that is the start of the new financial year.  It is a good practice to check with our champion that they are not getting transferred to a new section and we shouldn’t assume they will be staying put.  Every year we should get it into our calendar to check in on any likely staff movements which might effect them. 

If they flag a move, then we need to ask them to sprinkle the sacred water on our brow and anoint us into the bosom of their colleague who is taking over.  Being introduced by our champion is very powerful because it helps us to overcome any likelihood their replacement may go crazy and introduce our competitor.  There is an implicit obligation to honour what their predecessor was doing, otherwise it looks like an oblique criticism of their work.  When we meet the new person we have to start again and build the trust.  What personality style are they?  Highly analytical, time is money, have a cup of tea together or a big picture person?  What communication stye do they prefer?  We need to rejig everything. 

If there is a new person being recruited from outside then the whole effort becomes more difficult.  Our existing champion has left the building, so they have no influence any more on what happens.  How will we know when they have recruited the new person?  This is not very easy because when we call, we get that junior person who is highly motivated to tell us absolutely nothing about what is going inside the firm.  We can try and ask our champion to nominate someone in the same section or in a related section, who will take our call and who will share the name of the new person. 

Another tack is to ask the junior person who usually answers the phone to help us meet the new person.  We can explain that Suzuki san is leaving and we know that it will take a few months for the replacement to arrive and that we would like to call them every now and then and get an update, so that we can meet the new person.  Given we have a relationship with Suzuki san, there is a super slim chance they will agree to help us.

Sometimes our champion is the President of the organisation. As we know, corporate life can be brutal and suddenly your President champion is out of the organisation.  This has happened to me a couple of times recently. One was through a merger and the conquering acquirer ditched my guy, to put in their own guy.  In another case, I happened to see a LinkedIn post where a mutual friend was congratulating my champion on his new venture.  New venture?  What new venture?  I discovered he had quit the company and was now doing his own thing.  That happened very fast.  A third President, who had been very, very effective in his role and a great client, was suddenly gone.  I still don’t know why, but my champion has been pushed out. We need to keep a close eye on our champions!

All of this presupposes we are well organised.  We need to keep checking on the internal transfer plans for our champion and also to take action immediately we know they are leaving to be able to track the arrival of their replacement and find out the new name.  We need to keep up a regular contact with our President champion, because there are no guarantees of corporate loyalty or longevity anymore. None of this guarantees anything, but it is a lot better than trying to batter down the iron wall keeping us out.  Sales is hard anywhere but Japan just adds that patina of difficulty which makes everything much harder here.  Yes, it should be better, it should be different but it isn't. We have to adapt and be both agile and nimble.