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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.        Tell Stories

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

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

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

2.        Provide Insights

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

3.        Provide Valuable Data

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

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

4.        Engage Through Questions

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

5.        Third Party Endorsements

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

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

Seamless Slides and Stellar Delivery. Unlocking AI’s Potential in Presentations In Japan

Something I had never heard of before called “Steampunk” popped up in my TikTok feed. Now I write a daily blog published on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and X, called “Fare Bella Figura: Make a Good Impression, Be A Sharp Dressed Man” on the subject of classic men’s wear for business. Obviously, I am interested in how we men choose to master and control our first impressions in public.  Everyone is judging us based on how we appoint ourselves and that is before we have any chance to utter even one word.  If that is the case, and it is, why not make an effort to control that first vital impression? 

Anyway, that is another podcast subject, so back to today’s theme.  These Steampunk videos were AI created and featured seriously “killer handsome” men wearing very, very cool Victorian era clothing. The imagery was amazing, fantastical, and addictive.  Sadly, probably no one looked anything near that good in foggy Victorian London and few guys today could even come close to these AI images.  It is all fake, and this is an important point to keep in mind when we are dealing with AI.

This got me thinking about AI and fakery in the field of business presentations. Where is the line to discriminate between fakery and authenticity? Let’s look at some of the AI tools and see where they are leading us. Canva, Beautiful.ai, Visme etc., use AI to arrange our basic slides into very sophisticated output.  If we are not sure what style of visual presentation will best suit the content, then we can access help from Microsoft Designer and Google Slides AI.  If we have numbers to represent on screen, then Infogram and Datawrapper can help. The AI will suggest the best chart type based on the data. I don’t know that we need that much help though: for data over time use line graphs, for short-term comparisons use bar charts, and use pie charts for gauging proportional differences. 

If we are thinking about how to put the talk together, then ChatGPT, Claude and Jasper AI can craft a script as a base for us to work with.  If we want a formal tone, we can command it or go for a conversational tone, and the AI will respond accordingly.  If like me, you are not that red hot on grammar and punctuation, then Grammerly or ProWritingAid can make suggestions.  They don’t always get it right, so we have to maintain a certain amount of knowledge to intervene when needed. It is handy though to be reminded that you have started the last three sentences with the same word, so that we can introduce more variety into our prose.

I haven’t tried them myself yet, but I am told that Orai and Speeko will analyse my delivery in real time.  I can get feedback on pacing, tone, filler words, modulation and pronunciation.  I had to give a major keynote recently to an elite audience and if I had been more organised, I could have tried them out. I will use them the next time during my rehearsals. 

I wonder if they give us Good/Better feedback, rather than confidence sapping critique?  By the way, a word to the wise, if you ever ask anyone to listen to your practice sessions, instruct them to give you only Good/Better feedback.  Otherwise, their first inclination will usually be to criticise what you are doing and demotivate you.

I have seen some speakers using Mentimeter and Slido, which are AI driven to facilitate real time audience interaction.  We can run instant polls, pose questions, and get feedback during our presentation.  We can do the same things analog too, but it looks cool to use these tools. I have seen simple bats with “Yes” on one side and “No” on the other used to gauge audience agreement with whatever the speaker is proposing and it works well. We can simply ask people to raise their hands in response to their agreement with the question or not and no tech involved. Personally I go for simplicity when presenting.

I do recommend keeping a hawk-eyed accounting of the faces of the people in the audience. If you think that is too old school, you can try Beyond Verbal and Emotional AI.  These tools will interpret audience facial reactions and voice tones to help you understand the engagement levels of the audience. All great stuff but I find watching their faces carefully does the same thing, and it is real time.

There is no doubt AI is here to stay and capacity will only broaden and improve.  We have to keep in mind, though, that these are just tools and not a substitute for our role as the speaker.  I actually don’t want my AI enhanced slide deck to be so spectacular that the audience stops watching me and becomes totally engrossed with what is on screen.  We, the speaker, have to be the center of attention and the tools are at our command, rather than commanding us. That is why I don’t like using videos.  If they are to be used keep let’s them super short.

Like those handsome dudes in the Steampunk videos, the presentation is superb, but the AI is fake and we can never match what is being presented.  We can dress ourselves in the same Victorian way, using fine fabrics, but we will never be that handsome and cool looking. We need to keep AI in perspective too, not get carried away with the tool set and forgetting about the human dimension aspect of the delivery. We, the presenters, must always be the main game, the core talent and the real focus for our audience.

The tech has to be used in moderation and the speaker must be soley placed in the spotlight. Don’t let the AI become the star like in those Steampunk videos I mentioned.  We reserve that position for ourselves, always, everywhere and we allow no AI substitutes for us.

We see a lot written about public speaking and presenting. Usually it is on the assumption we are the sole speaker or one of a line-up of speakers who wow the audience one after another. Interestingly, a lot of speakers I see these days are often members of expert panels, herded together by the MC and taken through the key points of the topic.  I also notice that none of them are much good in this role and almost no wowing is going on ever.  The irony is we are on the panel because we are an expert in our field, but no one bothers to inform us how to perform our expert role when being a panellist.

Whether we are the solo speaker commanding the audience from behind a podium or prowling around the stage or sitting down in a row of other speakers, the fundamental things which work best don’t change all that much.  The key thing I have noticed which is missing most from panellists is projection.  When we are standing, we have more access to our body language and to voice projection.  We are also elevated in stature too, so we are readily visible to the audience from top to toe.  We feel more powerful when standing, and this comes across in how we deliver our talk.

When we are seated, we are literally cut off at the knees.  We are hunkered down in our chair, sitting low and are physically constrained.  It has a deleterious psychological impact as well. This seated position is the format we use all the time for casual chats over coffee.  This positioning sets up a mentality that is relaxed and conversational.  Nothing wrong with a conversational speaking style, however the associated soft volume we use is the issue. 

Of course we have been handed mics, but most people are not used to using them and often don’t know how to get the most out of the tech.  They usually don’t get a chance to work with the mics, which is something you would get as a single speaker when you are there setting up your laptop, etc., before the event starts. Also, holding a mic means we have tied up one arm, so our gestures are handicapped, compared to when we are standing using a stand mic or a pin mic.

In short, we become small on stage and we stay that way throughout.  I teach speakers to use their ki (気) or intrinsic energy when speaking to reach all four corners of the venue.  Projecting your energy is magnetic with audiences and we can deeply connect with the crowd.  Sitting low in a chair makes this energy projection much harder. You really have to be aware of the disadvantage you are at and you need to compensate for it.  If you don’t know, then you don’t know and you just become insignificant on stage very quickly.

I recommend having a strategy for your panellist presentation.  I would strongly recommend you make it your goal to connect with everyone in the audience.  We do this one person at a time.  What we see speakers doing, though, is looking out at everyone at the same time, at each other and at the MC in particular. They are not thinking of connecting with the audience at all, at the individual level. 

Use six seconds of contact with each person.  Don’t look at the other panellists or the MC – ignore them completely and only spend your time looking at the people in the room. Pick up one person in the audience at random and stare straight into that person’s eyes as you speak to them. At a distance, down the back, the ten people seated around that person all think you are looking at them, so the impact is magnified. 

When you look out at the audience, break the room up into zones – left, middle, right and then front half and back half.  This gives us six zones to work on and we make use of this zone breakdown to engage as many people as we can during our remarks.  In a minute we can engage with six people. In three minutes we can engage with eighteen people, and if we pick up the ten people around, then we have one hundred and eighty people engaged.

Sit super tall and on the front edge of the chair, so that you are physically thrusting your body language toward the audience.  Direct your ki energy to the very back wall of the room when you speak. 

Make the most of the mic and use a strong voice, without yelling or creating static with the mic, to project your energy to the audience. Hold the mic a little out in front of you and then speak across the top of the mesh.  I have seen panellists actually encompass their entire palm completely over the mesh, which totally defeats the efforts of the sound engineers, who have slaved over perfecting the tech.

Use the other hand for large gestures.  Remember, you are tiny up on the stage and the chair has made you short, so you have to overcompensate for the lack of physicality.  Don’t be afraid to go big with your gestures.  Way down the back, it still looks small.

We want our three arrows coalescing together: (1) one-on-one eye contact for six seconds with specific individuals in the audience, (2) strong energy projection through the medium of our body language and voice and (3) the power of our larger than usual gestures. All of our attributes are in sync and congruent with what we are saying.

When we do this, we instantly self-select as a real professional in presenting skills, stand out from our Lilliputian colleagues on stage with us, including the MC, and we become totally memorable, whereas everyone else is immensely forgettable.

I had two interesting experiences last week.  One was watching the aspirants for a top position in a Chamber of Commerce go head-to-head for the votes of the members by giving talks about why they should be elected.  I love attending these types of events because as an instructor of public speaking; I know there are always a lot of life and business lessons about to be revealed.  They had five minutes each, which is quite long actually. 

With that amount of leeway, there is a tremendous opportunity to use storytelling to reinforce key points and make numbers memorable. Sadly, our ambitious leaders didn’t use these tools at their ready disposal. Telling us about your resume is boring.  Telling us what you are going to do is doubtful.  Quoting numbers to back up any claims doesn’t really resonate.

How about a different tack?  Why not tell a series of stories which underline your past contributions in human terms and bring ideas to flesh and blood reality?  They could have talked about the impact they had through the prism of individuals they touched through their efforts and decisions.  Putting flesh on the bones of the activities makes them all the more compelling and relatable.  Any initiative has consequences and some outcomes.  Tell us what happened to the people affected.  How did it improve their lives or business?  Were there any concrete gains which flowed from an initiative you took?

Even in the case of a future decision, there will be impacts and we should take those possibilities and weave in a hypothetical outcome and how it would play out for those benefiting from it.  Actually, it hasn’t happened yet, but we take decisions for change on the basis that what we are going to do will bring in something better and different.  We can use a fictitious story to describe that future, even if it isn’t reality as yet. We outline a future which hasn’t been delivered yet, but if elected, we will make this story a reality and make it happen.

Wrapping up numbers in stories is a great way to make sure the achievements we are publicising register in the brains and memories of the audience.  We hear the numbers, but we recall stories. If the numbers are woven into the story, we will be able to recall them and therefore they will have greater impact.  Every time you are going to nominate numbers, think how can I wrap these in a story which involves people and make the number more real?

The other missing piece was emphasis on what was being said.  Both speakers kept the same volume and power throughout their five minutes.  However, not every word or phrase has the same value or impact.  Some elements can be highlighted by turning a vocal lamp up to high beam on the keywords.  When we hit a word or phrase with power or by employing a secretive audible whisper, we project the power of that content above everything else.  This is what makes it stand out. 

I was reminded of this when listening to a classical music piano solo performance.  The Japanese pianist was excellent and the pieces of music he chose had their crescendos and lulls as he worked his magic on the keys.  Between some of the pieces, he would take the mic and make a few comments about what he was playing and why.  What I found interesting was that he was Johnny One Note when he took the mic.  He had just been employing crescendos and lulls in his performance with his instrument, but not when he spoke.  Every word was given the same treatment and therefore no particular points were highlighted.  He didn’t carry forth his magic on the piano to his speaking and didn’t use the same amazing tool for his talk as he employed in his music.  For him, they were unrelated.

The problem is a lack of training in how to do public speaking and a lack of self-awareness. Our pianist didn’t bridge from what he did on the keys of the piano to what he could do with his vocal cords.  I would extend the same observation to other musicians who use their vocal cords as their primary instrument–singers–and observe the same phenomenon.  During their comments between songs, the singers will employ a flat range in their voice.  This is just after just having hit high and low notes in their performance.  Like the pianist, they don’t seem to connect the two ideas together.

As speakers, we should always be looking to tell stories to make our points more accessible.  We should also tell those stories employing highs and lows in our vocal range to make them more interesting.  Nobody else is doing this, so we have an uncontended open field of possibilities right in front of us, ripe for the taking.

In Australian politics, they call it a “Dorothy Dixer”.  This is when one of your confederates from your own political party ask a ruling Minister a real soft ball question in the parliament during Question Time, to allow for a fully pre-prepared answer. Dorothy Dix was an American newspaper advice columnist who would answer reader’s questions, and some say she sometimes would create her own questions to answer.

At political rallies, there has been a similar set up where a stooge or a plant in the audience asks the speaker a pre-arranged question, but tries to make it look spontaneous.  At business events, the speaker may have organised a friend to pop a question they want to answer to reduce time for questions they don’t want to answer or to make themselves look awesome. In Japan, these people asking the questions are called “Sakura” and they play the same role.

I know this goes on because from time to time I am asked to be a Sakura at a business presentation.  I am infamous around town for asking the first question.  This happened by accident and now if I don’t ask the first question, people will ask what is wrong with me?  Many years ago, I did have a question I wanted answered and before I could register my enquiry, the MC said “no more questions” and I was left suspended high and dry. 

I realised I could never predict when the last question would make it to prominence, but I could 100% reliably predict when the first question would come up.  I also realised that in Japan, at least, there is always a pause when the MC throws the floor open to questions, as many people are reluctant to ask their question immediately. This provides the opportunity to be the first with no competition and the MC is forced to take your question.

Sometimes the organisers or the speaker will approach me before things kick-off and ask if I can get things going by asking the first question.  They fear that flat, spine decalcifying, stone motherless silence when they call for questions.  It seems a damming verdict on the speaker that they were a dull dog, so dull in fact that no one wants to hear one more word from them on this subject. 

I can only recall one case where I was actually asked to lodge a specific question, so normally they leave that part of the equation to me.  I ask questions anyway and unless the question itself is stupid, too self-serving or cringy, and I already know the person asking, I am usually happy to help.

The speaker may have a desire to address an area of the subject which they couldn’t get to in the talk and may ask for a question which allows them to talk more about that topic.  That would be a reasonable request, because not everyone in the audience may be an expert and be able to fill in the blanks across a broad subject.

Should you as the speaker organise a “Sakura” for your talk?  I don’t think this is prohibited, but there are a few caveats.  You, as the speaker, must be prepared to answer audience questions and the “Sakura” role is not there to provide cover for you from legitimate questions, by stealing the question airtime.

The question shouldn’t be a soft ball job either.  It should be a question that seeks more information in a serious way. Asking cunning variations on, “why are you so awesome” or “why are you the leading global expert on this subject?”, would be ridiculous choices and the jig is up immediately and everyone involved in the charade looks stupid.

In Japan, it is often the case that audiences are shy to ask the first question, but feel emboldened when some other brave “first mover” grips the thistle in their teeth and launches forth. Asking questions in the West has no stigma and indicates an interest in learning more from the speaker.  These are all seen as positive attributes. 

In Japan, asking a question has five inferences: 1. The speaker was stupid and their talk impenetrable, 2. They were a poor communicator and the audience couldn’t follow the point, 3. You the questioner are too stupid to understand what the speaker said, 4. You want hog the limelight for yourself, stand out and try to impress everyone with how smart you think you are, by asking that question, 5. You have a legitimate question and the speaker was so amazing you want to learn more because you are a serious student of this topic.

Most of the weight in Japan is on the negative side about asking questions. Therefore, sometimes we may need to get the ball moving with a question to the speaker to give permission to others to ask their secretly held question. Another suitable device is that if there is that deafening silence after questions are called for, to pose and then answer your own question.  “A question I am often asked is…”. It has the same effect, gets things moving inviting the next question and you become your own “Sakura”.

There are 6 elements we should check when putting our visuals together.  Review this checklist before you start building the slide deck and your presentation will be much more impactful and successful.

1.        Make sure you are boss of the visuals and not the other way around

Often, the speaker is overshadowed by the visuals and everyone’s attention is directed toward the screen.  We must remember that the screen has limited persuasion power compared to using our facial expressions. We can express disbelief, shock, bemusement, horror, joy, doubt, concentration, scepticism, engagement, hostility, agreement, happiness, etc.  No screen can do that and we should be combining our words with our facial expression to really drive home the point we want to make.

We must make the visuals our servant and not allow them to become our master. You see a lot of presenters who are almost invisible, because they have yielded control to what is up on the screen.  We should stand stage left to the screen because we read from left to right.  We want the audience to be captured by our voice and facial expression and then they look at what is on the screen, rather than just looking at the screen and ignoring us. 

If you find that the audience are not looking at you, just stop speaking.  That pattern interrupt will draw them all back to your face to find out what is going on.  We should also be using our eyes to look directly at members of the audience for six seconds and speak to them One-On-One.  That technique has a powerful magnetic grip on our listeners. However, be careful, we can only hold that pressure for six seconds per person or it becomes too intrusive.

2.        Tiny fonts are not useful

We have all seen it.  The presenter puts up a slide and the font sizes are tiny.  Just to rub insult into the wound, they sometimes say dumb things like “I know you cannot read this but….”.  But what?  Why on earth do we have to sit there and look at a screen that we cannot read?   

The Golden Rule with any slide is that if the viewer cannot get the main point within two seconds, then the slide is too complicated.  This is especially the case with fonts.  Make sure the fonts are big enough to read easily and if there is a fear of not being able to get them to the right size, then that slide probably needs to be broken into two or more slides.  This is usually the solution for most slide shows.  Get the information on to more slides and then we can easily enlarge the detail on the slide to make it easier to read.

One way to check the sizes are correct during the production process is to print out the slide and place it on the floor in front of you when standing.  If you cannot read the detail, then more work is needed to adjust the size so that you can read it at a distance.

3.         Graphs, graphs and more graphs

Seeing six graphs on a screen is not uncommon in many presentations.  The obvious problem with this idea is that the fonts and numbers are so small, it is impossible to read what is on the graph. In general, the Chart Golden Rule is one graph per slide.  That allows us to make the graphs large enough to be easy to parse.

Bar charts are a great tool for comparisons. We can contrast results spread over one or two years.  More than that and the bar charts become hard to read. 

If we need to see a comparison over longer periods of time then line charts are the best for that.  Again, we should probably cap things at three variable because once we get over that number it looks like spaghetti and you have trouble following what is going on.  

Pie charts are good for comparing shares of something.  Two pie charts are the limit in this regard, because after that it gets hard to see what is on the screen. 

4.        White space is good

A lot of presentations are trying to cram all the information on to one slide.  The various contents are now competing for our attention.  Leaving a lot of white space on the screen is an excellent way of highlighting key information and forcing the audience to concentrate on the one thing we want to emphasise.  Putting up one number in large font or one word is very powerful.  There is only one thing to look at and we can talk to that number and elaborate on why that number or word is significant.

5.        Use one photo and attach some mystery

“A  picture is worth a thousand words” is a great saying and very true. It really allows us to make our point. We could carry this to the extreme and put up lots of photos, but we are defeating our aim of getting our message across. We are splitting our audience’s attention too thinly.

If we can include people in the photo, then that is even more attractive as we love to see people’s faces compared to cityscapes or landscapes. We are drawn to look at people’s faces. Knowing that, we can find a photo which has that element and which will assist us to make our key point. 

For example, if we were talking about the problem of homelessness in San Francisco we could put up some graphs tracing the development of the problem over time.  We could also put up a photograph of the homeless and the latter will have a lot more impact than the graph.  We can make the same point, but the power is totally different. Always think about where we can use photos to make our point.

We could put up a photo and label it to explain why this photo is important.  An even better idea is to tease our audience and just put up a photo and that is all.  The audience are looking at it wondering what it means and that ensures we have their 100% attention for when we explain the significance behind the photo.

6.        Control the colour exuberance

Too much detail on a slide is bad because we make the audience work hard to understand what they are looking at.  Once we introduce more than two colours on a slide, we have increased the degree of difficulty of comprehension substantially.  Yes, a couple of colours can provide some contrast and relief from the boredom of just one colour throughout the presentation. We shouldn’t go crazy though and assume more is better. As with everything in the visual presentation world “less is more”.  So we need to be careful with colour usage and not let it distract from our key message.

Most people don’t do a good job of their presentations. They spend most of their preparation time on the slide deck construction, rather than allowing important time for rehearsal.  Use this checklist to make sure your slides are adding value to your talk. By avoiding these mistakes you can create the time needed for rehearsal and your talk will be all the better for it.

It's been a while since I attended a highly technical talk by serious experts. The audience, however, was not as expert, so the two speakers knew they were addressing a less specialized group. Complex topics require special handling.Piling a lot of data onto one slide is a big no-no, but that didn’t stop our intrepid, geeky speakers. One of them, a retired professor, you’d think would be better at this given he taught it at a university. Perhaps I’m too optimistic about academics and technical specialists having actual teaching abilities compared to their true passion—research.

Most of the slides were terrible.There was one slide, in particular, that showed a key timeline and included important projections into the future. It looked amazing.Yet, I still wonder what it said. The font was so tiny, and there were so many colours.  Audience members like me had no ability to decipher the actual content. This slide was crucial, given the future implications of the technology they were discussing.

So folks, the simple lesson here is to carefully consider how you present information on-screen. If it’s too complex, provide handouts so attendees can at least grasp what is going on. If you are going to show difficult content on-screen, make the fonts large, and keep the slides simple and easy to understand. Also, please scale back on the wild color palettes.

As I sat there, I thought that horizontal timeline could have been magnified on the next slide to highlight key turning points in the continuum. It could have been like a blow-up of a part of the timeline, with the rest of the sequence becoming background wallpaper. The key components would be magnified on-screen for easy digestion, or they could have just broken up the timeline into larger sections on separate slides. None of this is complex.These were seriously well-educated, intelligent people giving this presentation. So, there's no doubt this is not beyond them. But if you don’t get it, you don’t get it.

The subject is absolutely topical and exciting, yet the talk was very dry. Like many technical people, they got lost in the tech aspects.This might be fine for a presentation to scientists or specialists, but we, the audience, were not as familiar with the finer points. In this case, a different approach should have been taken.

The visuals need to be more simplified. Key points should be kept clear and accessible. Analogies are a wonderful tool for taking complex, difficult subjects and making them clearer. For example, strategic plans are like gelato. Initially, this seems puzzling—what’s the connection between ice cream and business planning? But just like with gelato, we have many flavors and options. We don’t know which is best until we taste them. Similarly, a strategic plan might seem comprehensive, but we won’t know if it works until we execute it.

The speakers also missed the opportunity to use storytelling.

We were stuck at a theoretical and technical level, with no stories to elevate the key points.This area of science is full of stories—about the scientists, breakthroughs, triumphs, and setbacks. But we didn’t hear any of that. There was no “flesh on the bones” of the science.Think about how complex technical subjects are presented in movies or TV dramas. Progress is always depicted through a rich tapestry of stories.That talk was just yesterday, but right now, I can’t recall the name of even one key person who contributed to the rise of the technology, nor do I have any stories to tie the information together. This is key: stories are like glue.They help us connect complex topics over time by creating a narrative about who was involved, what they did, where and when it happened, and the outcomes.

Drama grabs our interest and holds our attention.Without stories, it was hard for the speakers to connect with their non-technical audience. Even harder to make the key messages memorable. Hammering the audience with facts and details doesn’t ensure the message gets through. I can’t recall any of the statistics they shared. Had they wrapped those numbers in a story, I might remember. So, technical presenters, be sure to craft stories we can all recall later.

Make sure that what’s presented visually is simplified so we can easily absorb the key points. Analogies are a great tool for explaining complex subjects and should be in every technical speaker’s toolbox. Having an amazing brain and decades of research experience won’t help if you can’t engage your audience and convey your message effectively.

As a vigorous networker, constantly in motion, always looking for new clients, I attend a lot of events.  Usually there are speakers or panel discussions or sometimes both.  In this regard, I probably see over 100 people a year presenting in Japan. One consistent theme across all of these presentations is the lack of understanding of the “ba” (場) when speaking. This “ba” in Japanese means the physical locale or place or occasion, in this context. What I notice is that the speakers are confusing the “ba” as a presenter.

They address the audience in the same voice strength, body language projection and gesture application, as they would use if they were sitting together having a chat over coffee with their friend.  You might wonder why they would do that when they are there facing an audience of fifty people or more?  Why can’t they scale up what they are doing to suit the much larger assembly?  Don’t they feel the need to engage the entire audience once they have been given the shot to address the masses?

Basically, they have no clue because they have never received any training on presenting. Their only reference point is coffee chats with a friend and they just keep that template for the larger occasion. Now I am sure they have seen someone present professionally, but I feel there must be a mental disconnect between what they are witnessing and how they see themselves. 

Perhaps even that is too optimistic for Japan, because they may have never seen a professional presentation here because they are so rare. Regardless, if they have ever seen a professional presentation they were just observers rather than students.  They didn’t see what was going on as a model.  They were just passive audience members observing someone else going through the motions.  Once you have been trained, you automatically become a critic and keen observer of what the speaker is doing, because you have a range of relevant reference points to compare against.

The combination of panelists and speakers I saw in a recent event had a common theme – no differentiation of the “ba” for this occasion and chatting over coffee with a friend.  The voices were quiet.  The energy low to non-existent.  The body language turned off completely.  No passion, no highlights, no take-aways, no persuasion attempted. It was as flat as a pancake. 

Yet here were a large number of company representatives giving their ideas on a particular subject, without much in the way of real commitment or passion.  A number of them were youngish, if late twenties- early thirties counts as youngish.  Is that an excuse?  I don’t think so.  Whatever age they were, no one on that stage had given much thought to what they were doing and what they wanted to achieve. It was obvious that representing their firm well as professionals was not in their minds.  And yet here they were – on stage speaking to us in the audience.

Just speaking more strongly would have made a big difference.  Not yelling.  They had microphones so there was no need for yelling but there was a big need to more vocal power and especially hitting key words.  It was all a series of monotone deliveries, one after another.  There was no passion for their subject or their point of view and that is a death sentence in the persuasion business.

No storytelling either.  They gave up such a major opportunity to connect with their audience by telling personal stories which would have made the point they were getting at.  It was just a lot of talking without much to say really and so very disappointing.  Engaging the crowd was not in their minds whatsoever.  This makes sense if coffee chats are your only reference point for presenting.  One-on-one over coffee you don’t have to project yourself, engage the other person or lift your voice. 

The average person is just not trained to know what to look for.  At the event, I was chatting with a female lawyer about how poor lawyers are as speakers at their own seminars where they are trying to find clients.  She had no idea what I was talking about.  As it turned out the hosting firm’s senior legal counsel gave a speech at the event and afterwards I referenced it to my lawyer companion, as an example of what the problem is with the way lawyers are trained.  She had just seen the same speech, but she couldn’t distinguish what was missing.  Like most people she had no clue what to look for.  I gave her some examples from the talk and I could see a glimmer of a lightbulb going on inside her mind.  A faint glimmer to be sure.

The coffee chat “ba” and the stage “ba” are totally different.  On stage we have to be more.  Bigger, bolder, louder, more energized, more persuasive , more engaging.  We have to be “on”, rather than passive and acting like a spectator, when in fact we are the main act.

This seems a ridiculous construct – of course we when we are presenting in business we shouldn’t lie. However, look at what is happening in the rest of the world.  Kellyanne Conway introduced “alternative facts” into the American political debate to explain lies.  Donald Trump rails against the fake media and fake news. It would appear that many people, including leading Republicans, think he lies a lot, and yet half of the American electorate support him.  Are we now in a free fall where anything goes? I know this is dangerous territory to wade into, because to paraphrase basketball legend and entrepreneur Michael Jordan, “Republicans also buy sneakers and corporate  training”.

Donald Trump wrote in the Art Of the Deal that, “I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration – and a very effective form of promotion”. This idea is often linked to German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels quote, “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth”.

So when we are presenting, is it allowed to introduce exaggeration?  You could answer that question by applying a gauge on the extent of the exaggeration.  Is a small exaggeration acceptable or is the line struck such that no exaggerations are allowed?  In Japan, at least, I would suggest that no one in business uses any “truthful hyperbole” or “alternative facts”, or exaggeration whatsoever.

This whole focus on fake news has created an audience full of cynics and doubters.  We all feel it. Every single day, I receive multiple fake emails and messages trying to get me to click on their attachment, or give them information so that they can rob me.  These fakes are getting better and better in sophistication.  More and more often, I have to contact the firm they are claiming to be from, to check they actually sent me that email or not. Back in the day, you took your chances outside with highwaymen and pirates. Today the modern era equivalents come over the internet through your email provider.  As a consequence, we are all highly tuned up on fakery and dirty dealings.

As a presenter, if we start exaggerating, our audience will doubt not just that point we are making, they will doubt every subsequent word which comes out of our mouth.  They will also warn all of their friends and colleagues to be careful of us, because we cannot be trusted, because we are a bold faced liar.

As presenters, recognising that the world is spiralling further and further down, with political discourse peppered with lies, we have to differentiate ourselves or some of this mud will get attached to us as well.  The way to do that is to offer proof, evidence, data, statistics, testimonials demonstrations, exhibits etc.  If we show a slide with a reference to some data, we need to include the source of that data.  Probably 99% of the audience won’t check it, but it doesn’t matter, we have to presume they will all check it and we need our information to be tight.  If we make a claim we have to be able to back it up with proof that what we are saying is true.  We have to see the audience in front of us as one filled with battle hardened sceptics and supreme doubters and prepare accordingly.

We must also realise this is only going to get worse and that the doubt factor will be applied to more and more of what we say.  We have to be very, very careful about making statements which stand on their own.  An opinion is fine and we have to flag it as exactly that, an opinion.  Every other statement needs to be surrounded by provable evidence.

The key is in the preparation.  We have an important message we want to get across.  What are the main points we will make and what proof do we offer to back up our claims.  That evidence has to be verifiable and cannot be “alternative facts” or “truthful hyperbole” or subtle exaggeration.  Depending on the situation we might distribute some additional documents which nominate the sources for what we are saying to head off any doubt arising in the minds of the listeners.  As things degrade further, we can be proactive about it, rather than trusting that people will take what we say at face value. As I mentioned earlier with slides, we definitely have to include the references to any data or claims we are making.

“If in doubt leave it out” is always good advice when stitching the presentation together.  If I see a slide with a reference to statistics from 2019, I wonder why is the speaker showing such outdated data and why can’t they offer something more credible.  Are they cunning, lazy or stupid?  Now, both their point and they themselves are firmly placed in my “highly doubtful box”. 

In Japan, by the way, official government statistics are usually three years out of date.  What should be an official, reliable source of information is made dubious by its antiquity.  We have to be very careful about claims we make and the proof we offer to back them up.  As usual, the Americans are leading the way for the rest of the world to become highly sceptical about what we are all being told. This pungent mud can stick to us as presenters too, no matter where we are located.

Tell the truth, back up what you say with verifiable data and avoid “alternative facts”, “truthful hyperbole” and exaggeration.  This is the path forward if we want to be regarded as credible presenters.

It was a big affair.  The entire Shinsei Bank retail staff were assembled for a series of updates from the Division Heads on what each Division was doing and where they were going.  One of my erstwhile lifelong banker colleague Division Head gave his presentation.  It was dull, monotone, low energy and not engaging in the least.  Unfortunately for him, it was my turn next.  By this time, thanks to my previous work as a Senior Trade Commissioner and Consul-General for Australia,  I had given hundreds of public speeches, mainly in Japanese, to audiences of all different stripes in Japan.

I knew how to give this talk in a way which would be interesting for the audience and in a way in which I could grab their attention.  My sharp elbowed colleague instantly recognised there were light years between his miserable efforts and my professionalism. 

Did he commit to self-improvement, to build the biggest skyscraper in town, to become excellent in public speaking?  No.  He sought out ways to pull down all the other skyscrapers, so that his could be the tallest instead.  He informed all in earshot, except for me of course, that “Greg is all style and no substance”. 

When this comment was duly reported to me, honestly, I just burst our laughing.  Not in an exaggerated thespian, ironic way, but a genuine belly laugh, because the idea was so ridiculous, so preposterous, so revealing about his insecurities.  I had given enough public speeches by that time to know it wasn’t just style that was engaging my audiences. 

What was ironic was that originally I was scouted to leave Austrade and join Shinsei’s Retail Bank, because of a speech I gave to the American Chamber of Commerce here in Tokyo.  In fact, that speech changed the direction of my career, although I didn’t realise it at the time.

Recently, I was reading an article by Kathryn Brownell in the Financial Times, where she referenced the first televised debate between Kennedy and Nixon in 1960.  Nixon didn’t understand the medium of television as well as Kennedy.  Kennedy saw the opportunity to speak directly to voters, rather than just relying on highlighting policy differences. I recall some reports I have come across at different times, which said that those who only listened to the debate, gave it to Nixon, while those who watched, gave it to Kennedy.

Nixon certainly made the complaint that the televised debate format brought in a new era where “politicians focused on style over substance”.  It was a dividing line between eras and the future belonged to those who mastered the skills needed to be successful with the new medium. Kamala Harris killed Donald Trump in the recent debate and that wasn’t just style and no substance.  She was extremely well prepared and brought all guns blazing to what Trump thought was going to be a knife fight.

So what about businesspeople presenting here in Tokyo?  I recall coaching a Japanese President who forsook the opportunity to do a professional speech, because he felt his vendor audience wouldn’t be ready for it.  He knew what to do but chose to not do it. That was highly perplexing to me as his coach, but standing out in Japan is never a popular course of action. He just gave the same old boring monotone performance, because that was the norm for his company and industry. It was painful for me to watch and know what he could have done instead.

I saw another local businessperson give a very good performance, as he was a skilled presenter.  However, when I sat back and thought about what he was saying, as opposed to just being mesmerised by how he was saying it, I felt there wasn’t much meat in that speech. 

Before Covid, I saw Shigeru Ishiba, a Liberal Democratic Party hopeful, currently  trying to secure the Party Presidency and thereby become Prime Minister, give a talk as part of a panel discussion. He was slumped in his chair, looking bored and his comments were lifeless, monotone and dull.  However, when I closed my eyes and listened to what he was actually saying, it had more impact. If he wants to run this country, I hope he has improved as a communicator since then.

It is obviously not a choice between style and substance.  We need both, and I want to replace the word “style” with “professionalism”, to make the point clearer.  Talking crap fluently is no help and neither is being valuable, but not being heard.  The big difference between Harris and Trump, I believe, was in their understanding of the occasion and the preparation for it.  This is precisely the same for us in business.  If we spend all of our time crafting the slide deck and none on the rehearsal, then our talk will not be optimised.

Observe any public talks today and even the good speakers face some people in the crowd who have whipped out their phones and are no longer concentrating on what is being said.  Having great content, which is ignored by the audience, because we are unskilled and so boring is no better than turning up with weak content.  We fail to have any impact. 

Let's wrap our numbers up in stories, so that people can remember them. Let’s work on our professional delivery skills, so that we can keep the listeners with us, from start to end. Let’s defeat the mobile phone, as the escape alternative to what we are saying.  By the way, it will only get worse. We have no time to lose to improve our communication capability.

Recently I was teaching a class of technical experts to have more impact when they spoke.  Like many specialists, their areas of expertise required great detailed knowledge and experience and they have to interact with other non-expert parts of the organisation.  In their case, they have to report to senior management and they also had to deal with the sales team.  The brief from HR was that the senior leaders didn’t take sufficient note of their reporting and advice because of the way they were delivering the information.  Salespeople were also pushing back on the direction they were receiving and not accepting what they were being told either.  They needed more impact when they spoke.

When we started the session, we discussed with them the areas where they wanted to improve.  Many people mentioned being more clear and succinct when they spoke. They felt that the complexity of what they were trying to convey sometimes made it difficult for the listeners.  Also, rambling during their explanation was identified as an issue.

One thing which I noticed was common across the group was their level of energy when they spoke.  They were bringing the same voice strength they would employ when having a chat over coffee with their friend to their presentations.  In Japan, this is a very typical area for more work needed when we are teaching presentation skills.  When we are speaking up in a meeting or standing before a group, we have to switch gears and bring a lot more vocal range to the content of what we are saying.

Not every word should have the same voice strength, though, but that is what a lot of people do.  They give keywords the exact same voice power, as they do less important words and phrases in the sentence.  This is highly democratic, but not very useful when trying to get our message across. We need to either hit those keywords with more volume or we need to strip the volume out and make it an audible whisper.  Both will work.  Applying the same strength throughout the sentence from go to whoa is the death knell of messaging.

Voice modulation is critical to keeping an audience with us. Listeners are so easily lost today to the allure of the internet on their phones and if they feel disengaged they are gone, gone, gone. If the vocal power is set at the same dial strength from beginning to end, then listeners will just tune us out, as it becomes repetitious and morphs into a boring, sleep actuating monotone. Like classical music, we need crescendos and the opposite, decrescendos or lulls.

The problem though, is often we have a lot on our mind and are supremely nervous.  We are not even aware that we are speaking at the one constant volume or in a monotone throughout our talk.  By the way, this doesn’t have to be a formal talk.  It can happen in a normal meeting, where we are presenting some results or giving some guidance on what needs to happen next. We lapse into a monotone and we are tuned out by the assembled masses.

Now, the nervousness has to be a best kept secret when we are speaking.  During the training, it often happened that someone would suddenly laugh nervously during their talk as the pressure mounted within them.  That laugh is a physical release from the internal mental pressure building up inside their mind. We can be nervous, but this information has to be kept from the audience, because it instantly diminishes our credibility as a speaker. 

We were filming the talks and for the first round we had them do the talk facing the camera and conducted at a ninety-degree angle to the audience. In this way, the speaker couldn’t easily see the faces in the audience. Instead, they had to concentrate on me as the coach. We sometimes do this to try to lessen the pressure of having to present to a crowd where there are a lot of beady eyes and faces staring back at us.  Later, when they had gained more confidence and poise, we had them give their talk directly facing everyone and they were able to do it without looking nervous. 

Remember, only we know we are feeling nervous. If we don’t show it and if we speak with a strong voice, we come across as confident and the audience will believe us.  That strong voice part can be a problem, though, for a lot of ladies who speak very softly.  One of the dangers is that their soft voice is ignored by the executives, usually men, who they are presenting to. They lack what is called “executive presence” and a big part of that is confidence, portrayed though voice stength. Fair or unfair, a meek, soft, tiny voice just won’t command the attention and credibility of hard driving male bosses.

When these softly spoken ladies were presenting, and I asked them to increase their voice volume, I would ask their colleagues if they thought they were yelling?  The answer would always be “no”.  I would then ask if they thought they could go even louder and the answer would always be “yes”. What a difference it made when they did.  Being softly spoken, for them, it felt like they were yelling. However, from an audience point of view, they just sounded very confident, credible and clear. 

We can get into a debate about whether women should have to change their speaking style to pander to men, but reality is reality.  Men occupy a disproportionate share of senior executive positions in most companies and they are an important audience for these ladies.  By making a small change, they will be heard as opposed to being ignored, which was the current situation in this company.

When we understand that our presenting voice cannot be at the same volume as our coffee chat with a friend volume, we will make the required adjustments.  The good news is that the results are immediate and we come across with a lot more credibly.

Josh Shapiro, the Governor of Tennessee, was regarded by many as certain to be Kamala Harris’s pick for the role of Vice President, as part of her campaign to defeat Donald Trump. Ultimately, she chose Tim Walz.  The six-minute speaking spot at the Democratic National Convention then, was a good opportunity for Shapiro to position his own future credentials for a run for the Presidency. Barack Obama used his 2004 keynote spot to catapult himself into the limelight, as a relatively unknown eight year Senator from Illinois.

Therefore, I was expecting a very good speech from Shapiro, but I was disappointed.  To me, it seemed to fall flat.  This evaluation has nothing to do with political affiliation, because as an Aussie, I have no right to take part in the coming election.  I am just using his talk by way of analysis of what works and what doesn’t and as a guide for business people who give speeches. 

Now we have to be careful of expert evaluations.  I was watching a video from an American guy who was also evaluating the Convention speeches.  He started with “I am a speech coach” and he then made a fatal error, which for me at least, indicated he was a fraud or at least a total dud, as far as being a speech coach is concerned.

What did he say?  He mis-quoted the famous research from Professor Albert Mehrabian on key factors when presenting.  The dubious speech coach started telling everyone that what was being said was 7% of the impact, 38% was based on the voice and 55% on how they appeared.  That is total crap and if you ever have that quoted to you, run far from that person, because they are clueless and dangerous.  Mehrabian’s research had a critical caveat on when those numbers apply.  He said that when what we say is incongruent with the way we say it, the audience gets distracted. They subsequently focus on how we sound and how we look, as opposed to what is the content of our talk.  However, if we are congruent, then the audience pays attention to our message and is not distracted, so voice quality and how we dress become less important.

Rant over and back to Shapiro and what went wrong.  I am not just comparing him against the absolute, so let me include some other prominent speakers who were also considered for the role of Vice President by Harris. I looked at Gretchen Whitmer and Mark Kelly’s speeches.  For me, I thought Kelly was wooden in his delivery and not able to really connect and engage his audience, so he is out as a model. 

Whitmer was the star in my evaluation.  Shapiro was talking at us, whereas Whitmer was speaking with us.  Shapiro used only one volume control throughout his six minutes – strident. Whitmer used modulation and had variety in how she got her message across.  Sometimes soft, sometimes strong, and always engaging.

In business talks, we want this facility to vary our delivery so that it isn’t all soft or all strong, but mixed together and re-formed in the right way, at the right moments.  Remember Mehrabian – we need congruency between the content and the delivery.  A strong emphasis on a word lifts its appeal, as does an audibly whispered version and we should use both.

Whitmer employed personal stories and examples we could to relate to in order to make her point.  Shapiro was mainly just using powerful motivational exhortations.  I wondered whether the organisers had allocated different roles to each of the speakers, but I doubt that was the case.  Each of these high-profile speakers would have worked on their speeches in isolation to best reflect what they wanted.

Being told what to think by the speaker is not as effective as providing context, evidence and laying out some alternate ideas.  Constant and rigorous admonitions are hard for an audience to handle because it tires them out.  You could tell from the applause that the audience was struggling.  During Whitmer’s speech they were energised and the difference was quite stark, I thought.

So when we are giving business talks, we should definitely be including relevant stories wherever we can.  If we can make these personal stories, that is the best because audiences will identify more strongly in those cases.  We are looking for points of agreement and commonality with the speaker and we need more information about them to be able to do that.  Just telling an audience what they need to do isn’t going to provide that personal connection. Also, audiences don’t remember statistics as well as they remember stories. In business, we have tons of stories to draw on, but often we don’t go looking hard enough to find them.  We have plenty of numbers, but let’s go find the stories we can wrap them in.

We can’t be lecturing the audience on how they should think about an issue.  We need to lay out information and insight and guide the audience to agree with the stance we have arrived at based on the context and our experience with the issue.

Whitmer used humour well to create a better personal connection with the audience, whereas Shapirio was deadly serious from woe to go.  Whitmer was relaxed and smiling and Shapiro looked taut and ardent.

In business, we need to look for ways to help our audience relax.  Smiling is good, but somewhat difficult, when you are feeling nervous.  Humour is also not an easy one either and that is why it is generally left to the professionals – comedians and politicians.  Nevertheless, we can at least try to appear we are relaxed and happy to have the audience listen to us.  Just a calm vibe is enough to help an audience relax.

So we can take away some lessons from Shapiro and Whitmer and inject the learnings into our own talks.

Watching the avalanche of speakers to the Democratic National Convention has been interesting.  Some really hit the mark and others not so much.  What makes the difference?  From what I could see they were all using teleprompters, so effectively they are reading what they wrote to us.  Some I felt were just reading back to us what they wordsmithed and others connected with us.  How did they do that?

Comfort with the medium is a big differentiator.  There is also the issue of which teleprompter you look at, because they had them left, center and right.  Too much rapid head turning is distracting. Burrowing into just one screen seems to be denying the love to the other areas of the audience.

Teleprompters are set at certain speeds and the advanced models will coordinate with your personal timing.  You stop and it will wait until you start again. I couldn’t tell which type they were using, but I would have to expect the most advanced tech was being used for such an important event.  Nevertheless, it was obvious that the cadence for some people was slightly off and that may be because they don’t get a chance to give many speeches using teleprompters. 

If you think about the case of businesspeople, I would guess that 99.9% of those located in Japan, have never had an occasion to use one.  So here is a hint, don’t make your speech your test bed for trying out a teleprompter. Get hold of one early and practice with it until you feel comfortable.

Holding the moment is another skill.  Imagine facing an audience of 25,000 people and having your face projected on the most monstrously huge JumboTron screen for the folks in the cheap seats at the back.  You also have all of those at home tuning it on television to watch, an audience of around 29 million people, plus all the social media views.  That would make anyone nervous, but the pros are not feeling rushed or speeding up because their pulse rate is going through the roof. They know how to hold the moment and build anticipation for what they are about to say.  As business folk, we have to have the same ability to hold the moment. Probably we won’t have a massive audience putting incredible pressure on us, so we should be able to manage it, if we do our planning well.

Pausing is a tough skill.  You feel the pressure to speak, but the ability to deny that itch is important.  By creating a gap between what you have just said, what you are saying now and then between that and what you will say next is powerful.  I thought Michelle Obama did a masterful job of combining the anticipation component with her pauses.  The speaker’s one liners are like a punchline for a comedian and timing makes all the difference.  Too short doesn’t work and so does too long, so it is a real skill to find the right gap. 

The key for businesspeople is to programme in pauses at certain points of emphasis in the talk.  These pauses will highlight and illuminate the key point we want to make and have it rise above all the other points we are making.

Energy is a tricky beast.  Too much and you are seen as verging on insanity or at least hysteria.  I recall when I saw Kimberly Guilfoyle at the Republican National Convention, it seemed too much to me.  Her speech felt histrionic and just too forced.

Too little and the connect with the audience is hard to establish.  Biden and Clinton are both losing their voice strength and it stood out in terms of the energy they could bring to their points.

Where is the line is a good question? There is a tendency to go hard from start to finish, rather than having some modulation.  That is easy to say but hard to do, with 25,000 people screaming out, while you are talking. You feel you have to project above the noise of the room.

In business, that is not a likely scenario, so we can have better control over where we insert strength and softness throughout our talk and we should be aiming for both. 

In my observation, American politics continues to descend into a morass of nastiness topped up with a lot of name calling and rabid criticism of the other side.  In my native country of Australia, politicians won’t publicly call their opponents “stupid” or “weird”, because they know the voting public won’t accept that type of behaviour.  In our national Parliament during the policy debates, the language is carefully monitored by the Speaker and always kept within the bounds of propriety.  As in most things, America is a different planet, especially when it comes to domestic politics and elections.

What about in business when we are giving public speeches in Japan?  Should we call elected officials or bureaucrats “stupid” or “useless”, as we rail and lament against their shortsighted, unwieldy, ludicrous, ridiculous policies?  Can we attack our sneaky, underhanded competitors in public and complain about the evils they are doing?  In general, can we do some good old-fashioned whining and complaining about whatever is aggravating us at the minute? Basically, the answer is “no”. 

We don’t have American style comparison advertising here in Japan because it is banned.  Showing your product’s better virtues up against the opposition is felt to be endangering societal harmony and is against the law.  The thought of a Japanese CEO publicly laying into a Minister or official, regarding some policy felt to be egregious or unfair, is unthinkable.  In general, public venting is not a thing here. 

The fear of the consequences to the firm by the Government taking revenge as a result of the public name calling is certainly a part of it.  Future applications requiring official approval may suddenly get slowed right down or rejected outright.  Maybe a surprise tax audit suddenly springs up out of nowhere. Complaining publicly about your company’s rival is thought to be very low-level, unrefined behaviour (品がない- hinganai) and would reflect very badly on your firm’s brand and reputation.

We can mention about industry wide negative events like the 2008 Lehman Shock, the 2011 triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and triple nuclear reactor meltdown and the 2020 pandemic.  Referencing the hard times resulting from these external events is acceptable, because we all probably suffered to some extent during these recent events, too.  We can’t labour the point though and we can’t go into too much hidden detail about the impact on our businesses.  If we share too much data, the thought will arise that we are unstable and maybe not long for this business world.

The Phoenix is a symbol here of rising for the ashes and Japan loves a good resurrection story.  We can lay out in general terms that things got very bad and talk about how the team pulled together and we made it through.  Going into detail about how we did it is a good idea.  Everyone loves to learn lessons at the expense of others, rather than themselves.  Balancing negativity with hope and revival is the key. Even if things are not totally hunky-dory just yet, talking about what you are doing to get out of the hole you are in is of interest to the audience.

In my experience, the glass tends to be half empty in Japan most of the time, so we have to make an effort to break out of that formula.  Telling people things are bad garners a “so what” reaction, because that is how they see things as being normal and not news to anyone.  From another angle, I don’t think too many Japanese enjoy schadenfreude though, at hearing about our troubles. Telling listeners how things were bad and that now they are slowly improving is felt to be more interesting.  Our efforts to revive are seen as worthy and admirable, because we are ( 頑張ってる - ganbatteru) or working hard and that is a good thing in Japan. 

Japan suffers earthquakes, tsunami, typhoons, flooding, landslides etc., on a regular basis, so every year there is some area wiped out. On television, we see scenes of people trying to rebuild their businesses and lives and their efforts are respected.  “But for them, there go I”, being the prevailing thought.

We don’t have to be Pollyanna in our talks, expounding how wonderful and successful we are.  That approach is not well regarded either, because it sounds elf-serving and boastful.  Leavening the good with the bad is a better balance and better accepted when giving speeches in Japan.

Most business speeches are very definitive.  We did this, and it worked for us and you could do the same and also get similar results. Usually, we are asked to speak because we have had good results and have rich experience in our industry. The hosts believe that others will be interested in hearing what we did, so that they can take lessons from it and they will be able to pull a crowd.  The problem is today we are in the Age Of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism.

If what we are offering doesn’t sound valuable or sounds dubious, then the audience loses interest immediately and lunge for their phones to hit the internet and escape from us.  Once upon a time, listeners would sit there politely and absorb what we were saying and wait to reach judgement.  Now we have to win them over from the very start.

They are also more sceptical than in times past and are constantly on the prowl for fake news. No wonder though, given the barrage of scams and fake information hammering us every day.  I constantly get fake emails trying to get me to click on something that will allow them to take over my computer and clean out my bank account.  The fakes have become more and more sophisticated and sometimes I have trouble telling if they are real or not.  I have had to ring my bank or my credit card company to check that what I have received is legit or not. They are now that realistic. Little surprise people are on guard.

This combination of short attention spans and cynicism about what we are telling them makes it very much harder to advance our arguments when we are speaking.  One approach is to use a couple of simple tools.  One is the rule of three and the other is recency. 

Basically, audiences cannot take in more than three points and remember them, so to prove our arguement, we should assemble the strongest three points we can come up with.  The way to use these three points, though, is not to just list them and explain what they mean.  This Age of Cynicism demands that we offer more balance.  We should list the pros and cons associated with each point we are making.  So as we go through them, we offer the pluses and minuses for each point. 

I remember when I was an undergraduate student doing Modern Asian Studies at Griffith University in Brisbane, we had a guest lecturer come in to talk about the causes of the Battle Of Sekigahara.  Tokugawa Ieyasu won that battle and set up a dynasty which lasted for hundreds of years and it was a major turning point in Japanese history. 

He started by going through a long list of the usual explanations for the events leading to the battle, and it was all very convincing. I was sitting there in the front row busily making notes.  He then proceeded to pull down each of these standard arguments and replace them with his own interpretation of events. It was a powerful intellectual example of providing balance and therefore becoming much more convincing than if he had just rattled off what he thought explained the situation.

We should do the same with the points we are making in our talk and provide balance. This invites the audience to observe that we are not being dogmatic and that we are considered and looking for fairness in our argument.  It is very disarming. We don’t present a static target to be attacked because we are demonstrating our intellectual flexibility.

Additionally, the recency phenomena is a key contributor to being believed.  We all tend to remember best what we heard last.  So, of the three points, the strongest recommendation should come last.  We do the same thing with the pros and cons for each point. Finally, we offer the last point as our strongest recommendation for the audience.  They heard this last, so it has the impact of being the most memorable argument and therefore more likely to be accepted.

Is running it last cheating?  No, we are just adapting our order to best suit human psychology to have the best shot at convincing the listeners of our argument.  We have shown balance by going through the pluses and minuses and we just order the points in a way which is the most convincing and effective.

So next time you give a talk, consider how you can introduce more balance in the argument you are making. If you do, the chances are much higher that you will be believed and well regarded as an expert in your field.  This will advance your professional and personal brands.

I am not an American, so I cannot vote.  I always tread the line of neutrality when discussing what is happening in America, turning myself into the Switzerland of speech giving advice.  Previously, I have written about the presenting skills of both Biden and Trump.  Now I move on to the new Democratic candidate for the US Presidency. 

Republican politicians and Fox pundits criticise Kamala Harris for only being coherent and capable when she is reading her lines off a teleprompter.  I have no idea if that is true or not, because I don’t see enough of her unscripted talks.  Donald Trump, apparently, has trouble reading teleprompters and so he prefers to speak extemporaneously.  He is often criticised for rambling and going off message.

Teleprompters are certainly part of the machinery for politicians and sometimes for captains of industry.  I was coaching a German executive who headed up a large Japanese manufacturer here.  He had an international keynote due to be delivered in English. The major Japanese PR company had brought in a single teleprompter for him and set it up to his left. Actually, I didn’t work well because the teleprompter was like a magnet and his ability to engage his audience was compromised. 

Audience members on his left got all the love.  Those on the right and in the centre got almost nothing from him. I suggested he drop the teleprompter or get one for the other side as well. In the end, he went with just his notes as prompts. This was so much better.  He also wasn’t reading his speech word for word, which was a major blessing.

I read a funny story the other day about Barrack Obama when he was President giving a speech based on a written text.  You can imagine how much vetting goes into a Presidential speech before it is delivered and how carefully the wordsmithing is considered. Midway through the talk, he turned the page over and he suddenly realised one of his staff had managed to miss placing the next page there for him.  He had to wing it on the spot, which he did.  So even written speeches can provide unnecessary excitement and potential heart attacks for the speaker. Remember folks, only we know what we are going to say, so we can wing it if we have to.  The lesson for all of us though is to always check the pages are all there before we give the talk.

A couple of things I think we can learn from Kamala Harris are timing, creating anticipation and relaxation.  I notice she has very good timing with her delivery when giving campaign speeches.  Even if you are using a teleprompter, getting the right cadence is not easy.  She makes good employ of pauses when she is speaking.  This is smart because for most of us we get nervous giving a big speech and consequently, we can tend to speed up.

This happened to me.  I was giving my very first public speech. It was in Tokyo and in Japanese to some unlucky Sundai Yobiko prep school students.  I was terrified that my poor Japanese grammar would be totally unintelligible and a mess, so I wrote the whole thing out.  I did this romaji which uses the English alphabet to reproduce the Japanese sounds for words. My Japanese tutor Ms. Higashi helped me to put the speech together, so I was ready for the big day, for my first public speaking debut.  I looked down at my page the whole time, read every word and never engaged my audience in the slightest. It was a total disaster, which put me off public speaking for many, many years. 

Originally, I was scheduled to give a twenty-five-minute talk.  My hands were sweating, I felt red hot, my mouth was as dry as the Sahara desert, my pulse rate was pounding and so elevated I finished the whole thing in eight minutes. The point is that when we get nervous, we can really speed up.  Kamala Harris doesn’t do that because she injects a lot of pauses to control the cadence of her talks.

These pauses allow the audience to diligently digest what has just been said and for each point to be clearly heard.  Even though we may find ourselves speeding up, the judicial placement of some pauses enables us to control the pace, regroup and slow down.  In her case, she often gets applause throughout her talk.  Pauses allow her to avoid speaking over the applause.  Now, this is unlikely to be a problem for any of us in business when giving speeches, but pauses are still a valuable tool for cadence and clarity.

She is also quite skilled at slowing down her remarks to draw out the anticipation of what she is about to say.  The audience correctly guesses where she is going with her remarks and they applaud before she even gets there.  We may not get any applause midway through our business talk, but we can use the same idea of building anticipation by slowing down.  Let’s make sure we get the audience to mentally meet us where we are going with our points.

She is also very relaxed and looks like she is enjoying herself.  I am struggling to think of too many CEOs here in Japan who I have seen in action looking relaxed and like they are enjoying the occasion. I see Japanese Presidents, in particular, utilising the corporate video so that they can reduce the amount of torture they have to endure, by cutting down the time they have to speak. 

If we are feeling the pressure and are nervous, it is very hard to look relaxed and like you are enjoying yourself.  As we get more experienced and add more notches on our speaking belt, the process improves.  We can seem more relaxed and like we are enjoying the opportunity to proclaim our message.  Until that happens, it is a good idea to fake it until we make it.  A nervous presenter makes the audience uncomfortable. We all want to see people presenting who are bursting with skill and confidence.

Looking cool, calm and collected makes it much easier for our audience to accept what we are selling.  Confidence convinces and bolsters the words we are saying.  Try speaking with the face muscles relaxed, the body language congruent with the words being used and pay careful attention to gestures.  Nervous people tend to get stuck in the same gesture and hold it for way too long.  After fifteen seconds, that gesture loses all of its power and just becomes annoying to an audience.

So copy Kamala and be relaxed when you speak.  Introduce well timed pauses and use anticipation. Enjoy the opportunity to deliver your key messages to your business audience and burnish your professional and personal brands.

As an Aussie, I can’t vote in the American elections, so I am a casual observer of what is going on. I was watching a very recent interview with Donald Trump and he briefly made mention about his public speaking approach.  That got my attention, because I teach this stuff. Of late, I have been using Joe Biden as an hanmen kyoshi or teacher by negative example on public speaking, so let me now bring in Trump too. 

You could make the argument that neither of them are relevant to those of us in business, but I think there are lessons to be learnt.  Admittedly, as business speakers, we won’t have an audience of cult like followers, who hang on our every word.  I would absolutely love that, but after giving 560 business speeches so far, that hasn’t materialised as yet.

When you see Trump rallies with the background of patriotic American flags, various message placards and sea of MAGA red hats, you know he has assembled the true believers and I doubt they are much aware of the intricacies of his public speaking techniques.  According to the studies I have seen, he is most popular with non-college-educated males.  That automatically impacts the content and his delivery mechanisms. 

In business, here in Japan, we will be speaking to the very well-educated, most sophisticated international businesspeople, Japanese and foreigners.  This requires we be operating at a very high level of public speaking, because the crowd isn’t going to automatically be with us and, in fact, may think we are just spreading fake news.  What we say and how we say it becomes very important in these circumstances.

In the interview, Trump said he looks for a reaction in the crowd to what he says.  If he reads from a script or a teleprompter or from his notes, he found that he couldn’t get the same reaction as when he speaks extemporaneously.  That is why he is so keen to wander off topic and ramble along, looking for embers to convert into flames amongst the faithful.  In his Convention acceptance speech, he couldn’t keep to the main points and started to wander off, looking for inflammatory content to rev up the crowd.

I agree with Trump that this direct engagement is the best approach to working an audience and owning the room.  Now, ironically, as far as I know, he doesn’t usually employ a slide deck at his political rallies.  Having said that, the slide deck is the only reason he is alive today.  That assassin’s bullet should have penetrated his skull and killed him, but at the most critical moment, he moved his head to the side to look at a graph up on a big screen to his right.  That screen saved his life without a doubt.

In business talks, we can usually use a slide deck or we may choose to not do so.  The slide deck advantage is it creates the navigation path for us and we don’t have to remember the order of what comes next.  If we don’t want to use the slide deck, we can just have a simple list of topics to talk to in front of us to keep us on track.  Trump’s point about looking down and not engaging our audience is correct.  A quick glance at the next topic, however, is certainly not going to be a crowd disperser.

What he has found is that the eye contact with the crowd and his observation of their energy has been central to keeping the crowd with him.  If we are looking at our page notes or at a laptop screen or a tablet, we are not looking at the people in front of us and that is a big error.  As business speakers, we need to be equally hard working to engage our audience.  This means looking at their faces and choosing our words carefully. 

When we see their energy or concentration flagging, we know we have to step it up and change the pace.  We may do that by hitting certain keywords much harder or even much softer.  It sounds counterintuitive, but dropping down to a conspiratorial whisper is also very effective.  It forces your audience to lean in to what you are saying.  It is also a pattern interrupt. 

When there is a change in the proceedings, that pattern break is what jars with the crowd and forces them back to listening to us.  If we hammer the audience with a full power download from start to finish, we exhaust them and they tune out.  The highs and lows are what we need and that variety is what maintains the crowds’ focus on what we are saying.

Whether we like Biden, or now Harris, or Trump, there is always something to learn from the positives and negatives, if we take that moment to reflect on what is going on full faced in front of us.  Most people just view the speech, but never bother to analyse what they can take away from it. I am agnostic about learning from the good and bad and will happily lift, pillage and copy all that I can to improve my own speaking abilities.  I suggest we all be agnostic too and look for where we can find things to make ourselves more effective communicators.

Joe Biden gave a disastrous debate performance. His team floated the idea that he had a cold and that was why his voice sounded so weak and soft.  There was also talk that his prior busy international schedule had also taken a heavy toll on him. Should he have gone on with the debate?  Looking back, I am sure he regrets the decision to go forward with it, rather than rescheduling. What about for us in business?

Dates for events are set well in advance, but a lot can happen in the interim.  If we get Covid, that is an easy one – there is no way we can turn up and infect the multitudes gathered to hear our pearls of wisdom.  What about a cold, food poisoning, toothache or something a little less dramatic than the residues of the pandemic?

If you were a man brought up in macho Australia, you would keep going and “soldier on”, regardless.  But is that actually the best policy?  We have to keep in mind that like Joe, we are putting our personal and professional brands out there on public display. Does anyone seriously forgive Joe for his shambolic presentation simply because he had a cold or a flight back from Italy?  I doubt it.  We judge what we see in front of us, and we are all so sceptical and unforgiving today.  We quickly jump to conclusions and we have no tolerance for underperformance or time for excuses.

It is tough in Japan, because the number of occasions we may have the opportunity to give a talk are relatively limited, even if you speak fluent Japanese.  We may not want to miss the chance to speak. The organisers will expect you to turn up and deliver and we will feel obligated to make sure the show goes on regardless of how bad we are feeling.  Often, the organisers in Japan are not expecting fireworks with the talk and their main concern is that the programme is completed in full and on time. If you give a reputation destroying effort, the hosts don’t feel any remorse about pushing you to perform as scheduled. They did their bit to pull a crowd and after that, it is up to you, to carry it off.

I would suggest that we take the long-term view.  Your reputation and brand are inviolable.  Once you create doubt about your professional competence, it is hard to win it back.  That is what Joe Biden is finding.  He cannot mount enough capability to overcome the train wreck and by the time this podcast gets released he may be out entirely.  Bad news moves at a fast clip and good news travels along on the saddle of a sloth.

We may compromise our relationship with the event organisers, but in most cases, we are speaking for no pay and just for glory.  If Joe had said I am unwell and can’t debate on this particular date, then the whole thing would have been rescheduled, despite the inconvenience to everyone.  After a day of headlines, everyone would have forgotten about it and would be focused on the new date.

Hardly anyone will remember that you cancelled your talk.  However, everyone there watching will remember you were a disaster or were fundamentally unimpressive.  And that is precisely what they will say about you when you name comes up.  “Oh, yeah, I saw him speak once and it was dreadful”.  Is that really the legacy we want to haul around with us as we move through this business life.

Making excuses doesn’t go down well either, once you do turn up.  Telling the crowd at the start that you are unwell gets no sympathy vote whatsoever.  Everyone expects you to be on top of your game and any excuses are seen as whining, weak, and pointless.  Japanese speakers do this a lot.  They start off their talk by informing us they are a terrible speaker or have a cold or didn’t have enough time to properly prepare the talk.  This is all seen as tatemae – superficial truth – by the audience and as a weak flex to show humility.  No one pays the slightest attention to the content of what is being said and expect the speaker to perform, anyway.

Our brand must be protected at all times.  If we feel we are not going to be able to defend it, we are better to be like the ballad of Davy Crocket and come back and “fight another day”.  Better to reschedule if you are not doing well and can’t pull it off.  There is no upside for you to go on stage and a huge downside if you do perform and fluff it.

American politics is a must watch for the rest of us.  Whoever becomes the next President will have major ramifications for every country on the planet.  I will not get into a political discussion about who should be the next leader, but I do want to pick up on some relevant aspects of the campaigns.  In particular, the way Joe Biden handled the recent debate and the subsequent massive criticisms of his public speaking ability.

I wonder how many of the people concerned about his poor performance are also having the same issues?  The major conclusions from the debate were that he was low energy.  He may or may not have had a cold, but he was certainly low energy as a presenter.  What do I see, though, in most business presentations by leaders?  If they are Japanese CEOs, then invariably, they are also low energy.  Don’t stand out in the crowd is how you “go along to get along” in Japan, so this low energy approach is baked into the culture.

That is all right then, isn’t it? When in Tokyo, do as the local Tokyoites do when presenting. Actually, no, it is not okay.  Being able to have an audience absorb our message is the goal, otherwise why are we presenting?  Low energy presenters are vying with the allure of the internet for the attention of the audience. If, as the speaker, we are not gripping the listener’s focus, they will switch that focus away from us to their email or social media – while we are still talking.  These days, even the good presenters have people in the crowd multi-tasking on their phones at the same time.

Here is the point: criticize Joe for his low energy, but just make sure you are not doing a version of that yourself.  Are you able to hit keywords and phrases to lift their value in a sentence? Are you able to move words to a higher plane to grab interest from the listeners?  Democracy is great, but there is only the dictatorship of the most important words in a sentence to be applied when speaking.  Not every word has equal rights and equal value, so elevate those which are more important to your message.

Joe is certainly not a fluent speaker of English.  In fact, he has never been a fluent speaker of English because of the stutter he has had his whole life.  What is amazing to me is that someone with such a stutter should choose a line of work which requires a lot of speechmaking.  Somehow, he has adapted his speaking to account for this stutter and that directly impacts his timing and speed of speech.  Well done, Joe, for being able to take such an obvious high profile speech defect and overcome it to be able to speak in public as a politician. I hope it gives encouragement to others who have the same malady. The lesson here is if you work on it, you too can improve your public speaking ability.  Maybe you won’t become an outstanding speaker, but at least you can become effective.

I have never stuttered, but I have done its close cousin – umming and ahing. This can be similarly distracting as someone with a stutter.  I worked with a colleague whose every few words were interspersed with “ums”.  It was seriously, seriously painful to have to listen to him. What can we do about overcoming this annoying habit?

The clue is to focus on the first word of each sentence, hit that word hard, say the sentence and then purse your lips, and rinse and repeat.  Over time, the umming and ahing will lessen.  I don’t think I have 100% eradicated my old habit, but I know it is a lot better today, by following this simple technique.

Another useful habit has been to use pauses more effectively when I am speaking.  The filler words are just our brain buying to time to construct the next sentence and decide how we want to say our thoughts out aloud. The pause delivers the same thinking time payoff, without the annoyance.

Another criticism of Joe was that he was sometimes rambling. This happens in CEO speeches too.  They fail on three levels usually.  One is they don’t take public speaking seriously enough, usually because they are technical people who consider this stuff as fluff.  They were great at maths, chemistry and physics at school, but were duds in English class.

Secondly, they have not spent the time and effort to sufficiently plan the speech and focus on the navigation to make it easy for the audience to follow. I was attending the speech of a global CEO pre-Covid and honestly, I was listening hard, but was still lost.  He went off on a tangent and “esoteric” is a kind word to try to describe what he was on about.  Actually, it was flat out puzzling what was the point.

I asked some of the others sitting at the table, after the speech, if they could follow him and, like me, they were similarly lost. When we speak, we have to make sure that the direction of where we are going with the point is clear to the audience. Each section must link to the next and there has to be a navigable flow to the thoughts and arguments.

The other speech preparation fatality is rehearsal.  I will be bold and assert that 99% of business speeches are only ever given once – to that audience, on that day, at that specific time.  The preparation time is usually sucked up with the slide deck assembly.  No time is left to actually do a full run through of the talk before it is unleashed on a live audience.

Rehearsal allows us to understand the time control required, to check the fluency of how we deliver the talk and whether all the bits stitch together properly or not.  Please, please, please schedule time for the rehearsal.  Also, carefully instruct those giving you feedback, to only give you “good/better” feedback. Otherwise, they will launch a witch hunt of your public speaking misdemeanors and destroy your confidence entirely.

Joe may have been a train wreck during the debate, but let’s not crow too loudly about his faults, when we may still share versions of them ourselves. We should always be looking to learn something from both fabulous and underwhelming speakers. Remember, in the latter case, without training, “but for them there go I”, applies in spades when presenting.

What an interesting panel discussion we had.  Georg Loer, an old friend of mine, after 17 years running NRW Global which stands for North Rhine Westphalia, was handing over the reins to Carolina Kawakubo.  The guest panellist was Jesper Koll, a very well-known economist here in Tokyo.  All three have been guests on my podcast Japan’s Top Business Interviews with Carolina #19, Georg #83 and Jesper #87.  An interesting contrast in presentation styles on display that evening.

Jesper is a very accomplished speaker.  He has developed his own style and is quite distinct.  He brings a lot of energy, wit and solid data to his talks.  Normally, his talks are a walk through his slide deck where he has assembled very interesting data on what is happening in Japan and he always brings some fresh insights to the statistics.  On this occasion, there were no slides supporting what he was saying, so I was interested to see how he would approach it.

This is important, because as a speaker, if we are too reliant on the visuals for the navigation and the IP, then we can get into trouble if there is a tech glitch or we aren’t able to marshal our argument without the deck.  Tech problems are always a possibility, so I suggest you just print them out and bring them with you.  If the slides can’t be seen, you at least can see what you would have shown and can talk to the points.  The audience can’t see them and please do not hold them up, as I have seen one memorably bad speaker do.  You can grasp the main point of the slide and then just talk to that point.

Jesper, always the consummate professional, just listed the numbers off from his prodigious memory. He could paint word pictures for us, without needing to reference any screen.  Now if you are like me and can’t even spell “prodigious” let alone claim such a memory, you can just note down some key numbers on notes.  Don’t read the notes to us, but certainly consult them.  No one in the audience is going to jump to their feet and denounce you as a charlatan and fraud for having to consult your notes.

Jesper has also come up with an aggressive technique with his audiences using rhetorical questions.  He will wander over to some poor unsuspecting member of the audience seated there in front of him, and towering over them, ask them a very detailed specific question.  The trick with a rhetorical question is the person on the receiving end can’t know if this is an actual question they need to answer or whether it is a question, the speaker is about to answer on their own.  The panic which ensues with the audience members ensures everyone stays awake and alert when Jesper is speaking.  He always rescues the audience member and supplies the answer to their massive relief.

Georg was very avuncular that evening.  He has a quiet, calm manner anyway, and he was clearly giving the stage and baton to Carolina as his successor.  He even dressed down, with just trousers, a white, short-sleeved shirt and casual shoes.  No suit, no tie – very informal and a clever visual signal that the stage belongs to Carolina now. He spoke with that quiet confidence of having done every aspect of this investment and trade promotion work for nearly two decades and having nothing to prove and no need to impress.  He knows his stuff and applied a very intimate conversational tone for that assembly of friends and supporters that evening.  This very personal approach brings his audience to him as he is projecting we are all one big team here, you and I.

Carolina was such a contrast with some senior executives I spoke about recently in episode #393.  They were vying with each other for selection and had two minutes to introduce themselves and sell their advocacy to the voting audience.  One of them couldn’t manage that much and had to read his introduction to us.

By contrast, she was so professional.  She was dressed for the occasion in a dark suit to add credibility to her talk.  No notes, of course and speaking with great confidence.  It is no easy thing to follow on from someone who has been in that same position for 17 years and who everyone in the audience knows intimately.  Confidence is such an important element for the speaker.  That sound in our voice that we know what we are doing and who we are is transmitted straight to the audience and they receive our signal. She did a great job, said the right things and said them in the right way.  She was totally congruent with her talk.

So three contrasting styles with the bombastic Jesper, the calm Georg and the aspirant Carolina.  They were different approaches, but they all worked for the speakers. It is a very broad church and there is plenty of scope for all of us to develop our own style as a speaker.

The premise of tonight's theme is how we position ourselves for the client before we even meet them. With the advent of social media, people will know they are going to meet you and will check you out. That wasn't possible before, but it certainly is now. So, how do we put ourselves in the best light, in the best position before we meet the buyer or the client? That's what I'll be looking at tonight.

A bit about Dale Carnegie: we're a very well-established company, 112 years old, originating in New York, and we've been in Japan for 61 years. We have 200 offices around the world and are quite well known. These are our locations, so wherever you're coming from, we’re probably there. We have eight million graduates and 100,000 in Japan. Warren Buffett is a graduate, as is Chuck Norris, one of my favourites, and the current president of Shiseido, Uotani san, is also a graduate.

These books are very well known: How to Win Friends and Influence People, Hito Wo Ugokasu, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Michi Wa Hirakeru, all very well-known books. They sell well. Dale Carnegie's book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, is consistently in the top ten business books in every language every year around the world. In the publishing industry, they say there are two massive long-sellers: one is the Bible, and the second one is Dale Carnegie's book, which is just incredible but true. So it does very well.

My theme here is that in business, know, like, and trust are some fundamentals. People have to know you to do business with you. They have to like you, generally speaking. While we might do business with people we don't like, it's not our preference, and they have to trust us. Now, I'm not going to deal with like and trust tonight. That's too much, but I’ll deal particularly with getting to know you, and we'll look at that.

So, how do I build credibility before I meet the buyer? How do I establish that remotely? That’s what we'll be looking at.

In 2010, I was scared of social media. I wasn’t on any social media at all, and these are the themes I was worried about. It was an unknown thing to me. I didn’t understand it. I thought, oh, my identity will be stolen. They’re going to hack my credit card. Trolls will hammer me if I post something. I was scared. At that time, social media was fairly limited. LinkedIn was the longest-running, but it was really a recruiting site for people posting their resumes. Facebook was mainly in America. Twitter was only four years old by that time, and Instagram was only one year old. It was all very new, and I was scared of it. Then something happened.

I met Jeffrey Gitomer, an American, a very famous author on sales, and an interesting character. He attended our Dale Carnegie International Convention in San Diego, which, by the way, is a beautiful place. I was very impressed by San Diego. He said to the convention delegates, all Dale Carnegie people, "How many people are on Twitter?" Nobody was on Twitter. Trust me, nobody. At that stage, he had 30,000 followers on Twitter, and he basically said to us, "You are all idiots." He didn't say that directly, but that was the message. "You should get onto social media." I thought, well, okay, he’s probably right. I should check this out. So that’s where I started.

I also got into a thing called content marketing. I had never heard this expression before, and there was a very good podcast with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose called This Old Marketing, which was really pioneering and promoting the whole concept of content marketing. I started listening to these guys and learning about content marketing, which was a revolutionary idea at the time: you put your best stuff out there for nothing. At that time, people were protecting their IP, hiding their details, their data. But they said, no, you put it out there. That was not a typical idea at that time. So I was studying that.

Today, I have 27,680 followers on LinkedIn and 3,383 articles and blogs published on LinkedIn. On Facebook, I have 4,200 friends. I’m not really big into Facebook, to be honest. On Instagram, I have 536 followers. I only started Instagram recently. On Twitter, I don’t have many followers. I’ve never quite come to grips with Twitter myself. I post on it but never look at it, basically.

As mentioned by Jeff, we started YouTube in 2013 and called it Tokyo Japan Dale Carnegie TV. Now, we have 1,920 subscribers. It has taken a long time to get over 1,000 and close to 2,000. Very hard work. We have 2,500 videos on YouTube, which is a lot. And of course, we’re a training company, so we have lots of content in the areas we cover. Another big influence on me was Grant Cardone, another American, a very famous hardcore sales guy, very successful. He makes this point: we are all invisible. I was talking about know, like, trust. But if you’re invisible, how do you build a business? People don’t know you, and that’s what he’s on about. People don’t know you. You have to make a big effort to get out there and be known. So I took that on board and said, okay, I have to become more visible. I have to work on that.

Social media is one of the big content marketing delivery mechanisms. We’re trying to get attention. Where is the attention on social media? Are we where the buyer's attention is found on social media? Are we where they’re looking on social media? In Japan, YouTube kills everything with 102 million. Next is Line, of course. X, formerly known as Twitter. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. LinkedIn has very low numbers, just three million. But if you’re in the expat community, it would be an incredibly high proportion of people on LinkedIn. My personal main target is expat leaders because I have all these Japanese working for them who need training. If I can get to the expat leader, maybe I can get the whole company. So that’s one of my targets.

Yes, it’s true. Facebook is basically Japanese. The comment was that Facebook is like LinkedIn for Japanese, and very true. I post all my stuff on Facebook. I post on all these things except for Pinterest. I don’t do Pinterest, and I can’t work out how to use Line. If I could work it out, I’d probably do something there, but I haven’t yet. We are trying to dominate our niches as a training company.

This gets tricky because we have three main curriculum areas: leadership, presentation, and sales. If we were only doing leadership, that would be one level of content we need to produce. But we’re not just doing leadership, so we have to produce a lot of content to compete with others who specialise in leadership. We have to produce a lot of content to compete with people who specialise in presentations and the same for sales. So we are tripling what would be a normal company's requirement, which is why we’re pumping out so much content.

What about AI? You might think, "No problem, AI will produce this presentation for tonight." In thirty seconds, you’ve got it. How easy is this? AI will write some posts for LinkedIn, and bingo, out comes the content. We are redundant as content creators because AI will do it all for us. Well, maybe. Your rivals might be using it. Maybe you’re using it. But how can we differentiate our content? Here are some ideas.

First of all, it doesn’t know your stories. It hasn’t been able to scrape those. Your personal stories are only known to you. You have a hundred percent control of that. When you write LinkedIn posts, AI tends to be a bit generic in the way it creates content. You look at the outputs, and they all have a similar style. But if you write as you speak, in the vernacular, that’s very much you. Very authentic, very individual, and with your own point of view. AI will scrape all of the world’s viewpoints on a topic, but you have your own individual viewpoint. That’s unique.

You must become highly skilled in presenting. You can get the best content from AI, but you still have to stand up here and deliver it. AI might do this online with an avatar, but in the real world, no. It can’t do it. Have your own personal style, which is hard to duplicate.

Some of my differentiation approaches include using my title, Dr. Greg Story. I have a PhD, and I use that distinctly because I’m in the training business. You’d rather be taught by Dr. Story than someone with just a basic degree, right? So I use that as a differentiator through my education as branding. I use a lot of alliteration when I write: "super sushi service." It’s alliteration. I use that style for my writing and use words in unexpected ways, normal words but in slightly unexpected ways. When you’re reading, it feels a bit different because it’s me. Others won’t do it. AI certainly won’t do it. I try to use unusual words to differentiate and have a style that’s recognisable. I hope that when you see my stuff, you’ll say, "Oh, that’s written by Greg Story" as opposed to anyone else. I also try to include personal stories to connect with my audience and make the content relatable and memorable.

So, AI is a tool we can use, but to truly stand out and make our content unique, we have to infuse it with our personal touch, experiences, and style. That’s something AI can’t replicate.

Again, to differentiate, to have a style that's recognizable. I hope that when you see my stuff, you'll say, oh, that's written by Greg's story as opposed to it could bewritten by anybody. And then try to include personal storiesto connect with my Now, I I avoided that.

And I broadcast, as Jeff said, video. I broadcast audio.

And then, what's your message?

And then, you can have a story with a lesson, a parable, something that you've learned. Something happened. You've learned a lesson from that and you share that lesson. So these are some typical storytelling themes we can use when we're putting together our content.

But I finally broke through as a presenter. I started sharing my personal information. I found I could connect with people in a way I wasn't able to connect so well before.

But we have these self limiting beliefs. The point is we've got to get over those. If we're going to project ourselves into the market and be credible with clients before we meet them, they've got to know us. We've got to get out there.So let's work on that.

But we've got some self limiting beliefs.

For example, I had a meeting with the president.

I had a meeting with Suzuki Taro, the president.

I hate being recorded on camera. I'm an introvert.

I knew where to hit certain words and phrases, key ideas,and bring my energy to that point in the sentence. Very hard for AI to know how to do that. So these are things that differentiate.

I think the name Story, someone can correct me here, but it's actually originally a Scandinavian name.

I try to make the client the hero.

I try to use my own cadence, my own rhythm. When I'm highlighting key ideas and phrases, which again, it's going to be very hard for AI to replicate that because it's my definition. For example, I've recorded one of my books,Japan Sales Mastery, whichn just about killed me, I've got to tell you. I can't believe how hard narrating your own damn book is.

I used to be scared of the camera, but I've managed to get over that and I am an introvert, actually. So this is very taxing for me tonight to have all these people in the room with me. I'll have to go home later and lay down for quite along time to recover.

I'm a very private person, Jeff. I don't share much. If you look publicly online, you find very little about me personally.You will find a lot of stuff about presentations, leadership, sales, not a lot about Greg's story.

I'm not beautiful enough or handsome enough to appear on video.

I'm not photogenic at all. I always look terrible in photographs.

I'm not photogenic.

I'm the guide.

I've got a very raspy voice from ten million kiais in the karate dojo, actually.

In this room, we put a green screen set over there. We set up the camera here and I will record myself on green screen video.

Include the names. Even if you have a code name for someone, include the names.

It automatically sent to my YouTube channel with the audio podcast and also, the podcast video goes to YouTube.

It was and I didn't do anymore after that. It's exhausted me. But someone else could narrate it. But I wrote it, so I knew where to put the emphasis.

It wasn't planned.

It's out there about a very small amount.

Much better. There's got to be a context. Something'shappening in the background. Something's going on. What is it? Bring out that background.

My Saturday mornings are writing every week. Saturday morning, I write. I write one on presentations, one on sales, one on leadership.

My voice sounds terrible.

Now I'm not handsome.

So I can multipurpose my one piece of content very, very effectively.

So I start, in my case, always with a blog text.

So include the people in the story.

So my copywriting structure looks like this.

So that text gets turned into podcast audio.

So this is multipurposing of content.

So we have different stories. We have the warning story, we can writeabout that. Bad things are coming.

So we're going tell some stories. Now, someone said to me tonight, oh, your name's Story. That's handy if you're gonna be in the storytelling business.

So, we need, I believe, to master video and audio and text in this modern age.

So, who are we according to what does Google say about you? Who are you when you look up Google?

Story, which got anglicized in the great Viking invasion of England, I believe in the eighth century. So there we go.

That audio will go to the podcast and will go to a place called Libsyn, Liberated Syndication, which hosts podcasts on Apple Podcasts.  It's got a huge list of different podcasts they get my content out to. That's what all those little green arrows mean. But it also turns up on my YouTube channel as audio.

The opportunity cost of no action because in a lot of cases, people think no action means no cost. That's not true.

The plan, let's get rid of the villain. Let's fix thatproblem.

The villain, client's problem.

Then I'll record those for my podcast.

Then, this is important.

Then, we have the narrative arc. There'll be certain characters in the story.

There'll be some conflict, some problem, or a big opportunity. What is that? Set the context with the opportunity. Then there's gonna be a resolution. Could be good, could be bad, but there'll be a resolution one way or another.

There's a teleprompter behind here and I'll be reading theteleprompter of what I've written and I'll take that text and I'll turn it into video.

There's an opportunity cost there. And then finally, the solution, the happy outcome. We talk about that.

We can have the success story, hey, we did well. We can have a humorous story, something amusing. We can have a branding story, talking about your company and how great you're doing and how you're helping save the world, etcetera.

What's the learning? What's the thing you want to get across to people? So that's an arc in the narrative. When you're writing a story, you're putting stuff together to think about.

What do you find? Yahoo, Bing, ChatGPT, YouTube, Amazon. If you search yourself on these items, what does it tell us about you? Who are you? I'm possibly going to be your client. I want to know about you. This is where I'm going to look. This is where I'll go. And what will I find?

Now, a lot of Americans have said to me that they can't use Facebook for business because there are a lot of embarrassing frat house photographs of them in very compromising positions, drinking very exotic-looking drinks with umbrellas in them, in very bad locations with very dodgy people. So they are excluded. But I said I was terrified of social media. I came late to the party. What you'll see on these mediums is me in business all the time. You're not going to see me casual very often. I control it.

So if you look up Greg Story, there are seventy-one entries on Google, forty-four on YouTube, ninety-one on Bing. I stopped at page ten. Chat GPT, one entry. I did a presentation last December for the American Chamber Sales Committee. At that time, I wasn't even existing on Chat GPT. So finally, I made it. I'm there. And it's actually correct. It wasn't hallucinating. I'm actually there. And then YouTube, there are fifty entries. I stopped at fifty. There's a lot more. And then Amazon, one entry. What's going on here? I've got, well, seven books already published, and the eighth one is with Amazon right now. So Amazon's search engine is not very good. So anyway, I don't know how that works.

So what has been useful for me to become known and credible with my potential buyers?

LinkedIn is my main medium for business, and this is what my front page looks like. You see lots of me in action. I'm running a soft skills training company. So what am I doing? I'm teaching or I'm speaking, naturally. And then, here I am. My name is not Dr Greg Story. The name in LinkedIn is Dr Greg Story, franchise owner, master trainer, executive coach, leadership sales, presentations, Tokyo, Japan. That is what's in my name bracket on LinkedIn, not just Dr Greg Story. And then, it talks about global master trainer, executive coach, three-time best-selling author, global business expert, leadership, sales, presentations and communication president. There's a lot of propaganda about me on that one page, and then you have all of my postings would come after that. Massive numbers. In this case, on LinkedIn, three thousand three hundred and fifty of them.

And then, as I said, twenty-seven thousand six hundred and eighty followers. Post impressions, seven thousand thirty-two in the last seven days. In the last ninety days, seven hundred and sixty-four people looked at my profile. Eight hundred and seventeen people searched for me. How many people are searching for you? You go to your LinkedIn, have a look at your number. How many people are searching for you?

When I see that number's high, I'm happy. It says that what I'm doing is working. They're searching for me. I'm trying to find them, of course, but they're looking for me. I may not know who they are, but I'm giving them what I want them to find. I'm packaging it up. I'm saying, this is me. I'm credible. I can do everything on leadership, everything on sales and presentations. I've got it. That's what I'm saying.

So Roberto DeVito was the editor of the American Chamber Journal, and I used to submit articles to the journal. I made a big mistake. When I first submitted them, I thought, you've got Dale Carnegie on the wall over there. I thought, well, Dale Carnegie, he's the icon. I can't compete with the icon. So I never put my name and photograph with the articles, only my name. Until one day, I was at an event. I gave someone my card. “Are you the guy that writes those articles in the American Chamber Journal?”,  I said, yes. I realised, you idiot. You should have put your own face and name, so people could recognise both instead of just the name. Trust me, my face and name is on everything I can find now, to catch up.

But I met, actually, I bumped into Roberto across the road in front of the Ark Hills building one day just by accident. I'm having a quick chat, because he's editing my articles. I'm putting them up there. He said, “Greg, why don't you start a podcast?” Here's my response. “What's a podcast?”.

I'd sort of heard of it. In the 1990s, there were podcasts, and they sort of disappeared, and they came back in the mid-2000s, right? 2013. So and I thought, wow, a podcast. Okay. So I'll take that on board. So this was a re-creation, but this would have been me back in 2013, 2014 actually, with this exact mic recording my podcast. I had zero idea. I was clueless. I didn't even think about the mic, you know. I didn't know the quality. But now, for the techy people here, and I'm sure there's a lot of techy people here. I use a Shure SM58 microphone. I use a Zoom H6 handy recorder, which actually is recording this presentation right now. I use Adobe Audition for the editing, and I use Libsyn to host my Apple podcasts. So that's some of the tech. Now, I'm not going to discuss what we do for the videos because there's a lot of lighting and camera and stuff for that, but we have a lot of gear for all that stuff. So I'm better organised now.

So what did I learn about podcasting?

First of all, don't be an idiot like me. Spend the money and get a good quality microphone. Straight up. Don't muck around. Get the right gear. Find a platform which can upload your content to multiple areas like Libsyn. You need something like that. If you're gonna do interviews, the guest provides the IP. Jeff has been a guest on my podcast, Japan's top Business Interviews, and he provided all the IP.

But if you're doing it yourself, then you need to have content. And I have a lot of content, as I'll talk about in a minute, because I can do that because we're in the business of doing training. So we know about leadership, presentations, sales, communication. And you got to be like clockwork. We say weekly. It's got to be weekly. You can't miss. And if you're going to do it, commit to it. There are so many podcasts that fail within the first ten episodes and they quit. Don't be one of those people. If you're going to commit to it, keep going with it. Don't worry about the numbers. Keep going with it. You'll eventually get the numbers you want.

So, this is my first podcast, August the second, 2014. Every Thursday, Leadership Japan Series. This is where I started. So now, we've got nearly seventy-four thousand five hundred ninety-nine downloads. Five hundred and fifty-nine episodes weekly.

Now, in 2016, I'm following this content marketing. The guru says, niche down. Right. But, get ready to ride the tiger's back. Because what I thought was, okay, niche down, I am going to break them out. The Leadership Japan series had content about sales. It had content about presenting. I know, I'll break them out and separate them. I'll niche down. “How hard could that be”,  I said to myself. Well, once you jump on to the tiger's back, as soon as you jump off, you get eaten. So you have got to be careful what you do here. So I started with one and then I presented this one. This is November third, 2016. Every Tuesday, this has twenty-three thousand nine hundred and fifty-two downloads. We're up to episode three eighty-five on this one. And then I did this one, which was the Sales Japan series. It's every Wednesday, three thirty-one thousand three hundred and sixty-seven downloads, three hundred and eighty-five episodes.

But the work to produce these additional two was much bigger than I expected. But remember, we are a training company. We are doing all of these areas, so we have to have content in each of these areas to compete with companies who only do sales, only do leadership, only do presentations. So we just triple our workload immediately and we're prepared for that.

Now, in 2018, Google said, we are going to now do voice-based search as well as text, and I believed them. And I thought, bingo. Because how many blogs were there in the world in 2018? Major, major, major number of blogs around the world. How can you compete with so many millions of people producing billions of people producing blogs?

And I thought, ah, audio. I have a lot of audio. Maybe I can win in the audio market. It's hard to win in the text market. So I know, I know, I got a great idea “Why don't I create more audio?”, I said to myself and try and dominate that voice-based search.

Well, guess what? You Google Greg Story, you're not going find much in the vocal department from Google. Thank you very much. Where's my voice-based search, Google? Still not there. So anyway, but I didn't know that. I believed them.

So I was inspired by, some people might remember the show, Tokyo on Fire from Tim Langley. It was a very good program on politics. So, yeah, I was inspired by this. I said, “you know what? I'm going do video”. So this is how I got started. The first one, my weekly podcast. So December 28th, 2018, I started doing my weekly podcast, and then I converted it into a video and put it on YouTube. So now we've got nine hundred and ninety-three videos, nine hundred and twenty-four subscribers, not a big number, nine hundred ninety-five episodes weekly.

So if you look at this, I'm doing six podcasts a week, fifty-two weeks a year. I'm doing three videos a week, fifty-two weeks a year. It's a machine. I've got a machine behind me. It wasn't there when I started.

I was terrified of social media. My colleagues, who were twenty years younger than me, had social media. I said, yeah, it's a fad. I was wrong. I was wrong. Now, I don't have twenty years to play catch up, so I have to run hard.

And these are some of the lessons I learnt from all this. So first, don't be afraid of social media. Second, repurpose content. So once I created all this, I realised the power of having all this content. So I turned it into books, as Jeff mentioned. These were the four books that were done. These three were audiobooks and Kindle. This is the latest one, done on audiobooks and Kindle.

Then I wrote this book.

Stop Wasting Money On Training.

I think that's a bit counterintuitive for a training company.Subtitle, “how to get the best results from your training budget in Japan” because I realized you couldn't find any books on on how to pick a training company. We are experts in training. So I wrote a book, a neutral book. It's not a propaganda piece for Dale Carnegie. If you read it, it's not like that at all. It's very, very neutral,very objective, but it talks about the things you need to think about. When I go to see the client, I’ve got two books.This is one of them.

Now, theres presentation and sales and very shortly leadership and I give them both.

Do I care if they read them? No. This says, we are expertson training. That's enough for credibility. Okay?

This is my new book. I say, we're waiting for Amazon to give us the thumbs up. Could be tonight. Could be tomorrow morning. It's that close.

I have never seen any books in English about leading in Japan written by foreigners.

If you can find one, let me know. I couldn't find any.

I believe this is the first book ever written on this topic. And the target audience are expat CEOs who are leading here to help them because these are the people who pay for our training, who have the decision making power or at least get me in front of the HR team to try and convince them to take us on as a training company. So very, very fresh.

Very, very fresh.

And I call it your complete leadership toolkit and it is a very complete book. So now, I have soon to be eight books, right? Coming up will be eight books.

Then, I will rewrite that leadership book for a Japanese audience and we'll translate that. That'll be number nine.

So everyone's heard of Gary Vaynerchuk, I presume. He's a legend. He's an amazing business person, incredible entrepreneur.

He took reality TV, combined it with motivation, and he combined it with education.

And he has another trading name as Gary Vee.

He had a guy following him around, video him all day long, which they cut up and brought out. He's unbelievable volume producer.

But Gary Vee or Gary Vaynerchuk has thirty people working in team Gary, chopping all this stuff up. He's a legend.

He says, I heard this recently, you have got to post twelve times aday.

I'm like, “that's ridiculous”.

How could you do that? Well, guess what?

I'm posting twelve times a day.

I counted them up. The blog goes to LinkedIn. It automatically goes to Facebook and Twitter. Now, purists would say,you're a very bad boy, Greg.

You should be recrafting that for Facebook and you should be recrafting that for Twitter instead of sending in the same stuff. Hey. Do I have that sort of time? No.

I've got three areas, presentation, sales, and leadership to cover. I'm busy. So I just flick a switch and bingo. It's there. Done.

I upload something I'll talk about in a moment called Fare Bella Figura. I'll talk about that shortly. It goes to, to LinkedIn and I share it also to Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram.

I upload video shorts to LinkedIn, then they get switched over to TikTok, threads, and Instagram, which is actually twelve a day.

So I'm actually doing what Gary Vaynerchuk said to do. I thought it was impossible, but I'm actually doing it. Amazed me.

So we need a mindset shift here.

We need to be agnostic about the funnel that brings the client to us.

But we got a brace for trouble.

We're doing something new. We should try it anyway. And if it doesn't work, well, you know, retreat if you have to and don't say no for the buyer in terms of trying something new. And if it works, go all in and ignore the critics and hammer it. So this is something that I was thinking about.

There are some fundamental business truths.

People judge us when they first meet us based on our bodylanguage, how we're standing, how we move. The second thing they judge us on is how we're dressed. They look us up and down. They're checking us out. They're making judgments. We haven't even opened our mouth yet, but they're making judgments, first impressions about us.

So we have to control that first impression and we mustbecome more knowledgeable about image control in business.

So I had some innovation considerations.

I found people often complimented me about the way I'm dressed.

I thought, can I drive that as a differentiator against my competitors in the training industry? Can I take that and drive it harder?

I didn't see any businessmen blogging about what they wear except for people who are in the clothing business.They got their own boutiques or whatever.

I didn't see any business people blogging about men’s clothing.

So I needed to execute though in a very light low touch manner, because I'm pretty busy and I have to have the guts, right, to court trolls, mockery, derision, abuse and hatred by putting myself out there and I was scared to do it.

I thought, you know, if I put out what I'm wearing, man, I'm going get hammered by these people. Well, I'm just going to be abused all day long.

So I took a deep breath.

I said, okay, I'll go for it.

Here's my premise and every one of my blog starts like this. I run my own soft skills training franchise business here in Tokyo. And many years ago, I decided to dress for success.

Each day, I consult my schedule and that day's work content drives my sartorial choices.

Before I head out the door every day, I check myself in the mirror and ask, do I look like one of the most professional people in my industry?

That's the premise, okay?

Then, this comes up. This is the Fare Bella Figura.  In Italian, it means make a good impression.

I use Italian because I think it's pretty cool. Sounds better. Fare Bella Fugira. Sounds pretty good in Italian,bright? So, master your first impressions. Be a sharp dressed man. Now, which is the band we know about being a sharp dressed man? ZZ Top. You know that song, Be a Sharp Dressed Man. I thought, that's pretty cool. I'll use that. So I put in Be A Sharp Dressed Man.

Now, this is what they get. I put in very detailed comment on what I'm wearing. You can see all the stuff on LinkedIn. This is just what I'm showing you. It's like wallpaper. And I have a photograph of me. But guess what's in the background?

Nineteen twelve. Dale Carnegie. I'm taking it right here. So, I'm promoting the company and the longevity of the company at the same time I'm promoting what I'm wearing. Right? So, I'm getting double value there.

So, now, here's the distressing part. Here's the results.

My handcrafted, really carefully written blogs, which I work really hard on every Saturday morning and come up with these eight hundred thousand word pieces, I get two hundred impressions on LinkedIn.

The first Fare Bella Figura,  when I put up, sixteenhundred impressions. I felt like crying.I couldn't believe it. Like, just show me in a suit and I get sixteen hundred. I'm writing all this stuff on leadership and presentation and sales and I get two hundred. And it continues to outrank my other blogs. Still.

So, at the end of my blogs, there's a sales funnel. There are three lead magnets and then the description about my podcasts and my books and about me and all the propaganda is there.

Guess what? On the end of all these posst, that same propaganda is there.It's there. It's a funnel to get people to come to our websitethrough these lead magnets.

So here's some takeaways.

Observe trends. I've noticed, and this audience is not very good representation of that, but suits are coming back for men.

Suits are coming back for men. Ties are going to come back for men. Shoes, serious shoes, not sneakers.

It's coming.

Check me in five years to see if I'm right.

But I feel it'smoving in that direction. I might be an early mover maybe in this trend. I don't know. I don't know. I might be totally wrong.

Let's see.

There's a gap in the market. No men are putting themselves out there talking about what they wear every work day. I only do it five days a week. I only do Monday to Friday when I'm at work. Right? So what's my point of view and experience here? Got to embrace that, some new ways to engage an audience.  

How do I differentiate myself from my rivals?

Try something new and stop if it doesn't work. So these are some ideas for you on how to control your image, your message, your content to hook into the client's mindset before they meet you. So you're crafting their expectations about who you are and what they can do with you before you even meet them.

Now, I don't know everything about digital marketing. This is only what I've done myself and I'm sure there are many things I can improve which I don't even know about. So if you see something tonight and you say, what are you doing, you idiot? You should be using this and you should be doing that and don't you know about this? Tell me, because I'm still educating myself about this stuff.

I'm a boomer, but in here, I'm still nineteen.

So with that, I'd like to invite you, who has the first question? Thank you.

It is not often that we get a front row seat to watch a group of very senior businesspeople compete with each other when presenting.   If you like blood sports, then this is right up your alley.  This is a zero-sum game for seizing the brass ring and even better, it is conducted in the full glare of the assembled masses.  This is an annual event, which, as a Master Trainer of presentations and public speaking, I always look forward to. 

Being the eternal optimist, I always imagine that this year I will be delighted with the high levels of professionalism on display.  This could be a leading indicator that the senior ranks of companies are understanding the importance of presentations, persuasion and storytelling skills. 

We all know the pressures in business and the levels of competition are getting more and more intense.  Throw in the rapid advances of technology and we have a boiling red ocean of difficulty, which we all must deal with.  These executives are always a good gauge of the ability of business to keep up with the demands.  Sadly, another year of no change and no improvement.

These executives have two minutes to convince the voting members that they should be selected over their rivals.  On this occasion, there were no women in the mix, which in itself is a worry, but that is another podcast. Every year I take detailed notes on what I am seeing and not seeing. 

Typically, no one seems to have a clue about what to do with their hands.  More importantly, they have no idea how to make their hands work for them. Gestures add strength to our words and are a powerful amplifier of our message.  Holding our hands around stomach or groin level or even worse, behind our backs, eliminates the opportunity to use this powerful message driving medium.

Gestures need to be held up high, so that they are easy to see.  The maximum holding time is up to fifteen seconds, after which the gestures lose all their power and just become annoying. Pointing fingers or fists at the audience are very aggressive gestures and are best replaced with using the open palm instead.  The desired effect is the same without the aggro.

Eye contact is another major lost opportunity.  In a one-minute period, we can engage directly with ten people and we should be doing that all the time we have available to us.  The alternative is what these executives were doing, which was not looking at the audience and just vaguely scanning the room, not focusing on anyone in particular.  A type of fake eye contact effort. 

It was a large venue with hundreds of people and so optically, when we select one person down the back to focus on, the ten people sitting around them all feel we are looking directly at them too. We can get ripple effect going with our eye contact and in one minute engage with eleven people. 

This wasn’t happening.  The result was the speakers seemed detached and not engaged with their voters.  This makes the message more difficult to drive in because the power of the eye contact is completely diffused and rendered useless.

Voice strength is important too.  One of the aspirants asked me for a few hints about five minutes before he was due to start speaking.  I know him well.  He has a very demure manner and is rather softly spoken.  I told him to simply increase his vocal power.  He may have feared that he would be screaming, but I assured him that would not be the case at all. I knew that this would help him to come across as more credible and confident.  He did that and turned out to be the highest vote getter.  A few of the speakers let their voice trail off at the very end of their talk, when doing the wrap up. This is extremely bad and leaves a weak final impression. Don’t let it fade out.  Instead make it a crescendo at the end and finish with strength.

Another surprising thing was how little the speakers understood about how to use a microphone.  There was a microphone stand for them to use and almost all of them stood too far back away from the microphone.  They were losing vocal power as a result and this diminished their dynamism in the eyes of the audience. 

One of them added to his woes by getting his feet positioning wrong.  If you point your feet at ninety degrees to the audience, you are balanced and will be able to focus on the entire audience.  If, like him, you get the angle wrong and are off fifteen degrees, without knowing it, your body positioning is now turned such that you are ignoring about a third of your audience on one side. Don’t ignore your audience. 

To my horror and astonishment, one company President of a very large and well-known firm, chose to read his entire speech from hand held notes.  This is a two-minute speech and he can’t manage that at his level?  I was thinking that is a pretty sad state of affairs at his age and stage.  There is absolutely no need for that.

If you do, it ensures you look down at the page and do not engage your audience. It screams out you are out of your depth entirely.  Unsurprisingly, he got the lowest number of votes.

I shouldn’t be too harsh though, because up until my early thirties, I was terrified of public speaking and fled every chance to participate.  At least he was up there on stage giving it a go.  I wondered whether I should reach out to him and suggest he can do better than reading his talk out to us.  It is a tricky thing, so I will dwell on that a bit more. It may have the opposite effect and he may take offense at my implied suggestion that he is crap presenter, which he is.

One major and disappointing absence in this melee was storytelling.  It was a very dry boring affair for the most part. These are not boring, wallflower type people who have done nothing with their lives and careers. They are international businessmen with years of adventures and experiences under their belts. No one seized the opportunity to weave a fascinating story into their talk, to really grab hold of their audience and monopolise their attention for those two minutes.

I would give none of these senior executives a passing grade and worry about how effective they are in their role as leader.  They are the guide, explaining the future direction of the business and they have to convince everyone to follow them.  I cannot be confident they are doing a good job of it.

For all of us, we need persuasion power and that means being able to get up and speak in a convincing and professional manner.  If that is beyond you, then get the training, preferably with us, but at least get it from somewhere reputable.  The need is not going to diminish or go away.  It is only going to become more intense.

Our presenter was vivacious, sparky, bright and engaging. She works in a cool area of business and has the opportunity to see what works and doesn’t work in many industries.  This enables her to pull together terrific insights and back these up with hard evidence based on numerous case studies and who doesn’t love a good case study.  A big crowd turned out to hear her talk, so the place was packed.

Chatting before we started, she mentioned in passing that she had not planned the talk and was going to wing it.  I thought that was “brave” but in a bad way.  The talk has been advertised for weeks. She knows when it is on, so why would she want to wing it?  I just dismissed that as either bravado or laying out an early excuse, in case it bombs as a presentation.  Either way, I didn’t believe it and sure enough, when she went through the slide deck it was obviously structured and well planned.  She was speaking to what was on screen, so definitely no “script” required, but it had a plan.

Early in, she said something disturbing.  She mentioned that she intended for this to be an interactive talk.  This sounds pretty sexy, getting the audience involved and it can be, but I got worried immediately.  Her invitation to contribute to participate flags the issue of time control. 

Whenever we invite the audience to chip in with their thoughts and experiences, we lose the ability to keep on time.  Some responses are short, but many are surprisingly long.  I am always amazed by how much pent-up demand there is out there for people to add their two bobs’ worth. Maybe these days, with everyone so engrossed with their individual phone screens, the opportunity for some people to speak up has shrivelled and they are desperate for their thoughts, musings and comments to be heard by others.  When you make that “interactive” invitation, there will be a proportion of people who will take you up on your offer and more.  The “more” bit is where we lose control. That impacts the overall discipline of the talk to conform to the schedule for start and finish.

There is nothing wrong with involving the audience, but it requires discipline on our part to control proceedings such that we finish on time. When we combine this interactivity at scale, we can blow out the time required to get through the prepared material.  This happened to me recently when teaching a class on presentations for a luxury brand.  In typical Dale Carnegie fashion, we plan our classes out to the second.  People in the class, however were much more talkative than I expected and I found a dilemma of more material to cover than the time allocated.  I had to drop some parts out because we had a hard stop.

The secret in this case is to skip those parts, but in a way which is not obvious to the audience.  Only you know what is in the slide deck and so you can make adjustments if you need to.  I just jumped to some later slides in a way which was not public to the participants.  As far as they were concerned, this was all part of the plan.

Our speaker ran out of time and made the amateur error of showing us al what we had missed out because she wasn’t able to control the proceedings.  This is really bad.  Now the audience feels unhappy because they were enjoying the first part of the presentation and they want to receive all the value they are trading their time for.  Seeing sexy slides whiz by with no commentary or explanation is really a tease, but not one we can enjoy.

My calculation was she needed about another thirty minutes to cover what she had prepared. If she had been more disciplined, she could have allowed some degree of interaction bit capped it so that it didn’t blow up the presentation time schedule.  She got caught by the organisers, giving her the bum’s rush to get off stage because the time was more than up.

Reflecting on the structure, she had spent a fair amount of time at the start establishing her credentials through trip down memory lane with her career.  It was relevant to what she was presenting about and it was incredibly charming, but I think it went a bit too long. Consequently, at the end she had to sacrifice the juicy bits about the case studies.  She could have let her evidence do the hard lifting to establish her credibility on this subject, because she certainly had the goods.  This is another discipline point – don’t get too caught up in talking about yourself, as fascinating as that is to you.

Her takeaway points were a letdown at the very end, as she wrapped up. She had the right idea, but the content was a bit ho hum.  She could have come up with some harder hitting recommendations at the end to really provide benefit to the audience.  No one was photographing the take aways, and that is always a bad sign with any sort of summary.

Her final impression was her rushing through the content, teasing us with the sexy bits we didn’t cover and then leaving us high and dry with humdrum guides to our next steps. The lack of discipline meant the presentation started well and just slowly imploded and collapsed at the end. She was still vivacious and charming, so that always helps.  Better though to be more professional and bring value to the audience. That is what we want them to remember us for.

Foreign companies often want to appoint a Japanese person to be the head of their Japan operation.  This is done on the basis that they will know what is best for the business.  This proclivity has made many washed up, tremendously mediocre Japanese Presidents a lot of money and substantially extended their careers.  At some point the shareholders, or the Board, start to ask why there are no results in the Japan operation. 

The local chief usually manages to fend off these “rude” enquiries for a few years until the jig is up.  In comes the shiny new President from headquarters who has been despatched to “fix” the Japan operation and turn it around.  This typically leads to another array of problems, but that is another podcast.  The idea is that the Japanese way of doing things is the best for Japan – “when in Tokyo do it the Tokyo way” kind of thing. 

I remember trying to sell our High Impact Presentations Course to a foreign financial firm.  The Japanese lady I was speaking with told me she wanted the “Japanese way” of presentations instead of the Dale Carnegie global best practice way.  It is an interesting question, isn’t it.  How far do we go to accommodate the Japanese culture and way of doing things, while still getting the maximum benefit from doing things at the highest possible level?

We do meet foreigners here who have been here for a long time and have quietly gone troppo.  They are trying so hard to assimilate they are out Japanesing the Japanese.  What should we do about how we present in business?  Should we go troppo too and do it the Japanese “way”?  What is the Japanese “way”?  Here is your handy dandy guide to going troppo when presenting in Japan and how to blend in with the locals.

1.        Monotone

Speak in a complete monotone voice and forget about using any voice modulation, pauses or hitting of keywords and phrases.  Some people will say this is just how it is because the Japanese language is a monotone language and so there is no chance for vocal variation, as we have with foreign languages.  That is almost true, except even Japanese speakers can use two mighty levers to elevate their presenting world.

Speed and strength will produce the variety needed.  Slowing words down for emphasis or speeding them up both work well.  Taking the strength down to speak in a conspiratorial whisper is good and so is using power to hit keywords.

2.        Be Seated

Invariably, when I am invited to speak in Japanese the layout will feature a desk with my name written on paper either draping over the desk or sitting upright on a paper tent.  The microphone will be on a low stand. This is to make it clear that I am humble and I am not standing above the audience, making myself out to be better than everyone else.  It also means I lose my access to my body language and most of my gestures.

3.        No Eye Contact

Looking a superior in the eye in samurai times would get your head cut off for insolence.  The culture ensures that we don’t make direct eye contact with people when we speak and so Japanese presenters have migrated this into their presentations.  They never look into the eyes of their audience members.

It also means that they haven’t realised that normal conversation and giving presentations are two different things and different rules can apply.  The engagement of the audience members through six seconds of individual eye contact are foregone in order to keep your head on your shoulders.

4.        Weak Voice

Speaking softly is a cultural preference and so why not keep that going when presenting?  The speaker is under-powering their presentation, so often, it is hard to hear what they are saying and there is certainly no passion involved as demonstrated through voice projection.  This guarantees the speaker has almost zero presence in the room.

5.        Few Gestures

Holding the hands in front of the groin, behind the back or together at waist level are all favourites.  Each position locks up the hands and cancels out using any gestures to emphasise the message being delivered. 

6.        Casual Posture

Having the weight displacement 70/30 is common and usually it results in one hip being kicked out to the side.  Swaying around is also popular as they speak. These are all distractions from the message, but no one is conscious of that, so they keep doing it.

7.        One packed slide

Cramming everything on to one slide, with five tiny different fonts and six colours, is definitely a typical effort by Japanese presenters.  The rule that we have to be able to understand the point of the message on the slide in two seconds has been tossed overboard in favour of a full noisy baroque effort.

Good luck with out Japanesing the Japanese when it comes to the Japanese “way” of presenting.