Zoom Meetings Starts From Hell – Part Two

In Part One, we looked at planning our first impressions on-line, the importance of rehearsing the presentation, dealing with the tech and having an opening which grips audience attention immediately.   The potential damage you can do to your personal brand doesn’t evaporate, just because you are now in the virtual meeting world.  No one cuts you any slack, just because you are now broadcasting from home.  We have to treat the on-line environment, just as we would the in-person occasion.  The only real difference is that the on-line presenting world is rife with less control, more tech issues and wholly, as opposed to partially, distracted audience.

We can be adding to the distraction factor ourselves.  When there are multiple presenters, the tech must be savagely brought to heel.  The curtain goes up, we start the presentation, but where does the camera automatically focus?  If one of the presenters is unmuted and shuffling papers, then they will suddenly appear on screen, even though they are not aware of it nor ready to go.  The inscrutable tech searches for sound and then synchronises with the camera views, capturing whoever that sound originated from.  The camera view can become quite chaotic, as each person’s inadvertent sound contribution has the audience view flicking from one person to another, without mercy.  From a viewer point of view, this chaos is distracting.   It diminishes our perspective that these experts being rolled out, are actually competent experts.

As mentioned in Part One, have a slide of the event up on screen and keep the presenters in the background until needed.  The host should be muting everyone and no individual’s camera should be turned on until the host gets the proceedings underway.  The host introduces the presenter with both voice and a slide detailing the key points of their resume.  We would do this in a live presentation when we were gathered in a room together, so why not do it on-line as well.  The host then throws to the presenter, who comes on camera and audio for the first time.  As mentioned last week, most presenters have their laptops on a table, so the camera is peering up their noses.  Raise the height of the camera so that it is eye line.  This is hard, but whenever possible, don’t talk to the screen, rather talk directly to the camera.

Also replicate this control environment for the Q&A at the end.  This can be quite comedic, as the control of the tech is lost and the camera and audio are flying around between all of the presenters who are not unmuted and on camera.  The same rules apply. The host takes the question and then passes that question on to the appropriate expert, instructing them to come on camera and answer it, before submerging them back into silent invisibility.

One thing I dislike with Q&A sessions is that you can only lodge your question through typing it into the Q&A section or the chatbox.  Now we are in the hands of someone designated to convey what you have written to the expert panel.  Because they are more intelligent than us, they often decide to rework our questions into their own concoction and present that to the speakers.  This is very annoying because usually they have missed the key point or have switched the nuance of the question. 

Question handling factotums should read the question as is, ignoring the inevitable typos, but keeping to the key import of the question.  The host often asks the first question. Sadly, rarely are those questions intelligent or probing enough. They usually palliative, lazily accepting motherhood statements as is and adding little to the proceedings.  Broadcasting that you the host are actually dim or dumb, isn’t all that good for the personal brand, so be careful when questioning speakers.

If using slides, please spare us the slide deck from hell presentation.  Bad presenters are consistently bad presenters and all of their horrible habits are replicated in the virtual world.  They bridge across from their real world debacles, bringing them faithfully to their virtual stage.  I was attending a webinar the other day and the Japanese presenter had the most dense slides you can imagine.  Laughably, one slide had as the backdrop a Robinson projection of a flat world map, with information on where they had their company branches.  Confusingly, over America they placed the Europe information and over the Europe map, they had their American data.  How hard can it be to visually line up your branches data to match the background map?  How much credit do we give to a company claiming to be professional, who can’t even rise to the most basic of intellectual challenges?

Speaking in a supremely boring monotone, I have noticed is not just a Japanese on-line presenter monopoly.  Often we are getting experts to give us presentations on the legal, taxation, HR, business and health issues associated with the current Covid-19 crisis situation.  These experts are notorious for putting all their eggs into the data dump and specialist knowledge basket and none in the communications, soft skills area.  Their dullness of delivery, in a funeral tone, assaults us during their data overload from hell content unveiling.  They are always like this but it is made so much worse in the on-line environment.  Streaming video on small screens and dubious audio quality take bad and transform it into horrendous.

People on these webinars are employing content marketing concepts during this crisis to show their value to potential buyers.  In many cases, they are revealing incompetence instead.  They fail to approach the on-line medium with a professional presentation mindset.  The tech issues are the fault of the platform provider.  The way the tech is used however rests with the presenters.

Here is a thought to get your head around - on-line audiences are usually vastly larger than what we would normally cram into a room to hear a speaker.  Telling the assembled on-line masses you are clueless is not the outcome you seek, but often the outcome you get.  It doesn’t have to be that way.

Zoom Meetings Starts From Hell – Part One

Like a lot of people, I have been searching for the roadmap to determine how to enable my business to survive this lockdown, work from home, brave new world.  I belong to various Chambers of Commerce, mastermind and networking groups.  I also have 24,000 LinkedIn connections, many of whom are pouring copious video meeting stuff into the daily feed.  This means I can participate in numerous on-line events or watch the videos of people recording their on-line events.  I do all this in the hope I can be become a more effective leader.  Man, it is mainly painful though.

The technology employed usually revolves around having a Zoom video meeting or some similar equivalent screen based live broadcast. Usually, the organisers won’t allow you to join until the appointed time, so you are connected but in standby mode.  Vaguely, you imagine that once the curtain goes up and you can join the proceedings, things will be of a professional standard, as they are now ready to rumble.  Rarely the case though. 

Most often the MC is not ready or there is no MC at all and we get an intimate introduction to how disorganised supposedly expert people are.  What comes up on screen is often a shambles, as people struggle with the tech.  Here is a hint.  Don’t do it that way. 

When you are going to start at the appointed time, you want all the presenters to have been successfully logged on fifteen minutes earlier and in place ready to go.  Audio seems to be the dim cousin of video technology. Usually it is the biggest problem to get logged in properly, so we have to allow for people to log off and log back in, before we kick things off and that requires time. 

We all usually Just In Time our swanning, grand entrance to a scheduled meeting in the office. In the on-line world, as a presenter, that is a high risk plan.  Get there early and fifteen minutes is a good margin for correcting tech issues. These are much more frequent than we would expect or hope.

When the curtain goes up, what is the first thing the audience will see?  It would appear that absolutely no thought has been given to this idea by the organisers.  In a live, in person presentation, we know that the first few seconds determines the first impression of the speaker with the audience.  Accordingly, we make efforts to make that a brilliant opening.  When we are all on-line, that idea doesn’t seem to have carried across.  There is no excuse for not designing the first impression you want to create with your audience, whether it be live or on-line.

For many, this video conferencing technology from home is a new thing.  At the office, the tech team sets everything up in the meeting room and you just turn up.  At home though, you are the tech team.  It is also obvious that few people have spent any time learning how to use the tech, before the presentations.  There are different systems and they all have their functionalities and idiosyncrasies. 

Tooling around through the menus and doing rehearsals beforehand, makes a lot of sense in this environment, yet there hasn’t been an event I have attended to date, where I see any evidence of this occurring.

In the live presentation preparation world, we always stress the importance of rehearsal.  Why would this idea become less significant, in a much higher stakes presentation environment?  You can record your practice sessions and review how you will look on screen as well, which is a great tool for improving how you present on screen.

I recommend you have a slide up on screen, at the start, announcing again what the event is and who are the hosts.  Use only voice at this stage, to announce what is going to happen in this broadcast.  This forces everyone to focus on the screen and not have their vision split between the screen and a small box with a talking head in it.

As the speaker, after you have been introduced, turn your camera on and come on screen.  Make sure you have arranged the environment at home to have a light source illuminating you clearly in front of the camera.  Also, if you are using a laptop, raise the level of the laptop, so that the camera is at the same height as your eye line.  Looking up the speaker’s nostrils, or over their impressive beer belly, because they have their laptop on the desk, is not a great first impression.  Dress for business, so your full suit of armour needed.

In some cases, the technology allows you to have a green screen background, so that your personal living arrangements are not visible to the viewing audience.  If you don’t have that option, then try to pick a spot at home with a background that is not too distracting from you, when you speak.

Just as you would live, commence with an opening statement that grabs everyone’s attention.  Remember the audience are now totally wild and free from all social contracts to behave themselves, when you are speaking.  They can be multi tasking like demons on speed at home.  You can become just one of a number of things going on in their world at the same time.  You need to crash through that clutter and grab their attention.  Make them stop doing all that other crap and pay attention to you and you alone.  This won’t happen by itself, so you have to design it from the start.

Video meetings are a different beast and we need to wrestle that beast into submission, so that we dominate it, rather than the other way around.

Getting Your Staff Messaging Right In A Crisis

There are plenty of experts providing insight and recommendations for corporates with their messaging during this Covid-19 crisis, but not so much attention is being paid to our internal messaging.  The public, customers and shareholders need to be fed updates and assurance by the company’s PR department.  Funnily enough the PR department rarely gets involved in the internal messaging of the boss.  Basically, the leaders are expected to work it out themselves.  Usually they are pretty hopeless communicators at the best of times and now in the worst of times, this ragged assembly are exposed as gross underperformers.

Having people gathered around in the office or neatly arrayed at the town hall, makes communication relatively straightforward and easy.  Having everyone dispersed and sitting at home in ignoble isolation is a different ask of the leader.  The Covid-19 crisis is scary, from a physical health perspective but also from a financial health viewpoint. 

Watching TV and reading the newspapers about rising numbers of people catching the virus and then seeing the associated mortality rates climb, tells you this is serious.  Watching companies shut down, many going bankrupt, millions of workers out of jobs and the share markets plummeting, under the weight of the economic consequences of the virus spread, adds to everyone’s fear roster.

The team are worried about their family’s health, the overall lifestyle disruption, their job security and here you are, their leader.  What are you telling them?  How often are you telling them and what mediums are you using?  There is a tricky balance required.  We must be transparent, without triggering alarm and panic.  We must provide hope, without being Pollyanna. 

We also have to be well informed of what is happening because things change very quickly.  Within a few short days, British PM Boris Johnson went from talking about building “herd immunity” and letting the virus spread, to locking down the whole country.  One minute Tokyo Governor Koike is talking about the calling off of the Olympics being unthinkable, to having the whole shebang postponed.  Within days, President Trump went from saying all the troops would be home for Easter, to instead chastising Governors for not locking down their states to stop the spread of Covid-19.

Most companies in Japan have a daily chorei or huddle, usually in the mornings, amongst the work group.  If you don’t, then now is a good moment to create one. The leader must keep this chorei cadence going, even if everyone is now beaming in by video.  Not everyone might make it, but do your best to insist that this is a priority. Continuity builds comfort that although things have changed, some normality, some stability can be assured.  These are good opportunities to remind everyone of the strategy in place for dealing with this crisis.  If you missed that bit of leadership fundamentals at the start, then put a strategy together pronto.

Update everyone on the company’s situation.  The cash situation is the difference between survival and just becoming a memory of what once was.  Tell people the truth.  This must be coupled with reference to the plan to get everyone through this crisis.  Hope and reality have to be doled out equally. 

Follow up with regular written communication.  If you are a foreigner speaking in Japanese, your range of vocabulary will rarely be equal to that of your mother tongue.  More likely, you don’t speak fluent Japanese.  In both cases get things down in writing as well.  If you have internal resources who are now freed up, get the text into Japanese. Even if that isn’t possible, then send it out in English. Most Japanese read English much better than they can speak it.  The live speech delivery may have presented some audio clarity issues, as well as linguistic challenges, so you can’t be satisfied that everyone got the message. 

Try to increase the amount of one on one communication as much as possible.  Reach out to your people sitting at home. Broken apart from their routine of 16 hours a day at work with colleagues, this new order can be disconcerting and lonely for many of the troops.  Hearing your voice and knowing that you were thinking of them is much more important than the content of your Churchillian call to arms.

Create a coffee time for staff to join in on-line and shoot the breeze.  Staff are constantly chatting, chatting, chatting throughout the day anyway.  Now we can recreate that personal connection with our colleagues, although compressed, into a virtual coffee time every afternoon.  You should join in as well and just chat. Don’t make it a rerun of the morning’s rousing call to crash through or crash.  Keep it light, communal and interactive.  Draw out those who are a bit quiet and have them speak up, so that they feel included and their colleagues can hear their voice.

Use video, text, phone calls and use them more frequently than you imagine is enough.  We are serving the weakest links in our teams in these times of crisis.  You might be independent, resilient, tough, a survivor, but you are also in the minority amongst your team.  Don’t see their world, through your personal prism.

Engaging Covid-19 Isolated Audiences

Once upon a time, isolation from our audience meant we were not getting our message through to them.  We were a poor presenter or the quality of the message was sub-par, so the audience wasn’t buying into it.  Today, our audiences are in isolation at home, either through Government mandated lockdown or company designated instructions.  Our communication patterns have been totally displaced.

In many cases, the equipment solution has been to have people use their phones or their tablets, rather than laptops.  That choice really limits the communication tools which are available and reduces messaging to very simple interactions.  The danger here is that communication becomes one way and rather limited.  Sharing data, especially visual data, becomes tricky depending on what hardware you are using.

Today’s technology is amazing, but still audio connections can be fragile and internet overload can make connecting to on-line meetings a challenge.  This is all a new experience for us, so we are often losing communication opportunities because we are in the midst of scarcity thinking.  We see the problems, the difficulties and we are locked into our normal ways of interacting, so we not seeing the opportunities.

There are technical limitations, but where possible, have some degree of visual communication with people sitting in isolation.  Just seeing other people’s faces for a few minutes is enough to re-establish the personal connection.  If you have the bandwidth to sustain that throughout the meeting, that is best, but if not, then at least have some visual exchange, before moving to voice only.  Remember to look at the tiny, little camera itself and not the big screen in front of you.  The location of the camera is usually set well above the screen, so we are in fact making eye contact with the screen, rather than our audience.

Our strong voice tone and speaking speed become very important.  We need to be really clear, because often the audio connections can be rocky and people can miss part of what is being said.  Sometimes the way people uses microphones is not very effective, so if you can’t hear people, ask them to get closer to microphone and to speak more loudly. This is why checking for understanding on a regular basis is important. We need to be much more conscious of this, because there may be little actual understanding and we are just waxing lyrically to ourselves and no one else, but we don’t have any way of knowing that.

Also tell people that if they missed something, to let you know, because you will repeat it.  Normally, we wouldn’t make that request because we are all expected to be paying attention.  In an on-line environment, the tech may be the issue, so we have to accept that communication cannot continue as business as usual.  Assume people are not following you, rather than the reverse.

It also means that we have to be agile, to keep our place when we get interrupted.  It is a bit like consecutive translation.  You say something, the interpreter conveys that and in the meantime you have forgotten where you were with what you wanted to say, because your concentration and flow were interrupted.  When we are making an on-line presentation, we need to be making notes of what comes next if we get interrupted, so that we don’t lose our flow and can pick up where we left off.

Normally, we speak, then we take questions at the end.  In the on-line world, we need to build in opportunities for discussion at certain points in our talk.  This is the best way to engage the audience throughout the talk.  We just stop talking and invite comment from the listeners.  Now they feel part of the proceedings and can have a sense of ownership of the discussion.  We then pick up the threads of the talk and move in until the next scheduled interaction.  Some technology handles this interaction live and in other cases, we are relegated to the dreaded chat box. 

I don’t like the chat box all that much, because we are now focused on the typing of the messages which means a time delay.  It is much better to have live comments, in real time, if possible.  If you have to use the chat box, then slow down and adjust the time for the talk or the content quantity, because you will need more time for the delivery and response.

We need to switch the way we plan our talks, the amount of content for the talk and the way we deliver them, to cope with a different receiving environment compared to all being in the same physical room.

Free Live On Line Stress Management Sessions

On a separate note, we are running public Live On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English).  We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered Live On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients.  This allows us to help our clients and our community.

The registration process for these free stress management sessions is being offered on our website, so please go to this specific page: http://bit.ly/dale_stress_e

Screen Based Strong Messaging Techniques

Most people have trouble getting their message across when they are in front of others and doing it in person.  Being on screen while everyone is working at home, makes the whole proposition so much more difficult.  A mediocre presenter becomes a shambles in this new medium.  There is the tendency to imagine that the screen based delivery medium makes lousy messaging and amateur presentations acceptable.  Well they aren’t, if you have a message to deliver, in fact you have to do a lot better in this case, than you normally would.

Get the logistics sorted. Dress for success, so don’t beam in wearing your pyjamas, Aloha shirt or your favourite deathmetal band T-shirt or anything other than full business battle attire.  Go for power colours rather than pastels. Avoid narrow stripes because sometimes there can problems with the video technology not handling stripes all that well. Looking professional adds to the credibility of your message.  A business suit looks a lot more powerful on screen than casual clothes, if that is the normal attire at the office. 

Get yourself a mouse to whiz around the screen with, rather than using the trackpad on your laptop.  Get a webcam camera if your laptop or home computer isn’t up to snuff.  The audio when connecting remotely can be a problem if your internet connection at home isn’t all that robust.  Headphones with a microphone attachment makes communication so much easier and clearer.  Also, most technologies allow you to record the session, so certainly make good use of this opportunity so that you can see how you come across to others using this medium.

Eye contact is really important in this screen based world, but so often we have nostril focus, because the laptop camera is shooting straight up the speaker’s nose. This is distracting us from what the speaker is saying.  The screen is confusing too, because the camera is above the screen and we all tend to talk to the screen rather than our audience.  We have to get used to speaking to camera and ignore the screen.  We can look at the screen, in the same way we would look at notes in front of us.  The key point though is focus on spending as much face to camera time as possible.  This is how technically difficult this is – raise the laptop height so the camera is at eye level.  I think we can all manage that.

Make sure there is some decent lighting in the room.  Often we don’t think about this and we and the room can be gloomy.  Arrange extra lights to be focused on you as the centerpiece so we can see you clearly.  We are used to close up shots in movies and television and this is the same thing with us when we are the focus.  When you are speaking during an on line broadcast, most of the technology transfers your face to the full screen for the audience and you are now a massive close up. 

You may or not be able to control the background but we should try, so we don’t have competition for our message.  Some broadcast technologies offer virtual backgrounds, if you have the bandwidth, so your humble abode is not front and center of the broadcast.  If you can’t manage that, then try to eliminate things which might be distracting from you when you are speaking.  You may be able to drop the background behind you into darkness by turning off some lights and only have light on you.

Everyone is feeling tense and uncertain about where we are going with the Covid-19 virus and attached business meltdown.  Without knowing it your face could be reflecting these worries, so don’t forget to smile on camera.  You may not have a killer smile, but do the best with what you have.  You can simply put a smiley face or the instruction SMILE above the camera to remind you to smile and that actually works quite well.  Smiling shows confidence and friendliness.  It also helps to build confidence in your audience that you know what you are doing, because you look relaxed and in control.  Frowning, creasing your eyes, stiffening your facial muscles all do the opposite, so avoid these simple mistakes.

Don’t forget your body language is a powerful communicator.  The screen can diminish you, if you allow it to. Instead try to own the screen and use your gestures and posture to your advantage.  Sit up straight and forward and get your hand gestures to sync with what you are saying, to underscore the message.  Don’t be afraid to stand up and present standing, because the camera just moves to a wide shot.  Don’t stand too far back though, because the audio might not pick you up as well as you need it to.  Also be animated and speak with passion, rather than droning on as a talking head on screen.

In the room, on screen, on video, it makes no substantial difference.  The basics of presenting apply everywhere, although we do have to make a bigger effort when broadcasting remotely.  Awareness is the key and repetition and practice assist us to become more professional in this screen environment.

Free LIVE On Line Stress Management Sessions

On a separate note, we are running public LIVE On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English).  We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered LIVE On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients.  This allows us to help our clients and our community.

The registration process for these free stress management sessions is being offered on our website, so please go to this specific page: http://bit.ly/dale_stress_e

Covid 19 And On-Line Presentation Skills

GIGO is a useful acronym from the past, which we can employ for the current problem we have conducting business meetings and presentations on-line.  Garbage In Garbage Out on-line interactions is not what we want to be promoting in this current Covid-19 driven business and health crisis.  Note that I put business ahead of health in this discussion.  This is not to ignore or belittle the consequences for the health of those over 70 or with an existing health condition, who we know suffer the highest mortality rates.  I just want to make the point that the business impact of the current crisis affects billions of people, while the virus affects hundreds of thousands. Businesses locate people in their homes rather than offices, to try and contain the contagion of the virus, yet companies are ill prepared for the human dimension of conducting business remotely.

There are tech issues around on-line meetings, which impact how many people can be on-line together and the stability of the streaming systems.  There are also audio issues depending on whether you are using a headset with mic or just your computer mic.  Many home offices in Japan are the dining room table or whatever can be rigged to set up the computer and not so many have a printer at home.  Given the strong culture of working long hours at the office, the home office concept is relatively underdeveloped here.  In fact, not so many Japanese companies issue laptops to staff, because everyone normally spends their entire time in the office using desktops. 

There are also cultural issues around appearing on-line.  Japanese homes were designated “rabbit hutches” back in the day, because of their small dimensions and crowded nature.  Not much has changed, as most people live in small apartments.  Turning on your camera to appear on-line, means you are now showcasing the family abode to everyone else.  I do a lot of video conferences with Dale Carnegie in the US.  One of the American meeting participants from Dakota, the land of endless vistas and big skies, noticed my camera background and asked me if I was doing the meeting in my closet.  How could I explain Japan to her, so I just said “yes!”. 

The upshot is that many participants joining the on-line meeting won’t want to show themselves and their homes to the other company members, so the ability to connect individually with everyone becomes more difficult.  All you see is their name on screen and no face. Also, when you have many participants on-line, even if they leave their cameras on, the sheer weight of numbers reduces the individual on-screen boxes to a very small size.  That means it is okay when you are talking, because your face is full screen, but everyone else looks like they are beaming in from Lilliput, where the people are six inches high.  It is very hard to get any visual feedback to what you are saying, as the screens are too small and there are too many tiny faces to be able to focus.

We are now talking to nobody and everyone at the same time.  We are speaking into a void, which can be very disconcerting.  Usually people taking part in meetings when they are face to face, are underwhelming as presenters, but now the problem is amplified.  They are dead dogs in person and become world champions at boring when they go on-line.  The meetings become lifeless, mundane and rarely satisfactory or motivating. Your business communication becomes as dull as dishwater.  Hardly a recipe for great work to be produced at home.

When we are on-line, we need to really power up our voice, use big gestures, bring energy to the screen and project our message with authority.  Actually, all the things we should be doing in a face to face presentation.  We have to go a bit harder than in person though, because we are reduced to a small screen version and that can minimise our messaging if we allow it.  Don’t allow it.  So go big, certainly much bigger than normal. 

It is hard to see audience reactions, so ask for feedback.  Most on-line systems have a chat box, so get people to write their feedback or questions there.  Some systems allow checkmarks or icons such as smiley faces or raising hands.  Get the audience to tell you when they have a question by raising a hand or that they are good to go with your message, with a reassuring check mark or a smiley face.  Make the most of the tech available to you.  As the presenter, you must remain the central focus though, just as you would in person. Keep people honed in on your message, by ramping up your presentation energy.

Free Live On Line Stress Management Sessions

On a separate note, we are running public Live On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on March 19 (English) and 24th (Japanese) and April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English).  We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered Live On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients.  This allows us to help our clients and our community.

The registration process for these free stress management sessions is being offered on our website, so please go to this specific page: http://bit.ly/dale_stress_e

Covid-19 Challenges Leaders’ Communication Skills

Most leaders tend to underestimate the importance of communicating with their teams even in normal times.  We are now definitely far removed from “normal times”.  Panic buying, lockdowns, quarantine isolation, working from home are just some of the features of the response to the virus.  The health issue gets most of the focus, but the real dangers lurking in the shadows are economic.  People are not yet connecting what all this dislocation will mean for business.  An economic downturn can get sparked by the stock market crashing, a major collapse in consumer sending, rising unemployment rates, trade restrictions, and supply chains grinding to a halt.  Actually, we are facing all of these right now.

The virus is global and so are the effects on business. It won’t be one country or a couple of countries being impacted.  The interlocking of business means we face an escalation of economic effects across the world.  The virus will mainly kill those already in poor health or over the age of seventy, but the economic disruption will hit billions of people and kill off millions of businesses.  As the leader, what are the messages we need to be presenting to our team and what are the mediums we should be using?

Japan is the most experienced capitalist country dealing with the virus.  We are six weeks ahead of everyone else, so we can see the business impact of the virus, as it drives down the basis of commerce – the free exchange of goods and services.  This exchange is grinding much more slowly than before and that has ramifications for small medium enterprises’ survival. 

PM Abe suddenly closes all schools elementary level and above and this immediately hits the school lunch suppliers, the part time workers at the schools, and this impact is transferred down the food chain.  Events are not held, tourists both internal and external stop travelling, restaurants are emptying as people stay at home, Hotels lose bookings etc., etc., and everyone expecting related revenue gets nothing now.  They in turn stop spending too, because they are in a tough cash flow situation.

The initial leader communication efforts were focused on avoiding the virus and the health issues involved but things are moving much faster now and business bankruptcy is a prospect which must be faced. The economy was already slowing down, because of the trade friction between the US and China and the additional two percent increase in the consumption tax. The virus economy impact is already pushing Japan further into recession and the possibility of no Olympics being held will just add to the damage to business sector. The danger is that the virus dissipates, as the temperatures climb, only to return again in Autumn.  Things may start to improve, only to fall back in a few months time and we go through all of this disruption again.

The time for a leader in Japan, to gather the troops together for a town hall has passed.  No one wants to get together in a big group, because of the risk of contagion from people who may not even be aware they are infected.  That means we are down to video calls and emails.  People are increasingly working at home or are at work, but avoiding human contact as much as possible.

The messaging needs to be transparent, factual and realistic.  Papering over the economic ramifications of the approaching recession won’t fly with a sceptical workforce, who have already seen the blunt incompetence of Japan’s political leadership.  Trying to pretty up the money situation is pointless.  You tell everyone that “we are fine” financially and then a few weeks later, you may be telling people they need to take a pay cut or take unpaid leave.  It doesn’t take long for small companies to burn through their cash reserves. 

The leader needs to communicate the real situation and get everyone’s support to weather the storm together. The danger is people will lose faith in you, and faith in the company.  If you survive the economic impact of the virus, you may find your best people will leave when the opportunity presents itself, as things stabilise.  They will look to go to a bigger, more robust company that provides a safer financial situation for them.  You come out of this crisis substantially weakened and then it gets worse again.

Being honest, transparent and flagging what may need to be done to survive can have the effect of rallying everyone together to fight.  This effort needs constant communication with the whole team, a good chunk of whom may be sitting at home with lots of time on their hands, just worrying about their future.  In this situation you cannot over-communicate what is happening.  Constant updating should be the norm.  Communicating your confidence that the company will make it through this and come out stronger must be the message.  People need repeated reassurances from the leader.  Are you ready?

Free Live On Line Stress Management Sessions

On a separate note, we are running public Live On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on March 19 (English) and 24th (Japanese) and April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English).  We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered Live On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients.  This allows us to help our clients and our community.

The registration process for these free stress management sessions is being offered on our website, so please go to this specific page: http://bit.ly/dale_stress_e

Should I Recycle My Content Between Presentations?

We go to a lot of effort to prepare for our presentations.  We find the best quality information, assemble the slides to showcase that data and we make big efforts for the successful delivery of the talk. Once it is over, then that is the end of it.  It was a lot of effort for a one time event.  It reminds me of that esoteric Japanese art Sunae, where you craft sand into artistic landscapes and designs and then discard the artwork thereafter.  We craft our artistic efforts and then as the presentation comes to an end we discard the work.  Isn’t this a waste?  Or should each presentation stand alone, representing a point in time in our speaker journey?

For me, I try to create the opportunity to give the same presentation a number of times.  Obviously, repetition helps to improve the presentation.  We learn so much from the first time we gave it, that it seems motainai or a complete waste not to be able to use those insights and try again.  The problem is how to create the opportunity to repeat the presentation?  Various host organisations have some degree of requirement for exclusivity and they want their members to have the virgin roll out and not the recycled rendition.  They resist allowing you the opportunity to offer them the new and improved version because they want to differentiate themselves from other organisations.

I understand the point but in fact no two presentations are ever the same anyway.  The speech is not being read out aloud (if you are doing that please contact me immediately!), so we are usually talking to the points we bring up.  What we say in the moment may be phrased an entirely different way to last time.  In fact one would hope that was the case, because the idea is we learnt something from last time and now we can offer a better version. 

We may have supplemented the slide deck or thinned it down based on our last experience with the limits of the time, for the quantity material we prepared.  Hopefully these were not too far apart, because we should have been rehearsing before we gave it, so we should know the time required for the delivery.  After we gave it the first time we realised that now there may be some slides which no longer fit, given the time interregnum between presentations or we may have found something better since the last time.

We may have left bits out the first time, in our fevered efforts to get through the presentation and this second time we want to make sure they are not missed.  The audience questions may have raised issues we hadn’t considered when framing the presentation and now we can incorporate the answers to those issues this time around.  Or we may have been given constructive feedback and have now been able to incorporate that into this delivery.

We might worry we will be flat the second time around, as it has become a bit ho-hum for us.  That is rarely the case though, unless you are doing the exact same presentation every week for months, which for most businesspeople is highly unlikely.  Even stage actors, who have their shows run for weeks, always manage to freshen up their performance. If you see the same show twice, you will notice that the two performances are slightly different.

If we can, we should try to convince the good burghers in our towns, to have us present the same topic to different groups, within a reasonably close span of time, to reap the benefits of what we learn from actually doing the presentation in front of an audience.  I remember when I gave a talk to a 5000 person audience.  I found the scale of the venue was so different from normal, that I had to change how I presented. I instinctively knew that in order to master that environment and that situation, I would need to repeat that experience at least five times a row in order to master it.

Keep all of your presentation materials and notes and plunder the past for the keys to future glory.  Practice makes perfect, so manufacture lots of opportunities to speak.  Don’t wait for the phone to ring, instead get on the phone and get the next gig.  That is how the pros did it and why wouldn’t we do the same.

Owning Your Material When You Didn’t Create It

The minions are swarming around the venue.  There are people setting up cameras, sound equipment, teleprompter invisible screens, and additional hangers on and assorted riff raff just standing around watching the chaos.  In swans the big shot to rehearse the delivery and the tension in the room rises.  This is Japan, a no defect, no mistake, no error society where big occasions scare the hell out of everyone.  The pointless game of panic induced “what if” now gets going, as various nobodies try to run the speaking coach ragged, in their efforts to head off the thousand things which could possibly go wrong.

The speaker has not had much time to even look at the content and the time allowed for the rehearsal is zen like minimalist.  Someone in the marketing department or the PR department has prepared the material or maybe it came from the big name PR company.  The speaker certainly had very little chance to even look at it, let alone rework it.  To reduce the amount of speaking time, the geniuses organising the speech have stitched videos into the proceedings, unknowingly sacrificing valuable face time for the speaker, who is now relegated to the second string, behind the video images.

This is what it is like being the speaking coach to big shot executives in Japan.  In one case, the speaker was thrashing around trying to fit into the straight jacket his staff had created for him and the speech rehearsal was going nowhere.  The teleprompter set up had just one screen, so the speaker was very efficiently speaking to only the left side of the room.  The rest of the audience were being blanked by the speaker and that is not a good look. 

When I looked at the material, I wondered why does the President of this company have to read his speech at all. Doesn’t he have some personal knowledge of the business?  Can’t he just throw out the prepared script and speak to a number of pertinent points, following the theme of the talk?  He could tell this set up wasn’t going to deliver him the best opportunity to get his message across.  In the end he tossed out the teleprompters and came up with his own speaking points and used those at the international event.  It was so much better.

Another senior Japanese executive from the automotive sector was due to speak overseas in English, even though his English wasn’t strong.  The slide deck from the PR company had speaking notes for every page, written in perfect English.  The speech was short, only seven minutes, but even so memorising the entire speech was folly.  I assured the executive that speaking English perfectly was unimportant, because communication goes beyond words. Mimes discovered that centuries ago and there was an entire silent movie industry that thrived for decades without any words ever being spoken, until the “Talkies” arrived.

Next the slide deck presented a problem.  How was he supposed to follow the script?  He could spend his time with his head down, reading the words in English for each slide.  If this is all that was required, we could keep him at home and just show a video of him doing just that and have almost the same lack of impact as having him do it in person.  Instead, I asked him to distil the essence of what each slide meant to him, down into one single sentence and then one single word.  That word was placed on each slide in Japanese kanji, like a secret code, and all he had to do was speak to that word.  By telling the audience what that slide meant to him he was authentic.  His English may have been garbled and the grammar mixed up, but it didn’t matter.  He was communicating from his heart what the slide content meant to him and that message registered with his audience, in a way a speech just read out loud to the audience could never do.

No matter how busy we are, we take a big personal brand risk of allowing others who know nothing about presenting, to decide how we will appear as a speaker.  Get an expert to help, if the stakes are high or work out a way to own the material.  Make it yours and the speech will go more smoothly and easily.  The impact on the audience will be significant and the key messages will get through.  That is what we want isn’t it.

How Much Selling Should You Do During Your Presentation?

The organisers of public presentations are usually not very happy for the presenter to start flogging their company’s products to the audience.  They are looking for good information for the assembled masses and no propaganda.  This makes sense because if you are sitting in the audience and you start to hear what sounds like a commercial for the speaker’s products or services you feel offended and belittled by the presenter. 

I was in such a gathering when the host of the Chamber of Commerce event introduced himself as an “expert”, in his particular line of work, when kicking off proceedings.  It had a bad smell about it.  If you have to go around telling everyone you are an expert, then we will question just how much of an expert you really are.  Participants will also complain to the organisers about you and your blatant self promotion and you may not be invited back to speak.

Obviously we give these public presentations to promote our personal brands and our companies.  Where is the tipping point when you have pushed it too far?  Subtletly is always the best policy.  I still remember visiting the German Pavilion in the Tsukuba Expo in 1985.  There was a long, winding staircase to the second floor and all along the wall were framed photographs of all the German Nobel Prize winners.  There was no banner announcing “we Germans are smart”, but the huge number of faces peering down, as we wound our way up the stairs was a subtle tour de force of German intellectual power.

We should rely on some key elements when selling ourselves when presenting.  Bald faced telling people you are an “expert” is completely up for debate, but showing through the quality of what you present that you really know your stuff, is very convincing and makes you highly credible.  There needs to be some fresh data or perspective to cut through all the competing messages floating around the internet and media.

I like Jesper Kohl’s presentations.  He is a perennial favourite of different Chamber events here in Tokyo.  He is a leading economist in Japan and I have probably seen Jesper present twenty times or more over the years.  Every time he is super engaging as a presenter and always has new and high quality information on the Japanese economy.  He is the master of the pregnant pause when asking his audience members questions.  Just as the victim is ready to bumble out their answer, Jesper slips in the answer, revealing that was a rhetorical question after all and not requiring an answer.  As an audience member it certainly keeps you on the your toes!  He doesn’t have run around telling us he is an “expert”.  His content and delivery tell us that. 

Delivery is the other indicator of expertise and professionalism.  You can be beautifully attired, shoes with a mirror shine, hair perfect like looking like a Hollywood idol and still be a dud if the presentation isn’t done correctly.  I was watching a VIP visitor to Tokyo, representing a huge multinational energy company, who gave a very dull presentation. The information was fine, because some minions in the marketing department had cobbled it together in a workman like fashion.  The perfectly coiffed, suited and booted presenter delivered the whole thing slowly, clearly and completely devoid of passion.  It was painful and decimated his personal brand.

To be credible and prove you are the goods, have first class content and deliver it in a completely professional manner.  Blatant self promotion is self defeating and your speaking career will be short lived, as the invitations dry up.  Please never allow the claim that you are an “expert” leave your lips.  We are not that dumb.

Advice For Your First Major Presentation

At different stages in our careers we are asked to give a presentation.  It may be a simple reporting on progress on a project or the state of play with the current results.  The audience usually starts with our colleagues and bosses.  Over time, as we rise through the ranks, the scope of the presentations we have to give increase in complexity and the audience size also increases.  It might be at a  whole firm kick off event, an offsite with senior management or a public presentation representing the firm or the industry. The leap from talking in front of colleagues to the company Board or to a public gathering is quite steep.  The nervous tension is also profoundly different.

We can feel quite confident in front of colleagues but presenting to the members of the Board raises the stakes completely.  Consequently we become a lot more tense and nervous.  When we are in the spotlight it can often feel more like an interrogation lamp.  Our pulse rate climbs alarmingly, we start perspiring more than normal, our palms become sticky, our throat is parched and our stomach feels a bit queasy. 

This is the fight or flight adrenalin rush kicking in.  The blood is directed to the larger muscle groups like the arms, shoulders and thighs, away from the internal organs, which is why our stomach feels a bit strange.  The pulse rate quickens due to the chemical cocktail floating around our system, as we prepare for action.  Logically, we are not about to sprint out of the venue or engage in hand to hand to combat with the members of the audience, but that doesn’t matter because our brain’s instructions to the body has overridden that logic and is prepared to just such occurrences.

Deep breathing to slow down the pulse rate or purposely striding around in some private space, away from prying eyes, helps to burn off some of that nervous energy.  There is only so much you can do to calm down the chemical reaction.  It also doesn’t necessarily matter how many times you may have presented either, because the nature of the event, the composition of the audience and the scale of the occasion can make us nervous.  I read once that even such a regular performer as famous singer Frank Sinatra, was always nervous about getting that first note correct.

The other antidote to nervousness is good preparation.  You would think this was the most obvious and logical thing in the world, but an amazingly high proportion of people spend all of their preparation time on the wrong things.  The slide deck gets all the love and attention and rehearsals are totally neglected.  This is lunacy but also reality.

A competent presentation needs a couple of elements.  Understanding who is in your audience and what they want to hear is very basic but often overlooked.  I attended a senior executive’s talk on personal brand building.  It was odd, because it was basically aimed at people who work for similar major companies.  The audience was 99% small and medium enterprise staff.  The speaker had not considered her audience at all when she developed her talk.

A clear point of the talk boiled down into one sentence, brings clarity about how to structure the talk.  What evidence can we gather to support this central point of our talk.  How will we wrap the talk up both before and after the Q&A.  What is a grabber opening which will draw the audience in to want to hear what we have to say.

We also have to be clear who is the boss on stage – the slide deck or us?  So many presenters become slaves to their slides and that content becomes the main event not the presenter.  I am about to coach a senior Japanese car company executive on a speech at an international car show to be held shortly.  The PR company has prepared the slides and the draft English content for each slide.  They asked me if the content was suitable.  Well it is great, except that he will never be able to use it. There is no way he could memorise that amount of content in English for that length of speech and still put in a good delivery as a presenter.

My suggestion is for him to think what does each slide means to him, boil that down to one word and let’s put that word on the slide and he can elaborate on that word during his talk.  No memorisation needed and he will speak in his authentic voice about what that image says. 

Get the basics right, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse and once you start the nerves will calm down.  You will be able to switch your focus from you and everything that is a problem, to your audience and trying to get them to buy your message.  Keep doing that and presentations will lose their scariness.

Who Are You Presenting For?

My regular Rotary meeting held every week at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo has a featured speaker.   Our speaker this time was a celebrity in his eighties and very well known to the audience.  Rotary runs like clockwork and every section of the hourly meeting is choreographed and the meetings always finish on time. Not this time though.  Our speaker gave a rambling talk, which seemed to lack any direction or point.  For no good reason he also managed to go way over his allotted speaking time, so the meeting finished late.  This Rotary audience is full of the captains of industry in Japan and so they are busy executives, for whom time is their most valuable resource.  I was sitting there thinking what have we go there with this speaker?

My conclusion was that this speech was for his pleasure.  He wanted to ramble around and across a number of unrelated subjects.  He clearly liked the sound of his own voice and was happy to have a big audience in front of him.  The fact that he managed to go over the time was amazing given there was almost no structure to his talk and he could have ended anywhere really.  Japan loves its celebrities, so they get cut a lot of slack and are indulged.  This has probably been the speaker’s experience for decades and today he is quite indulgent with himself, because there are no boundaries.

It reminded me though of the importance of focusing on our audience.  The danger can be we become wrapped up in our subject or in this case, wrapped up in our own importance.  This happens in business too. High powered CEOs jet in to give a speech, they have people fawning all over them and are treated like rock stars.  A few years of that and their sense of proportion starts to drift.  The issue, as speakers, is they represent the brand.  If they are too impressed with themselves and their superior expertise and ability, the audience can feel it.  They are focused on themselves and not the message or the audience. This is not a brand plus.

It can happen with passionate speakers too.  They may be legitimate experts in their field and are fully sold on the merits of what they Are doing or offering.  All great, but this can lead to a shift in focus away from the audience on to the details of the subject and their glorious part in it all.  In many ways this talk is all about them and their love for the subject.  We don’t want that.

From start to finish the focus has to be on getting the key messages into the brains of the audience and selling them on why those messages are important.  We the speaker are the vehicle not the main act.  As we get more confident speaking in front of audiences and as we start to enjoy holding sway over crowds, the danger arises that this becomes an extension of our egos about how great we are.  Anytime we switch focus off our audience, be it to the details of the technology or to our glorious selves, then we are going in the wrong direction.

The design and execution of the talk should be solely focused on the audience and giving them what they want.  We know this by our prior research into who is coming - gender, age, job titles, company name - and by mingling with the early arrivals, to get a sense of what brought them here etc.  We know that the Q&A section will help us address specific interest points for individuals in the audience, which may not have been fully covered in the maIn body of the speech.

The starting point of why we are doing this talk should be clear.  It is not about us, but about those who have taken the time and made the effort to listen to us.  If we start the design phase from that perspective we will be well down the track to get the talk right for that audience.

The Big Idea When Presenting

The podium is a powerful place for powerful ideas.  The audience has no idea what you are going to say and where you are going to take them during your presentation.  In Japan, at least, they will politely hear you out until the end and then perhaps offer up a question oR two.  For the thirty or forty minutes allotted to you, you are the master of the universe, omnipotent over all seated before you.  And what have you done with this remarkable opportunity so far?  Not that much I would reckon.

In business we are very pragmatic, practical, down to earth, focused.  No one expects a businessperson to be giving a fiery, impassioned call to storm the Bastille and put the heads of useless politicians and leaders on pikes to be paraded through the town square.  In fact, we bend over backward to be apolitical on the basis that we have customers of various allegiances and beliefs and we don’t want to upset our revenues or hurt our brand.

This tends to breed a focus on the details of elements of our business when we speak.  We might be doling out useful advice based on our own experiences to date.  It is all kept pretty locked down, neutral and safe.  We don’t challenge ourselves and so don’t challenge our audience either.  This is not varsity, where a lot of airy fairy stuff can be debated for intellectual stimulation.  This is the real world.

The only issue with this “steady as she goes” model is we don’t push ourselves to go higher.  We focus on what we know and have seen, instead on what could be imagined.  We don’t try to think about issues at a more holistic level, to take a local company issue and elevate it to a conundrum facing the industry.  We don’t try to project our intellects to a higher plane of thinking because we are caught up in the weeds of the detail of our speech.  We spend vastly more time deciding the order of our sides than on any big idea.

This doesn’t mean our business speech has to whir off on a philosophical tangent far removed from the reality we all face.  It does mean though that at a couple of points in our talk we can try to go higher than our own self interest and look at the bigger picture at the industry, country and international level.  It may just to be offering up issues for consideration or to project different angles to a problem.  To push ourselves to see something in a new light and from a bigger perspective.

The dealing with everyday problems can bury us in the everyday, every day of our working lives and that is a limiting factor in our own intellectual development in business.  By taking the opportunity of the podium presented to us, we can challenge ourselves to see what we can say on a bigger topic.  One or two big insights per speech is probably enough though, otherwise it sounds like we are on our soapbox, indulging our egos.  This should not dissuade us though from thinking “what bigger points can I make about the world of business in my speech?  Where do I see future danger points for the industry, the society, the country etc?”.

So when we are next preparing our talk, let’s ask ourselves “what can I say on this topic that will elevate some issues beyond today and my small part of it?”.  That act alone elevates our own thinking and vision.  Our job in the actual presentation is to do the same for the members of the audience.  To challenge them to think more deeply and think differently.

Small Target Tactics For Hostile Audiences

Presenting isn’t always adoration, adulation, regard and agreement.  Sometimes, we have to go into hostile territory with a message that is not welcomed, appreciated or believed.  Think meetings with the Board, the unions, angry consumers and when you have sharp elbowed rivals in the room.  It is rare to be ambushed at a presentation and suddenly find yourself confronting a hostile version of the Mexican wave, as the assembled disgruntled take turns to lay into you.  Usually, we know in advance this is going to get hot and uncomfortable.

We still have our message to get across but we have to make some adjustments to head off trouble.  The essence of the issue is disbelief.  The audience, for whatever reasons, simply don’t believe what you are telling them or they just don’t trust you, regardless of what you tell them.  The first casualty of this type of speaking engagement has to be big, bold statements.  In less tense situations we might be throwing these types of statement around with gay abandon and not face much resistance from the audience.  If what we have said gets brought up in the Q&A we bat it away without breaking into a sweat.  No problem, we have this one!

In more fraught circumstances, those big statements will get us hammered, maybe even as soon as they are issued, with no regard for waiting for the Q&A, as the interrogation gets underway immediately.  By the way, if there is an intervention by someone in the audience, we should redirect them to ask that question in the Q&A, which is where we will handle all questions.  This stops your flow being interrupted and the proceedings being hijacked.

We need to be more circumspect about claims we make.  We need to introduce ideas surrounded and buffered by evidence.  Instead of saying, “this is how it is”, we need to say, “according to the research, this is how it is” or “according to the experts, this is how it is”.  We swiftly and subtly slip off to the side of the attack and let the third party reference take it between the eyes, rather than ourselves. 

We need to wrap up our statements in cotton wool and preface them with comments like, “as far as we know…”, “according to the latest information…”, “to the best of our knowledge…”.  In this way, we are not holding ourselves up as the oracle, the all knowing, all seeing sage, unburdened by limitations of self awareness.  We are making ourselves a small target, harder to attack and providing many loopholes to leap though, should we need to.

We need to lead with context and background.  Making statements, drawing conclusions, before we get to the evidence part, is ritualistic suicide as a speaker facing a hostile crowd.  We need to take a note from the pages of the Japanese language grammatical structure.  Unlike English and most European languages, in Japanese the verb comes at the very end of the sentence.  This is a great metaphor for dolling out the evidence. 

In Japanese, we don’t know if the sentence is past, present or future oriented, if it is negative or positive until we get to the end of the sentence.  That means we have to sit there and absorb all of the context, background and evidence before we can make a judgment about whether we agree with what is being said or not.  This is what we should do with a hostile audience – load them up on the details, the data, the evidence, the testimonials, the expert statements, before we venture forth with what we believe to be true. 

We deliver this this deluge of facts piecemeal, so that the audience is taking the information, processing it in their own minds and jumping to conclusions about what they have just heard.  Our object is that the conclusion they have jumped to is the same one that we have reached, based on the same information. It is almost impossible to disagree with our context.  They may not agree with our conclusions from our understanding of the context, but the context itself is usually inviolable.

Before we go into Q&A we must publically announce the amount of time available for questions.  It is going to get heated and we don’t want to appear like a cowardly scoundrel beating a hasty retreat, because we can’t take the rigour of investigation of what we are saying.  By having stated the time available at the start, we can simply refer to it later and say, “we have now reached the end of the fifteen minutes for question time” and go into wrapping up the evening with our final close.

Hostilities will commence immediately we begin to speak, so we have to be mentally ready for that.  We also need to switch our presenting tactics to account for the pushback which will come.  By making ourselves as small a target as possible, it becomes much harder for any enemies in the audience to successfully attack us.  If they are going after you, they are definitely not your friend, so keep that in mind when your are preparing.

Dress For Success When Presenting

How should we dress when presenting and does it actually matter?  It matters - particularly in Japan.  Japan is a very formal country, in love with ceremony, pomp and circumstance.  Always up your formality level in dress terms in Japan, compared to how formal you think will be enough.  This was a big shock for this Aussie boy from Brisbane, who spent a good chunk of his life wearing shorts and T-shirts or blue jeans and T-shirts.  Tokyo is not Silicon Valley, where dress down is de rigueur and where suits have gone the way of the Dodo.  This is a very well dressed, sophisticated capital city where serious money is spent on quality clothing.

Business suits are a given when presenting.  Not even coat and slacks in the Italian style, but business suits.  The colour should be on the dark spectrum to fit in with the solemnity of your “aura and presence” as an expert, about to pontificate on your subject.  A serious speaker in a light coloured suit is an oxymoron in Japan.  Go dark .  The suits don’t have to be the deepest black in colour, because darker greys and blues will work.  Now the odd thing is this applies in summer too.  The summer speech outfit will be a little lighter in colour than the winter suit, but not as light as the very light colours in summer suits.  It doesn’t matter if they are three piece, double-breasted, or have one, two or three buttons.

Needless to say the suit should fit well.  I have a very old and dear friend who has, like me, been in constant battle with his weight.  We take it off and then we put it all and more, back on again.  Very frustrating of course, but a painful reality.  The sight one day, of him giving a major speech, while only able to close the bottom suit button, rather than the top, was very sad.  It said to the audience, “I am fat, in denial and have not bothered to adjust my suits to match this fact”.   We all have our “fat suits” of course, for those occasions when we are losing the struggle against our expanding waistband, so that would be a good choice if you are carrying a few too many kilos. However, if even the “fat suit” is now too tight, then go to the tailor and get it adjusted.  Better to be paying a small amount of money for that, then telling the world you are a loser in the battle of the bulge.

The shoes will be formal, brogues are good, shined within an inch of their lives and never “down at heel”.  It would be rare to wear any other colour than black, because the suits are going to be dark.  The belt obviously must match the colour of the shoes and be in good condition, not looking like you have worn it to death.  I don’t even know why I mention this, except that I often see some Japanese gentlemen messing it up getting the colour coordination wrong and displaying a belt clearly on its last legs.

The socks should match with the colour of the slacks and avoid fascinating contrast colours that herald your rebellious and exciting individuality.  Save that funky revolution for the weekend.  They should be knee rather than ankle length.  When seated on stage, for say a panel discussion, there is nothing more alarming than the sight of a very hairy shin protruding from underneath the suit pants.

The shirt should be white, never coloured.  I know this seems very limiting and lacking in imagination but there is a biological reason for it.  When we are on stage we can become nervous or the lighting on stage can heat us up.  The consequence is we begin to perspire and the neck area is one location where this happens very quickly.  That gorgeous Egyptian Giza 45 cotton shirt, in light blue, becomes a two tone job, as soon as the sweat envelopes your collar and makes it turn dark blue.  Now the audience is losing touch with what you are saying and are fascinated by your unfolding two tone colour arrangement of your shirt. 

For the same reason NEVER take off your suit jacket.  I am soaked under my jacket, by the end of a 40 minute talk, because I am pumping out so much energy and heat.  If I had my jacket off, there would be a much darker colour running down the side of my body.  By the way, there is nothing more unpleasant than seeing someone in a shirt, sporting a saturated armpit, raise their arm so the soaked armpit becomes visible to the audience. 

Your tie collection may have some daring beauties, but leave them at home.  At one stage, I was sporting some very ferocious Versace ties, with very vibrant colour combinations and adventurous patterns. I never wore them for speeches though, because they were competing with my face, for the attention of the audience.  Also, forget the power colours.  You don’t need them, because your speech delivery should have power and authority to command the obedience of the assembled masses.

The same daring do logic applies to pocket squares.  Especially fluffy, elaborate and exuberant little darlings grab the gaze of the crowd and they take their eyes off your face.  We don’t want that. The plastic name badges you are given by the organisers are another trap.  Don’t wear them when you get up to speak.  They reflect the lights and your body movement can set them off on a navy signal lamp training session.  We don’t want anything competing with us when we are speaking.

I am highly reticent to speak about ladies fashion, because I have so little knowledge of this subject.  My wife tries to encourage me to become more expert, but there has been no great progress to date. My only advice would be basically adopt the same ideas – dark suits, white blouses, black shoes, no scarves, modest earrings and broaches and basic hair and makeup approaches.  This is not a runway extravaganza, but a chance to drive home your message.  By the way, if it is a panel discussion, where you would be seated on stage, then a trouser suit may be easier.  Always make your face the centrepiece, so the audience is firmly focused there.  Our faces can transmit so much power to drive our messages, so we can’t let anything compete with this awesome weapon.

Using Micro Stories When Presenting

Storytelling is one of those things that we all know about, but where we could do a much better job of utilising this facility in business.  It allows us to engage the audience in a way that makes our message more accessible.  In any presentation there may be some key information or messages we wish to relay and yet we rarely wrap this information up in a story.  As an audience we are more open to stories than bold statements or dry facts.  The presenter’s opinion is always going to trigger some debate or doubt in the minds of the audience.  The same detail enmeshed in a story though and the point goes straight into the minds of the crowd and is more likely to be bought as is.

When we are planning our talk, we think about what is the key message.  We should get this into one sentence, able to written on a grain of rice.  Okay, you are not likely to be able to achieve that any time soon, but the keys are brevity, clarity, focus, conciseness, and paring the message down to its most powerful essence.  We build the argument to support our key message, broken up into chapters throughout the talk.  We design our two closes, one for before Q&A and one to wrap up the whole talk at the very end.  We design our blockbuster opening to pry the phones out of the hands of the audience, to get them to listen to what we are saying and going to say.

We can inject micro stories, by which I simply mean short stories, into every part  of this design.  The opening could be a short story which grabs the attention of the listeners and primes the room for our dissertation.  It might be focused on an incident which relates to the key message of the talk or about an episode from a famous historical figure or about someone in the firm or a client that drives home the message.

Each of the chapters of the talk can rely on micro stories to back up the evidence being presented to justify the conclusion we have come to and the point we are making.  These stories bring flesh and blood to the dry facts and details.  They can enliven the point we are driving hard on, by making it something the audience can relate to. These facts don’t just appear.  They are there because of a reason and there are bound to be stories aplenty attached to them.

Both of the closes can be separate stories that enhance the final messages we are delivering to the room.  We keep them short, bountiful, memorable and attractive, such that they linger long in the minds of the audience members.  We want our story attached to the inside of the brains of the listeners, so that they remember it long after the event has passed by.

A thirty minute talk would probably have five chapters, an opening and two closes, so at least room there for eight stories.  These stories can be our own, garnered from our experiences or they could be folkloric stories from the firm’s rich history or we could be borrowing other people’s stories to make our point.

We all have products and solutions.  Where did these come from?  How were they created and who created them?  What about the firm’s founders’ stories?  Why does this company exist and how has it manage to stay in business for so long?  Taking the key chapter content, we can inject some life into the data points by looking for creation stories or application tales of high deeds and gloried achievements.  Other client’s stories can be some our stories too, as we relate how our solution changed their world.  These stories lend themselves for inclusion in the “about us” component of the firm’s website and for placement in the corporate brochure. 

The point is we have so many stories to choose from, we have a surfeit of content lapping all around us.  All we have to do is collect it.  So from now on build a library of stories about the firm, the personalities, the products, the client successes etc.  When you are reading about other companies look for their stories that you can borrow to make a point about your own business.  Add them to the library so that you don’t have to go scrambling about trying to think of stories.  You have them there, ready to go whenever you need them.

2020 Here We Go – Let’s Build Our Personal Brand As A Presente

The New Year’s resolutions concept is ridiculous, but only because we are weak, lazy, inconsistent and lacking in discipline.  Apart from those small barriers to execution of desires, the concept works a treat.  The idea of a new start is not bad in itself and we can use the Gregorian calendar fantasy, to mark a change in the year where new things are possible.  So as a presenter what would be possible?

There are around 800,000 podcasts in the US and many millions in China.  Blogs are in the billions now, video content is going crazy, live streaming is rampant.  Every single which way, we are under assault from competitor content marketing on steroids.  In addition, there is all of the advertising content coming at us through every medium.  Will it diminish?  No.  What does it mean for us in business?

Personal reputation will be built through our efforts to cut through all of the clatter competing with us.  People are consuming information on small screens and are deluged with competing content.  The experience is transitory, because the next deluge is coming down the pike.  How do we linger long in people’s memories?  Well we don’t.  Even the few who see our content soon move on.  In offices, people sitting next to each other send emails rather than talk.  Phone calls put a dread fear into those younger colleagues entering the workplace.  The anonymity of the texting facility is preferred to human contact.  We are becoming increasingly impersonal, as we are fixated with our internet connected devices.

In business though we need the human touch.  We want to do business with people we can judge are a safe option as a business partner.  We can check out their social media to get a sense of what they are about.  We can watch their videos to get a better idea of who they are and what they know.  This is all still rather remote and at arms length.  We don’t do business that way.  We want to look them in the eye, to read their body language, to gauge their voice tone, to judge their intelligence through their mastery of the spoken word.  Other can write your posts for you, but when presenting on stage it is just you baby and you had better have the goods.  We want to see what we are getting.

To get cut through, we need to be standing in front of as many audiences as possible.  Yes, we can attend networking events as a participant and we should, but we should be striving to do better than that.  We should be hogging the limelight, a titan astride the stage, commanding attention and delivering powerful messages.  That means seeking every opportunity to speak we can possibly manufacture, being proactive in promoting ourselves, unabashed about pushing our personal brand.

Yes, there will be haters.  Two of my staff attended an American Chamber function recently and some helpful fellow attendee started laying into me.  They being very loyal staff were really upset about this, told me about it and were obviously frustrated regarding what to do about it.   I asked them a couple of clarifying questions.  Was the individual or their company a client? No.  Were they ever likely to become a client? No.  Did they have a personal brand of their own? No. 

I didn’t bother asking who it was, because they are obviously a know nothing, do nothing, become nothing nobody.  If you want to promote yourself you have to pop your head above the parapet.  Expect there will be someone who will want to kick it.  That doesn't mean we should self-censor ourselves, because some nobody is jealous about what we are doing.  Grasp on to the bigger picture here, have courage and go for it.  Those who get it will respect you, haters will hate you, no matter what you do.

Public speaking is the last bastion for those who want to take their personal presence to the top.  We are being flooded by information around us, so we need to look for chances to break free from the crowd and establish ourselves as the expert in our field.  It means putting ourselves out there to be judged, but we are going to be judged anyway, so let’s control our own destiny.  In 2020, resolve to do as much speaking as you possibly can and create as many opportunities as possible to promote your personal brand.

Reflecting On Your Past Presentations

As the calendar year slowly winds down, now is a good time to review and reflect upon the presentations you have given this year in over the past few years.  What have you learnt not to do and what have you learnt to keep doing?  Those who don’t study their own presentations history are bound to repeat the errors of the past.  Sounds reasonable doesn’t it. We are all mentally geared up for improvements over time.  The only issue is that these improvements are not ordained and we have to create our own futures.

Do you have a good record keeping system?  When I got back to Japan in 1992 I was the Australian Consul and Trade Commissioner in Nagoya.  As far as the locals were concerned, I was the Australian Ambassador to the Chubu Region.  I am sure the parade of the various Ambassadors in the Tokyo Embassy never saw it that way, but that is how the locals viewed my vice-regal presence.  One consequence was you were regularly asked to give long speeches.  I say long because a one hour speech would be a dawdle, compared to the two hour monstrosities you were expected to fill.

I started writing down the speech number, the title, who it was for, what language was I speaking and how long was the speech.  I did this because Japan loves the devil they know and you would be asked back to speak again and it is embarrassing if you don’t recall the first talk.  I am now over 535 speeches on my list.  Without knowing it I was compiling a body of  work as a speaker.  The list noted the topics I covered, which was a useful reservoir of things I could speak about if asked to venture forth a topic for the nominated speaking spot.

I would often use visuals.  When I started we were back in the dark ages and were using overhead projectors (OHPs) and breakthrough innovations like colour OHPs instead of just black and white images.  For photographs, we used a slide carousel and a slide projector.  At some point we moved to powerpoint and life got a whole lot easier, when it came to preparing presentations.  Somewhere I probably still have those OHP presentations stored away somewhere, except today you would struggle to find an overhead projector to show them with.  We can much more easily store our presentation materials today, so there is no excuse about not doing that.

I keep my presentations in digital files stored by the year in which they were delivered.  This is very handy because you can go back and see what you covered when you gave that talk.  Some of the images may be plundered for a current presentation, if they are relevant, so it is a nice resource to draw on.  You can also see how much you have grown in sophistication as a presenter, by looking at the quality of what you have been presenting.  This is a step we shouldn’t miss because we are often so caught up in our everyday, we lose sense of the time progression in our  presenter lives.

A more difficult task is to grab the points that are additional to the slides.  These may be kept as notes on the print out of the slide deck or in a notes format for the talk.  If I have notes, which these days is pretty rare, then they will be very brief.  They are flags for me to expand upon when I am delivering my talk.  More frequently I will print out two or four slides per page and then write on those pages.  I will note some key points I want to make when we get to that slide.  If I am not using slides then the notes format plays the same prompt role. 

Things occur to me during a talk, which were not planned.  Maybe I got a light bulb type of idea or a question exposed an answer and brought some additional information to the forefront.  One thing I strongly recommend is immediately after the speech, carve out thirty minutes for quiet reflection on the talk and think about what things you would change in order to make it better next time.  The tendency is to rush back to work, which usually means either meetings or catching up on email.  They can wait.  Don’t schedule back to back activities after the talk – give yourself a little time to think.

What I find hard to do is to store the notes hand written on the pages and the notes on the ideas which occurred to me after the talk.  Paper tends to get lost and you throw it out in a bug of spring cleaning and lose it.  Either take photos of the notes on your phone or scan the pages and then file them together with the electronic slide deck in the file for that year of talks.  This way you never lose the inspiration and record of your thinking about this topic.

Time will pass.  You will deliver talks, will get ideas both before and after.  Capture them and learn from what went well and how you can improve on it for next time.  You need a system and if you don’t have one today,  then now is a good time to think about creating one.

Leading An Intentional Presenter Life In 2020

Are we going slowly glide in 2020 carrying all the bad habits and bad baggage from everything we have thought, done and procrastinated on up until now?  Or are we going to seize the opportunity of a man made temporal illusion to divest ourselves of the sins and misdeeds of the past and strike out anew?  The change of the calendar for some signals a new financial year, when new budget numbers and plans are fixed.  For others it has already passed or is soon to fall upon us.  Regardless, this opportunity should be seized to review and plan for the next calendar cycle.  Rarely though is presenting skill part of that process.  Let’s change that this time.

Here are seven things to commit to in 2020 as a presenter.

1. Look for every opportunity to present

“Practice makes perfect” may or may not be true for you, but the more we do presentations the more chance we have to become better.  Don’t hide from or refuse occasions where you can get up in front of people and talk.  Even better, list up organisations who need speakers and make contact.  Give them a range of topics you can speak on and see if there is a match of interests.  What have you got to lose?  Nothing, so go for it.

2. Swear a blood oath to rehearse before you give a talk.Rule number one in presenting is “never practice on the audience”.  Rehearsing gives us time to work on our timing, to make sure we are congruent with our planned content and the time allotted within which to deliver it.  It helps with controlling our nervousness and builds our confidence.

3. Decide you are the boss of this presentation.Don’t yield power to your notes, from which you will read the presentation.  Don’t be overshadowed by the slick corporate video.  Forbid the slide deck from out muscling you on stage.  Make your face, voice and gestures the center piece of the delivery, such that all eyes and ears are encompassing you because your grip on the audience is so intense.

4. Banish the internet.Start your talk with a gripping opening that so immobilises your audience that they release their desperate grip on their phones. Ensure they cannot abandon you and escape to the titillation of the internet and assorted apps that are the siren’s call competing for your spot in the limelight.

5. Always wrap your statements up in the cotton wool of context to protect them.Every time you stray into statement land, that charming, well behaved audience mutates into a howling pack of ferocious critics, disagreeing with your ideas and conclusion.  This reaction is usually based on nothing more than ignorance and prejudice, because they don’t have the proof, the evidence, the background.  All they hear a bald faced statement, of which they are doubtful.  Instead tell them a story which is deep with context, evidence, data, testimonials, a tsunami of proof, from which they cannot escape.

6. Prepare two closes for before and after the Q&A.Smoothly wrap up your talk and then call for questions.  Answer the questions and then seize control back from the random direction the questions have taken.  Remember the final questions are often the worst, because all the better questions have already been asked.  The worst questions are those which having little If nothing to do with the topic and these will come up.  Your second close gets the whole show back on track and allows you to issue you main message again, such that it is all that is ringing in the ears of your listeners, as they depart the venue. 

7. Video your presentation for review and/ or ask trusted friends of colleagues to give you feedback.Make sure that it is structured feedback because you want to ask about specific things, rather than “how was it?” This type of broad based feedback isn’t so helpful.  Also make sure you instruct them to tell what you did that was good and how you can make it better next time.  Never allow critique to raise its ugly head.  If it comes up, stop them right there and redirect them to good/better feedback.

Let’s change up our professional game as presenters in 2020 and go back to the basics.  None of this is complex or difficult.  It just requires the time allocation and the mental attitude of wanting to master the art of presenting, rather than being a second rate show for the rest of your life.  Turn that around with these seven points.  You will become a person of influence and persuasion with those around you and 2020 will be a much better year because of that.

How To Use Video In Your Presentation

Video is the refuge of rascals when presenting.  The unskilled Japanese President tries to shift the attention off his miserable presentation skills, by diverting the focus of the audience to the video.  Actually, it is a mighty relief in many ways from his dirge like, monotone, monochrome delivery. He was killing us slowly with his lifeless words.  The idea is that the video will compensate for the presenter.  It also takes up time, so the presenter can whip through the morass of their presentation and get out of there quicker.  The scoundrel’s respite.

I personally try to avoid using video because it competes with my face.  I want the full power of my expressions to be brought to bear, to convey the key messages I have for my audience.  I want to monopolise the flow of the proceedings, so that it moves along with me in charge.  There is a place for video though, when it makes sense and when it is reined in and kept under control.

Video is very versatile, as it can combine movement, music, images and still photographs very effectively.  It can tell a short story very powerfully.  It can bend time to its will. Emotions can be appealed to, physical dimensions made more impressive, speed made real and other people’s expressions and faces conscripted to serve the presenter’s messaging.  It can bring both fantasy and reality to us in a powerful way.  We are all used to watching video and movies on our phones, DVDs, etc., so we are open to the medium.

In certain industries and businesses, the visual aspect of their branding, packaging, design etc., really lends itself to employing a full video arsenal.  Fast motion, slow motion, music combinations entertain the mind and stretch the imagination.  Brands do this well, but corporate PR videos usually do it less well.  In Japan, the latter is more often than not what we are subjected to, by the boring wannabe corporate Titan trying to command  the stage.

Like anything, if it is done well it works.  This is the issue though, do you have a great video to show or are you just showing a video for the sake of it?  It is rare that a video would be specifically produced for a particular presentation.  This normally means we are drawing on the video library of the firm and it would be a rare piece of luck to get the video content available, to chime with the speech you are giving.  The planets rarely align so helpfully in real life and what we wind up doing is trying to slam the square peg into the round hole with what we have.

The reprobate presenter just picks up the whole video, as is, and plunks it down in the beginning of their talk.  This means that we haven’t really connected with the audience as yet and we are distracting them from focusing on us, by breaking their concentration to look at a video.  They usually have trouble actually showing the video because the loading process doesn’t work well on the laptop.  They were in a slide deck, had to go out of that and then bring up the video.  There may even be a link in the slide deck to the video, but it is hit and miss as to how often that works on the day. You become frustrated because the damm thing worked fine in the rehearsal and now for some mysterious reason, it refuses to work when the punters are assembled.

All of this fiddling about means you have now lost your connection with your audience, who are whipping out their phones to escape to the internet, because you are boring them with the tech.  Once the video is over, we have to reconnect with the audience.  If the video had a lot of excitement and energy and you present like a beached mullet, the contrast is mega.  Everyone hopes you will disappear and more video will be rolled out instead, because it was a lot more interesting than you. 

So we need to design the bridge into the video and the one out at the end.  I have no memory of anyone doing this well by the way.  Probably because the thought it was actually necessary, never occurred to them.  We have to make sure the video is kept short and adds value to our message.  We must dominate it, not the other way around.

The Winning Formula When Speaking

I was invited to an English Speech contest for Middle School students.  The students must have home grown skills and are not eligible to compete if they have spent more than six months abroad, in an English speaking environment.  This was pretty grand affair.  The organisation running it is run by students at university, who took part in the contest themselves when they were in Middle School.  Many of the graduates become business patrons and supporters as they work their way up in their business careers.  It a perfect Japanese storm.  Japan loves uniforms and the organising body had that covered and Japan loves formality and there was plenty of that on display too.  There were some significant lessons on offer for presenters as well.

One of the sponsoring countries had their Ambassador there to present a prize and give a speech.  Extolling the virtues of his country and its educational opportunities for these keen students of English is a natural fit.  What wasn’t so natural was that he had to read his speech.  I have been a diplomat, yet I see this time and time again - Ambassadors who are poor public speakers.  Anyone in that position, for that type of occasion who has to read his speech, qualifies as a poor pubic speaker in my book.

By contrast Her Imperial Highness Princess Takamado gave a splendid speech, alternating between English and Japanese.  She wasn’t reading it, the content was relevant and interesting.  When you are a member of the Imperial family there is tremendous expectation on you and she could have chosen the safe route and have read her speech.  Yet, she gave her remarks without notes and spoke freely.   It was so much more powerful and connected with her audience.   The toast was given by a senior Government official, who did so in excellent English and without any notes either.  The only one who couldn’t give his speech without reading it, was the one native speaker involved.  Rather ironic I thought.

Then we had the three finalists give their talks.  Of course they had memorised their speeches.  As Middle School students living in Japan it would be unlikely they would be able to do anything less.  A five minute speech is a long time to memorise a speech, but they all did it brilliantly.  If the Japanese education system does one thing well, it is rote memorisation.  The final speech was given by the winner and it was very surprising.  Also surprisingly, the three finalists were all boys, where normally this in area of education where girls usually do better.

The English pronunciation of the finalist was certainly not as good as the second and third place winners. You would think that would disqualify him for winning but it didn’t for a number of very important reasons.  When he started speaking I was thinking that his pronunciation wasn’t so good, so how did he manage to win?  What followed was a winning combination of factors. We can learn a lot from a fifteen year old Middle School student from the backblocks of Wakayama Prefecture.

His theme was about him trying to improve his poor pronunciation which was congruent with who he was.  In other words he was being authentic and appropriate in the eyes of his audience and so he could connect with them.  The other boys told stories too but this boy included dialogue with his grandmother in his recounting of his story and this added that additional element of drawing us into the action.  When he spoke he did something more than the other contestants.

He spoke with his whole being.  The other two finalists with better English pronunciation used their voices, some small gestures and some facial expressions in their talks.  The winner however was speaking with his whole body language lined up behind his words.  He was moving in a relaxed way that was congruent with his message.  He sounded more natural, even though it was a totally canned speech.  He wasn’t the best English speaker in the contest, but he was the best communicator in English.  That difference is huge.  I found the same thing with my Japanese.  I started by worrying about linguistic perfection but discovered it didn't matter.  Even if my vocabulary was limited, my pronunciation unreliable and my grammar garbled, the audience came with me into my story, when I delivered it the right way.

As adults, in business, we can decide to avoid reading our speeches at all costs.  Thinking about our audience when we craft our talk is critical.  In the delivery, we should be authentic.  That means we don’t worry about occasionally mispronouncing words or stumbling over phrases.  We are focused in our delivery on bringing our total body language, our passion, to the subject.  We don’t get hung up on perfection, because we are focused on communication.  If we do that, then we will be successful in getting our messages across.

How To Review Your Presentation

Athletes and coaches spend a lot of time watching their team’s performance.  Strengths and weaknesses are sought in order to amplify the former and eliminate the latter.  Close scrutiny is applied to key moments, crucial transitions and pivotal points.  Presenting should be no different.  Cast your mind back though, to the last twenty presentations you have attended and ask yourself how many speakers were recording themselves for later analysis?  I would assert that the answer would be either zero or very close to zero.  Why would that be?  High performance athletes are constantly using video to check on what they are doing.  Why don’t high performance leaders, experts, executives, industry influencers, and assorted gurus do the same thing?

These days the technology is very good.  A simple video camera and tripod investment is a minor affair.  The camera microphone itself at a certain distance is fine or you can add a shotgun microphone if needed.  You just set it up turn it on and forget about it until the end.  You may have to be careful with the arrangements such that no one in the audience will be in the shot and you need to tell everyone that is the case in order to remove privacy concerns.  Well if it is all this easy why aren’t more speakers doing this? 

The smarter ones are.  I often coach speakers before major presentations and we always use video.  I can tell them what they are doing that needs improvement, but there is nothing more powerful than having that information pointed out to you and seeing it at the same time.  If it is just you shooting the video yourself and there is no coach review possibility, there is still enough material on the video for you to make improvements in your presentation.

How do you review the presentation?  Look at four possibilities for the next time.  What can you delete, add, reduce or amplify?  There may be habits you have that detract from the persuasion power of the message.  Perhaps you are mumbling or umming and ahing.  Confidence sells and to sound confident you must be clear and consistent in your delivery.  Look for tell taLe body language tics that have a negative connotation.  You might be swaying around in a distracting way that competes with what you are saying.  Or you maybe be fidgeting, or striding around the stage showing off to everyone how nervous you are.  All of these habits weaken your message with your audience.

Are you engaging the audience with your eye contact?  My Japanese history professor at university would deliver every lecture staring at the very top of the back wall and never engage in any eye contact with the students.  Don’t be like that.  Use every second of the presentation to lock eyes with members of your audience for about six seconds, one at a time and in random order.  Are you using congruent gestures during you explanation or no gestures or too many gestures or permanent gestures?  Gestures are there to be points of emphasis, so hold for a maximum of fifteen seconds and then turn them off.

Video is also excellent for considering what you might have done, looking for things you could have added to the presentation.  Maybe there was a chance to use a prop or introduce a slide to support a point or call for more audience participation by getting them to raise their hands in response to a question.  I was giving a talk recently on “AI in the Workplace” and I showed two paintings labelled A and B and asked the audience which one was painted by AI.  They had to raise their hands to vote.  This was more interesting than just showing them a slide with a painting done by AI.  Roughly half of the audience went for either A or B.  In fact they were both done by A1 so it was a bit of ruse, but very effective to drive home the point I was making.

If you cannot organise a video or if the hosts are not cooperative, then have someone you trust give you feedback.  Don’t ask them a broad question such as “how was it?’.  We need to be more specific.  “Did my opening grab the attention of the audience?”,  “Were my main points clear and supported with credible evidence”, “Was I engaging my audience with good quality eye contact throughout?”,  etc.  Give them a checklist before you start so you can guide them in what to look for.  Unless they are a public speaking expert themselves, they won’t know how to help you best.

In a year, most people don’t get that much opportunity to speak in public, so it very hard to get the right frequency to enable improvement.  If you could do the same presentation five times in a row, by the last one you would be on fire, but that hardly ever happens.  This is why the video or expert feedback becomes so useful.  You can review the presentation at your leisure and improve on your professional public speaking capabilities for the next outing.

How To Give A Motivational Speech

I was attending a Convention in Phuket and the finale was the closing inspirational speech for the week of events.  I had to deliver the same speech myself at the Ho Chi Minh Convention a few years ago.  This is a daunting task.  Actually, when your audience is chock full of presentation’s training experts from Dale Carnegie, it is simply terrifying.  The length of the speech is usually around ten minutes, which though it seems shortish, can feel quite long and challenging to design.  Being an inspirational speech, it adds that extra degree of difficulty.  It comes up though.  The organisers ask you to deliver the closing, rousing call to action to fire the troops up for another year.  Are you ready to meet the challenge?

There are some key components we must assemble.  There must be one clear and compelling message.  In a speech like this, we can’t rattle off the twenty things everyone should be doing.  They can never remember them all and the whole effort becomes too diffused.  It is a single call to action, so what is the action or idea we want to propose.  We might use slides or we may not, it will really depend on what we want to say.  Often in these cases, we can use images very effectively without any words and we supply the narrative during our comments.  Photos and images are powerful for capturing attention and people’s emotions.

A call to action is an emotional commitment that goes beyond logic.  We need to hit the bulls eye of what grabs people’s hearts.  This is delivered through stories.  We take people on a journey of our construction.  We plan it such that it leads them to feel what we want them to feel and to think what we want them to think.  This planning creates a funnel effect where we keep pulling people back to our central message.

Storytelling technique is a terrific vehicle for the speaker to lead people’s hearts and minds.  We populate the story with people who are familiar to the audience.  Ideally they can see these people in their mind’s eye.  They might be people they have actually met or have heard of.  They may be historical events, figures, VIPS, celebrities or people of note who are familiar to our audience. 

In Ho Chi Minh for my closing speech at Convention, the timing was such that we had previously suffered from the triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor meltdown in Japan. I spoke with emotion about that event.  About having a nuclear cloud pass over your head polluting all the drinking water. Of having massive aftershocks every day for weeks, of the relentless black churning oily water engulfing communities, of the chaos and destruction.  I brought that experience alive to drive home my central point.

We flesh out the surroundings of the story to make it real.  We are all used to watching visual storytelling on television or in movies, so we are easily transported to a scene of the author’s creation, if the words create pictures.  We describe the room or location in some detail in order to transfer minds to that place.

We place the event into a time sequence with a peg for the audience to grab hold of, to make the story come alive.  We might do this by nominating the date or we might specify the season or the time of day or night.  This type of context is important because it takes the listener down more layers of the story to make it more relevant.  They can draw on their memory of similar occasions to approximate this story.

The delivery is where all of this comes together.  It is a call to action so the speaker needs to get into high gear to make that happen.  There will be an element of theatrics involved for effect.  This is not some dubious trick or variant on a parlour game to distract the punters.  No, it is taking the key message and driving it hard through exaggeration.  Our speaker in Phuket toward the end of his talk dropped down to the push up position and pumped out twenty rapid fire  pushups on his fingertips. I don’t know if you have ever tried this fingertip version, but it was pretty impressive for a man of his age group and was totally congruent with his key point about stress equals strength.  It was dramatic, it was daring, but it also added that X factor to his talk. 

There must be vocal modulation too, from conspiratorial whispers to hitting key words or phrases with tremendous intensity.  Gestures will be larger than normal and more dramatic.  The speaker will be eyeing the audience with great intensity, with a fire burning in their pupils of complete certainty of the veracity of the key message.  There will be a level of super engagement with the audience, to the point they are cheering and responding throughout the talk rather than consolidated clapping only at the end.

Crafting a key message, a powerful call to action for an end worth pursuing and then wrapping it up in storytelling, delivered with energy and flair, is the formula for success when delivering the closing inspirational speech at your conference.  Make it memorable and don’t hesitate about going BIG.

How To Personalise Your Presentation

Are we talking at our audiences or with our audiences?  There is a vast difference between the two.  Most of the time, the talks we attend are in the talking at category.  The speaker has some information to impart and proceeds to go into the detail with us.  There is a very one way approach, broken only by the Q&A section.  The degree of detail and advice can be very convincing and valuable and we are happy to hear it.  The speaker though remains remote and removed from us.  We have nothing to grab on to, in order to bring the speaker closer to us, to feel some greater simpatico with them.  They speak, we listen, they finish, they leave, we all move on.

Our personal brand is driven hard by the “personal” part, yet many speakers are very impersonal in the way they approach the task.  This comes back to their starting point, to what they are trying to achieve.  In this sense their horizon can be very limited.  If you have only ever seen speakers being distant, when it is your chance, you think that is how you are supposed to do it.  Most speakers are pouring forth data in its raw form.  They are not wrapping it up inside insightful stories, that that grab our imagination and become transfixed in our memories.  It is all a very dry affair really.

To make the whole process more personalised we need to switch our thinking.  If we look at business, what do we see everyone trying to do?  They are trying to personalise their products and services for the buyers.  In speaking terms, we need to be doing the very same thing.  The irony is that we can have speakers talking about marketing in the most detached manner from their audience. Let s do not be like that.

What is the key message for your audience and why is it important?  What will this do for them should they choose to follow your advice?  Who is it most suitable for and when is the best timing to get started?  These questions should arise at the very start of the planning process. Trying to write your key message on a single grain of rice is a great metaphor for gaining the clarity needed to refine your key message down to its most important parts.  This is where we begin.

Who is the message aimed at is a theoretical construct.  What we need is to see who is turning up to the talk. Today, some host organisations won’t release the names of who is coming, but you should insist on getting the names of the companies, so that you can get a sense of which industries are in the room. This means that you can now juxtapose a general point you are making on to the business reality of the company representatives in your audience.  By specifically personalising the message to their reality, you have just made a massive connection with your audience.  If you can keep repeating this throughout the talk, the power of this engagement is immense.  Probably you won’t be able to personalise the messaging for every company in the room, depending on the size of the attendance and the time allowed to speak, but you can certainly gain a big share of audience attention when you do this.

When using examples from the industries in attendance, the credibility of those examples skyrocket compared to using a general comparison.  It does take some research and more work in the preparation stage, but the rewards are greater.  When people in the audience feel you are speaking to them directly, they feel greater connectivity with the speaker. 

Even those who didn’t enjoy a direct example from their industry, will appreciate that the speaker knows their stuff, because they bring their points to bear on specific company’s actual situations.  We have moved from the general and theoretical to the real and practical. Businesspeople much prefer a good dose of reality in their speakers.  So find out who will be in the room, start your talk composition from that point and then build in examples that will resonate with those in the room.

Should I Go Over The Top When I Present?

In our High Impact Presentations Course we have exercises where we ask the participants to really let go of all their inhibitions and let it all hang out – and “go over the top”.  By contrast, we are all usually very constrained when we speak in public.  Our voices are very moderate, our body language is quite muted and our gestures are rather restrained.  This often carries over into our presentations and we find ourselves speaking in this dreadful monotone, which is putting everyone to sleep.  Our body language is minimal and our gestures rather weak, perfunctory.  The exercises we put everyone through are there to expand their range of possibilities as presenters and to do this, we exaggerate the levels and scope.  Of course, in its raw form, it is too much for a professional presentation, but fine as a training tool.  I am often asked though, how much is too much, when it comes to being more powerful as a presenter?  How much “over the top” is appropriate?

I definitely think there is a place for going “over the top” in a business presentation.   The degree to which you push the envelope though is dependant on the subject, your message and the audience. There is no simple scale where the excessive bits are neatly marked in red for our calibration and warning. 

If you are giving your talk and you outraged by something, then expressing your outrage during your talk will be entirely congruent.  You may do that with a higher level of voice volume, hitting certain key words harder, combined with strong body language, a matching facial expression and bigger gestures backing up the message.

You can’t keep going at that “over the top” level though, because you will wear out your audience and its real impact begins to unwind pretty quickly.  Clinical, well planned bursts are more effective, because of the contrast between the storm and calm.  It is a bit like classical music with its crescendos and calms.

When presenting, our body language is very powerful and very expressive.  It can really jumpstart an idea.  We are firm devotees of this concept.  For example, in our morning meetings or chorei, we have a couple of set pieces.  Each day a different person leads the group.  We go through the Vision, Mission, Values, one of Dale Carnegie’s principles, motivational quote, etc.  In our Mission Statement component we say, “By providing customised business solutions, based on the Dale Carnegie Principles,  we exceed our client’s expectations”.   When the chorei leader says the word “exceed” everyone does their version of thrusting a pointed finger as high as possible, upward toward the sky. 

At another point in the chorei we talk about our mantra, which is to “10 X our thoughts and our actions”.  We used to do this by crossing our arms across our chests, opening up the fingers of both hands, so that we are expressing the symbol of an X shape and the number ten.  One of the team had the genius idea of going more over the top.  So now we stand with our feet well apart and push both our arms out and upward at 45 degrees, so that the effect is to create a cross symbol, in the same shape as the letter “X”.  It is a very dynamic movement and very powerful in communicating the idea behind it.

What has this got to do with presenting in public? The difficult part is to free ourselves from the limitations of normal daily conversation, where we are so restrained and let some pizzazz come into our presenting persona.  Our daily chorei gets us used to going over the top.  Now when speaking, hitting a key word very loudly or elongating its pronunciation is very dynamic and will grab your audience’s attention.  It helps us to break through all of the mental clutter and minutiae that is dominating their thoughts and preventing them from giving us their full attention.

When we combine a key word with a very big gesture, then the amplification of that message becomes very powerful.  I noticed this when I was presenting to an audience of five thousand people.  The venue was large, the seats at the back were far away and the top tier guests in the last rows saw me as about as big as a peanut from that distance.  In this case, you have to use the whole stage, center, left and right sides and the stage apron. You have to employ very exaggerated gestures to overcome the tyranny of distance from your audience seated at the back.

Props are another area where some showmanship can work well.  In a speech in Japanese in Nagoya, I was making the point that Australia was very much focused on the Asian region.  I decided to reverse an 18th century Meiji era slogan for effect.  In the original, Japan was being encouraged to leave Asia and follow Europe.  It said “Datsu A Nyu O”.  I reversed it to “Datsu O Nyu A, meaning for Australia to stop following Europe and to follow Asia instead. 

By itself, reversing the well known slogan was a powerful idea. It was a new construct for a Japanese audience to have such famous a Meiji era call to action, which they all studied at High School, reoriented to a completely new meaning.  The ”over the top” contribution was to have it hand written in Japanese kanji brushstrokes, pasted on to a traditional roll such as you will often see with Japanese paintings.  I attached small weights to the bottom of the roll, so that when it was unfurled, it dropped like a stone and made a slight snapping sound when fully extended.  It was a very dramatic unfurling of a surprising usage of the Japanese language and culture by a foreigner.  It was “over the top” but congruent.

We can take the chance to stand out at different times.  We need to pick our moments and decide how far we will push things.  None of us need another vanilla presentation from some entirely forgettable speaker, but we don’t need pyrotechnics every time either.  Find some spots for hitting a word hard, or using a big gesture.  Use a powerful facial expression of wonder, disgust, surprise, joy or anger, where it is congruent with what you are saying.  “Less is more” though is a good rule and leave the amateur theatrics to the aspirant thespians.  But where it works, do go “over the top”.