Clubhouse is a new app that enables audio discussions with people who share a similar interest, coming together from around the world.  The conversations are not retained and the content disappears each day.  There is no distribution of the content either, because of that removal function.  Unlike say a written blog which can sit on your website continually adding value to your brand.  Also, there is no repurposing capability, because there is only one format and that is not transportable.  Your written blog can become a podcast or the script for a video. Nevertheless, you are live, unfiltered and global all at the same time.  We are putting our personal and professional brands out there for all to calibrate, evaluate and conclude about. Because it is new, we may be blind to the position we have inadvertently put ourselves in.

What is biggest problem with Clubhouse?  It is what people are saying and how they are saying it.  Because it is an open mic situation, some people reveal they are babblers.  Maybe the isolation factor of so many people working at home is driving this need to just talk, talk, talk.  For the listener though, the impression is this person is not smart, clear, concise or considered.  Would you want to connect further with them or do business with them?  Probably not.

Being highly articulate and thinking on your feet while live is a bigger ask than giving a prepared talk.  There is no opportunity to rehearse the content and the delivery.  Being a live platform, Clubhouse precludes that facility. When you write something, you may be very credible and authoritative, but in a live environment you don’t have anywhere to hide.  If you can’t get to the point or your point is a bit pointless or mundane, then judgments kick in and your personal brand can take a hit.

There is also no visual aspect to support what you are talking about.  In formal presentations you can show things on stage or refer to slides on screen, to help drive the key information you want to get across.  Now we are down to just voice, so how expert are you at painting word pictures.  Most speakers are scanty in accessing the word picture opportunity when presenting. 

Clubhouse also needs storytelling skills.  These have to be concise, because otherwise you become too long winded and hog the limelight. Nobody is going to appreciate that and your reputation suffers accordingly. High interest gripping stories packed with vivid word pictures, filled to the gunnels with value would be the way to go. Using the variety in your voice options, including modulation, pauses, and word highlighting, add to the ease of following what you are saying.

How many people with all of these skills have you heard on Clubhouse so far? Hiding amongst or blending in with equally hopeless speakers on Clubhouse isn’t the answer. What should we be doing? Make sure your Clubhouse profile is done well. Get a good photo of yourself so the people can see what you look like. Make it a professional look in business battle dress if you're a professional. Or something groovy if you're a pony-tail, black Armani, t-shirt creative.

You have a lot of space to write about yourself. So when people check you out, you want to come across as an expert or authority in your field. We want to connect with experts and winners, not wannabes.  Make sure the first three lines are really powerful, concise triumphs of marketing, because that is what appears in the feed.when your name comes up on screen.

Be very cautious about which rooms you participate in. Find your topic of interest, and then see if there are regular gatherings of other folk with a similar proclivity. Listen to the quality of the contributions first and decide if this one is a keeper or not. You might have to spend some time sorting through the dross, but there is no shortcut available as yet. If you can find a group of like-minded people who have something worth listening to, then keep attending.

Eventually the host will invite you to elevate to speaker status. Part of that decision is based on your profile and your regular interest in the content. When you get asked to speak, start strong with a confident voice, be polite and thank the host and the other participants for this chance to talk.  Being complimentary of comments from some of the other prior speakers is also a good idea. This shows community, humility, and consideration.

Having mapped out in front of you the key bullet points you want to cover, also set a timer in front of you for three minutes. This makes your contribution punchy, valuable and concise. It will be evaluated highly because of the “please, no fluff “ rule. If you find yourself suddenly waffling, then stop speaking and give someone else a chance to contribute. You usually get more than one chance to speak, but don't overdo it. No one wants to listen to some thrusting blowhard, who loves the sound of their own voice. Go into Clubhouse with a plan just as you would with any presentation.

The difference with this medium is you can crash and burn globally, rather than just in front of a limited room of 50 people face to face. It is still your personal and professional brand out there at risk though. So take steps to eliminate or reduce that risk factor.

This pandemic will blow over soon and we can all get back to normal.  What will that “normal” look like though in the presenting world.  CFOs have pulled their green eye shades down and sharpened their pencils and realised the company can save a truck load of dough by attending business and industry conferences virtually, rather than in person.  I am on the Board of the International Dale Carnegie Franchisee Association.  Normally (that word again!) we would travel to our Owner’s Meeting in some pleasant locale and gather the faithful from around the world in June.  We had to do it virtually last year and had the biggest turnout of participants ever and saved a fleet of truckloads of money for the Association and the Franchisees.

Will we do them virtually now?  That is a good question and like a lot of organisations, is a hot topic under discussion.  Companies won’t be so keen to spend big money on internal meetings anymore, because the economics is unassailable.  Face to face won’t necessarily go to zero and the perfidious online platforms will continue to plague our lives into the future.  The term “hybrid” is getting tossed around with expansive abandon, as we explore constructs such as some people online and some in the room arrangements.

How do we present in these situations?  There are people in front of us and people beaming in from their homes, workspaces, cafes, the beach or wherever takes their fancy.  As the presenter are you in the room or online?  Are there multiple presenters, so there is a mix of presenter locations underway?  The complex business of presenting is only going to get even more complex.

This is really the Age of Distraction and those beaming into the sessions are completely free to escape from us with no compunction, shame, accountability, or grace. Bosses worried about leading people without line of sight, once the great diaspora to our homes took place. They should be more worried about company meetings being held online and how much engagement is going on with the troops. The bottom line is it is not only not going away, it is about to become more diabolical. Technology will evolve, but the burden on the presenter just escalates exponentially.

After a year of everyone being on Zoom, Teams, WebEx or whatever, do I see people mastering the medium? Sadly, I don't. I still see people who are still placing their laptops on the desk in front of them, rather than raising the height of the camera to eye line. I found the box set of the Harry Potter movies I bought many years ago for my son is the perfect height for elevating the camera and elevating my ability to release audiences from peering up my nostrils.

Do I see people engaging with the camera? Or with the faces arranged about five to 10 centimeters below the camera on the main screen? Everyone is looking at the faces on the screen when they are talking, rather than talking to the camera. Yes, it is perplexing to have that gap. Yes, it is a flaw in the tech, because your brain automatically directs you to the faces rather than to the lens. It means though that when we are in the presenter role, we have to override our brain and keep telling ourselves, keep looking at the lens, keep looking at the lens, keep looking at the lens.

True, we can't see the reactions, but that is not so different to presenting when the stage is flooded with lights and the audience are in a deep pool of darkness in the distance and you can't see anyone's face. 

The other basic thing still missing, even after everyone has become a veteran of online meetings, is energy in the presenters. The screen mediums rob us of about 20% of our on-screen presence. So, we have to at least ramp things up by that factor, to just tread water.  Given people are easily prone to multitask in the background, we need to lift our energy even further to engage them. Do I see people doing this after 12 months of experience? No, they babble on in a flat dull voice, with no presence and little energy. The presenting role is set to become even more fraught. If we haven't even mastered the basics, how are we going to handle substantially greater complexity? Time is short. “Tech waits for no man”. We have to shift our mindset and shift it right now.

As presenters we want to inform, persuade, entertain or motivate our audiences. Most B2B business presentations fall into the “inform” category, because the organisers don’t take too kindly to presenters “selling from their platform”.  They want us to get up there and bring some value to their audience by providing data, experience and insights.  Grabbing the mic to flog your widget will see you blacklisted as a presenter for that organisation and through word of mouth, probably many others, as you are considered an idiot sans common sense.

Telling people useful stuff is fine, as far as it goes.  However, there is always too much information for the size of the time we have, so we are constantly chopping bits out to make it all fit into forty minutes.  The danger here is that we become captured by the elegance of the data, the rarity, the precision or the raw value.  Why are we telling the audience this information in the first place?  This basic concept starts to erode in our consciousness as we start building slide after slide, packing them to the gunnels with useful information.

Storytelling is a powerful way to convert data into memory and impression.  Our listeners will remember data bound up in stories much more easily than a trail of disparate numbers.  Stories also help persuade audiences of what we are saying.  Also, they tend to recall us as someone they would welcome listening to again. Stories alone won’t take us as far as we want to go.

If we want to really reverberate with our audience, we need to get them going much deeper than they would left to their own devices.  People enter the venue at a low ebb.  They are sitting there passively waiting for the performance to begin.  As the speaker we have to lift their energy stocks right up and get them involved in our talk.  Audience passivity has to be replaced with engagement.  We have the usual toolkit for that.  We can get people to voice their agreement with ayes or nays.  We can have them raise their hands to signal their opinion to the question.  Or we can give them handheld bats with “Yes” on one side and “No” on the other and have them wave these about in response to our question.

Rhetorical questions are good to get people thinking about what they believe and why they believe it.  We can switch it from rhetorical to real, by calling on individuals in the crowd whom we know, to speak up.  “I see Suzuki san sitting there, who I know is a real expert in this area and we have enjoyed some great debates in the past.  So Suzuki san, how do you see this playing out from your perspective?”.

There is always a tension in the air when a question is posed. Are we supposed to answer this or is the speaker going to take care of that.? Not knowing which keeps audiences concentrated on what we are saying, which is precisely what we all want.

We can also add pertinent questions after supplying some rich data and key information.  Most business talks are laden with apple pie is good and motherhood is admirable statements.  We state the unremarkable in our advice and everyone listening just forgets it immediately.  If we want to have impact, we have to push the audience further in their thinking.  We need to make what we are saying as relevant as possible to that audience.

If we say something bromide like, such as, “culture is very closely linked to team performance” then the audience will be absorbing this and nodding in agreement and forgetting it straight afterward.  It is much better to challenge the audience.  So, we say the same thing and then we add the bear trap, “Can you say you are fully satisfied that the current culture in your organisation is producing the highest possible levels of team performance?”. 

Now we have exposed the gap between the actual and ideal situations.  We all sign on for the ideal situation of course and agree that it is ideal, but so what?  We need to go after the audience members further and push them to action by challenging that big gap we have exposed.  We can rub salt into the wound and say, “If you are not completely confident in the current culture delivering out performance, what are the three things you can do today to start fixing that issue?”.

We allow a very pregnant pause to engage the audience in self-reflection and deep thought about available solutions.  By emphasising three items, it makes the whole process much more concrete.  The stage is now set for us to be the 5th Cavalry, coming over the sand dune to the rescue and tell them what we found worked best for us.  If we had just given them our three things straight up, the impact would have been negligible. Now they are all ears, because the three things they came up with on their own were all pretty lame.

How we package stories makes all the difference in being considered valuable and memorable as a speaker.  Challenging audiences in the right way is also a real skill and it needs careful planning.  Time for all of us to get planning.

Year Two of the pandemic puts a lot of stress on organisations.  I was watching a television news report last night on an Inn that is closing.  This particular Inn is well known in Japan, because it featured in the hit comedy movie series “Otoko wa tsurai yo!” – “It is hard being a man”.  This “Otoko wa tsurai yo!” series reached 46 movie releases, so it is a legendary franchise here in Japan.  The Inn has been running for 231 years and the owner is the 8th generation of his family to run the Inn.  The pandemic has finished them off and all the staff are out of a job, through no fault of their own.  My wife was crying watching this news report because in Japan longevity, continuity, loyalty, predictability are highly respected.  I am sure many people shed a tear to see 231 years of history end.  There will be many working in other companies who are also worried whether their firm will suffer a similar fate.  This is the time to have that Town Hall to assure everyone the firm will make it out the other side of Covid-19 and there is a plan.

Get them altogether, if you can, with social distancing or do it online if you can’t, but do it.  Now busy bosses may be inclined to not put in the time preparing for this presentation, thinking it will be okay if they just wing it.  If you are a staff member watching the presentation and you feel your President couldn’t be bothered to prepare properly and is just winging it, how are you going to feel about the stability of the company or the quality of the plan?

We have a long way to go with this pandemic and there are many tough months ahead. This is the time to assure everyone it is going to be okay, that we can come out the other side of this mess.  Why are we going to be okay?  That would have to be the central question. It is on that basis of making it clear that the whole presentation should be designed. We need to take this conclusion and prepare two closes, one for the initial end of the presentation and another for the end of the Q&A.

Now that we have the central thesis fixed, what is the evidence that it is true.  We need to assemble the data, facts, evidence and proof that we will survive Covid-19.  There will be various elements of the business that will drive the outcome so we need to talk about those.  We also need to play the Devil’s Advocate and explain how we are going to deal with the problems that may arise.  We need to present a strong Plan B ready to go.

Finally, we need a powerful opening for the talk.  We won’t have a problem with getting people’s attention, as we may do with a public talk to an unknown audience.  The team are all ears to find out what their future holds.  What comes out of our mouth has to be reassuring, positive, credible and convincing.  This needs very careful design because this is where we grab or lose our audience.  If we don’t get this right then what follows may be ignored, discounted or silently mocked.

Having done all of this design work we are now ready for the next stage. Now we start assembling the visuals to support our contention, that we are going to be okay.  We have to choose only the most powerful pieces of proof, because we have limited time to be able to maintain everyone’s full attention.  Make sure the visuals are zen like in their clarity and simplicity. Resist the temptation to pile everything on to one slide. 

We need to think through what are some of the likely questions which will be asked, to make sure we are ready to handle those well.  Trying to think of an answer to a tough question on the fly is not recommended.  We can pretty much guess what people will ask and be ready with our answers.  We are going to listen to the question, apply a cushion – a short statement that says I heard you, without agreeing or disagreeing with the question.  We are buying valuable thinking time now, so that what comes out of our mouth next is considered and articulate, rather than a bumbling series of ums and ahs, as we struggle to compose an answer.

Once we have pulled our talk and the Q&A answers together, we need to allocate the time to rehearse it.  We need to know how it sounds when we explain it and how the elements link together to bolster our arguments. We need to measure how long it will take to get through it, to make sure we are keeping on time.  We need to practice handling some of those hot questions before we get them for real.

This is probably the most important talk anyone of us will give in our careers and this is why the professional basics for giving presentations are so important.  If you are fumbling, if you are struggling, then that is your fault.  You should have already completed proper presentation training.  The best time for this was yesterday and the second best time is today.  When the stakes are high, you have to be able to rise to the occasion.  Preparation is everything.

I listen to some podcasts on writing, trying to better educate myself on the craft.  I was hopeless at English at school, so the rest of my life has been a remedial fix in that department. Fundamentally, these podcast authors are aimed at fiction writers, rather than non-fiction scribblers like me.  A lot of what we do in business on our dog down days may seem like we are living a fiction, when the numbers are not there or the results are dragging their sorry backside along the ground.  Despite these self-recriminations about our situation, we are in the non-fiction storytelling business for business purposes, not for winning literatary or public oratory awards.  What are some of the elements we need to consider when deciding, “right, time to get a bit more serious about storytelling in my presentations”.

Welcome to the one percent club of presenters, who actually incorporate stories into their business presentations.  Usually getting into the top one percent in any professional field is diabolically difficult, but here we have an open field in front of us, devoid of worthy competitors. They have all stayed at home. That is the type of field I like play in.

Now are we going to tell a deadly boring or basically dull story?  Are we going to lose our audience’s attention? Are we driving them to their phones for escape to the internet, to get away from us.  Have we forced them to search for something more interesting, better suited to while away their time?

What would make for an interesting business story?  We need personalities to come to life in this story, preferably people the audience already knows.  These might be executives in the company or people from the rank and file.  Something happened and they were involved.  We need to describe them in such a way that the listener can visualise that person in their mind’s eye, even if they don’t know them.  We need a location for our central characters in this story.  Where are we?  Which country, which city, which building?  We don’t need a riveting recounting for the fans of Architectural Monthly, describing the building in deadly detail, but we need some remarks to set the scene.  Are we in a massive skyscraper, are we downtown, are we in a restaurant?  What season are we in?  Is it blazing summer now or deep snowy winter? Just when are we experiencing this incident? How long ago was it?

We need drama. Yes, I know there is a lot of drama in business and we are up to our armpits in drama on a daily basis, but that is what makes it so appealing.  People know about their own dramas well enough, but they are superbly curious about yours.  Maybe yours is worse and that puts their regular meltdowns in perspective.  Maybe your drama is a dawdle, compared to what they are being served up every day, “you were luuucky” they think. Check out Monty Python’s Four Yorkshireman skit, for a humorous masterclass on great one upping someone else’s problems.

Something bad is going to happen, unless something else happens instead.  This is the fare we get fed from television and movie action dramas all of the time, so we know the format. The damage will be great to the firm, an individual’s career, the survival of the business, etc.  Even if you have some great news to relate, set it up from some bad news dramatic context.  No one really relates to perfect people.  We can’t identify with those who are blessed with great everything and glide through business, untouched by any blood and gore.  We want to hear about the struggles and eventual success. We need a tale of hope, a saga of eventual success, an overcome all odds story of ultimate triumph.

At the end we want a punchline that teaches us something. Give us some guidance on what we should do, genius ideas on what we could do, hints on the possible.  The climax has to be soaring, elevating, buoying us up, encouraging us to bear the pain of the present. We all want hope for the future in these grim times.  Obviously, the delivery has to match and we need a crescendo call to action at the end, something to have people leaping out of their chairs and punching the air, ready to run through fire.  Okay, I got a bit carried away there.  I have never seen that happen to date in any business presentation. But we do need a finish that becomes a start for the rest of us, a trigger to go forward, bursting with a lot of heart.

Let’s tell our business story so well, that everyone remembers the point we were making and they remember us, as someone they would enjoy to hear from again.

Presentations have become tediously monochrome.  The speaker speaks, the audience sit there passively taking it all in.  After the speaker’s peroration, they get to offer up a few questions for about 10 to 15 minutes or so and then that is the end of it. With the pivot to online presentations, the fabric of the presentation methodology hasn’t changed much.  We sit there peering at the little boxes on screen, hearing a monotone voice droning on. We listen to enquiries from others submitted beforehand or we may actually get an open mic opportunity to ask our questions directly, although that has been rather rare.  We may be directed to the chat to make our question known to the organisers.  The formula is basically the same and has been the same since our antediluvian origins.

Why can’t speakers vary their presentations to sometimes include more interaction?  Why does it always have to be the same format?  Obviously, we have to pick our moment to go off piste.  The audience composition, the topic of the talk and the organiser’s latitude for doing something different, will be factors for consideration.  One of the tricky aspects of asking questions of your audience is getting people to contribute and to do so in a way that they can be heard by everyone.  The obvious answer is to have a team of your people armed with handheld mics, which they can ferry at warp speed to the individual asking the question.  Here is a word to the wise.  You should choose who you want to question, but also allow some free styling as well. Events where the guests are seated at round tables are great for this and long rows of schoolroom type seating are not.

We are not switching the presentation to a continuous dialogue with the audience – that is a different type of presentation altogether.  I am talking about livening up a standard presentation with more interaction with the audience.  The reason you select the people is because it allows you to control the affair more closely.  It is also more surgical.  You know who is in the room and there may be some people who are very well informed, articulate and confident.  That type of individual would be a prime target.

We have five arrows in our question quiver.  If we want a yes or no answer then the Closed Question is ideal.  It might be regarding a fairly macro question, that would have relevancy for everyone in the audience.  “Should Tokyo continue to pursue the holding of the Olympic Games this year?”, would be an example. In this case, we can ask the entire audience the question.  We can ask for a show of hands as to whether they agree with the point or not?  I have been to some events where two sided paddles have been distributed to each seat beforehand, with one side saying “Yes” and the other “No”.   A simpler method is just ask those who agree to raise their hands, then after that, ask those who disagree to raise theirs. Everyone can clearly see the survey results immediately in real time. 

The Open Question cannot be answered by a “Yes” or a “No” and requires an actual answer. “What do you think about ….”, “How do you feel about …?”. This is why selecting your interlocutor is a good idea.  If you select one of the punters at random, you may be putting someone on the spot. Next thing they are spluttering away lost and wholly embarrassed. They will hate you for it forever.

If only you are selecting the people, then there is the suspicion you are using sakura or stooges in the audience, whom you have cunningly planted beforehand.  So it is also wise to open the floor up as well to those brave and informed enough to offer their opinion.  Don’t worry if no one goes for it, you have at least demonstrated your embrace of true democratic ideals of free speech.

If the opportunity presents itself, we can ask a Follow-Up Question to take the discussion down a few more layers for deeper insight.  Often people will give a high level answer and it is more interesting to get them to go further with their thinking, experience or detail.  We have to be careful this doesn’t become a dialogue though between some person in the audience and the presenter. The danger is everyone else is sitting there bored out of their minds and feeling excluded.   Probably one of those follow-up questions per talk is about the right distribution.

From within these dialogues, we can take a person’s viewpoint and Floodlight it to the entire audience.  We can ask those who have had a similar experience to raise their hands.  Now we have switched from the micro discussion between two people to a macro level of involvement of the whole audience.  This is a good way of overcoming the feeling of exclusion by those listening.

We can also go the other way and Spotlight a question.  Someone made a point and we can then call out someone else in the audience for their experiences.  We have to be careful we don’t ignite a war of words between the members of the audience.  Rather than call for their opinion or views or evaluation of the previous speaker’s comment, we should ask what has been their experience.  This will keep the potential fireworks contained for the most part.

One thing to note is when we ask people for their comment please have patience.  Once we ask the question, don’t expect an immediate answer.  People process these issues at different speeds and so if there is a silence, let it hang there for at least 15 seconds. Don’t jump in unless you have to, in order to allow that person to gather their thoughts and respond.  If they are obviously lost, then rescue them and give them a question which they can easily answer to save face.  We need to select people carefully and if it is not the best selection, then we have to have a Plan B.

Questions have potential to engage with our audience and create more interaction.  We must plan it carefully though, because it could lurch into a train wreck.  Planning and good preparation are the keys.

Many people break the rules of presenting, usually unknowingly.  They have Johari Window style blind spots, where others know they are making mistakes, but they themselves are oblivious and just don’t know.  This is extremely dangerous, because when you don’t know, you keep hardening the arteries of your habit formation. It is diabolically difficult to break out of those habit patterns once formed because you become comfortable with sub-standard performance.  On the other hand, breaking them for effect, is very powerful and can be a tremendous differentiator in a world of mainly tedious presentations.

There is an old saying that “to break the rules, you need to know the rules”.  Presenting is the same.  Breaking them unwittingly or in ignorance is not the same thing as a conscious, well informed, professional choice.  Let’s take some rules and break them on purpose.

The “berserker stage fiend” is the presenter who wears a furrow in the stage as they pound across from left to right, over and over again throughout the presentation.  This is normally derived through a combination of heightened nerves and low self-awareness.  They are not tuned into how much all of this pointless striding backwards and forwards, is diminishing the power of their message.  Moving with purpose is fine, but incognisant hyperactivity is not.

We can however, for effect, suddenly explore dynamic activity on stage to drive home a point.  For example, if we were to relate the story of the leadership teams’ panic over the nail biting 90% drop in revenues, thanks to lockdowns caused by Covid-19, we could suddenly start pacing furiously across the stage. We mimic and then exaggerate the emotions of that moment. We move on stage in this way with the intention to demonstrate the sheer scale of the dilemma and the psychological impact it was having on the leaders.  We wouldn’t be doing this throughout the whole speech.  That would engender an audience meltdown. For a minute or two, it is a dramatic re-enactment of the fear, frustration and sense of doom’s arrival, that everyone was feeling.  Together we bring forth a dialogue of distress, fusing it with the frantic on stage pacing movements.

The “galactic black hole” presenter sucks all of the energy out of the room.  They completely break contact with their audience.  This time the desired effect is one of total despair, all hope lost, no solutions available and facing massive unforgiving defeat.  The speaker drops all eye contact, stares at the floor about a meter in front of them and drops their chin onto their throat, so that they are looking downward at an accentuated sharp angle.  The shoulders hunch over and the body energy is reduced to a minus number.  The voice is frail, catching, weak, whispering but still audible.  You definitely need a microphone to pull this one off.  With this “in character” rendition of the replay of the horrific experience, we exaggerate for effect.  This is not something we should sustain for too long or do too often.  It works best as a single, short duration, audience undermine effort.

The “whoop and holler “presenter goes way over the top.  Sometimes you will see comedians use this device.  They employ the micro psycho rant, at top volume, to drive home the point.  This energy rocket differentiates the point being made from all that has gone before. In this Age of Distraction and Era of Cynicism holding audience attention has become a zero sum game between the presenter and the punters’ hand held phones.  Either we keep them with us or they slip into the magnetic field embrace of internet access.  For these reasons in telling the story, we might want to imitate on stage, an explosion which took place back at the executive suite.  Or it might be the re-enactment of a big client meltdown of epic proportions.  We become overly dramatic for dramatic effect. 

Yelling at your audience isn’t normal behaviour.  We have to set it up and then move into character to pull it off.  It has to be a crescendo.  It peaks then subsides back to normality. But for those few seconds, we are going all out to flag the key message we want to bring to everyone’s attention.  Voice, gestures and body language are combiningg for the big combust.

Pacing like a frantic madman, ignoring completely or totally yelling at our audience are radical ideas in presenting.  These pivots break the rules, but when required, may help us to break through to our audience.  It will depend on the context of the topic, the audience and the event, as to whether these big guns would be employed. At least we need to have them in our armoury should we want to call on them.  Choosing them with purpose and doing them without intelligence are divergent universes. We know the rules perfectly, but we choose to break them, on our terms and at our pleasure.  When fully congruent with the points we are making, they work for us in ways others presenters cannot match in the major messaging stakes.

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.

Rushing out the door to get to your talk and arriving in the nick of time is bad, bad, bad.  You have cut it very fine. Breathless, you greet the hosts, who are looking suitably pale as they thought they had an event with no guest speaker.  The shambles has started and now the odds are it will continue into your talk, as you battle with the tech.  The laptop decides to throw a tantrum and not behave.  The slide clicker won’t cooperate and the microphone has developed a bad case of static.  You become flustered and your equilibrium has been thoroughly turfed out the window.  I have done all of these things, fortunately not all in one, at the same event but definitely accumulatively.

The worst delusion ever was when I had this genius thought that I could create my talk on the plane, flying from Osaka to Sydney overnight and then go straight to the venue from the airport.  Man, I was so efficient too, arriving just in time for the talk.  Mercifully, it was an internal peer presentation, so no clients were exposed to this total unmitigated disaster.  I was cranky too because of no sleep on the plane.  I turned into a bear, not a cuddly Koala bear, more a Grizzly bear in the Q&A, when someone had the temerity to question my thesis.

I learnt my lesson the hard way.  Getting there early has so many advantages, so we need to prioritise that over the many competing tasks we are facing.  It is a choice we can make and should make.  Wouldn’t aimlessly chatting with punters before the talk be a waste of my valuable time, you may be thinking?  No. Arriving an hour before the gun goes off is advised.  You have plenty of time now to stiff arm the tech into submission and make it behave.  Check the microphone is working properly.  Confirm that we can we get the slide projector to talk to the laptop? 

If the organisers have breezily told you don’t worry about lugging your laptop around and to just bring the USB, then don’t listen.  For some unknown reason, the slide layout can change depending on the type of laptop being used.  That was news to me until it happened.  Fortunately, I arrived early, connected all the gizmos and bingo the layout had gone totally crazy.  I reworked the entire deck, while sweating profusely and got it done with one minute to spare.  Whew, I was a wreck and we hadn’t even started.  But I was able to do it.  Imagine if I hadn’t gotten there early enough.

Getting there early also harks back to why you are doing this talk at all.  You have plenty of other things to do with your valuable time.  Presumably you are there to win converts to your message, fans for your firm and build your professional network, image and profile.  Not too many speakers are there under duress.  They may have been roped into giving this talk because they owe someone or feel some giri or obligation.  That can happen, but it is extremely rare for most speakers.

Getting there early allows you time to work the room as the audience members are traipsing in.  You are charm personified as you smile, exchange cards, chat, thank them for attending and create that all important positive first impression.  The key here is to let them do all the talking.  Your turn will come, so let them tell you why they are here for the talk, what interests them about the topic etc.  In this way, you pick up valuable data on the topic and on the zeitgeist in the room.  You are also winning over fans for your presentation before you even give it.  It is rare that anyone can withstand this type of charm offensive before the talk, then suddenly turn into a Frankenstein monster at Q&A time and start savaging you.  That scrum of the great unwashed are those who turned up late and you didn’t get a chance to smooze them.

Don’t be in hurry to bolt out of the room after you have finished either.  Allow the time to spend chatting with those who have a big enough interest to stay back and engage with you.  They will want to exchange business cards and build their network, so make time for them to do that.  There will be those with a burning interest in the subject who want to ask a question of you directly and privately.  There will be business groupies who like to meet big shots and by definition, being the speaker, you are a big shot.

You will have gotten a good sense of how things went by your observations of people’s faces as you were in delivery mode, plus from the nature of the questions at Q&A.  After the talk is over, you can also get a good gauge by how many people want to hang around in a long line to meet you.  Don’t rush off.  Instead, allocate the time to be gracious with people who are also allocating their time to talk with you.  The charm offensive has to go all the way, so don’t try and be “efficient” and truncate it.

I have also found that if you are high energy speaker, a powerful and passionate presenter then the whole thing is draining.  Also, if you are introvert like me, all of those people are wearing you out.  I find being charming is really tiring. So don’t forget to build in a bit of recovery time for yourself, rather than rushing straight back into the fray.  Find a quite coffee shop and take a few moments to regroup and quietly reflect on how it went.  This introspection is important and even better, take some notes and keep the record for review before the next event.

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”.

In the public arena most presentations follow a set formula. I speak, I stop, you ask me questions and then I finish up and leave the venue.  Inside of companies though, there will be different types of presentations.  We may be creating a new project, getting the team members together and taking them through what we need to do.  It might be a report on the progress of the section, where we are with revenues and clients etc.  In some cases, we will be leading a discussion on where we go from here or how we will approach the project. We want people to buy into the direction, by helping create it.  We might be doing a SWOT analysis as a group, to gauge where we are and what we need to be.

In these cases, we don’t want to be doing all of the talking and we want others to get involved.  One of the problems though, is that people are hesitant to speak up in meetings.  They do have great ideas and good insights.  However, they keep them to themselves and leave the room with these little gems still stashed away out of sight.  People are not stupid.  They have been taught the dangers of speaking up by bad bosses or evil colleagues.

At some point it has happened to them directly or they saw it happen to a peer.  An opinion or comment is shredded on the spot and humiliation is being handed out in big gobs.  Once you experience that for yourself or witness the shredding, you are cautious about what you say and who you say it to.  Never forget, that the people in our building are up against a bunch of people in another building somewhere in town.  The quality of our ideas and our execution of those ideas, is what determines who wins in the marketplace.  If the ideas of our team are being traumatised at birth, then the other crowd will win.

In any meeting, the same confident three people will dominate the airwaves and all of their ideas will be adopted.  There will be others sitting there with better experience, insights and ideas who are never heard. There are also cases where the politics is so rife, that jealousies and petty quarrels impede the development of an all team approach to beating the competition.  We are too busy for them because we are fully occupied squabbling amongst ourselves. Or the boss is so dominant, no one dares to speak up, so the whole meeting becomes a monologue, with the boss talking talking, talking. This is where the facilitator’s role becomes important.

Often it is better to bring in an outside facilitator who has no axe to grind, no revenge to extract, no agenda and no dog in the fight.  They don’t care about the past or hierarchy and are focused on getting the most out of the group in front of them.  They are strong and can shut down any crap that some people want to pull, when trying to drag the proceedings back into the usual quagmire.  I often play that role for senior executive groups, so I have seen all the typical shenanigans up close and personal.

If you are using the DIY approach, then set yourself up for success. Set some clear ground rules at the start or some of your colleagues will try to hijack control away from you and engage in their own agendas.  Control who gets to speak and for how long.  This is important because if you want to suppress the few noisy ones, you have to have the authority to tell them, nicely, to shut up and let others speak.  Sounds good except when the person who is talking too much is the boss or one of the senior heavyweights, who enjoy throwing their weight around.  Bit of tricky situation there for your career.  If you do the right thing, you may be in the big shot’s bad books and future retribution is headed your way.

Set the rules and get everyone to agree to them up front, including the corporate nobles as well as the hoi polloi.  When you want to shut them down, you just cut them off while they are droning on and sweetly say, “thank you for your insights and I want to follow our agreement, that we will seek enough time for everyone to contribute, so let me ask you to please finish your current point and then I will get some other comments”.  You won’t get fired for that one!!

The other problem is getting people to speak up, without someone else trying to destroy them, because they disagree with what they are saying or because they have a grudge or whatever.  We set the rules that any comments will come in two forms – what you like about what they just said and your suggestions for taking their idea to a further and better place.  Also, that except for you, no one else is allowed to cut anyone off, when they are speaking.  It will happen and then angelically, you say, “Thank you Tom, and please allow me to play my role as facilitator and note that I am glad you are ready to weigh in.  Also please let me allow Mariko to finish her point first, then you can tell us what you liked about it and then how we can make it even better”.  You won’t get fired for that either, if Tom is one of the big bosses!!

Make the meeting rules the sole arbiter of correct behaviour, rather than yourself.  Get everyone to agree before you start. Be an exemplar of tact, good manners and humility, when you assume the regal crown of controlling the meeting. Internal facilitators are walking around in a mine field, so always nobble the boss before you agree to take the role. Get their support and agreement to allow you to shut them or any other worthies down, if you have to.  This facilitator gig is not for the faint hearted.

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.

“How was it?” is a pretty lousy survey question a presenter may ask of acquaintances, friends or their staff immediately after speaking.  Unless they are your sworn enemy or a sadist, they are not going to tell you what they really think if you stink, because of the relationship you have with them.  We need to make sure we are growing and improving as presenters, so objective feedback is crucial to achieving that aim.  How can we grab ourselves some of that good oil?

I always talk about the importance of eye contact with your audience.  The reason is simple.  This is the key factor in getting objective feedback in real time.  By engaging in eye contact with as many people in the audience as possible in the time allowed, you have a greater chance of reading the reaction to your words.  We want the lighting in the room to be up and not darkened, so that the slides can’t dominate you as the speaker.  This is because we want to be able to clearly see the audience. 

If they are leaning in or leaning back, there are two completely different messages there.  We get the lean back posture in our training classes from those individuals who were  told by their boss to “go to training”.  It is a common posture of sceptism, reluctance, irritation and disbelief. The same applies when speaking.  There is no greater feeling when presenting than to have a large audience lean in to you.  It only has to be a few millimetres but when done on mass, it is like a drug.  Once you have experienced it you want that feeling every time.

Facial expression in Japan is a tough one.  The serious “I am really listening to you” face and the “this is crap” face look exactly the same here.  I was giving a speech in Japanese to 150 salespeople in Kobe and there was a gentleman seated about half way down on the left.   Right throughout my talk his face oozed with the “this is crap” reaction.  At the end, he sprang out of his seat and bolted down to where I was standing exchanging business cards with some of the audience.  I thought my karate training was about to come into play here because he was going to hit me.  Instead he was pumping my hand in the handshake and telling me how much he liked the talk.  I was silently reflecting that I wished he had told his face he was enjoying it.  Most people will have a positive or at least neutral facial expression but don’t assume a serious face is a negative reaction was the lesson for me.

Nodding the head up and down is a sign you want to see.  It says the audience is in agreement with you.  When you start to get this head nodding going on across a lot of faces it is a powerful acknowledgment that you are doing a good job selling your message.  A way to train your audience to do this, is to nod up and down yourself when you make a statement you want people to agree with.  They will mimic what you are doing and get this head nodding habit of responding that way to other things you say which they like.

Japanese audiences have zero conception that they are expected to take any action during your talk.  We have to get them physically involved which helps to get them supporting your key points.  We can’t go crazy and overdo it, but in a 30 minute speech you could get them to raise their hand twice and that wouldn’t feel like it was too much.  Beyond that however and resistance will emerge.  So, to increase engagement you can ask a question, a rhetorical question.  That is good because it forces everyone to concentrate on what you are saying, rather than allowing their minds to roam around. You can also ask an actual question and raise your own arm up to model what you want them to do.  The question you ask has to be delivered in such a way that the only possible answer is a “yes”.  This makes it as easy as possible for them to raise their hand. For example, “Raise your hand if you are getting tired of Zoom meetings by now?”.

If you have someone with you when you make the speech, don’t ask them what they thought about it.   Ask them to tell you what they thought went well and what could you do better next time.  Having some helpful friend start canning your talk is not going to make that speech a positive experience for you.  We have to ask them very specific question too, as far as possible.  For example, “Did you find the speech opening grabbed your attention to stop thinking about other things?”; “When I mentioned the names of a couple of people in the audience I met before we started, did that help to make a deeper connection with the audience?”; “When I summed up again after the last question, did that help to recall what my main point was?” etc.

Some speech host organisations do surveys of the event and their response rate is usually microscopic and so of little help.  You can always distribute a flyer to every table, with the QR code access to a site, where they can answer a few short questions.   You can do this during the speech as you are wrapping up.  It is not great timing, because you are asking people to divert their attention from what you are saying. However, if you wait until after the talk has finished very few people will bother to do the survey. 

Instead say “please take one minute to do the survey using the QR code on your tables and then I will go through the final bonus slide for you”.  Stop speaking for that minute and just wait. After the bonus slide has been covered, we sum up again to make sure our key message is the last thing they remember. In this way, we will get a much better survey of the crowd and the feedback will help us to focus on the areas needing more work.

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 overviewhas 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.

This recent debate is a hot button topic. Let me set the record straight, I am an Australian living in Tokyo, so I have no dog in this American presidential brawl.  I am approaching this topic from the point of view of what we would do, if we were under attack in public, rather than to rule on the rights and wrongs of politicians’ strategies.  Imagine it was you up on that stage getting hammered, what would you do? As a presenter, it is unlikely you will ever face a Trump when you are speaking to a business audience.  A political debate is a different animal to the cultured world of business, as we urbane professionals give presentations on worthy commercial subjects. Nevertheless, we can come under attack when presenting and there will be no moderator there to try and rein in the provocateur.  Biden and the moderator Wallace were clearly rattled by the constant interjections and disdain for the pre-agreed debate rulebook.  In public presentations in business, there is no rulebook.

Heckling speakers has been around forever.  The political world especially, has this from top to bottom.  Watch the British parliament in action and there is the moderator, the Speaker, struggling to get the interjecting honourable members to shut up.  In business, the heckling most often occurs at town hall meetings of the staff and shareholder gatherings.  The employees or the shareholders have a beef with management and they are unrestrained about arguing with what is being said.  They don’t have the floor when heckling, so they are limited to a few words or a short phrase.  This was much the same as Trump’s tactics during the debate.  They major in the short sharp barb that is very hard to parry.

If we are under fire when speaking, what should we do with these interjections, usually voiced with venom?  This exchange has to be understood for what it is.  This is not an intellectual engagement where the full issue can be argued at length and in depth.  This is a vicious Iron Mike Tyson left hook to the jaw, aimed to disable, humiliate and provoke into error.  In any audience, there will be a cross section of people listening to the verbal fisticuffs.

One group will not approve the tactics, because it is outside public decorum boundaries, but will sit there in silence not wishing to get involved.  A smaller group enjoys blood sports and they have discovered that public speaking is a new category for them to enjoy, so they like the spectacle.  There is another minority group in hot agreement with the heckler and will feel emboldened to get involved directly themselves or to just utter shouts of agreement with the heckler.  This aggressive group will not be converted to agreement in a public forum by you, because your differences are often ideological, financial or procedural and can’t be breached very easily.

Actually, we don’t need to try and win the debate, because we can never win them over.  What we have to do is preserve our dignity and appeal to the basic fairness of the silent majority.  When people yell out during our talk, we have a few arrows at the ready in our quiver.  We can invite them to debate with us at a different time and place, as we need to go deeper on the subject, well beyond the time constraints of this event’s schedule.  We can ask them to agree to disagree.  This is disarming because we are saying we don’t see any resolution of opinion here, so let’s accept that fact and move on.  We can appeal to fair play and say we should be allowed to make our point and mention there will time at the end for questions, so ask them to please hold the interventions for the moment and let’s have the debate at the end of the proceedings.

When we feel our antagonist is trying to slam verbal shivs into us, we can hit back hard.  We have to do this in a way though that doesn’t end up in a verbal brawl that diminishes everyone, like we witnessed with the presidential debate.  We can say, “That sir (or madam) I believe is an outrageous untruth.  Having said that, I respect your right to hold a different opinion to mine, so let’s take this debate off line and you and I can argue the case at the end, after the event is formally concluded.  I look forward to it. For the moment, let’s continue with proceedings”.  This approach dismisses the heckler’s point as untrue, but in a way which seems balanced and fair.  Of course, the heckler and their entourage won’t be satisfied with that approach, but we are not trying to win them over.  We are aiming to appear elegant, in control, considered and above the rough affray.

If they continue heckling, we just say, “Thank you. I accept your right to disagree with me and I have already stated that I am happy to debate with you at the end, so let’s leave it until then”.  After which you just pick up where you left off and continue with your talk.  If the heckling still continues, it now moves outside the bounds of acceptability and their argument and they themselves are both diminished.  Either the silent majority will become less silent and tell the hecklers to be quiet and leave it until the end or the organisers will be forced to take action to shut down the mob.  You don’t care, because the key objective is to emerge from this verbal punch up looking in control and professional. Name calling, arguing the point, counter heckling, telling people to shut up etc., means you are now in the blood and the mud wrestling with them.  Once they drag you down to their level, you cannot get back up again. Your own credibility is compromised.  Avoid this at all costs. 

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.

It was a strange feeling.  I was back in the Super Safe Classroom after 7 months of teaching solely LIVE On Line.  In the online world, we are engaging our audience every two minutes.  Remember, this is the Age of Distraction. Audiences are weaponised at home with unseen devices to escape from our grasp and our message.  They will be multi-tasking like demons on speed, given the slightest pretext. We have to be very, very focused on keeping them engaged.  Teaching live in the room, I had to suppress the urge to say “give me a green check”, or “give me a smiley face” to keep them active and onboard with me.

It led me to think about how much engagement I was getting previously with an audience.  Occasionally, I might ask them to raise their hand in response to a question.  This is a bit of a tricky thing.  You can very quickly wear out your welcome with this type of request.  There is that creeping feeling of being manipulated by the speaker.  We are in the eye of the storm right now between the pre-Covid and post-Covid era, as presenters.  This whole schmozzle will probably take at least a year or more to clean up, once vaccines become widely available. What will be some of the differences around giving presentations, when we get back to some semblance of normality?

In the good old days, I would be looking for some head nodding to let me know if the audience were engaged or not.  Is that going to cut it anymore? Our body positioning can be very dynamic.  I was at a talk in my hometown of Brisbane, where the presenter took this to another level.  The speaker was introduced by the MC, “Ladies and Gentlemen please join me in welcoming our speaker today, Mr. Brown”. There was no Mr. Brown. The stage was completely bereft of presenters.

Suddenly he started. We could all hear his voice, but he was nowhere to be found.  It was quite startling. We all sat there perplexed, craning our necks around left and right frantically searching for the origin of the voice we could hear.  He then very slowly and deliberately walked up the middle aisle from the very rear of the hall, to the stage speaking all the while.  It was a spectacular entrance, I have to say and quite bold to do it that way.  I haven’t had the guts to try that yet, but maybe now I will give it a go.

As I previously mentioned, we would teach students not to overdo the hand raising bit, but what about from now on?  Will live audiences be more comfortable with getting more involved in the talk?  Let me make an important clarification here. I am not talking about those diabolically dreadful dross webinars, where the speakers are captured in tiny boxes on screen, like an assortment of cheap omiyage chocolates in a tacky box.  These are very sad and boring affairs, with all the talking heads just droning on and on. 

I am talking about LIVE On Line, where there is tremendous interactivity.  “I am unmuting you Tanaka san, so please come on camera and share with us your thoughts” or “Let’s go to Suzuki san for some comments on this issue. Suzuki san come off mute and tell us your ideas please”. “Give me a green check please, if this has been your experience too?”.

Will we be calling on people for their comments on some issue?  We always have a chance to get there early and meet a few of the punters as they arrive.  We remember their names or maybe we made a note on their meishi. We take the opportunity to have a conversation on the topic before proceedings get underway.  We could say, “Tanaka san, earlier we were speaking about this very issue.  You had a very interesting take on it and would you mind sharing it with everyone.  Can we get a mic for Tanaka san please?”.

Will we be walking into our audience more?  Using our body language to get up close and personal.  Jesper Koll is a well known speaker here in Tokyo and must the most entertaining economist in captivity.  He will suddenly lurch forward to where you are sitting, in the first or second row, tower over you and hammer you with a rhetorical question.  The problem is you have no idea if this a question you have to answer or whether he will answer it himself.  Trust me, when he swings your way with that question, you break into a sweat because usually these are questions for which you have no good answer.  He has your full attention.

The LIVE On Line rule is you must have interaction every two minutes.  For the in-person talk that would be too much, I think.  However, as audiences have been trained to accept more interaction with the speaker, maybe we have to lift our game and get them more involved than we did in the past.  Let’s try it when we next get an opportunity to present in a real, rather than a virtual room.

Speaking is easy, so being clear should be easy too.  Well that sounds good in theory, but there is more hope in play here, than actual technique going on.  Imagining that your usual conversation style is sufficient for presentations is another exercise in hopeful thinking.  Wait a minute, people say that we should speak in a conversational style, so isn’t this confusing or contradictory?  What is meant by “conversational” is that the feeling should be relaxed, familiar and inclusive rather than aloof, stiff and hierarchical.  Being clear when speaking to audiences is no accident.  Careful planning is needed and so is a pair of pruning shears to trim the excess from your discourse.

We have a common tendency in casual speech, to spend a lot of time saying something which can be communicated much more economically.  Often, we begin by making a reasonably clear statement and we are doing well in the speaking clearly stakes.  Then we spoil it, by adding a lot more content to the same point.  In one of our speaking exercises called the Magic Formula, the action step the speaker is recommending and the benefit of that action, both have to be communicated in five seconds each.  How hard can that be, you might be thinking?

In our training classes, I hear the participant punch out the key point clearly and in time, but then they just keep adding and pilling on the words. They begin to waffle. This is a habit we need to kill, when making more formal presentations.  Today’s audience of thrusting multi taskers have no patience with dross.  In fact, they have no patience period. They lurch for their mobile phones and seek refuge in the internet, to escape that white noise in the background.  That white noise is you by the way, taking too long to get to the point.

Being clear revolves around having a crystal central message, which has been constantly worked on until you can write in on a grain of rice.  Okay, that's an exaggeration, but the point is to get it down to as few words as possible.  This requires massive effort to get clarity of the message you want to convey.  Once you have sieved the nuggets of your speech, then you start looking for the framework to hang the speech on.  You need a structure that arranges the point being conveyed wrapped, bound tightly by evidence. A great example of evidence is to tell the background as a story, involving events, people, places, seasons and times.  Evidence can also be statistics, examples, data – anything that will satisfy the logical types in your audience, who only believe in facts.

This main body of the speech is where the key arguments are made and it has to be tight, tight, tight.  We arrange the argument, point then evidence, point then evidence, all through the main points. We do so while employing brutal brevity.  Get out those razor sharp pruning shears. If the content isn’t strongly supporting your key points with muscular evidence, then tighten it up or cut it out. Getting each key point down in size, gives you greater scope to add more salient points.  Usually, in a thirty minute talk, you will get through around three to four main points.  Three main sections of the speech packed to the gunnels with waffle and fat with fluff, destroys your credibility.  Instead compare that to five major points supporting the argument, all lean like a racing greyhound. We should be keen to glean the dynamite points from all the material available and make room for as many of those power points as we can manage.

The flow between the points should be silky smooth, with the end sentence of one setting up the start of the next section of the points and proof you are putting forward.  We need a bridge between the sections rather than lurching abruptly from one point to a different point.  Doing it this way will be baffling our audience.  Often this is what happens though.  The speaker wanders all over the place, frothing up three or four main arguments and leaving a trail of confused punters in their wake. Waffling on is the mantra of the graduates of the Hopeful School of Public Speaking.  We don’t want hope, we are going for clarity and surety.

Speaking speed is a tricky balance.  We don’t want to kill our audience by bludgeoning them with a monotone, lifeless delivery. We want to speak with a lot of energy and naturally we tend to speed up in the process.  The more passionate and engaged we become, often the faster we go.  We need to maintain the passion, but adjust the torrent flow. More pauses, shorter sentences and a good cadence are best.  If you notice you are speeding up, then stop speaking and create a small pause, so that you can regroup and continue at a better pace.   Concentrate your passion and energy on key words which you want to emphasise.  Doing this will mean they stand out in the mind of the audience.  All words are not equal. We choose which ones to give more power to, making them stronger.

Speaking powerfully, clearly and with passion is a brilliant combination.  This is the result of planning not hope.  The other key success ingredient is to practice. Getting the cadence right only comes through practice.  Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech wasn’t the first time he had delivered it.  He had given it many times refining it and practicing it, until he had a sufficiently large enough stage to make it a beacon for racial equality.