In Part One, we looked at the ideas of primacy (the first thing we remember) and recency (the last thing we remember) and what this means for speakers. Now in Part Two we will go deeper with our entry and exit points of the chapters within the talk and how to choreograph the big crescendo for our polemic’s sparkling conclusion.

We naturally have to pump a lot of energy into designing the opening stanza of our speech.  On the surface of it, this would seem to be our one big chance to establish our theme, point of view and talk direction with the audience.  The opening is a battering ram to smash into the brains of the assembled masses and launch a takeover of their every thought.  This is easier said than done though, because any lapse of logistics or vocal quality and energy will see them scampering for the mental exists to get their internet fix mainlined through their phones.

Even if we do manage to hijack them at the start, we cannot presume we won’t lose them somewhere midstream.  That is why when we do the planning for the talk we need to design distinct chapters into the talk.  These chapters are constructed around the evidence that supports our central proposition.  Now these chapters have a primacy and recency function as well.  The opening of the chapter has to dislodge that last thing we told them and replace it with the new bauble. 

Most speakers pay no attention to this chapter idea and just arrange their talk to move from one section to the next.  The sections of the talk compete with each other for audience attention and we have to be aware of that.  At each chapter start we need a mini-battering ram to blast the tunnel deeper into the listener’s mind.  We have just told them some scintillating detail backing up our overall point and now we need to dislodge that, so we can ship in the next point.

Stories are good for this exercise as are questions, quotes, facts and statistics.  We are wading deep in our evidence portion of the talk at this point, but the facts need to be arrayed before the audience in such a way that makes them irrefutable.  In a forty minute speech each chapter will be about five minutes long, so taking out the blockbuster opening and the first stupendous close before the Q&A, we probably have time for six or seven chapters.  So that means we need some variety with each opening.  Starting each chapter with the same thing becomes predictable and boring. Predictability is the speaker’s nemesis, because it invites the audience to escape from us now that they know what is coming next.

In the planning stage investigate the point you are making to support your overall argument and see what type of opening the evidence lends itself to.  There may be some doubling up with opening gambits, but try for as much variety as possible to keep audience attention on you the speaker.  The end of each chapter is mini-close as well.  That means we have to come up with a zinger one sentence finisher that really makes your key argument sing.  This is all a matter of planning and that is the rub.  Most speakers do a poor job of planning because they are waist deep in slide assembly and logistics.  This is what they call planning but that is delusionary.

We have used each chapter to make our case and each chapter ending to summarise the facts and evidence of that section.  At the first close, before the Q&A, we need to bring the whole juggernaut to a crescendo.  Again, this is all about our design creativity and communication expertise.  Naturally the vocal delivery is a rise at the end of the final sentence that barks credibility, power, conviction and belief. 

We finish strongly, implant a pregnant pause that invites the audience to recognise we have finished and that they may now unleash their frenzied applause.  We then glide straight into the Q&A, following which we add another powerful close.  It can mimic the first one, it could be different, it is all in the planning and what type of impact you want.  Nevertheless, the vocal delivery will again be triumphant, strong and commanding.  Many speakers end with a whimper, their voice quietly falling away. Don’t be one of them.  Go out powerfully, with energy, verve and supreme confidence.  Deliver an ending they won’t forget, because we know the power of recency and we want our message to stick.

Primacy refers to the beginning of something, as it enters our brain. This new entity has a powerful impact on our memory and our concentration.  To muscle itself into our existing brain thought stream, takes a lot of mental energy. If successful, the new direction grabs us more powerfully than continuing with the same existing thought pattern.  Recency is focused on the last thing we have heard.  One of the narky criticisms of some people is that the thoughts we share with you are the result of our most recent conversation. We tend to remember the last thing we heard.  That makes a lot of sense doesn’t it, but what does this mean for speakers?

Are we only able to have our audience remember our openings and closings of our speechs?  Yes, the audience will certainly most easily recall the first and last pieces of information.  They will also strike an impression of us, on the basis of our first and last visual and vocal touches.  Obviously, we need to plan for and control the delivery of all of this opening and closing business, but we can go beyond that.  There will also be numerous other opens and closings going on during the audiences’ busy day. How do we shove all of those completely aside and dominate the minds of our audience.  We want them to absorb our message and to exclude all other competing thoughts?

Why do we have only one opening and one closing?  Could we break the talk up into chapters?  Each chapter is given a gangbuster opening and closing for that particular thought or point we want to convey.  Could we bring some physical action to the fore to differentiate the chapters and lift the audiences’ engagement with us?  This is only possible if we switch up our thinking about what is achievable with a talk.  The speaker’s normal fare is the same as everyone else’s normal fare.  We are immediately at a disadvantage to stand out from the crowd.  Sadly, we are at one with the speaker push, fitting in with standard operating procedures and methodologies.  We become another grey automaton lined up with all the other robot speakers.  Let’s stop doing that.

In a forty minute talk, there will be room for around seven to eight chapters, an opening and the first close before the Q&A, then the final close.  Let’s change up the opening at both the mental and physical levels.  We want an opening statement, question, quote, testimonial or story that rocks the audience back into the folds of their seat and makes them take note that they are strapping in for a major ride here today.  This shatters everything that came before for them up until that point. We must extinguish their previous thoughts and proclivities.  This is especially so, if you are one of a number of speakers tumbling along one after another, launching forth on some worthy topic.

Let’s organise some crew, instead of always going solo. If there is a switch between you and the MC or the previous speaker, there is always some dithering around with the tech to get the laptops exchanged and your slides up.  This drains the lifeblood of your first impression and the energy in the room simply tanks.  The MC roars, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the incomparable, the amazing, the stupendous Dr. Greg Story. Please welcome him to the stage, because he is going to totally rock our world today”.  You scramble up on stage and are immediately bent over like an old, old man, head down, trying to get the laptop hooked up to the projector.  This unwanted intrusion into the opening segment continues while you are zipping around with your mouse, looking to boot that slide show up.  This lull in proceedings has cratered the impact of that powerhouse MC introduction. It has now effectively been driven down to a pathetic whimper.  People have whipped into scrolling through their Facebook, LinkedIn or email, ignoring you while you get your act together.  The opening’s marvellous, magical momentum has melted away.

Why not get someone else to handle the logistics, so that you can get straight into your talk?  They set it all up while you are already speaking to the audience.  At the right moment they leave the slide advancer for you on top of the laptop, gracefully glide off stage and leave you to continue solo.  This way we float directly onto the power stream of the MC and then take the audience even higher with our own energy.  Yes, we need to have a lot of energy at the start, because remember there are two bodies on stage. We want to monopolise the audience’s attention for ourselves.  We purposely stand on the far side of the stage, to draw everyone’s looking line away from the tech God and have the audience focus on us instead.

In Part Two, we will go deeper with our entry and exit points of the chapters and then how to choreograph the big crescendo for our polemic’s sparkling conclusion.

Bruce Springsteen’s song Glory Days lyric, “Boring stories of Glory days yeah, they’ll pass you by” pops into my head sometimes, when I hear a speaker reminiscing about their glorious past.  I was sitting there at a chamber function when the speaker began to talk at length about his start in sales and his experiences.  It was fascinating for him no doubt, but it made him sound dated. He seemed to have become covered in dusty cobwebs too all of a sudden.  Talking about ourselves is great and dangerous at the same time. 

Usually when we speak, there will be our introduction done by the hosts.  If we are on the ball, we don’t place ourselves in their hands, so we write what we want them to say.  That doesn’t mean they are on the ball and can carry out a simple task.  If we make it too long, the hosts usually manages to murder it by dropping bits or getting things wrong.  I am always astonished that they cannot successfully read a piece of paper with words on it.

The audience is also on danger alert because they know the propaganda offensive is about to hit them.  It is hard to write about yourself though, because there are so many things you want to include.  Why is that?  We are desperate to establish our credentials with the audience, so that they will become more accepting of what we are saying.  We believe that volume is important so we should cram as much in there as we can.  In fact, we are defeating our own efforts because either the host mangles the text or the audience switches off.

Avoiding the chronology approach is always a good start.  Sometimes these details are included in the programme flyer and you don’t need to mention them at all or you can organise your own flyer for the attendees.  This is a good tactic and not hard to do.  When we are speaking about ourselves, we should focus on the key points only.  These are the things which relate to our expertise on this specific topic.  I am a 6th Dan in Shitoryu karate, which is wonderful, but probably doesn’t have anything to with a topic like presenting.  I could instead say this is my speech number #342 and that would be congruent with establishing I am a real world expert of the dark art of public speaking and have the experience required to tell others how to do it.

Often we are using powerpoint, so we can bring up some slides about our company.  This should also be brief.  Simple clear slides are what we want and the selection of information should be limited to the most powerful USPs or unique selling points of our firm.  Slide after slide makes an audience restless.  They are sitting there thinking, “enough already, get on with it”.  When I worked for a long established Australian Bank which was rather unknown in Japan, I would show a photograph of the establishment of the first branch back in the 19th century.  It was a black and white photograph with people dressed in the fashion of the Victorian era and it oozed with longevity.  I also attached the date in the Japanese Imperial reign format, rather than the Gregorian calendar, to make it seem even more ancient and venerable.  That one photo showed my Japanese audience we had stood the test of time and could be trusted with their money.

The CEO cowardly public speaking escape route of reliance on the souped-up corporate video at the start of the talk should be avoided at all cost.  These videos are rarely a good match with the specific topic for that day, because there is usually only one video. It has to be the Swiss Army Knife of propaganda videos, to travel around the world boring people of every persuasion.  If there is a particular section in the video which is really powerful, then just cue that part and don’t bother with the left over detritus.

Giving our own examples is a good idea in the talk, but again, we have to steer away from too much recalling of our glorious triumphs.  The audience is only interested in how what you are telling them will result in their own glorious triumphs, now and into the future.  We have to get a balance struck between talking about ourselves for effect and not for the stroking of our own massive speaker ego.  Where possible, use client examples of what you did for them, rather than droning on about what you did.

It is a tricky equation of how much is too much, which bits are more important than other bits and how much time should I allow for it.  Err on the side of caution and go minimalist, recalling Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, “less is more”.

For many people it may seem we are getting into oxymoron territory here.  “Public speaking…enjoyable?  You must be kidding mate”.  Many are called upon to speak and reluctantly they give their talk without talent, enthusiasm or particular motivation.  A duty, an unavoidable pain, like going back to the dentist for that root canal. As we rise in our careers, the necessity to speak in public goes right up in frequency and length.  Unfortunately, no one tells you this is what is on the cards for future you, so you are perpetually unprepared.  If we knew this was part of our unescapable future, then we would all get the training and end the misery right there.

Even for those who are sufferers, do they seek relief through getting training?  No.  They just continue blundering forward, reeking havoc wherever they go, destroying their personal and professional brands. This includes those who are devastated by nerves, quivering, pulse racing, hot flushes sweeping over their body, faces going bright red, knees knocking, stomach queasy and throat parched.  Do they get training?  No.  They just lurch from fearfulness to fearfulness, whenever they are required to speak in front of others.

What do we need to fix this.  Obviously training is one part and so is repetition.  Most speeches though are one offs, a one and done affair.  The speech has been used up for that audience, on that day and then it is shelved forever.  So how do we get repetition?  We may not get the chance to repeat the content, but we can give more talks.  To do that though we have stop hiding from the chance.  As a child in Brisbane, I watched the Three Stooges on black and white television and one of the jokes would be two of them would step back when asked to volunteer, making it appear that the other one had stepped forward, wanting to do the task.  Reluctant speakers are mentally doing the same thing.  Whenever the chance to get some repetition going comes up, they step back and let others do it.

Even if the chance to present to an audience is a one time thing, that doesn’t mean the talk is a one time thing.  If we are smart, we are giving this speech numerous times.  We do these without an audience, in private, as a rehearsal for the big event.  I competed in senior level Karate competition for many years and would never dream of going on to the mat and doing the kata or prearranged patterns, once only just for the judges.  I would be practicising for months in the Dojo, rehearsing that kata, over and over again until I dropped.  Why would putting your reputation out there in business require anything less?

By the time you hit that stage you are well practiced and confident.  Consequently your brain doesn’t release masses of chemicals preparing you for battle with a sabre toothed tiger, where you either run away or stand your ground and fight.  Consequently, come showtime you are not so nervous.  Some nerves yes, but not debilitating.

The other mental shift is to decide who this speech is about.  Not what it is about, but who it is about.  For people who hate speaking in public or become crippled with nerves, the speech is all about them.  It is about their mental trauma, induced by how they feel they will be judged by the audience and their deep fears of imminent, unmitigated disaster, about to  humiliate them for the rest of time.

We must switch the focus to the audience.  We are giving each person six seconds of eye contact, inducing that feeling in them, that they are only person in the room.  Hawk like, we are scrutinising their reaction to what we are saying.  We are judging if they are with us or do we have to push harder to bring them on board.  We are pumping out our ki (気) or intrinsic energy into the audience, to maximise our body language.  We are using congruent gestures to add lustre and power to our words.  Tonal variety, variations in speed and power engage the audience, such that they are eschewing their mobile phone’s siren call to escape to the internet.

In response, some will smile, nod, laugh at your amusing asides, follow you through the navigation of the talk.  After a while, some will start to lean into you.  It will only be a few millimetres, but what a rush that feeling is. When twenty, thirty, fifty, one hundred people start doing that at the same time, there is a powerful energy in the room. It hits you like a drug racing through your veins and leaves you looking for your next hit.  This is when public speaking surpasses duty and becomes a real pleasure.

Experts, pseudo experts, amateurs, believers, sceptics, supporters, enemies make up that sea of faces in front of us when we get up to speak.  We can get some basic data from the organisers about who is in the room.  What industries, companies, gender, age configurations are arrayed in those venue seats.  What we can’t tell are the information assimilation biases of our audience members.  This means we have to plan for a spread of reactions to what we are going to say.  By plan, factor that into the content and the delivery of our talk.  How do we do that?

There will be four basic personality styles in that random selection of individuals gathered to hear our talk.  Obviously we can’t easily satisfy four different demands at the same time.  During the course of the presentation we have to input elements which will appeal to all four, at different times.  Usually speakers don’t do this at all.  They plan and deliver based on their own preferred styles and to hell with the rest of the room.  Actually, it isn’t that nuanced.  It is not a conscious decision and more of one by neglect.

Content needs to have evidence.  The degree of granularity we can go into however will be linked to our knowledge base and also to the time available to cover the topic.  If we just bludgeon our audience with numbers for forty minutes, the Analtyicals in the room will be euphoric and everyone else totally nonplussed.  They love the detail, the proof, the evidence through numbers and 0.0001 is a fully acceptable number for them.  They don’t care about us speaking in a monotone or being fully boring, as long as we keep coming with more valuable data. They will ask us incredibly detailed questions about what we presented and will be carefully checking to spot any contradictions or errors in the numbers or the assertions.

Amiables are very conservative and low key.  They don’t like bombastic outbursts.  Radical ranting and venting don’t go down very well with them.  Calm delivery, in not too a loud a speaking voice is appreciated.  They like plenty of reference to people.  Who was involved, what did they do, how did they feel about it, are all curiosity factors for them.  They generally won’t raise their hand to ask a question, because they prefer to keep a low profile.  If we are low key throughout the talk, then the Analyticals and the Amiables will be fine with that, but not so other key types in the audience.  We need to have periods of calm interaction with our audience, to keep these first two groups happy. Focusing on data and people tends to go down well.

Expressives  are bored with all of that data and hate that low energy stuff speakers get up to.  They want some action, flamboyance, excitement, passion, enthusiasm, pizzazz and entertainment.  They don’t care too much for the nitty gritty detailed evidence. They want to see some powerful belief and emotional commitment to what we are saying.  They like the towering rhetoric of the motivational speaker.  If really moved, leaping out of their chairs and being supportive would be no problem for them.  We need to provide some big picture speech elements for this group.  At specific moments we can unleash our passion for our recommendations, get very powerful in that advocacy and really push out the volume and the energy.

Drivers are very outcome focused, so what value can you bring to me?  What can I learn that will make me better so that I can use it to improve what I am doing now. The “five key things”, the “ten steps” are all super attractive frameworks.  They want to know the why, the what and the how. They don’t need the cheerleader, because they want the takeaways.  They are their own cheerleader, so they search for new knowledge they can apply.  Your passion is appreciated but the viability of the information in concrete usage terms is more appealing.  Having lots of energy is fine but having very little is not.  Be powerful at times but come laden with gifts of guides to doing better.

In our talk we need to have phases that provide value to all four groups.  We cannot favour our own style or one other style exclusively, because we have effectively excommunicated the rest of the group. This is a delicate act to pull off, which is why it needs careful thought and planning beforehand.  You can't make this stuff up or get the balance right on the fly.  We have to start with the premise that we have a range of people in the room. We need to give them all a taste of wonder, defined by how they see that playing out.

In our High Impact Presentations (HIP) course, we do a number of presentations over two days of training.  What I love about teaching this programme is that you see the results immediately.  If we are teaching leadership or sales, it is very hard to see immediate results and those programmes are multi-week efforts.  Day One we have the first presentation which forms the marker for the programme.  I challenge everyone to give me their very best, knock it out of the park, most spectacular presentation they have ever given in their life.  When we get to the end of Day Two and they compare the last video of their presentation with this first one, everyone has exactly the same reaction “oh, my God” because they have made such vast, almost unimaginable improvement in just two days.

People who are already quite good, become more polished and sophisticated in their presenting.  The real eye poppers are those who are shy, panicking, timid or inaudible through fear.  Two days later they are unrecognisable from what they were the day before.  I was looking at some of this amazing progress being made and I was thinking to myself, what has made this huge difference?

Kiai is a key factor.  Kiai (気合) is a Japanese word made up of two characters ki ( 気) and ai (合).  Kiai means to bring your life force to a point of convergence.  In karate terms, this means the blow is delivered with a total commitment at the point of impact.  Your whole bodyweight, mind, breath, voice are all layering on top of each other, to register an explosive outcome inside the body of the opponent. Your middle body area from the hips to the rib cage, are compressing like a vice. All of this is being done at hyper speed as well, to create the maximum amount of power.

The first time I heard a kiai was in February 1971.  With other beginners, I was waiting outside a door that led to our first karate class and we could hear all this crazy yelling going on inside.  I peaked through the gap in the door and saw many people dressed in these white pajama looking get ups, leaping around and making a hell of racket.  I didn’t know then that for the next 50 years, I would be doing the same thing.

The same phenomenon is not limited to martial arts. If you have ever watched competitive weight lifting for example, you will hear the kiai when the lifter drives total concentration to the point of the lift and exhales with a strong breath at the same time.  This is what we do in karate and what we need to be doing in our presentations. Instead of grunting and exhaling, we are using our vocal delivery range to bring impact to our message.

The students I was teaching presenting had no kiai when they started the HIP. Their words were just words, spoken at normal conversation level, as if they were chatting with the person sitting next to them.  The presenter has permission to lift their speaking voice to a much higher level than is normally the case in polite conversation.  Remember, we are standing up in front of others seated in a venue, so we have to project our voice to the back of the room.  If we are presenting online, it is the same thing.  Video has two nefarious impacts on us.  We appear to have gained three kilos in weight when on camera and our normal voice strength is down by about twenty percent.  That means we have to raise the speaking level twenty percent online, just to get to a normal level, let alone going a bit harder because we are presenting.

In the course, I explain that we have to speak with more power.  We have to hit the words harder than normal.  We also have to mentally project our energy into the audience.  So it is not just the voice range that is important.  As I mentioned, we are focused on the kiai, the convergence of our life force.  We push our body energy toward the people sitting in front of us through our body language.  The breath is being exhaled with the delivery of the words and the energy output level is extremely high. Our gestures are also being added in to provide even more physical presence to what we are saying.

I always need to encourage the participants to go bigger with their gestures.  This helps to raise their energy level and to add more power to their presentations.  When I am telling them to go bigger, they never go big enough, so I have to really push them. They think this looks completely crazy and is making them come across as totally out of control.  Every single person coming back from the Review Room having looked at themselves on video say that even though they thought they looked over the top, it didn’t look like that on the video and in fact it looked completely  congruent with what they were saying.

When we are speaking using more kiai, the audience feels our presence.  They feel our passion, commitment and belief in what we are saying.  This is very attractive to the listener and they are more likely to accept and support what we are saying.  Bring your breath, physical energy, gestures and voice to a point of convergence when you speak and you will have real impact as a presenter.

Sometimes the organisers of the presentation event ask us if they can distribute our slides before the speech.  They are thinking that this will help the audience to follow what we are saying.  Especially in Japan, audience members are probably better at reading than hearing the content.  So having the slides at hand to refer to during the talk makes a lot of sense.  Never do this!  Ignore the supposed sage advice of event organisers, who themselves rarely if ever give public presentations.  There are very few occasions when you need to be handing out bits of paper to support your talk.

The only exception to this rule of mine would be if there are numbers involved and they are locked into tiny cells in a spreadsheet.  I am sure you have suffered the ignominy of sitting in an audience and struggling to make sense of the numbers being shown on the screen.  The speaker gracefully moves through the spreadsheet, pointing out various gripping correlations and conclusions. Of course, they have added an important caveat before their pontifications about what we are all looking at, by saying “you probably can’t see this but….”.  Naturally we can’t see it.  The tiny number squiggles are unable to be claimed from the cells on screen, because the presenter has not considered the needs of the audience. 

I could arrange for just those spreadsheet numbers to be distributed before the talk, so that people can read along with my explanation.  This is giving verity to what we are claiming because the audience can check the numbers themselves.  I am still reluctant to do that though.  As soon as I refer people to the sheets of paper in their hand, I have lost my connection with them.  They are now looking at bits of paper and not at me.  I can’t see how they are reacting, because their faces are looking down.

I would prefer to treat the spreadsheet numbers like wall paper on screen.  They form a backdrop, but I don’t expect anyone to plumb the depths of numbers they cannot see, let alone read.  Instead I would use some animation and blast out key numbers in huge font in a call out emerging from the background.  Now everyone is looking at one huge number and I would explain the importance of that statistic or number.  The wall paper in the background is a type of proof that we have the numbers, we are not hiding them.  We don’t need to show every number in the collection though, because there will be some numbers more important than others. 

We just keep repeating this animation process for every key number.  We can make the sheets of paper available at the end, for anyone who would like to go more granular.  In this way, all eyes are kept on me as the presenter. I can also read the faces of the audience as I present these key data points.  I am scanning their faces for resistance.  Am I going to get any pushback during the Q&A?  Are they buying my argument?

If we distribute the entire slide deck before the talk, then what is the point of the talk in the first place?  We may as well all stay at home and just send everyone an email with the attachment and they can read through it all at their leisure.  Once the audience has that document, they are reading page eighteen while you are explaining page one.  You have lost control of the narrative.  They are now processing what they are seeing in the document and somewhere in the background, they can hear some white noise.  That white noise is you, by the way, droning on about your presentation.  They are not fully listening any more and as the speaker you have effectively lost your audience.

As the presenter, we must never become second fiddle to the slide deck or the spreadsheet.  We must control the flow of the argument.  The story is meant to unfold in a certain logical order, a build that pushes ever onward, toward a powerful conclusion.  We are here to sell our argument and that means we have to get right behind it all the way.  Don’t delegate the point of the talk to the slide deck.  Get out in front where you can dominate proceedings and where you can read ever nuance of your audience’s reaction to what you are saying.  We must be the star of the show, not the cells in a spreadsheet or masses of text on screen.

So, when the organisers, those never presenters, insist we need to distribute the talk beforehand, cast them a steely glance. In an icy voice of shivering indignation refuse their idiotic offer.  Others are allowed to be unprofessional, but we must be the island of insight, knowledge, intelligence and experience.  That is the path of the real presenter.

Donald Trump has made this technique of “many people say….” famous for dealing with opposing views.  This is not an exercise for or against Trump. Rather, it is just looking at different ways we can head off opposition to what we are saying.  We should have a point of view when we speak and therefore we should also be prepared for opposing points of view.  Getting to the Q&A to deal with pushback is okay, but it is better to deal with it inside your presentation.

Most of us are one dimensional when we prepare our talks.  We are thinking of ourselves and what we want or need to say.  We don’t give much thought to how others will receive it.  In Japan, it is unusual for anyone to go after you when you are speaking.  Good manners requires that everyone be stoic and put up with annoying counter opinions.  No one should lose face in a public arena.  This is fine, but those who disagree may not bark, but they do bite.  They will do it afterwards, rather than in public.  They will criticise your failings to others and you will go merrily on your way, never realising that the audience thinks you are a total light weight.  Better to grasp the nettle in the moment and end it then and there.

The key is to first design your talk in the first draft.  I don’t mean write the whole thing out word for word, but to design the two endings for before and after the Q&A, to create the key points with evidence and finally design the blunderbuss opening to grab everyone’s attention.  Once you have this framework start looking for your points of view interventions.  There will be a few of these in the speech.  These are the things you want us to believe or to do.

Now isolate these out and think about the opposite point of view.  What would be the strongest arguments against your point of view.  If you say there aren’t any, then a big reality check on your self awareness sounds like it is in order.  Take the lawyers approach of preparing the brief for the other side in the argument.  What would they say, how would they refute the points made, what counter evidence would they proffer.  You might not think the evidence is comprehensive but that isn’t the viewpoint of those holding those ideas. Also consider what questions would they ask to find any holes in your proposition?

In the talk, you can draw on the Trumpian technique of putting up a stalking horse argument and then disposing of it comprehensively.  You might say, “there is an alternate viewpoint that says XYZ.  Most experts however believe that ABC is more convincing and better supported by the evidence”.  You have said that not just you, but the experts are opposing this XYZ viewpoint and what is more, they have looked at all the evidence and concluded that what you are saying is more accurate.  Third party interventions from experts makes it harder for people in the audience to disagree with you.

“Japan is different” is an all weather counter for just about everything that people base their views on.  Japanese people disregard any surveys or research presented unless it includes Japan in the comparisons.  It doesn’t matter what it is, unless there is a Japan component involved, they conclude it doesn’t apply here because, well, Japan is different.  We can say that normally we would expect EFG to apply, but because this is Japan then we get UVW instead.  This is hard to argue against because it is well accepted here that this logic makes sense.  Of course, we have to have good evidence that this is how Japan does work in this case and that usually isn’t hard to muster.

Another method is to mention that the evidence is not complete yet, but that the trends seem to be pointing to whatever it is you are recommending.  This is allowing that later research may refute what you are saying, but as far as we know up to this point, this looks to be true. Again, we make ourselves a small and elusive target for counterattack. 

Mentioning this is your experience allows other to have had a different experience, which is fair enough. You are not saying that you are the sole guru on this subject, but everything you have seen so far, tells you this viewpoint seems to be the best case.  You are open to other’s experiences and this comes across as a very even handed and balanced approach.

The key is in the planning, to know where the hot buttons will be pressed by people in the audience and to head them off at the pass, before they get going.  Taking other opinions into account will make your talk seems more rounded and less dogmatic.  You come across as knowledgeable on the subject and an expert who should be listened to.  It is hard to argue against and your talk will go very smoothly when you get to the Q&A.  The Q&A is the graveyard of many a good talk by the way, because the speaker didn’t plan ahead for pushback.  We won’t be in that category anymore, going forward.

Whether we asking to give a talk or asked to present, we need an audience.  The onus is on the meeting hosts to take care of the logistics of the venue and the associated tech needed to carry out the presentation.  We cannot leave everything to them though, because our personal brand is tied up with the success of the event.  Now “success” can be defined in many ways, but having a venue space for fifty people and having five people turn up, wouldn’t strike too many people as a triumph. This would be more like an embarrassment.  We naturally want to get our message out to as many people as possible and so we want to maximise the audience size.

There are a couple of hooks for us to pull an audience for our talk.  A key one is the title of the talk.  This can sometimes be a talk title which must be approved by the organisers or you may be free to choose the one you prefer.  If we look at newspaper, magazine or any media advertising headlines, there is a real skill in getting these titles to grab people’s attention.  Most speakers are not trained copywriters. They never imagine they need to enlist the help of a copywriter to help with creating the presentation title.  So we are all in the DIY school of speaker copywriting.

The best title selection will revolve around a number of factors, such as the content of the talk or the nature of the audience.  Think of the title as a hook, to snag interest from potential attendees.  What title would locate the sweet spot of both appealing to those interested in the topic and a compelling offer, to inspire the punters to turn up to the speech.  The title cannot be too long, in the same way that headlines are kept brief.  How can we get the explanation of the content and the hook, into as few words as possible.

Last week, I talked about how to use the Balloon Brainstorming Method to create your speech content.  The construction of the talk I explained, starts with the punchline, crafted in as few words as possible, in order to drive clarity.  I also went through how to create the base content sectors, which are the bones of the talk.  Having done all of that, we then create the opening piece. This is there to smash through all the clutter in people’s minds, when they enter the venue, to hear our talk.  The title is often best taken from that opening piece.  We don’t use it word for word, but we look for the strongest hook therein, to finally create the talk title.  We only have a few words available for that, so each word must really outperform for us. 

I was recently asked to give a talk, but received no great guidance on the topic.  The host wanted to pull an audience. So I thought about what is a common topic that would attract as many people as possible to attend.  I chose “public speaking” because this freaks most people out fairly universally, across all cultures, ages and gender ranges. 

I also have a lot of experience and am an expert on this topic, so I have supreme confidence to talk to an audience about it.  This sounds like bragging, but we must have expertise and real confidence to stand up in front of others and pontificate.  If you don’t have that, then please spare the rest of us the train wreck masquerading as your talk.

I used my Balloon Brainstorming methodology for the content creation. Finally I had to create the talk title.  I had come up with 15 subtopics, which would be too many for the time allowed to cover, so I needed to trim that down. 

I decided to go with twelve topics, because it is a substantial number, but doable in the time granted to me.  So, I started writing out possible titles, to see if I could find one that would resonate.  In the end, I came up with a title using alliteration as a means of grabbing attention.  The hook was The “Terrible Twelve” Typical Errors That Presenters Make And How To Fix Them.  I was pushing the boundaries on title length, but I liked the alliteration of “The Terrible Twelve Typical” components in the title.  Key words were Typical, Twelve, Terrible, Presenters and Fix. Anyone reading that title would have a clear idea of the value of the talk. If they had an issue with presenting, they would feel this would be a talk providing substantial value, through its clear coverage of the topic. 

The next step was to flesh out, in a few sentences, the content of the talk giving the audience a taste of what will be covered.  This will be the text to accompany the title, when the hosts advertise the talk.  Again, we only have a few sentences to work with, because there are always space limitations when advertising the talk.  We should have some word count indication from the event sponsors, of how much we can say, when we are writing this piece.  This overview has to reek with value to the audience and should cover the key pain points associated with the topic. 

Finally, we need a customised Bio to go with the talk.  It also will have a limitation on length, so only the highlights associated with your being an expert on this subject can be covered.  It is not a job application, so don’t send in your modified CV.  This has to be crafted by you as power text, not a shopping list of bullet points.  We want to build our personal brand and establish our credentials to talk on this subject.  Remember many more people will read about you, than will ever be able to attend the actual event. This is a free kick, advertising you to the world.  So, what do you want people to know about what a legend you are?

A request came to me recently asking me to speak to an audience.  So my first question was, “what would you like me to speak about?”.   The answer was fairly broad.  Actually, that is good and bad.  Good, because there is plenty of scope to tackle various subjects, but bad because it is rather vague and obtuse.  Where to start?  I absolutely won’t be searching for previous slide decks on related subjects or thinking about the slides I could create on the subject.  In this regard, I am in the minority of presenters.  This is the minority you want to be in, because that slide first crowd is categorically not the group you want any part of.

When we are tasked to give a talk, how to do we work out what to speak about?  A technique I always use when brainstorming about anything is the idea balloon brainstorming method.  I will have a problem I need to solve.  I need a system that generates the best possible ideas I can come up with and at hyper speed.  Maybe someone else has better ideas, but they usually aren’t around when I need them, so I have to work it out by myself.

The first step is to use paper and pen.  This is old school I know, but there is something about the creative process for me that works best on paper.  I am also a visually oriented learner, so being able to “see” the ideas on paper works well for me too.  This is me and you may be different.  My point is to know what does work for you in the first place and try and master that system, rather than just fumbling around in the dark.

I write the key word or phrase in the middle of the sheet and draw a circle around it, an idea balloon type of look.  Then I think about what are the related elements to this subject.  This is at a high level in this first instance. Say I was going to give a talk on presenting.  The center of the balloon would be the word “presenting”. Each element related to this topic would be written and then a circle drawn around it, creating idea balloons, with connecting lines drawn back to the center balloon.  Elements might include “topic selection”, “preparation”, “delivery”, “audience analysis”, “common mistakes”.

Each of these elements would then be transferred to individual separate sheets of paper and each word goes in the center of its page and the process repeated.  The order is important. For example, I need to understand who I am talking to before I plan anything.  So I start with “audience analysis”, then drill down to the elements related to that which might include new sub-balloons such as, “gender split”, “expertise level”, “age demographic”, “industry”, “language fluency” etc.  These would be points I would ask the organisers about, before I even started the speech preparation.  I need to know at what level to pitch my talk – are they experts or amateurs or a mixture. This selection would normally be enough information and I wouldn’t need to drill down any further.

For other elements, I would want to go deeper though.  For example, “topic selection”, would be the next logical step. I would place that in the centre of a new page and then start adding the sub-elements.  This would include topics such as “topicality”, “data availability”, “my angle”, “my expertise”, “audience value factor”, “audience interest”.  Taking each sub-element, I can go deeper again.  On a fresh sheet of paper, I could place “topicality” in the middle and start building up ideas circling them into balloons on the page.  For example, “Covid-19 health concerns”, “business disruption”, “working from home”, “isolation”, “staff retention issues”, “mental health”, “suicide increases”, “leadership issues”, “productivity”, “cash flow”, etc.  As you see the list can grow very quickly for some sub-elements.

The beauty of this system is the combination of breadth of the topic possibilities and depth achieved with each topic, all being done again at a rapid clip.  In ten minutes, you have multiple sheets of paper with a lot of ideas created from which to start making some selections.  The next stage is tougher however, as you have to start making decisions on what you will select from the numerous possibilities.  The talk has a time limit, so there has to be a sieving of the gold nuggets, that will have the greatest impact on the audience and provide the highest value.  Remember, these are our personal and professional reputations we are putting on the line every time we present.

Once the topic is decided, I need to write a single sentence or phrase, which encapsulates what I believe about this topic.  This is the punchline and should be completed in as few words as possible. I am forced to be clear.  This is usually quite difficult, but the effort put in will help to make the conclusion we craft well worth it. The next step is gathering evidence to support the conclusion.  There will be sub-chapters inside the talk, to arrange the evidence into a flow, that is easy for the audience to navigate.  We need to remember that every five minutes we must switch up the presentation content, to keep our audience in our grip.

The last thing we design is the start of the presentation. This is where we build that all important first impression with the audience.  In this Age of Distraction and Era of Cynicism this opening has some heavy lifting to do.  We have to establish our credibility to deal with the sceptics and smash through all the clutter clogging up the brains of our assembled audience.  It has to be powerful or the masses will be scrambling for their phones to escape from us.

Outlining our presentation is where we start.  The assembly of the slides we will use comes last.  It is important to get the order right.  Do so and you will always come across as a polished professional when you speak.

You see it.  The presenter publicly self-immolates. They might butcher the start, get lost in the weeds of their content or be put to the sword at the end in the Q&A.  They can’t engage with their audience, are incoherent and quivering the whole time.  It is a train wreck on display. Reputations and credibility are flayed alive.  Here is the irony – they chose it to be like this. They made a series of poor decisions about this presentation and then reaped the whirlwind of total humiliation.

Rehearsing the presentation takes time.  Time which could be devoted to adding massive content, multiple fonts and gaudy colours to the slides.  This is why failures fail.  They ignore logic and decide that practicing on their audience is much more efficient.  It is not terribly effective though. The long term damage from short term decisions is substantial when you thrust yourself into the public eye. If you don’t have big brackets of time available, then just work on pieces at a time, over time.  That means start early, so there is no mad rush at the end. 

I made a genius decision once to prepare my presentation on the flight from Osaka to Sydney.  No sleep and subsequently plenty of irritability upon landing made for a combustible cocktail. When someone in my audience had the temerity, the audacity, the gall to challenge my assertions in the presentation, it didn’t go well. I vowed NEVER to try that exercise in efficiency ever again.

Turning up just before kick off, to find there is some technical issue with your slides or the laptop or the audio is a life shortening experience.  Always make the time to go early.  I was giving a presentation to the Japan Market Expansion Competition and dutifully brought along my USB to plug into their laptop.  Their Microsoft environment didn’t like my Mac presentation layout, so it changed the whole thing.  I arrived early and found myself sweating like a maniac, as I tried to fix every single slide before the start.  I finished with one minute to go, but I was a nervous wreck.  If I am not using my own laptop, I go even earlier now.

First impressions start from the moment the organisers advertise the event and include elements of your bio.  People are forming biases and opinions about you, which they are going to size up against what they see in front of them.  Get there early, check the tech and then gracefully mingle with the punters.  Do your best to be charming.  Being an introvert, that is no easy task for me.  Do your best to schmooze people in the crowd before you start and build supporters in the room.

Don’t eat too much at the lunch or dinner prior to your talk.  Try instead to engage your table colleagues, again building rapport.  You can always eat later if you are starving.  When they call your name stride confidently and effortlessly to the stage.  Have zero interaction with the laptop – don’t even touch it. Instead get straight into your opening.  You don’t need any slides to begin with, so concentrate of creating a powerful and positive first impression.  Once you have done that, then you can look down at your laptop and start the slide deck rolling.  By the way, many balding presenters proffer a brilliant view of their sparse, patchy pate, as they lean forward over the laptop, fiddling with the machine.  Don’t be one of them.

 Start off with a power opening to grab attention. Remember, we are all self-focused and supremely interested in what happened to us this morning, what we need to do after the talk and what is coming up for us tomorrow. The speaker is competing with all of these high value items in the minds of the audience.  We need to supplant all of that inner-focus with our ideas, views, suggestions and recommendations.  Make sure to raise your voice tone from the get go, to set the energy level at the right point to carry through to the rest of the proceedings. It is very hard to start soft, then work your way up, so start strong then vary the tone from there.

Keep your eyes on the crowd the whole time.  Read their faces.  Are they buying what you are saying, are they bored, are they surreptitiously or furtively looking at their phones under the table, are they nodding in agreement?  This is why, if some helpful venue flunkey turns the lights down, so that you are dominated by the screen, you should stop speaking immediately and ask for the lights to be brought back up.  In my experience, the moment those lights go down, a big proportion of a Japanese audience is lost, because they are sleeping.  It seems to be a bit like the rhythmic rocking of the trains here, that induces slumber.  Lights go down and off they go Pavlovian like, to the land of Nod.  I have seen that scenario play out a number of times here.  I find stopping speaking for about ten seconds interrupts the pattern and then resuming with a powerful burst of energy and voice volume wakes them right up again.

Keep the main body to around three major points in a thirty minute talk.  Pile on the evidence though, because we are always speaking to a room full of sceptics recently force fed a diet of “fake news”.  Save the heavy detail for the Q& A, if you need it. Keep the points clear and accessible, pitched at the level of expertise of your audience.  Forego all the acronyms and jargon which appeal to the cognoscenti, if the audience are mere mortal ordinary punters.

Don’t get into arguments in the Q&A.  There may be hot questions hurled forth by provocateurs, self-aggrandising show offs, flouting their knowledge in front of the great unwashed.  Answer them to the best of your ability and then say sweetly, “let’s continue this discussion after the talk.  Who has the next question” and move on, giving them no more eye contact or recognition for the rest of the talk.

Always prepare a second close after the Q&A, so that you dominate the last item to linger in the memory banks of your audience.  The conversation triggered by a final question can be completely tangential or even totally unrelated to what you were there to talk about.  Don’t let someone hijack your purpose. Seize back control of the point of this presentation, by unfurling your final close.  Thank the audience and then elegantly descend from the stage to mingle with the masses.  Leave everything on the podium and pack the gear up at the very end.

I have the opportunity to give a number of presentations each year.  I video them as well, so I can study where I can improve them further.  What I find very interesting though, is that I am a poor model in some ways for others, who don’t have that chance to present publically so often.  I was teaching some presentation skills classes recently and the students are probably a better fit for most people as a model.  They are in the class because they need to become more persuasive and more professional when they speak.  Our High Impact Presentations Course is the Rolls Royce of presenting, so allow me to encapsulate some of the big breakthroughs I see in our classes, as tips that you can immediately adopt for yourself.

1. Stand up straight.

Well come on, you may be saying, is that a tip?  How hard could that be?  Surprisingly many people can’t stand up straight.  They put more weight on one leg than the other, kick out one hip and so look way too casual.  Others are swaying about the place from the hips, like a drunken sailor.   This swaying makes them look like they lack confidence and conviction about their messaging, which is extremely bad, but simply fixed.  Stand straight and don't’ sway about.

2. Turn your neck

 Do not turn your shoulders or feet, when looking at people in the audience sitting on the sides.  Amazingly, some presenters even half lean over toward someone who is sitting off to the side of the speaker.  Or, even more fascinatingly, they do this cute little soft shoe shuffle with their feet to face that person.  You look clunky, way too casual and unconvincing.  Stand up straight on the one spot and just simply turn your head to look at people to the sides of the audience.

3. Start strong

It is very hard to build up the energy after you start.  For whatever reason it is easier to start strong and then adjust the strength later.  When you begin softly you tend to get stuck there.  Remember, this is the Age of Distraction and we face the toughest audiences ever created. When they hit that room to hear your talk, their brains are chock full of stuff already.  We have to break into their brain and open them up for our message.  A strong start cuts through the crowd noise and grabs immediate attention. 

4. Use gestures intelligently

The gesture needs to be congruent with what we are saying.  A simple way to understand this is, if I was saying, “this is a huge global project” and had brought my palms together in front of my body facing each other only a few centimetres apart, showing a very narrow range, the words and hand position don’t match.  For that sentence, I need to have my arms up around shoulder height and stretching wide, almost at 180 degrees to my body. 

What many people miss is the opportunity to pair the gesture with the concept.  Use your hands as a measuring stick to indicate high, low, big, small etc.  When the students do this type of gesture in the class, they feel a bit shy, as if it is too exaggerated.  However, once they get into the review room with the other instructor, they see themselves on video and realise it looks very natural and normal.

5. Eyeball your audience

If we want to persuade our audience we need to engage them.  The most powerful way to do that is give them eye contact.  Politicians are geniuses at getting this wrong.  They do eye contact quick sweeps of the assembled punters, effectively connecting with no one.  This is fake eye contact. 

We want to pick up people in the crowd and give one person solid uninterrupted eye contact for six seconds, then immediately move to the next person at random in the audience and give them six seconds of eye contact.  We just keep repeating this throughout the entire talk.  Six seconds is long enough to engage without becoming intrusive.  Depending on the size of the audience, you may have been able to personally connect with everyone there.  That is powerful.

6. Use your voice

Speakers speak with their voice, but many are not really using it properly.  Using it properly would be to select certain key words in a sentence and either hit them harder or make them softer than the surrounding words.  It might be used to slow----things----down or SPEEDTHEMUP when we speak.  Also we can go high and low in modulation for more variety.

7. Turn the energy switch on

We speak with a certain energy output, when we are having a normal conversation.  We cannot transfer that same energy to the stage or to the online world when we are presenting.  We need to really ramp up the energy output. 

We have a different role when we are in the limelight.  We need to project our confidence, our belief in what we are saying.  An easy way to do that is drive up the energy output and radiate that to the audience.  We need to vary the power of course, throughout the speech, but the baseline will be about 20% higher than what we would experience in normal conversation.

If you start adopting these seven tips into your next presentation, it will be remarkably more effective.  Are any of these tips especially hard?  Not at all.  What is required is self awareness and the ability to adjust what you are doing to make it better. 

A bonus tip is to rehearse.  Don’t experiment or practice on your audience.  Don’t spend all your prep time on beating the slide deck into submission.  Allocate time to practice the talk and if possible video it for review.  You will be better at getting the time limits of the speech correct and will be so much more confident when the big day comes for your talk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.        Eyes

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

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

2.        Face

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

3.        Voice

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

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

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

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

5.        Ki – intrinsic energy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.        Tell Stories

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

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

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

2.        Provide Insights

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

3.        Provide Valuable Data

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

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

4.        Engage Through Questions

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

5.        Third Party Endorsements

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

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

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.