As businesspeople, we don’t get that many chances to face a public audience and give an actual talk.  The majority of the time, we are giving internal weekly reports on projects or revenues.  We feel constrained to deliver in the same way everyone else is delivering – monotone, lifeless, dull accounting of the progress or non-progress of our section.  We fear if we start ramping up we will be disparaged as an idiot, so we keep the lid on what we are doing.  Going full Hamlet on the project update will certainly draw some negative criticism from our bosses, who will quickly tell us to stop clowning around and get back to the usual methodology.  Are we doomed to stay in first gear as presenters for eternity?

Probably.  Work reporting has a certain format and level of expectation which is it should be hum drum and ordinary, not melodramatic or dynamic.  What can we do though within that frame to work on our skills?  Firstly, we need to re-set our habits.  We need to develop a work rhythm presentation which won’t get us called in to the boss’s office for a dressing down, but which also allows us to work on some of the basic skills. 

Planning the report needs a makeover.  Usually the planning component is pretty marginal.  Instead let’s think about what is the key insight from the numbers or the project progress or lack thereof.  What is the message we want to convey?  Once we determine that, then we start to build the framework for the delivery.  Usually we are one of a number of people presenting and the rest of the troops will be doing a sterling job to put everyone to sleep with their efforts.  That means we need to plan our opening of our report in a way which will grab attention but without being too over the top. If we start with the equivalent of “the sky is falling” that will get flagged immediately by the boss as negativity, seeding panic and will warrant a powerful scolding about our negative impact on the team spirit.

So we are looking for a start which is less powerful, but powerful enough. For example, we could say, “We had some surprises this week”.  Those surprises could be positive or negative, but that simple statement will get everyone wondering, “Oh, yeah – what surprises?” and we will have achieved our aim to grab everyone’s attention.  We are basically practicing the dark art of creating newspaper headlines.  The start should be short, sharp and attention grabbing.  We are trying to work a pattern interrupt into our headline, to break though the mental barriers in the room.

When we get into the main report it is a good idea to frame the key points.  We could say, “We had some surprises this week.  Let me go through the three things which were unexpected”.  Now we have set up a simple navigation process to allow our audience to follow our report.  We could have said, “We had some surprises this week.  I will go through the macro and micro factors behind these”.  Now we have framed two chapters of the report, making it easy to follow.  Another approach could be using time.  “We had some surprises this week.  Let me go through the lead up, where we are now and what we can expect next”.  We can now cover the past, the present and the future in three chapters and this is simple to follow.

Our final message needs to be clear.  It may just be a simple summary of the key points, a call to action, a recommendation, a warning, or a rallying call for support from other teams.  Our report may be only five to ten minutes long, but it gives enough scope to apply these frames to the talk and mimics exactly what we do in a forty minute public speech.  We get to apply the formula we need, even if only on a smaller scale.  We need to be using our voice to highlight key words and phrases, our gestures to accent data or insights and our eye power to connect with everyone in the room.  There is no reason why we shouldn’t be doing this every time because this is what makes for effective communication. 

If we do draw some negative comments take a long hard look at the perpetrator.  Are they skilled in communication and presenting?  If they aren’t, then just ignore them.  What if it is the boss?  We should always keep a professional tone, no going over the top, but keep going, because often the boss cannot present to save their own life and are no model for us.  Just tell them you are taking these weekly reporting opportunities to develop your communication abilities.  If you are not leeching into thespian antics, then there should no basis to be reining you in.

Another area where we can excel is in using our slide information.  I say this because everyone else will be making all the usual mistakes of cramming everything on to one slide, having too many fonts and too much data which simply cannot be read.  If we are using spreadsheets, then distributing copies to everyone beforehand is a better idea than putting up columns of numbers no one can understand.  If we are paperless, we can still show the spreadsheet. Usually there are only a few numbers to highlight, so we should concentrate on those.  The spreadsheet becomes wallpaper and we use animated popups to highlight a specific number in very large font.  We can then talk to that number. We keep repeating this process for the specific numbers we need to talk about and there usually aren’t too many of those in a short report.

Graphs are a good way to show numbers.  We need to recall the golden rule of a slide has to be fully understood within two seconds of it going up.  The key is to avoid having more than one graph per slide if possible or a maximum of two slides, if a comparison is required.  Line graphs are good to show trends and pie charts are great to show proportions.  Try to keep the animation to a minimum, because it just distracts from the key message.

Our thinking changes to “I am giving a five minute or ten minute segment of a forty minute speech and I will prepare accordingly”.  This way our frame of reference is always the full professional presentation rather than the sad excuse which most people deliver.  In this way, we are able to practice our skills within the realm of weekly reporting reality.

There are some fundamental mechanics of the presentation delivery.  I would call these hygiene factors for presenting.  Eye contact, facial expression, voice modulation, gesture usage, pause insertion and posture are the basics.  Unfortunately, in my observation, most business presenters have not mastered these core skills.  This despite all of the training available, all of the free information being plastered all over the internet.  “Content Marketing” experts are establishing their credibility by providing phenomenal information for free.  What an age we live in, yet we still have presentation train wrecks.

Let’s presume some have mastered the basics, so what comes next? Here are three elements we need to be working on.

1. Clear Meaning

When we ask our presentation class participants what are some of the attributes they want to achieve when speaking in public, “being clear” is always prominent.  However, what is required to be clear?   The audience has to be able to navigate the talk and follow the direction the speaker is taking everyone.  I attended a talk by the President of a huge global organisation here in Tokyo and he “wandered like a cloud” all over the place. It was a navigation nightmare. Let’s not make our audience work hard to keep up.

The chapters of the talk should be clear, the flow logical and the points quite apparent. The delivery needs the right pacing, with sufficient pauses to allow the messages to sink in.  We need a pattern interrupt every five minutes of the talk, to keep the interest of the listeners.  We will ensure there are highs and lows in the delivery, so that it is not all delivered at the same pace.  This is a very common mistake amongst business speakers – they have only one speed setting from start to finish.  We need to mimic classical music with its ebbs and highs, it lulls and crescendos.  Certain critical key words are culled from the herd and given special attention and treatment to make the message clearer.  We might hit them with a stentorian outburst of raw energy or we might drop it all down to a cupped hand, conspiratorial whisper, for which the audience has to mentally lean in to hear.

2. Message Appeal

If your core message is mundane, boring and unremarkable, it will be hard to excite the assembled masses about what you are saying.  Storytelling in business is one of the dark arts. It is rarely mastered, poorly understood and infrequent in its application.  Presenting statistics for example, can be boring, but wrapping them up in the drama of the story can be gripping.  Reveal who were the heroes who forensically excavated these numbers and their herculean efforts to dig into the data to find the gems.

Delve into what are the ramifications of their findings.  Extrapolate into the future to paint a picture of hope or despair with these numbers presented as early warning indicators. Capture which careers are about to be shredded or heralded?  When storytelling, we need to take the listener to a place, in a season, at a time of the day, with people they know and all of this located in their mind’s eye.  We take the audience with us to the precise moment it all happened and draw out the hard lessons we have won as a consequence.

3. Passion and Engagement

Talking in a monotone, matched with a wooden face devoid of expression, quickly becomes a funereal distraction for the audience.  Removing all the physical energy from the talk sets it adrift from the listeners.  They feel no connection and no interest, because the speaker themselves doesn’t seem interested in what they are saying.

Enthusiasm is contagious and we hunger for a speaker with fire in the belly.  Instead we usually get the legions of the walking dead of business speakers – those armies of the grey, gaunt, forgettable and dull.  We are not simply advocating high energy, almost crazed hysteria here, but considered belief and real commitment to the message, one which the audience will definitely buy.

Your energy sets up a vibration.  it transports your passion and commitment to what you are saying directly to us and infects and envelops the whole room.  When we speak, we employ our “ki” (気), our intrinsic energy and we push that energy out all the way to the back wall, as a conscious effort to fill the room with our presence.  I am sure you have had the experience of when someone enters a room, they literally fill it with their presence.  That is precisely what we want to achieve as presenters – to dominate that meeting room space with our power and “ki”.  The first step is to have that mindset to want to do that and then direct our energy outward, rather than bottling it up, restraining it.

We specifically want to engage that entire audience and connect with them all.  We use our eye contact power to make that connection.  We should focus our gaze on a single point, so select one of the eyes of each audience member. We look so deeply into their eye we feel we can delve into their soul.  Well delve for only about six seconds however, because with that intensity, it soon becomes intrusive.  The impact of that one-on-one engagement is enormous.  They feel they are the only one in the room and we are talking directly to them.  That connection triggers tremendous continued support for our personal and professional brands

The basics platform allows us to take our presentations to the highest levels.  We must work hard on amplifying the connection between our message and the audience. Therefore, we are the rare ones who can break through all the communication dissonance. Others simply fall by the white noise wayside.  Being a presenter has never been tougher or more demanding. In our Age of Distraction and this Era of Cynicism, we have to stand tall as highly capable, skilled communicators, showing everyone the way forward.

There are some levels of presenter and so where do you fit in?  The scaredy-cat like I used to be, avoiding all opportunities to present.  The novice presenter trying to work it out by yourself through trial and error?  The student of presenting who has worked out the connection between persuasive ability and career and business success.  The semi-pro who holds down a full time job which does provide a number of chances a year to keep working on advancing your presentation skills?  I don’t include the professional presenter because that has become their livelihood and is out of scope for 99.99% of people in business.

For those in denial, I know, I get it.  I was so terrified of embarrassing myself I decided the best course of action was to escape all chances to present.  As we advance in our careers though, the room to hide starts to disappear and we have to face the reality – if you can’t present you cannot advance in your career or business.  Here is some clear advice – don’t struggle along.  Become proactive and go and get the training.  Find a class where there is a psychologically safe space where you can learn with positive encouragement.  Our ego is already fragile about presenting and the last thing we need is someone criticising us.  Look for trainers who follow the good/better school of feedback.  That means they tell you what you are doing well and encourage you to keep doing that and explain how you can make it even better.

If your colleagues are not paid up members of this school of feedback and all you get from them is critique, just be polite and thank them and move on.  They are clueless about developing people so just blank them out and keep up your training and study.  As you advance you will actually become a problem for other presenters.  Some of them will try to pull you back down to their level, because they are aware they are hopeless and prefer everyone to be the same, so that they don’t stand out.  A cutting comment from a work colleague is seared into my mind, “Greg is all style and no substance” after my presentation to the whole company.  Ouch! Fortunately, I knew why he made this stupid comment and just ignored it.  If you bump into these people, just ignore them and keep working on your skills.

For those who have started on the path, the trick is to keep going.  I remember reading one of Tony Robbins’s books where he realised most business speakers only get a few chances a year to talk in public and that he could get the equivalent of years of experience in a few months, if he got enough chances to speak in public.  I followed that same idea myself and looked for every opportunity to speak and I still hold to that strategy.  Event organisers are always looking for free industry speakers.  I am sure Tony Robbins had to give a lot of unpaid talks before he become good enough to get paid.  Anyway, we are not in it for the money, we are trying to get a professional capability and we need an audience to work with.  As you build up a resume of speeches given, more chances will flow to you.  It has been a long drought of opportunities thanks to Covid, but in 2023 we should start to see the reappearance of in person events and the chances to speak at them.

This will be good for the semi-pro who may have gotten a bit rusty having had no spots for the last three years to keep advancing their art. It would be a very good idea to go back to the basics to make sure we have not forgotten any of the professionalism we had previously developed. It might also be an idea to proactively reach out to organisations who are slowly emerging for the shadows and starting to host in-person events again and let them know you would be happy to give your talk.  The audience size may be considerably smaller and some of them will probably be watching you online, which is not as good as having them all in the room, but better than nothing.

Review how you went and analyse what needs to change to make your presentation better.  Simple things you did before may have evaporated and will need to be re-introduced into the mix.  Eye contact will definitely be one of them for a lot of people.  We don’t just look at our audience en masse.  We single out people and use our eye contact to engage them during our talk.  Too much is too much though, so around six seconds each is the formula we need.

I have only seen a couple of speakers live in the last few months and they were pretty rusty I thought.  My guess is they just carried on from where they left off, except they are not at that previous level anymore and need to rebuild their skills.  When we get back to basics, we plug any holes which have appeared or we make sure everything that should be happening is in fact working for us.  This won’t happen by itself, so we need to work at it.  The beauty is if we do this and everyone else just carries on as if there hasn’t been a three year break, then we will instantly stand out as an excellent presenter.

Our personal and professional brands are invaluable and we have to invest in them and presenting is the one time when all is revealed publicly.  We have to make those chances winners and build our reputation and take it even higher.

Chris Anderson is a curator for TED talks and so far there have been a billion views of TED talks since they started forty years ago. He wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review titled “How To Give A Killer Presentation” which was published back in June 2013 and it still stands up well today.  I have given a TED talk myself and so have had some exposure to the process and the rules they have around giving presentations.  Let’s look at the 5 key points from Chris’s article. I will add my take though, because the original article can easily be accessed for his advice in detail.

1. Frame your story - figure out where to start and where to end.
   There are four basic presentations we have to choose from: inform, motivate, persuade or entertain. All of them will go much better if we have storytelling as a key component of the structure.  In particular, potentially “dry” inform types of talks can be brought alive by adding a story which highlights the facts.  Going behind the numbers to the drama involved is always more interesting.  Heroic tales of how the revenues were won against the trials and tribulations of the market or despite the competitor’s dirty tricks, rather than just stating the numbers, is a lot more gripping for an audience.

The story requires a meeting of the audience, their mind’s eye and our tale.  We want to get them to the spot where it happened, when it occurred, who was involved, what transpired and what was the result.  We have to explain things in a way in which the audience can see the scene we are describing in their own mind.  That makes it so much more real for them.

2. 
   Plan your delivery - decide whether to memorize your speech word for word or develop bullet points and then rehearse it—over and over.
   Chris Anderson does mention memorisation as one possibility but actually suggests it is better to have points to speak to and I totally agree. The memorisation path is strewn with trip wires, steel traps and squelchy bogs. Reading it to us is doom, be that off a piece of paper or from text on screen, so certainly email it to us, instead of that very bad delivery idea.

The key secret here is simple.  Only you know what you are going to say, so if you mess up the order or leave a bit out, only you know that and please, do us all a favour and keep such a piece of intelligence to yourself.  I had rehearsed a talk for a Convention audience as the closing speaker and despite all of that effort, I was suddenly and inexplicably going from my point three to my point five, while I was delivering it.  It was like an out-of-body experience, observing myself departing from what I had rehearsed. Only I knew the order though, so I just plonked point four down after point five and carried on shamelessly, as if this was all part of the grand plan.

3. Work on stage presence - but remember that your story matters more than how you stand or whether you’re visibly nervous.

Chris makes the point that jiggling the body around when speaking is distracting for an audience. Quite true, but some speakers can’t help themselves. The adrenalin being pumped into the body by the brain which was sensing fear, is such a strong chemical reaction they cannot control themselves very easily.

The solution is stand on the one spot and don't move. Also do tons and tons of repetition in rehearsal, so that you are so confident in your material, that you can order all the butterflies zapping around in your tummy to fly in formation.  Look at the people in the audience who are nodding their heads or smiling in approval of what you are saying and avoid all eye contact with those who look grumpy, adversarial or negative.  This will boost your confidence and help you to control the nerves

4. Plan the multimedia - whatever you do, don’t read from PowerPoint slides.
Yes, please don’t read to us.  Using photos is a bit of a favourite of mine, because the audience can understand the photo in 2 seconds and then I can add my spin to what this photo represents.  When I did my own TED talk, this was the technique I used.

5. Put it together - play to your strengths and be authentic.

Being natural and conversational rather than pontificating, lecturing or sermonising is a good idea, as the audience can absorb the message more easily. None of us need a wannabe thespian or a baroque orator for our next speaker.  Using pauses is a good idea too, because it is a natural phenomenon and it helps to direct your mind to what needs to come next. If the nerves are driving the speaking speed up too much, then a short pause gives you the break you need to redirect to the right speed.

When presenting some things work better than others.  The good news is there are tons of resources to guide us on our quest.  Using trial and error is an extremely bad idea because remember this is your personal and professional brand which you are exposing to the world every time you get up to talk.

When I was preparing for my TED talk, the thought that this talk of mine could potentially be accessed and assessed by millions of people, scared the hell out of me and made me rehearse like a demon on speed.  I suggest we all do that for every talk, TED or otherwise and when we do, we will do a much better job of it.

In the sales world, it is well known that as buyers the first purchase we make is the salesperson serving us.  We decide we like and trust this person and therefore allow them to extract our money in return for a service or product.  It is the same in the world of presenting.  We buy the presenter first and then we absorb their message.  Given this is fairly obvious, why aren’t all presenters doing their best to sell themselves to their audiences?

In some cases, this leads to failed attempts at straight up humour or self-depreciating remarks faintly disguised as humour.  Interestingly, recently I was asked about humour when I was giving a talk on how to be persuasive when delivering presentations.  It was actually an ambush question.  The questioner had in fact taken lessons on doing standup comedy and was testing me on what I knew about the subject and what I might be recommending.  I didn’t know his background of course, so I just made my standard point that we should leave humour to the professionals, unless you are remarkably naturally gifted.  He told me later how hard he found it to try and be a comic, which was in fact a reinforcement of my advice – leave it to the pros.

So if we remove failed attempts at humour as a way of ingratiating ourselves with our audience what else is left for us?  One thing to make sure of is consolidating your existing fan or potential fan base before the talk. Make sure to let your business contacts know that you are giving this talk and when and where it will be held and encourage them to attend.  There is nothing more relaxing for a speaker than to look into an audience and see a lot of positive, friendly faces who the speaker already knows.  Magically, their supportive vibe surreptitiously spreads to others in the room.

Another ploy is to get there early and go through the guest list or check the name badges for people you know, but whose name and face combination may be a challenge for you to put together.  Seeing a familiar name makes it easier for you greet them as they arrive by using their name and it gives the impression that they are an important person for you.  It is flattering and it creates a bond of familiarity which again helps with the speaker’s connect vibe with the audience before you even start.

Starting strong is important and the start kicks off from the time you arrive at the venue.  Get there early and check the tech is working, because that allows you to have peace of mind and remain cool, calm and collected about giving this talk.  If there are issues with the computer or the monitor or the projector, this can take years off your life if it occurs just before you are due to go on.  We don’t want that. 

When you are called to the stage to give your talk, don’t fuss around with the slide deck and getting things up on screen.  These first few seconds are critical to creating a positive first impression and we need to really work on getting it right.  Go straight into your well designed opening, which will immediately deliver the audience into the palm of your hand and have them eager for more.  Only after that, introduce yourself and thank the organisers and all of that standard, good stuff.  If possible, have someone assist you to get the slides up on screen, so you can skip that distraction and remain fully focused on your audience.

Don’t imagine you have to recite your resume to have credibility with the audience, because that should have been done for you by the MC.  Trying to sell the audience on how great we are isn’t going to be a winner.  It is a tightrope, but we have to be confident yet humble. Our job is to make sure we supply the MC with what we want them to say about us. We may need to stiff arm them about delivering it exactly as we have written it.  Some unprofessional MCs imagine that they are soaring eagles, unbound by the earthly laws and can do a better job than we can. They will decide to wing it, by coming up with their own version of our introduction, which invariably in my experience is a pale shadow of what we have written.  We have to maintain 100% editorial control of our brand and insist they follow the script.  If they resist that idea, then we should take that task off them and do it ourselves – it is definitely not ideal, but it is better than someone else butchering our introduction, first impression and brand.

The first words out of our mouth have to evoke massive levels of inner confidence, because audiences buy confidence.  They reject doubt, insecurity, gratuitous pleading and weakness, so don’t start with an apology or an excuse.  No one cares about your problems anyway, because they are totally preoccupied with their own.

Get your most valuable insight, data, statistics, narrative right up the front.  Don’t imagine you can warm this audience up by slowly releasing all the gold in dribs and drabs, as you move through the talk.  Give them the best you have from the start and they will stick with you to the end.  If you start slow and average, trying to gradually warm them up, they will immediately be on their phones, plugging into the internet, before you can say “trainwreck”. 

The key is to plan the start meticulously.  If we get this right, then we will carry the audience with us and be in a position to deliver our key messages, thereby enhancing our personal and professional brands.

I attended an online presentation recently and the presenter was from one of the HUGE social media companies and the presentation was very different from the norm.  He was using his company’s internal platform to deliver the presentation, rather than using standard tools like PowerPoint or its equivalent.  He could conduct comprehension tests of his content using a sophisticated timing mechanism, which would rank people in terms of who were the fastest to complete the test and do it the most accurately.  It was quite snazzy and there were other little flourishes which were quite cool. 

It was all going pretty hummingly, until he introduced his colleague who was going to add to the conversation with her experiences and views.  This is when things came crashing down. Her delivery was done in a monotone, which had the effect of making me suddenly feel drowsy during the session.  Her lifeless presentation was in complete contrast with the all the bells and whistles this company had been putting on display, before she was introduced.

This made me think about was that high tech presentation actually effective in terms of communicating the core messages?  When I thought back to the guys talk, I realised that I had been distracted by the tech and hadn’t fully absorbed the points he was making.  This is a distinct danger when presenting using “cool” tools. 

I am not a fan of anything distracting from the speaker. Online presentations in particular are the refuge of scoundrels.  While we are talking there are members of the audience who are completely distracted by doing their email or some other task and are not really taking in what we are saying.  The first hint is when they won’t turn on their camera.  This is a sign they don’t want to be involved fully in the meeting and are there, but not really. 

Usually online, there is big screen real estate taken up mainly with the slides and a tiny little box, with a postage stamp sized image of the presenter.  In this situation, it is super hard for the speaker to connect with their audience. If you decide to torture your audience by speaking in a monotone as well, then expect trouble.  All we really have is our vocal modulation because they usually cannot see our gestures or much body language, including our facial expressions.  We have to be working hard to make that vocal range compensate for all the other parts of the presentation tool box which are missing.

If we are online, we should try to turn off the “share screen” function as much as possible.  Yes, it is a bit of fiddling around to get the slide deck back up, but on balance we are better to appear in a larger format on screen, rather than being trapped in that little postage stamp.  The same applies when we are presenting in person.  Most people start with the slide deck and keep it up throughout the whole presentation.  Yes, we can do that, but why not hit the “B” button on the keyboard sometimes and send the screen into blackness, so that the only thing to focus on now is us.  We just hit the space bar and the screen is back up again and this is so much easier that trying to do the same thing when online and operating in Zoom or whatever.

I am not a fan of using video in presentations.  It is extremely rare that the video actually adds any value to the talk.  It is often “filler” for speakers who don’t like speaking and want to reduce their bit as much as possible.  They think that a glossy PR Department “high production values” corporate video will make up for their lack of delivery ability.  It won’t.  We as presenters have so much more high octane potential than a corporate video. If the video is too slick, we come off as second best and our messaging capacity is damaged.  If the corporate video is rather ho hum (and that is usually the case), we have lost the audience and now we have to work so much harder to get them back with us.

Simplicity in terms of what we show on screen is good for us as speakers, because we are the star, not the slide deck and we need to keep it that way.  Too much information, too many fonts, too many colours, too much animation, is a nightmare for us to break through with our message.  Yet, we see presenters doing this to themselves, making their job as a communicator so much tougher than it already is.

“Go light on the bells and whistles gimmicks and be the bells and whistles yourself”, would be my advice if you want to get your message through.  If you just want to project a high tech image and don’t care about getting your points registered with the audience, then knock yourself out and go for it.  The only problem with this approach is it is so transitory and ephemeral, you have to wonder why you bothered in the first place.  We go to all of this effort preparing our talk, so why not make sure our key messages are resonating with our audience, be that delivered online or in person.

“Urgent – we need help” is the type of text message you love as a training company.  It means the “why now?”, part of the question has a train wreck answer that you can fix.  In this case and in many similar cases, it is not the big bosses getting difficult or disgruntled clients acting up.  It is a grass roots rebellion against colleagues who are clueless when presenting.  At a certain point, the lack of professionalism becomes a restraint on the forward momentum of the organisation.

The road is rocky though for the presenter. There may be resistance from guerrilla groups who feel threatened if others start to make progress leaving them forlorn and exposed.  I remember going on stage after one of my colleagues, who had given his presentation to the entire firm.  It was a dud and he knew it.  There was no excitement and his messaging fell on stony ground.  I was an experienced speaker and presenter by that stage and I knew how to rock an audience.  I heard later that my persuasion free zone colleague was telling anyone who would listen after my presentation, that I was “all style and no substance”.  It was a clever putdown, because it sort of sounds smart.  This is the type of nonsense you may have to put up with from nobodies who are threatened by your professionalism.  It is better to suffer this invective though, than to stay hopeless and be just like them - a dud when it comes to persuasion power. 

The message I received was a case of rebellion.  With many retail operations there are seasonal changes of the product line-up and the marketing department have to infect the salespeople with passion for the brand’s latest offerings.  When the marketing department presentations are as a dull as dishwater and are failing in the persuasion stakes, then sales suffer.  The salespeople go on silent strike.  They are not motivated to move sales, because they don’t believe in the selections.  The marketing department presenters didn’t engage their internal audience. They didn’t use storytelling to fire up content for the salespeople to use with buyer.  They didn’t persuade their listeners to trust their marketing expertise.

Bosses have an uncanny ability to spot trouble early and realise that the next season’s results are not going to make the targets, because the enthusiasm for the seasonal selections isn’t inspiring much confidence in those who have to move the merchandise.  Hence the panic message to come and fix this issue.

Marketing departments, R&D centers, and middle management are the groups most often required to have persuasion power.  When they are not trained they are under powered for the task.  This has a flow on effect and the full potentiality of the organisation’s messaging capability isn’t being maximised.

When presentation training is invested in, it has the immediate impact of fixing the problem at hand, but it has other effects as well.  If we are all watching skilled presentations by our internal colleagues, it says a lot about the professionism of the organisation, boosts our esprit de corps and builds our pride in ourselves, to belong to such an organisation.  These skills spill outside the firm and show up when we meet clients and give them presentations which persuade and lead to increased sales. When we representing the organisation in a public setting at say an industry event, other groups note that we are doing a professional job and then they extend kudos to the rest of the entire organisation.  If we see you are a dud, we assume everyone is a dud.  If you are a star, we think they are all stars over there.

Salespeople are like water – they are always looking for the path of least resistance.  If the firm relies on them to sell the range of goods selected by someone else, then that internal presentation has to be professional and convincing.  In the case of this client, we have known them for a number of years and could have done the training much earlier, but there was no appetite for it.  Often the time and money combination conspire to stop bosses taking action until it is almost too late.  This is the tension between the “urgent and important” time management quadrant and the “not urgent, but important” quadrant.

These types of fundamental skills are not urgent but important and need to be raised up the hierarchy of priorities for the firm in order to head off trouble before it can ever arise.  Who wouldn’t want to work in an organisation where everyone was professional and persuasive when making their report or recommendations.

As speakers we have a tremendous amount of things to concentrate on when presenting.  Is my speaking speed at the right cadence?  Am I being clear with what I am saying?  Are the audience able to follow the navigation of my slide deck?  Am I losing attention to the wiles of the mobile phone, as people escape from me to the internet?  We can all have a lot of considerations buzzing around inside our brains. These considerations are all directed to ourselves.  Our delivery of the message to the audience can get lost in all of this mental effort and consideration. 

Let’s assume the fundamentals have been completed.  The audience analysis has clarified at what complexity level we should deliver our talk.  We have planned a blockbuster opening to seize the audience’s attention away from all of the competing distractions for our message.  We are providing evidence and proof to back up what we are saying, in this disgruntled, newly cynical world of “fake news” phobia.  We have cleverly designed two closes, one for after the main body of the talk and the other for after the last of the enquiries in the Q&A.  We want to dominate proceedings and ensure we control the last thing the audience hears, rather than the content of some random offering which was totally off topic.  Most importantly, we have not spent the majority of our preparation time jostling one slide with another to build the deck.  Rather we have been rehearsing our talk to ensure we have it within the time limit and that we have the right structure and flow for the presentation. We have pre-prepared possible answers for the most likely questions we can anticipate, so that we are never caught off guard.

With all of this in the bag we are ready to rumble with the delivery. Many technically oriented speakers believe that the delivery is trumped by the high value of their content.  They have written themselves a “Get Out Of Jail” card for this component, to excuse their lack of skills in this area.  Delusion reigns.  If you are droning on in a monotone, saying “um” and “ah” every five seconds and generally demonstrating no enthusiasm whatsoever for your topic, then no matter how brilliant the content, many in the audience will simply escape to the internet to get away from you.

Here are six points of persuasion for your delivery, which will ensure the audience stay their hands and don’t lunge for their phones as soon as you start speaking.  To help us recall all of them, we will move from head to toe as a simple memory trick, so that we don’t forget them.

Eyes

Eye contact is powerful and totally underused by most speakers.  If you fear your audience, making eye contact with them is terrifying.  If you have followed the fundamentals outlined earlier, your fear will diminish and you can get on with the business of engaging your listeners.  Our rule is 6x6.  We want to look deep into the eyes of our audience members one by one and hold their direct gaze for around six seconds.  Less than that and there is little engagement. More than that and it becomes intrusive.  Here is a little trick.  In a big audience, when you select one person in the crowd to engage with, at a certain distance the twenty people sitting around them all believe you are looking at them.  It is also hard to look at two objects simultaneously, so focus on just one eye of the audience member and talk directly to them for six seconds.  Mentally divide the audience into a baseball diamond, so that you have the inner and outer fields, left, center and right fields.  This gives us six sectors to engage with at random, to make sure we are covering the entire venue and not favouring those closest to us rather than those at the rear or those on our left side over those on the right.

Face

The slide deck mustn’t dominate that most powerful illuminator of ideas – our facial expressions.  However, many speakers have one facial expression throughout, regardless of the content of what they are saying.  We want to perfectly match what we are saying with how we are saying it.  If it is good news look happy, if it is bad news look serious, if it is puzzling, look curious, etc.  Professor Albert Mehrabian’s research showed that when we are incongruent between content and delivery, our audience becomes distracted from our message.

Voice

Voice modulation provides contrast and variety, which are important elements to keep our listeners with us until the very end.  An audible, conspiratorial whisper is just as powerful a message communicator as a stentorian outburst.  All loud or all soft are the attention decimators we need to avoid.  Mix it up and go for variety.

Gestures

Holding the same hand position for longer than 15 seconds, saps all the power from it and it just becomes annoying.  The faucet idea of “turn it on, turn it off”, is the right metaphor for how we should be thinking about gestures.  Combining gestures with our eye contact, facial expression and voice power can really project our words and phrases into the minds of our audience.

Pauses

We need small breaks to allow our audience to digest what we have said, rather than snowballing them with the next offering, until they cannot remember what we said five minutes ago. Pauses help us to control our delivery speed too, so that we are not rushing through the content.

Stance

Standing with our weight split 50/50 across our legs always looks professional.  Don’t slouch, stand up tall and straight.

These six delivery reminders will ensure your message is received clearly. We go to so much effort to prepare our talks and so much stress to deliver it, then it will be a total waste if our message is not getting through.

The Japanese idea of Shu-Ha-Ri is a combination of three characters – 守破離.  I first came across this concept when I was living in Australia and studying karate there. It is a very typical concept in all traditional arts in Japan.  Each character has a separate meaning, so they don’t make up a compound word, as is often common with Japanese phrases.  The idea represents a learning journey.  Shu is to protect the traditional techniques, the basics, the fundamentals.  Ha is to detach and break away from the tradition, to innovate and depart from our attachments to what we are doing.  Ri is to transcend to a level where there is no self-consciousness of what we are doing, we make it our own, because we have absorbed it all and it is now part of us.

This is very much the journey of the presenter.  I was reminded of this the other day when I was giving a talk to a Tokyo American Club audience. I was the guest speaker and I chose as my topic the Six Impact Points Of Persuasion.  One of those six points was on the use of gestures.  In the Q&A, one of the audience members asked me if I was using gestures during my talk with conscious thought or whether they were just happening naturally.  Actually, I had never thought about that and I realised these were unconscious acts driven by the content of what I was saying and by my delivery skills as a presenter.  I was in a mental state of Ri, in the Shu-Ha-Ri format.

For most businesspeople this is a very hard stage to reach.  They often get only a few opportunities a year to speak.  Unfortunately, they usually do no rehearsal and only deliver that talk once in their lives. Also, they get no coaching on how to make their next talk even better.  Even if there are only a few chances to stand up in front of an audience, we can get to work improving trying to move to the next stage.  It may be that stage one – Shu – could occupy us for a number of years, but as we say, the best time to start becoming excellent at presenting was yesterday and the second best time is today.

In this first stage of Shu, we need to consciously remind ourselves what we are supposed to be doing.  We need to make sure we get our feet in the right position to make sure our body posture doesn’t start excluding audience members, because we are only facing half the hall.  We need to remember to look people in the eye when we speak, as opposed to letting our gaze wander aimlessly like a cloud over the whole audience and find we are paying no attention to anyone.  We need to engage the audience and using direct eye contact is the best way to do that.  We need to manufacture our gestures to match the content of our message and to hold them for no longer than 15 seconds so that the power doesn’t disappear from the gesture.  We have to get our face involved rather than letting it become wooded and that is actually a pretty hard habit to break. We have to remind ourselves not to slip into a monotone voice when presenting and make sure we have vocal variety and that we are not getting too fast.

As we get more chances to speak, we keep concentrating on these points, so that we make sure we are covering all the bases. At a certain point we start to internalise what we should be doing and have to expend less energy to keep checking what we are doing.  We are getting into the Ha stage.  We start to think of new things we could be doing.  Perhaps we will move around the stage a bit and try and get closer to the audience. If it is a big stage, we want to move to the left and right extremes and try and connect with the members of our audience there.  We are no longer worried about out foot position, because we are capable of re-setting our body so that we never eliminate half the audience from our gaze by looking off to only one direction.  We become more comfortable with our gestures and they are not needing to be forced anymore and are occurring naturally.  In fact, we might be getting more flamboyant and larger with our gestures to reap a bigger impact on the audience.  We are getting better at being more focused on the audience, than on what we are doing.

In the final stage of Ri, we are not even conscious of all of these little building bricks we need to make the presentation a success.  We are not even conscious of ourselves because we are now totally focused on the reaction of the audience and reading their thoughts about what we are saying, to see where we need to make some adjustments.  We are now focused on what they like and what interests them.  We start to get into a close embrace with our audience as we move them around, dancing to our tune.  We are in sync with them and they with us, as we become one unit.

Next time you present, make a mental note about which stage you feel you are in.  Start thinking about what you need to be doing to move along the journey to the next stage.  When you break the process up, like this, it provides good insight into our progress and helps us to move forward.

Contemplating this title you may be thinking “I am not boring”.  You would be a rarity in business then, because think about how many interesting business presentations you have heard in your life to date.  I would reckon you would have trouble counting them on one hand.  If you believe you are not boring, then you are one of the elite amongst business presenters.  Is that the case?

Why are so many businesspeople such duds as presenters?  The answers are not hard to find.  There is a basic miscalculation going on about content and delivery capabilities.  The underlying mistake is thinking that if my content is really good, I don’t have to be really good in delivering it.  Once upon a time, information was hard to find and speakers could bring something fresh to their audience. Search engines have ended that monopoly on insights and data.

The other issue is audiences today are tough, tough, tough.  Steve Jobs has ruined it for all of us.  In 2007 he introduced a weapon of audience mass distraction called the iPhone.  If we sound even vaguely boring, audiences abscond to their conduits to the internet and leave us behind, no longer listening to what we have to say.   The Jobs era has overtaken the Mehrabian era.

Professor Albert Mehrabian did some research in the 1960s and found some disturbing trends regarding audience attention deficits.  His research however has become some of the most misquoted and poorly understood in the modern era.  His numbers are heralded and trumpeted far and wide, but usually totally out of context.  He found three statistics which help us to identify the issues we face as presenters.  If you ever hear any guru or pseudo guru telling you that presentations are broken up into brackets of 55%, 38% and 7% run for the hills yelling “fake news”.  They will explain that 55% of a presentation’s messaging success is made up of how we are dressed and our appearance, 38% based on how we sound and 7% on what we have to say for ourselves.

What Mehrabian actually found was that these statistics only become relevant when what we are saying is incongruent with how we are saying it.  What does that mean?  I am sure you have seen this – the president is reporting the excellent results in a monotone voice, with a wooden face devoid of any expression, with zero body language.  The delivery doesn’t match the message and we get easily distracted.  In the Mehrabian era, that meant getting focused on what the speaker was wearing or how their voice sounded and audiences were missing the messaging.

Today they are lunging for their app encrusted mobile phones to get to TikTok or their email or one of their other favourite social media platforms.  Our message is out the window, often even if we are a highly polished, professional and engaging speaker.  We have to do our best to reel the audience in to hear our message and we need to use some key leverage points to achieve that.

A monotone voice is guaranteed to have the audience flee from us, so we need to use voice modulation to create the variety we need to retain attention.  We can elevate key words for the audience with either power or softness, using a type of conspiratorial whisper to grab attention.  The key is in the variation and the link to volume control to raise the attention given to certain key phrases or words.  Pauses are another voice control aspect which makes a big difference to how easy we make it for our listeners to follow what we are saying and for them to navigate our presentation.

To voice we add gestures to dramatize what we are saying.  The coordination of strong gestures and sets of key phrases really lifts the message in the minds of our audience.  The gestures tap into our body language and we can accentuate good and bad news accordingly.  If we also add in direct eye contact with members of our audience, the effect is mesmerising and will stop them from reaching for Steve Job’s speaker tool of attention destruction.  They will stick with us right to the end and absorb the messages we are promoting and that is why we are giving these talks in the first place isn’t it?

It seems ridiculous that such simple tools can lift us from speaker Death Valley oblivion to being listened to without distraction.  Mehrabian gave us hints on Stage One of the Death Valley escape routes, but Steve Jobs threw down a much more formidable challenge as speakers.  The numbers are more like 99% mobile phone competition and 1% message success today.

Being boring and incongruent isn’t even the divide anymore.  Interest isn't enough to escape the gravitational pull of the mobile phone.  We have to be very effective, engaging and professional, in full command of all the tools at our disposal to vanquish the siren calls of the internet for our listeners.  And you think your quality of information will restrain them from escaping?  That is a massive delusion. Even worse, for the rest of our working lives, the situation will never improve for us as speakers.  Time to face the reality.

As a presentations trainer, I can appreciate the difference between class participants when they cross that bridge and begin to display confidence when they are presenting.  Nerves and fear drive most people when it comes to giving presentations and just telling them to “be confident” is actually ridiculous.  If they could do it, they would, but basically they have no idea how to project confidence, when they are imploding through stress and fear.  The focus is all on them and not on the audience and that is a big mistake.

Here are four building blocks to improve our confidence when speaking in public.

1. Self-Acceptance

The survival of the human species has in no small part been due to fear and hence taking necessary precautions. When our brain comprehends a dangerous or stressful situation about to occur, we don’t wait around for that to unfold.  Instead, we start pumping chemicals into our body, particularly adrenaline, to get ready for fighting our way out of trouble or for flight, as we take off and distance ourselves from the danger.  We need to accept that this is entirely normal and that the flow of chemicals into the body is not controllable. 

We also face mindset issues around whether I can do this successfully or not.  Again, this is natural.  If you said, “I am going to go out there and be a total train wreck”, then there would be no fear, because we have set such a low marker for ourselves.  Rather, we set a very high bar and sometimes that bar is set way too high.   We need to be calibrating what we are doing here.  If we say to ourselves that this is a journey as a presenter and today I am going to work on three things in my talk and not worry about trying to be perfect, then the pressure is rapidly reduced. 

2. Self-Respect

When we see people highly skilled in a profession or activity, we respect them for their abilities and accomplishments.  It is the same when we see a great speaker. What we can’t see is their first presentation or their early days as a speaker, when they weren’t so skilful.  Our mindset shift has to be from lack to capability. 

We have skills in many areas, but we conveniently forget that we built those skills up over time and we weren’t complete at the start.  We can go into our memory banks and draw on our history of achievement in various areas in our lives and assure ourselves that we can become skilled in this presenting arena too, just as we have done in other areas of our lives to date. 

3. Take Risks

If we keep doing the same things, in the same way, we will keep getting the same old results. If we want to see some growth, some advance, then we need to make some changes.  Einstein is credited with saying that doing the same things over and over again in the same way and expecting a different result is basically crazy.  There will be one of two changes required.  Either we tweak something that we have already been doing or we bring in something new.  These both have risks attached to them.

To progress, we need to add new skills and abilities to our repertoire and this is what we have been doing our whole lives, so the idea is not strange.  We don’t have to start with something massively risky though.  We can start small and build from there, as we become more comfortable with our presentations.  Pick something which is a small risk and try it. Next analyse how that went and adjust for the next speaking chance. If we keep doing this, we grow our range of possibilities rapidly and dramatically.

4. Self-Talk

We have mentioned mindset and a great function of how we think is what we think about.  In the early 20^thCentury, psychologists discovered that we could change our situations in life by changing how we thought about them. Until then it was fate, luck, God’s will, etc,. and we had no control over any of that.  The idea that changing your thinking could change your life is a well accepted concept today and so we spend a lot of attention on our mindset.

What are we shovelling into our mind though?  The media is a full of bad news, fake news, conspiracy theories, etc. We need to apply some strong filters to what we allow into our mind, if we want to become more confident and successful.  Our own media – our self-talk - also must be harnessed and controlled. 

“I can’t” language needs to be switched to “I can”.  Just swapping the words though won’t get us very far.  We need to add some evidence.  For example, “Because I have done the preparation I can do it", or “ because I have done this before at a smaller scale, I can use that base to go bigger this time”, are better approaches.

Confidence is a project for all of us.  We can be super confident in some things and terrified in others.  The focus on building our confidence in new areas like presenting are key and these four tools will definitely assist in that effort.

We have been asked to speak or we have punted a chance to speak to an audience.  We will have a message in mind for the talk and we begin the process of constructing the talk.  Unfortunately we are now in the era of short attention spans, “fake news”, massive cynicism and intolerance.  Contending philosophies and diverse experience has been tossed out the window in favour of tribal agreement and solidarity of interpretation.  Cancel culture started on US varsity campuses as students began aggressively confronting Professors during lectures, if the students didn’t agree with the content or view.  As American politics has collapsed into a bi-modal equation of “us” versus “them”, bi-partisanship has been quietly taken out the back and garrotted.

“A hundred flowers blooming and a thousand schools contending” isn’t fashionable anymore, as foxholes are dug deeper and the sniping has become continuous.  Where does this leave us as speakers?  It is difficult enough to be a speaker today, without another layer of complexity.  Every time we get on our feet to speak, we are putting ourselves up as targets and are exposing our personal and professional brands.

Business topics generally are pretty boring, so the degree of angst being generated isn’t usually substantial.  Nevertheless, there are land mine fields a plenty for us to stray into.  Diversity, equity and inclusion generates attention around the configurations of the upper echelons of companies.  Plastic waste entering the food chain demands changes in the amount of plastic being used and how it is disposed of.  Floods alternating with droughts around the world and the disappearance of ice sheets at the poles, has attention focused on what companies are doing to battle climate change.  Online hacking and broadcast of personal information and internet security in general, are urgent issues without solutions in sight.  I could go on, but let me stop here to make the point that while most of what we say, we may think is harmless, we may be overly optimistic.

Captains of industry and the sub-captains are being scrutinised to an extent not seen before.  Audiences are sensitised to their preferred expectations and requirements about how they think the world should be and how companies should conduct themselves.  Next thing we pop up to give our talk and walk into any number of potential maelstroms.  Are we skill set ready?  Are we mentally prepared? 

When presenting in business, unlike at some Universities, it is unlikely the audience will try to shout us down and deny us the opportunity to speak and be heard.  Generally, hostilities and gun play are reserved for the Q&A.  Once we open up for questions, we are now in a street fight, the defining aspect of which is that there are no rules. Audience members can say whatever they like, however unrelated or off-topic to what we were speaking about.  They can be rude, arrogant, bullying, condescending and aggressive and there isn’t anything we speakers can do about that.

If we are smart, we will have set the frame of the questions by delineating the time period for the Q&A.  This is a critical move because if you ever have to get out of Dodge in a hurry, you can always say, “we have reached the end of our allotted time for today’s talk and let me make some concluding remarks”.  We insert this little time control timebomb at the start to enable us to have a dignified exit if we are being bombarded with nasty questions and swept up in oceans of invective.

We can disarm a heat seeking missile thinly disguised as a question by paraphrasing what was asked.  With any question time, it is a good practice to repeat the question so that those down the back can hear it.  Well that is except for the attack question and we definitely do not want to repeat it.  Instead, we paraphrase it to take the heat out of it.  For example, if someone asked, “Isn’t it true that you are going to fire 30% of the workforce in the next few weeks?”, we can paraphrase this as “the question was about staffing”.  We still have to answer the question though, but we have successfully reduced some of the tension in the room and we come across as cool, calm and collected in the face of incoming hot rounds of fire.

The best plan is to give our answer and smoothly and swiftly move on to the next question by saying, “Who has the next questions?”.  Do not ask the hostile interlocutor if they are satisfied with your answer by saying, “does that satisfy your question?”, because if it doesn't the brawl continues.  If your antagonist won’t be brushed off so easily and interjects during a follow-up question, denouncing you as a fraud and a charlatan for not properly answering their question the way they wanted it, we need to be careful what we say next.

We need to remember that we cannot win in a street fight with no rules, so we are better to break off hostilities with that person and just move on.  We should say, “I appreciate you have strong views on this subject, so rather than occupy everyone’s time right now, let’s you and I get together after the talk and continue our debate”.  At which point we again say, “Who has the next question?” and keep moving forward.

If things don’t get this fraught, but we still have a sizeable gap in views on a subject with one of our audience, we need to just acknowledge that and not try to “win the argument” because that is just not possible when we deal with zealots who are locked into their world view on a subject.  We can say, “thank you for sharing your thoughts on this subject and I see we are a fair way apart on this topic, so let’s just agree to disagree.  Who has the next question?”.

We cannot win in a public verbal brawl, so we are better to avoid it at all costs.  The audience expects us to be professional all of the time and many of them will view the antagonist’s activities as ridiculous. We cannot bring ourselves down to that level and so we must stay above the mud and the blood they want to embroil us in.

The date has been set for our presentation.  Naturally, we are pretty busy with work, so we borrow that Toyota production line mantra of “Just In Time:” and leave it all to the last moment to cobble together our presentation.  We rifle through our previous presentations, looking for slides we can repurpose for this topic, which of course is an excellent time saver.  We just manage to get the deck together in time and off we go to the venue.  Here we give the only rendition of this talk to our live audience.  This is such a high risk high wire act, threatening both personal and professional brands, you shake your head as to why on earth someone would choose to do it this way.

Toyota makes great cars and they have pioneered many innovations in car production, but they are not the model we need for giving presentations.  We need Aesop’s fable here about the hare and the tortoise.  The hare is so much faster than the tortoise, but in this fable the hare loses the race, because although the tortoise was slower they were more consistent and steady in making progress.

“We don’t plan to fail, but we fail to plan” is an old saw we have all heard before and which we ignore at our peril in any aspect of life.  Regarding presentations, restrain your hand for from firing up the laptop to start searching for slide decks and instead spend some time tortoising.  Who is my audience going to be?  What level of expertise will they have on this subject?  What are their seniority, age and gender splits?  What are they most interested in?  Can I get enough information from the organisers to enable me to start the planning?  Slide deck amalgamation is like firing blindly into the dark, because we don’t know what our target is for this talk.

Once we have decided who we are going to be targeting for this talk, what is the purpose of the exercise?  There are generally four purposes from which we can choose: persuade, motivate, inform or entertain.  Most public business talks are usually focused on the first three.  The entertain one is the classic “filler” role for the speaker.  You are the light variety show before or after the main event.  It might be the luncheon or dinner spot at the convention or conference.  I hate this one.  You need serious, real talent to be entertaining, which is why, in a business context, we should leave this to the professionals.  If you are a great raconteur, bully for you, but for most of us, this is a step way too far.

Once we know what our purpose is, we can fix on some key messages.  These will depend to a great extent on how much time we have been allotted.  There are only so many things we can cover in-depth in a thirty or forty minute talk.  Having our central thesis determined is fine, but so what?  We need to think about the evidence we will marshal to make our point stick and for us to be convincing for the audience.  This might include data, statistics, expert testimonials, evidence, examples, storytelling, etc.  If we find ourselves making a bold statement, then we need to pause and say the words “fake news” out aloud to ourselves, because that is exactly what the audience will be thinking, unless we can prove what we are saying.

We need a blockbuster opening to break through all the mental clutter immobilising our audience and blocking our messaging from getting through.  We need to design two closes, one for at the end of the talk and a second one for after the Q&A.  Recency is a powerful thing with human beings, so we have to go with that flow and make sure the last thing they hear is what we want them to hear.  Now we are ready to consider what visuals we need to help the audience and ourselves with the navigation of this talk.  There will be a burning temptation to load the slide deck to the gunwales with content both on each screen and with too many screens.  Go totally Zen here.  Be minimalist, stripped down to the bare essentials.  We don’t want the slides to upstage us – we must remain the main act and the slides are our servant, not the other way around.

Once we are ready, we start the hard work and that is the practice, the rehearsal of the talk. Doing a full thirty minute talk at full power, over and over again in rehearsal is seriously exhausting, but necessary.  We need to know the content, the cadence and whether we can fit it into the time constraints we are facing.  By the time we get in front of our audience we are a very polished presenter on this topic, fully tooled up to impress everyone with our professionalism.

In Part One, we explored the mental barriers around linguistic perfection which are holding Japanese businesspeople back and denying them the chance to have “executive presence”.  Once we have cleared that hurdle, then we can start to work on the other key elements for achieving “executive presence”.  Appearing confident is not a plus in Japan.  Here, being unsure, timid, shy, unprepossessing, modest, bashful are all signs of good citizenship, by fitting in with the majority and avoiding standing out.  Having “executive presence” is the exact opposite of this cultural preference, so it takes quite a lot of work to convince Japanese executives they have to stand out and be heard.

The obvious differentiators are eye contact, voice amplification, gesture usage and posture.  Looking someone straight in the eye is a western concept emphasising credibility and trust.  In Japan, it is rude, so everyone is taught to look at the forehead or the throat instead.  When coaching these executives, I have to make the point that their role is different when presenting, to other aspects of their work.  They are not having a chat with their mates now.  They are on stage presenting or in the meeting room commenting.  Six seconds of eye contact is about the right length to engage someone in the room without it becoming too intrusive.  We have some proprietary “secret” techniques for helping with this eye contact fear and we change the dynamic for these executives and they realise they can do it.  They could always do it in fact, but mentally they were not ready to do it and that is where we apply the magic.

Engaging the audience, especially an international audience, makes a huge difference to the credibility of the Japanese executive.  They come across as supremely confidence and sure of what they are saying.  Let’s face it, we are all suckers for buying the confidence of others and by extension, what they are saying.  The voice has to back it up though.  A tiny little voice gets lost very quickly and audience attention drifts away.  Speaking with a loud voice is not polite in Japan, so we run into another cultural barrier. 

We use a lot of video in our coaching and while the Japanese executive may feel they are screaming out their words, under our coaching direction for them to go louder, when they see the replay, they realise it just looked extremely confident.  “Seeing is believing” is definitely a necessity here to overcome the mindset that loud is bad.  Amplifying the message really makes such a difference to be taken seriously and for people to dwell upon what you are saying.  Again, it is adding that patina of confidence to the message and our own credibility standing behind the message.  It sounds simple – when appropriate, speak louder.  However these executives are not even close to the loudness required, so they need a lot of support to help them through this barrier.  We also have to keep pushing them to go bigger with their voice modulation, to have more vocal range, to project more power.

Holding their hands behind their back is a favourite of Japanese executives when speaking, usually because they are not sure what to do with their hands. They feel this anchors them and provides stability when they speak.  That may be true, but it negates a lot of the power available to us as speakers, especially when we can employ our gestures to really emphasise a point we want to make.  Combining eye contact and voice modulation with our gestures is a dynamite combination.  It creates so much power and credibility for the message.  Hiding our hands behind our back or locking our hands together in front of our body are denying us access to this tremendous tool.

Gestures have a very short use by date though.  Holding the same gesture beyond around fifteen seconds just sees the power of that tool evaporate and the residue is just an annoying distraction.  We have to turn the gestures on and off.   Gestures also have to be congruent with what we are saying.  We can show something large by extending the width between our hands or we can use one hand as a measure and show something tall or short.  The words have to match up with what we are indicating or it looks strange and is an unnecessary distraction from our message.

Posture is another indicator of confidence.  Slouching, leaning on something, shifting our weight continuously, wandering around the stage, walking too briskly to and fro, only engaging half of the audience are all competition with what is coming out of our mouth.  We want to appear professional and that means standing straight and tall like a professional.  It means commanding the whole room with our body language.  There is a Japanese word “ki” (気), which is describing our vital life force and we want to employ that when speaking.  We want to be projecting our energy into the audience and across the room, we want to fill up the entire space with our energy. 

Using correct eye contact, voice modulation, gestures and posture together creates an impression of solidity and gravitas.  This adds up to creating a sense of “executive presence” when we are speaking.  For Japanese executives, the hardest parts for them are straying from the cultural confines of their upbringing, to become a force in public.  Naturally, we teach them how to secure all of the attributes needed to have executive presence, but the key is how we teach them the necessary mindset shift, to bring it all together.

As a training company we are often asked to assist with helping Japanese executives to have “executive presence”.  This term is a broad descriptor, but essentially we all understand what they are talking about.  They want their Japanese executives to be seen as professionals and to have them listened to and taken seriously. Japan is the third largest economy in the world, but its star is fading.  In my observation, on the world stage of conventions and conferences, APAC executives from China, India and Korea are having greater impact.  One of the issues is linguistic expertise imbalance, with Japan usually at the back of the bus.  This is a self-induced limitation though, which doesn’t have to be such a negative factor.

The Japanese mindset is one about perfection.  There should be no defects, no mistakes and having set the bar so high, they have made it extremely difficult for themselves to deliver when speaking in English.  Chinese speakers have an advantage because the grammar is similar to English with a subject-verb-object configuration.  International Indian executives are educated in English and the main barrier for them is the degree to which their strong accent plays a role in making communication difficult, combined with the rapid speed with which they speak.  When we get to the Koreans though, the comparisons become a bit harsher, because Korean language has the same grammatical structure as Japanese – subject-object-verb.  So, why are the Japanese not doing a better job speaking the international language of business – English?

Actually they can do it, but they have talked themselves out of it and as a consequence they hesitate to speak up in English, which of course means yielding zero “executive presence” in the global arena.  This is one of the reasons they love to use slides when presenting and pack those slides with massive amounts of text, which they then insist on reading to us.  Given we can all read, this is very boring and we switch off and escape from their talk.  They are also allowing the screen to dominate the proceedings and their potential executive presence has now been surrendered to the slideshow.  Remember, we want all of the attention on us and we want to dominate the slides, not the other way around.

When we are coaching Japanese executives to have more presence, we have to deal with this linguistic issue head on. They have made a fundamental assumption that linguistic perfection is needed to be effective in communication.  Therefore, they fear failure and embarrassing themselves by speaking less than perfect English.  The best way not to fail is not to speak at all or to speak as little as possible.

This fear of failure runs through the society.  Karl Hahne, who runs Hafael here in Japan, was a recent guest of mine on my Japan’s Top Business Interviews podcast.  He made an interesting observation, which hadn’t occurred to me about failure and how it permeates itself in Japan.  He noted that in ancient times, if a samurai failed his lord, he was expected to commit seppuku or ritual suicide.  In the modern business world, we sometimes see executives committing suicide to take responsibility for mistakes.  In some cases, they even kill themselves to take responsibility for their superior’s mistakes.  The aversion to making mistakes runs deep in Japanese society and as coaches, we have to work with that fact in mind.

We work on switching their mindset to encompass the idea that you can still have effective communication, even if there are errors or imperfections.  I demonstrate this by mangling the Japanese language, using an English grammatical structure with Japanese vocabulary.  I say, “watashi Tokyo eki ikimasu” and then ask them what I said?  They tell me, “you said you were going to Tokyo Station”.  I get a bit melodramatic about this stage and feign shock and ask them how they could have possibly understood what I said, when it was imperfect Japanese.  The point I make to them is that just as they adjusted what I said into correct Japanese in their mind, we do the same thing.  They don’t need to limit themselves by fearing mistakes, because this hesitancy in speaking up is guaranteed to erode their presence in a meeting or when making a presentation.

To get attention we need to be confident when we speak.  All of us buy the confidence generated by others and we receive the message they bear as a result.  If we fear mistakes, then we just don’t speak up and even if we do, it usually isn’t convincing, so it is ineffective.  Getting over this mental barrier is hard for Japanese executives and this is where they need a lot of coaching.  In my own experience, they certainly have enough grammatical knowledge and enough vocabulary, so that is not the real barrier.  Their perfectionism has to be replaced with confidence that their message is getting through, even if there are mistakes.

In Part Two, we will look at some of the tools available to these executives, to have greater executive presence.

As Covid slowly declines here in Japan, things are slowly getting back to a semblance of normality.  Imagine my surprise, to be asked to apply for a spot in a Chamber of Commerce pitch contest, with actual people in the room.  Actually, I was a ring-in, because originally they told me I would have to join the pitch contest later in the year because this one was already full of contenders.  Covid took care of that little glitch and eliminated some of the pitch contestants who became infected, so I was shuffled into the pack at the last minute. 

I asked the organisers where in the batting order I would get my chance.  I was in the middle, which isn’t a great spot.  I prefer and recommend you go first or last.  If first, the idea is to blitz it so that the first impression is owned by you. Also all the other contestants are being measured against you and they are not going to measure up at all.  The end spot is the most preferred because this is the final impression and the one that lingers longest in the mind before the voting process starts.

Ten minutes is long enough if you know what you are doing.  The other contestants who went for a slide show made some basic errors.  You only have ten minutes, so the point is to build a strong impression for your company.  If you choose to use slides, then make them super interesting.  The other contestants didn’t go for that idea and decided to just boor everyone with lines of text and more text and some more text, for good measure.  In the case of one of them, their profession was a people business, but there were no people in the slides.  If it had been me, I would have had tons of photos of customers enjoying their service, lots of shots of happy families, some shots of the behind the scenes preparation for delivering the service.  Something visual so we could identify with the service they provided.  Text means your brain has to think whereas images tell you all the information you need to know immediately.

In my case, I decided to take a leaf out of the content marketing handbook.  Content marketing means you provide some examples of your service to show your credibility.  It might be white papers, testimonials, videos, podcasts, books – all manner of things which underline you are a legitimate expert in your field.  We have produced a handy little card to fit into your wallet called 6 Impact Points For Persuasive Power.  Before the talk, I distributed these to everyone in the room. 

When it was my turn to talk, I explained that persuasion power is needed by everyone in business, be they leaders, salespeople, colleagues and anyone who would like others to cooperate with them.  Now I have cast a wide net, to make the topic relevant to all gathered to hear this pitch.  I didn’t say much about Dale Carnegie, except that we will celebrate 60 years in Japan next year.  That is sufficient credibility by itself.   I mentioned the five core areas we cover, to give people some idea of the scope of the business and that was about the sum of the propaganda.  It is supposed to be a pitch contest, but actually waxing lyrical over the virtues of your company is pretty dull for everyone else, so it doesn’t really get very far.

I went through the six points explaining how they work and how anyone can incorporate these into their presenting skill set.  The audience feels they are getting some value for their time rather than being forced to listen to irrelevant details about another company they have zero interest in.  People are primarily interested in themselves, so by focusing on how these 6 persuasion points can help them, they feel some benefit from attending and listening to me.  The other key thing with this choice of content was that I have to be able to walk the talk.  If I am going to run around telling others how to present, then I have to be able to be the role model myself.  This is a chance to add credibility, when you can do what you recommend to others.  The speakers before me felt the gap in presenting expertise and it was also obvious to the audience.  The speaker after me publicly said that I would be hard to follow and she was right, because her presentation unfortunately was not benefiting from the points I had just been making.

The pitch contest was no contest, because I planned it that way.  No powerpoint in sight so that all the focus was on me.  I also chose a subject of universal applicability and interest.  I demonstrated what I was talking about, so that people could leave the affair thinking they learnt something from an expert and that card is for sure safely ensconced in their wallets.  One of the earlier speakers mentioned he had spare copies of the powerpoint, if people wished to have them and naturally no one was interested in the slightest.  Their carry home item was A4 size, not attractive and also not particularly useful in information terms.  A robust business card sized summary of the 6 points on the other hand was kept.  That was no accident.

So when we are presenting with other speakers, lets always assume we are competing with the other presenters and lets approach it like a contest, making sure we emerge the winner.

Remote work is a sticky concept.  Bosses may prefer to have people under direct supervision in the office, but the masses have voted with their feet and headed home.  Tokyo commutes are a shocker.  Crowded trains, standing squashed up against total strangers for long hours is not something anyone looks forward to and being able to ditch all of that and stay home instead sounds much better. There is a need for in-person teamwork and finding the balance between remote days and days in the office is a hot topic at the moment and will continue to be so. 

Internal and external meetings will need to be conducted remotely.  We are entering the hybrid world where some of the team are in the same office meeting room and everyone else is at home connecting remotely.  This will spill over to meetings with clients.  Japan is always a country where there is a surprising number of people required for the meeting on the client side.  I can’t count the number of times when there was just me on one side of the table and host of people on the other, with me wondering why are there so many required for this meeting?  That will continue in the remote world and in the hybrid meeting world too.

This presents a number of problems.  Engaging our audiences online and in the room are both difficult thanks to the technology.  When groups gather in a room for the meeting, there is normally one camera to cover all.  There are some tools available like the Owl which uses multiple cameras covering 360 degrees, to show who is speaking on the screen for those who are remote.  This is good, but there is a limit to its effectiveness, because it suits small groups gathered in a U-shape.  Sound is the issue here.  Usually there are one or two of those UFO looking microphones on the desk to pick up the audio and in my experience they are never quite satisfactory.  It is also very frustrating when those in the room react to an unintelligible remark and start laughing, while those beaming in remotely have no clue what is going on.  This really divides the group into first and second class citizens very quickly.

The other problem, which despite everyone working with the technology for the last number of years, is that few people still understand how to use the camera.  In a meeting room with one shared camera it is difficult, because the distance to the people speaking is quite far and with a wide shot, we don’t feel any connection with them.  The Owl and similar technology can help, but I haven’t seen too many firms bothering to use it when they already have installed one camera at the front of the room.

For those joining remotely, they invariably fail to look at the camera at all and are looking down at the faces on the screen.  This is understandable, because we are trained to look at people faces and this is where all the body language information is located. Unfortunately, we are not looking at the people though, because our eyes are downcast.  We are looking at the middle of the screen, rather than at the green dot, which is where the camera is located on the top of the laptop.  When we ignore the people’s faces on screen and talk directly to the green dot, we are now engaging directly with the audience because they see us looking straight at them.  For the speaker though, it is not very satisfying, because there is no sense of strong personal bond between us and the audience faces on screen, so we feel disconnected.

To add to the already heightened degree of difficulty, when we introduce slides, the speaker becomes this person trapped in a tiny little box on the screen. We cannot really see them very well, so the personal relationship is lost.  Normally when we are presenting, our face, voice and gestures are critical to being persuasive, but when virtual we are robbed of two of the elements. We only have our voice to work with.  Sadly, very few people understand the importance of how to use modulation, pauses and speed control for emphasis when speaking. Take note next time you hear people giving a talk or in a virtual meeting.   The tendency is to put the same amount of speed and strength behind every word.  Boring and often monotonous.

In fact, we need to use pauses more in the remote world, to allow people the people listening to follow what we are saying.  Also, we purposely hit key words with more power and this is a must, if we want to lift certain key words in the understanding of our audience.  This is not a word democracy. Not every word has the same value in a sentence. Most people who are not trained properly give each word gets the same emphasis treatment, so there is no differentiation.

Do we really need to have the slides up all of the time? If we can stop sharing the screen as often as possible and present ourselves in full screen mode that is best.  Yes, that may mean a bit of switching between getting the slide deck up again and alternating between it and ourselves, but this is the way for us to have more impact.  Being on full screen allows us to employ gestures, however limited and also to make the best use of our facial expressions.  These are very powerful in driving home our point and communicating our message.

Having the camera at eye height would seem to be an obvious thing, but I still see so many people just resting the laptop on the table in front of them.  Why shooting up one’s nose is thought to be professional or attractive is a mystery to me, but a lot of people have zero self-awareness and continue to make this most basic of mistakes. We want to get that camera at eye height, so we can make it easier to ignore what is going on in the main screen and just engage each person directly through the camera.  

If people don’t work these things out, we will all be treated to desultory presentations for the remainder of our working careers.  That thought sends a shiver up my spine, I can tell you. Or can we all get back to the understanding that this remote medium has its own idiosyncrasies and we have to master them, because this medium isn’t going away. 

I hope they can come up with a technology solution that give us the type of effect you can have with a teleprompter, where you can be looking straight at the camera in the middle of the screen, rather than just the green dot, which is mounted at the top. That would help us all to be better able to engage the people on screen with great eye contact and improve our communication effectiveness.  Until the technology catches up, let’s get to work on what we can control and be a professional when in person and when beaming in virtually. 

I teach presentation skills to businesspeople.  In the first class they do a simple self-introduction and this is where we instructors can tell the skill level of the people in the class.  A recent class had quite competent people and I am sure they would have been seen as already quite good by their peers and bosses.  At the end of the class on the next day, they were transformed into a completely different, highly persuasive and skilled presenter.  I was thinking what was the difference?  They were by all measures fairly good when they arrived into the class.  The obvious answer was the coaching they received, but why did that make such a major difference and can we get better at presenting by ourselves without coaching?

There are books on presenting and I have written one called “Japan Presentation’s Mastery” and there are millions of others.  There are tons of videos on presenting and I release two a week, one called “The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show” which covers leadership, sales and presenting.  The other show is called the “Japan Business Mastery Show” and it covers the same content, but in a more abbreviated version for people with no time.  There are no doubt a lot of podcasts on the subject and I release this one “The Presentations Japan Series” every week.  What I am saying is there are no shortage of resources on how to become a better presenter and I am doing my best to create content for Japan as my niche.

If you absorb all the content available there is no doubt you will become a better presenter.  But will it make you a great presenter?  To become great, I believe you need two things – lots of presenting opportunities and quality coaching from experts.  I forget which Tony Robbins book it was I was reading, but I remember he made the conscious decision to do as much presenting as he could, in order to master the art.  I thought that made sense and I certainly grabbed every opportunity after I came back to Japan to work in 1992 to give presentations. 

Things have gone quiet since Covid, as there were no events, but still I am up to presentation number 548.  I tried to incorporate what I was studying into my talks and also to note what was working for me and what was not.  Over three decades I have built up the experience now to be very comfortable speaking and presenting.  My TED talk last year did push me though, because it is very short at 13 minutes and the video goes global. If you are doing a poor job, a lot of people know about it. I also don’t count my presentations given as a corporate trainer, because that is not a public speech style presentation and has a different goal and cadence.  It is still standing up in front of people and commanding the room though, but it is different, so I don’t count the many thousands of those facilitations.

What about the coaching aspect?  The coach provides options.  We know what we know, but the coach can see more than what we can see.  When you think about it you are facing the audience and looking at them and you cannot see yourself, unless you are videoing the talk (and I strongly recommend you do that every possible chance).  The coach can see the impact we are having and can help us to ramp that up.

It might be more voice variety and modulation.  It might be larger gestures.  I might be to start moving around or to stand on the one spot and not move.  It might be to get us working on engaging our audience members through using eye contact and holding their gaze as we speak to them. 

It might be to inject pauses to slow things down.  If we are nervous or even if we are on a roll, we might be speeding up.  When this happens, each successive wave of ideas wipes out the previous one and the audience can get a bit lost trying to keep up.  The pauses allow them to digest what we are saying and get them ready for the next pearls of wisdom.  They also allow us to adjust our speaking speed and slow down. 

The coach can mention to us that we have a very serious look on our face, because we are concentrating so hard and it comes across as aggressive or angry and that isn’t the image we want to project.  We don’t notice we are doing that because we are consumed with the message and the delivery and are oblivious to the how we look to the audience.

The coach can also encourage us to take some risks.  They can suggest things which are outside our usual gamut, but which when incorporated will enable us to lift our presentation to a higher height than we could imagine by ourselves.  Sometimes we need to stretch ourselves so that we can make a bigger action in the talk and have it within the bounds of business relevancy.  The coach can help us to escape from our Comfort Zone and challenge us to be more and be better.

My recommendation is to absorb as much knowledge and information as you can about presenting, get as much frequent practice as you can manage and get a quality coach.  That is the winning combination.  Remember we are all putting out personal and professional brands out there every time we open our mouths to speak.  Do we want to be perceived as true professionals and in that way build trust and credibility?  Of course we do, so that is why this trifecta is such a winner.

This Japanese saying the “frog in the well doesn't know the ocean” is a favourite.  When I think about its application to presenting, one of the issues we face is we are all living in small wells.  We go the same conferences or events and the people presenting are rather homogeneous and so the bar gets set pretty low, because they usually are not very good.  Without understanding the process, our expectations are getting conditioned to mediocrity. 

When we are growing up, we are usually not exposed to great speakers.  High School teachers are unexciting speakers. Politicians on television are normally underwhelming, doing their best to avoid answering the questions or recommending anything too strategic, in case there is an electoral backlash.  They are all looking for the middle of the middle.  Our professors at Uni do a lot of public speaking, except you would never know that judging by how they deliver their lectures.  The speakers invited to the degree graduation ceremony are normally dull dogs.  When we get into business, we rarely encounter much professionalism around presenting. It is field of frogs croaking in their wells.

A few decades of this and you are done.  If we want to lift our game, increase our persuasion power, we need to get out of the well and start exploring the ocean.  Persuasion power is absolutely required.  The amount of data and information coming at all of us on a daily basis is staggering.  Traditional media and social media are conspiring to drown us with sheer volume. How do we cut through all of that dross and white noise and register with our audience when it is our turn to communicate? We need to be crafting our messages using storytelling and backing it up with solid and relevant data.  Just a big data dump, no matter how good the data is, won’t cut it anymore.  Audiences today have micro-concentration spans and also way too many options to escape from us.  If we are just reproducing the same old same old from decades ago, we are kidding ourselves.  The good news is it is all getting better for us.

What is amazing today is how easy it is to expose ourselves to the best speakers.  Content marketing requires that we all put our goods up on display so that potential buyers can see how good we are and if we have what they want.  This means it is all out there for free to sample.  YouTube and other platforms allow us to search out content we are interested in and find people who are knowledgeable and within that group find out the top communicators to follow. Search engines can help us to locate content from people who we know are renowned skilled speakers and we can usually access their talks easily and for free.  TED talks vary of course in quality and the format is rather limited to short presentations of under 15 minutes.  There are just so many available though, with a bit of searching, we can find the best content.  In our local areas there will be a broad number of organisations sponsoring talks. In Tokyo there are a number of Chambers of Commerce which are running talks all of the time.  If you are a Rotarian like me, then at least once a week, you are listening to a speech by some notable.

So, we have a cornucopia of options to observe and learn.  Now we hit the main barrier.  Having the ability to access the ocean and doing anything about it though, are different things.  We just keep in our lane and we don’t devote the time to exposing ourselves to the best of what is available.  We can learn from what is working and also from what is a train wreck, a shambles, a catastrophe.  Learning what not to do is also a valuable lesson and there are scores of instructors available in that regard.

We are all feeling pressed for time, but actually we have a lot of time.  If we take out working and sleeping, our available time for study is still sufficient, quite sufficient.  The choices we make determine how far we move forward.  Accepting that persuasion power is a fundamental requirement, you could argue a duty for people in business. If that is the case,  then we need to make the priority to access all of the available resources and work on improving our knowledge and understanding.

If we only watched one of the top speakers for an hour a week and took extensive notes and then referred to those notes before we contemplated making a speech, then we would be in the top 1% of presenters immediately.  This is only because most people don’t do anything and what they do do is pretty dull and awful. Presenting is the bastion of scoundrels for the most part, so devoting time to build the skills makes us stand above and apart from the rabble very quickly.

I am a hoarder.  I never throw anything out and this habit spills over into preparing for my presentations.  I always keep previous presentations and I plunder earlier slides for content I can use for the next one.  Topical content has a short shelf life but other content, particularly images, can be used for many years.  This is all well and good, however it does have one serious drawback and that is you face the dilemma of how much content to use and which content to select.  Having given 548 public speeches so far, you would think I would have this problem under control by now.  I am a glutton though for data and cool images and this sea of information gets harder and harder to swim through.

Invariably, I select way too many slides.  Trying to prune them though is tough, because we can fall in love with the quality of our research or our numbers.  The intentions are admirable.  We want to deliver the highest quality content to our audience and so the pruning shears are not being wielded vigorously enough.  Dropping out slides has a certain amount of pain attached to it, so the discipline to do it is definitely required.  We have to keep reminding ourselves of the time limit we face for the presentation.  We get caught up in the logistics of slide selection and other important aspects get missed. 

One of my pet peeves with presenters is when they have bitten off more than they can chew and the last 20 slides are raced through or skipped at the end, because they have messed up their time control. We feel cheated.  Here is some valuable information being whizzed through and we would like to know some more about these slides but we never will.  We are trading our time for value, yet due to the speaker’s ineptitude we are not getting the full value of the transaction.  So there are definitely brand damage elements to doing this and we should all avoid these every time.

Another casualty is we spend all the time on the slides and nothing on the rehearsal.  Here is the irony.  If we had spent some time in rehearsal we would have immediately realised we had too much material for the time allotted.  This happened to me when I did my TED talk.  I had prepared  eight chapters for that talk, but in rehearsal, I realised I had to axe the last chapter or risk trying to rush it all through.  One of the downsides of TED talks is that they are shown globally, basically forever.  If you make a mess of it then that knowledge isn’t limited to the 100 people in the room, as per a normal talk, it now goes out to millions who see what a dill you are.  So rushing it through would be a bad choice and cutting stuff out is the better option.

A lot of the time we are showing data, because we feel this is valuable information for the audience.  That means slide after slide of numbers, bar charts, pie charts, line graphs etc.  This can get very dull very quickly.  Also, we tend to not remember the tsunami of numbers either, so is there much point to doing it this way?  Being more selective on some key numbers would make more sense and help to cut down the pressure on time.  Rather than just relying on visuals to make the point, we can use storytelling as well to really drive home the relevance of the numbers.

Let me use an example of Voice Of Customer scores.  Say we are trying to highlight our positive reaction from our buyers for our product or service and we are referring to scores out of 100.  We could just show trend over time and make a comment about the direction of the trend.  Additionally, we could add in a story about the numbers.  If we had a number like 72% for the Voice of Customer score, on the face of it, that isn’t particularly remarkable.  We could make the comment that Japanese buyers are hard markers.  Or we could go further and tell a story about the luxury goods industry in Japan which has a permanent dilemma.  When buyers in Japan are surveyed on their happiness, the scores are substantially below similar surveys in the rest of the world.  The luxury goods companies initially thought they had a problem in Japan, but what they found was the scores for their firms’ products and services were consistently lower than other markets.  Ultimately, to make sense of the comparative scores they started adding in up to 30% additional scores to compensate for the Japanese buyer’s lower scoring scale.  So that miserable 72% score actually represented 93.6%, which was more in line with other surveys in other countries.

It takes more time to tell a story like that, rather than just show a number like 72%, but the story is memorable and people will remember that long after the talk is over.  So we have to allow time to wrap some numbers up in stories in our talks, which means we have to axe other slide darlings.  We are providing more value in this way, because the audience will recall the key points more easily and so the time trade off is definitely worth it.  So when you are thinking about creating your power collection of slides, stop right there.  Instead think about which slides lend themselves well to storytelling.  Absolutely do the rehearsal to be able to gauge how much time you have available to show the slides and tell the stories.  If you do that, then the whole presentation will accentuate your personal and professional brands.

I was listening to a recent episode of Victor Antonio’s Sales influence Podcast show and one of his guests was quoting some research which showed that assertive and arrogant salespeople did the best when it came to selling.  Their discussion pinned the key factor back to the seller’s confidence and belief in what they were proposing.  Being an arrogant presenter isn’t going to a formula for success with your audience, so I don’t recommend that route.  Being confident however is certainly a winner in the persuasion stakes.  Think about it though, how many of the people you have seen presenting looked totally confident?  I would vouch not too many.

If this is such an important attribute when presenting and it makes perfect sense irrespective of any research on the matter, then why isn't everyone when presenting doing their best to project confidence?  The pendulum tends to sit in the middle.  Not too hot and not too cold and so the presentation and the presenter both become instantly forgettable.  Vanilla style efforts are a formula for obscurity.  This is ironic really because often the intention is to increase the presenter’s profile and raise the levels of business credibility being attached to the speaker.  These are important motivations to go to the trouble to prepare a talk and to put one’s personal and professional brands out on display for all to evaluate.

How can we project more confidence when presenting?  It sounds too simplistic, but speak louder than normal.  We have to separate our normal work day roles from our speaker role.  We cannot give our talk as if we were chatting over coffee with our colleague.  We have a different set of responsibilities now and we have a greater profile to boot.  The effort to speak louder forces us to raise our energy levels.  This now sets up a transmission of our energy from our position on the stage to the audience members seated in front of us.  They can feel the energy we are projecting.  I don’t mean shouting or screaming, but I do mean trying to “throw” your voice.  One thing to help with this is to try and project your voice to the farthest wall not just to the audience members seated in front of you.  Having that distance objective in mind will help to raise your energy level and also your connection with the audience.

Another simplistic sounding piece of advice would be to look at your audience.  In Japan we don’t make direct eye contact very often, because it is considered to be confronting.  Again, there is a difference between chatting with a colleague over coffee while not staring them straight in the eye and giving a business presentation.  The roles are different and we have to accept that construct.  When we are the speaker we want to stare straight into the eyes of our audience.

The way to do this is to regulate the length of the eye contact.  Three or four seconds is too short because it doesn’t allow us to make that one-on-one personal connection.  If we start holding the eye contact for over seven or eight seconds then the connectivity bridges across into axe murderer, psycho maniac levels of intrusion.  It is too much and it makes people feel very uncomfortable in Japan.  Around six seconds gives us enough connection without too much pressure.  Living in Japan beats the direct eye contact power out of you, so it takes a bit of concentration to suspend the usual societal norms and start making eye contact with strangers.  I would notice it when I went home to Australia and I would find myself avoiding making direct eye contact with people, through force of habit from living here in Nippon for so long.  So it requires confidence and guts in Japan to make eye contact with others in a public forum such as a speech.

When we make the eye contact, we have one thing in our mind.  We want to have the person we are looking at feel as if it were just the two of us in this room and that we are giving them our full concentration.  After about six seconds we shift our gaze to the next person and then we repeat the exercise.  In a forty-minute speech, we could make one-on-one eye contact with four hundred people.  In other words, we could connect with every single member of the audience in most cases and with smaller audiences, we could do this multiple times.

We want to be unpredictable with our eye contact, so we should mix it up, rather than moving along the rows of seated audience members in a linear fashion.  We do this to keep our audience members on their toes and not allow them to zone us out and daydream about picking up the dry cleaning or whatever it is they need to be doing after this talk.  Having the speaker suddenly fix their eyes on you and stare at you while they are talking, definitely wakes you up.

So if we can just change up two things – the power of our voice and eye contact – we can make a big difference to how we are being perceived by the audience.  That high level of confidence will translate into the listeners being more open to believing what we are saying.

How do we want to be perceived when we give our talk?  What constitutes the personal and professional brand we are creating?  How can we master the first impression?  Often we are not thinking about these things at all.  We are too busy piecing together the slide deck puzzle we will use during the presentation.  Perception, personal brand, first impressions are a thousand miles away thoughts, as we tinker with the visuals.  What a big mistake.

Whether we like it or not, the audience will form an impression of us, they will perceive something about us as a presenter and they will make a judgement about our brand – for good or bad.  Given all of this is going to happen anyway, we should make a decision on all three fronts and determine the outcomes we want, rather than leaving it to chance or random luck.

Planning the talk is important, although for a lot of presenters that stops at the complexity level of the decisions about the order of the slides and not much more.  We should start our planning with the outcome in mind.  How do we want to be perceived?  Take a moment and start writing down the type of perceptions you want to enjoy after the talk.  It will probably be an easy list to assemble – “I want to be seen as professional, competent, clear, engaging, interesting, knowledgeable, etc.”  Now make a new list about what constitutes your personal brand. 

In my case, it means how I dress, because that is often the trigger for those all important silent first perceptions about who I am.  So it is always an expensive Italian suit, usually Zegna and always worn with the top jacket button done up.  It means French Cuff shirts, so that I can wear cufflinks, it means a pocket chief to be an accent to the silk tie.  The Italian leather shoes often have a brogue pattern and the shine should always be mirror like.  The hair always trimmed and neat. 

Basically, I am trying to convey that what we do is deliver quality solutions.  We do this with great attention to detail and we are reliable and by just looking at me, you can see that is true. If I turn up dishevelled, everything a complete mess, then the audience may draw the conclusion I or my organisation cannot be trusted with their business.  Boris Johnson was able to pull off total dishevelment and still become the UK PM, but I lack his wit, charm, erudition and vocabulary.

First impressions also means how I come across.  For me this usually means lots of energy and dynamism.  It means using a lot of eye contact with the audience and trying to meet as many people as possible, before I give the actual talk, to create that personal connection.  It means getting there early and checking the name badges or the attendee list, to recall any of those pesky names of faces that I have met previously and to look for people I want to meet.  Like most people, name remembering is a struggle, so a bit of early arrival name badge checking goes a long way to remedy that character flaw.

In my case with regard to perceptions and brand, I want to come across as dynamic and powerful, so the very start of the talk is critical to deliver that impression.  When my name is called, I move quickly and confidently to the middle of the stage and do not spend even one second finessing the laptop to get the slides up.  I leave that to others to take care of, so that I can take care of my audience and get proceedings underway immediately and start delivering value.  I am already set up with a lavalier microphone. This allows me to free up my hands for gestures when I need them to come forth to accentuate a point I am making.  We only have a few seconds available to cement that first impression and wasting it on playing around with the equipment is a big fail.  There are many ways to open a speech and I will have chosen one suitable for thAT particular audience in attendance on that day. 

Now it is quite possible that your audience may require an entirely different persona as a speaker.  It may require a very soft, calm, quiet approach, taking a lot of the energy down a few levels and dropping the decibel level of the voice projection as well.  The stage entry might need to be slower and more deliberate, calmer and more considered. If that is the case, then I switch gears and deliver accordingly.  For example, if the audience were in their teens or in their eighties, we would think about what would resonate best with them and then adjust our approach accordingly. It makes sense doesn’t it.

However, is this a fake presentation and are we fraudsters, if we switch gears like this?  No, but it is a calculation of how to match the needs of the audience, rather than satisfying our own needs.  This delivery may need less dynamism, volume and gestures and more pauses for reflection.  Is this still within my brand guidelines?  Yes, it is, because I choose it to be a broad tent, to accommodate my brand. The dress part may not change all that much, except perhaps the intensity of the tie and pocket chief combination, but everything else remains pretty much the same.

The key point is to consider how you need to arrange your brand and your first five minutes for that particular audience.  If you give the presentations only as you like to give them, then that will work with a certain proportion of the audience who are more like you.  It will however fail to resonate with a large swathe of the audience who you still want to reach with your message.  The planning is the key to get this right.  Thinking about who you are speaking to, what initial impression you want to form, how you want to be perceived and what is the personal brand you are projecting, are all key elements of that planning process.  This shouldn't happen by chance, it should be a product of your design.

Recency is a simple concept to understand.   It basically means that we are all simple beings and we tend to remember best what we heard last.  Given this is so simple, you would think that presenters would be masters of the wrap up.  Not so.  I am always amazed at how often speakers allow the final impression to crash and burn through neglect.  What do I mean by neglect?  They are missing in action when it came to the planning of the final impression and they are also underperforming in the delivery of the last section of their talk.  So often the voice mouthing the words of the last sentence just trails off and dies a slow death.

If we understand the importance of recency and the critical nature of determining our final impression, then we will carefully plan for it.  Often, the speakers are trying to stuff too much material into the time allotted, so you see that pathetic mad rush at the end.  They start apologising and begin skipping through the slide deck like they have been snorting cocaine, because they have grossly miscalculated the time.  As audience members we feel totally short changed and cheated.  Some of those final slides looked very valuable and we see we are not going to get what we came here for, because the speaker was so inept.

They manage to complete the catastrophe by allowing their final sentence to just trail off into oblivion, as they suck all of the energy out of the room, dribbling out the finish.  The end is a massive anti-climax and the whole presentation lands with a massive thud, as it fails on so many levels.

The planning process has one hugely significant contingent and that is the accompanying rehearsal time.  This is when you discover you have too much material for the time you have been given to deliver the presentation.  It is painful to cuts bits off the flesh of the corpus of the talk, but you need to be surgical about it and trim, trim, trim until you get down to presenting only the richest residue. 

The planning process also allows you to work out what you need to say after the end of the Q&A.  Remember, the Q&A is a street fight – there are no rules.  Anyone in the audience can take the whole talk off topic with their dubious question.  Suddenly the recency is at risk of being disconnected from what you have been talking about and the final impression is focused on their question. Everyone has forgotten all about the main body of your talk.  Your message has potentially been supplanted by something irrelevant to the topic.

We need to have decided our key message right at the start of the planning and that becomes the frame around which we build the talk conjuring up the most powerful and relevant evidence.  In the last five minutes we do a couple of things.  We reiterate our key message and we do this slowly, being in no haste, because we have rehearsed and we have allowed enough time to finish in a relaxed and professional manner.  We take our time and we again try to connect this message to the audience and how it will help them.  We try to draw out its relevancy for their work.  We might be throwing down a challenge to the audience to institute what we are suggesting and attempting to get them to take specific actions after this talk.

We are purposely slowing down the pace, talking slowly and employing pregnant pauses to allow the listeners to digest and contemplate what we are saying.  Contrast this with the mad rush through the slide deck by the disorganised speaker who is in a mad panic

 to run faster off the cliff, because they didn’t plan and didn’t rehearse.  Instead, we are relaxed and in perfect control, as we lull the audience into a psychologically safe place, before we lower the boom.

As we get to the completion of the talk, we start to inject energy, conviction and power into our voice and body.  We start to build to a crescendo, combining body language, eye contact, voice and gestures.  This is a combination of all the tools available to us, which accentuates our message and our final impression.  Our audience buys belief, confidence and commitment and our job is to make sure this is the final impression they have of us.  None of this is left to chance.  We plan it, we rehearse it and then we deliver it with a flawless execution.  It doesn’t come across as canned though and instead seems a spontaneous eruption of passion for our message.  Start with the intention to finish like this and your talks will be so much more memorable than others.  Your personal and professional brands will soar while others will just disappear from collective memory.  People will remember you and will remain impressed well after the event has finished.

It seems logical that any presentation we are giving is ours.  Well, that is sort of correct, but what I am talking about is making it reflect your style and personality.  When you talk to people about being a leader, they often bring up the word “authentic”, but when you talk to people about presenting, few ever mention that word.  They are focused on being easily understood, convincing, concise, memorable etc.  Being yourself should be the default, but somehow many people get wrapped up in being the “presenter”, as if it is a role they are playing.

I totally agree that the presenter role is a thing.  What I usually tell the Japanese participants in our classes is that when you are presenting you have a different set of responsibilities.  When having a chat with your friend over coffee, you can talk in a soft voice and not project any great energy.  However, when you are up on stage, that is a different set of responsibilities.  The volume has to be sufficient that no one in the audience is struggling to hear what you are saying. Of course, you might be thinking, what is the issue, we all have microphones today.  True, but have you ever noticed that many people have no clue how to handle the technology.  They hold it down way to too low relative to their mouth or they strangle it, by placing their hand over the mesh, which is specifically designed to pick up the sound.

The energy part is also important.  We buy enthusiasm and confidence and the amount of buying going on is in direct proportion to the amount of energy being projected.  What if I am a low energy person, aren’t I being authentic to speak with low energy - isn’t that who I am?  The answer here is that you should give up any ideas about being a speaker, because there is a range of skills and mindset required to do the job well.  If you don’t have those skills and the right mindset, why do we have to listen to you, when we can listen someone who is more professional.

We have to be ourselves but be our professional selves, not our train wreck selves.  What I am talking about is operating at a high level of skill and bringing aspects of your personality into the presentation.  Many presenters are stuck in low gear and they give a journeyman performance but we don’t feel close to them or impressed by them.  Being able to bring more of yourself means, not being afraid of adding a little flair when presenting. 

I will contrast two presenters.  I attended an event recently and the slides were well done, the presenter (I am his client by the way), was very well presented, his voice was clear and calm.  That was the problem – it was calm.  It wasn’t energised or excited by the chance to share his content with the audience.  The voice was clear but the tone was flat – it was a Johnny One Note performance which can be sleep inducing, if we get too much of it.  He is the President of his firm and he should be the chief proselytiser, he should be projecting his confidence about what a great company they are and about all of the great things they can do for their clients.  The demand for his company’s services is strong, so maybe he doesn’t feel any need to project anything, but that is a big mistake.  Markets turn and he has a professional brand for himself, regardless of where he works.

Another presenter I saw brings all the clarity, professional slides etc., to the party but he also brings a lot of himself and all of his little idiosyncrasies as well.  He brings all of the professionalism around the skill and mindset but also some of his personality.  This is what makes him memorable.  We associate the professionalism with his personal brand and he can take it one step further – he makes his talks entertaining.  This is dangerous territory because being entertaining as a speaker is the hardest element in the speaking universe to pull off.  The true professionals are just that – they are doing stand up for a living and the rest of us are amateurs delving into an area of great complexity.  I am sure you have no shortage of recollections of speakers attempting to be humorous and just falling totally flat.

We don’t need to be comedians, but we can allow aspects of our personalities to shine through which can be entertaining or at least work well in that environment.  The speaker I was referencing isn’t setting out to be humourous, but he is allowing his natural personality to come through and that makes his talks entertaining.  I realise about myself that comedy is not in my future, so I don’t even try it.  I also realise that there are limits to how much I can loosen up on stage.  I compensate for these weaknesses by being authentic, which in my case means being high energy, confident and powerful when presenting.  Think about how you can be authentic, but also be skilled and memorable when on stage and not just fade into the wallpaper and become totally forgettable after the talk is finished.

I get this question quite often: “should I follow the logic of ‘when in Rome, do as the Romans do’ with regard to doing business with Japanese companies?”. Their question is usually related to how to present to buyers. The Western “pitch deck” is usually well designed, professionally laid out and zen like in its simplicity.  Ironically, the equivalent decks from companies in the land of zen, are usually more reminiscent of the Baroque period, highly ornate and florid in design.  Polar opposites in fact.  The style of the actual delivery of the decks is usually also a world apart and it is quite shocking when you first encounter this phenomenon. What should we be doing to be effective in winning business from Japanese companies?

Very, very occasionally, when teaching presentation skills here to Japanese people, we will encounter a preference for the “Japanese way” of presenting, rather than the global standard that we are advocating.  What do they mean by the “Japanese way”?  We should speak in a monotone, with no energy, have our back to the audience and read everything on the screen to those in the room.  It also means having a slide with 5 different fonts and a similar number of colours, packed to gunwales with data.  If using graphs is a good idea, then let’s put up five on the one slide, so that everything is so tiny, you cannot make much sense of it.  If proffering information is considered important, then let’s affix vast slabs of impenetrable text to the slide and then read it to the audience.  Another favourite is to put up the entire spreadsheet, packed with microscopic numbers in the cells.  Just to spice it up, let’s add some animation and have various bits move around.

Why are the Japanese decks and every other collection of information offered often so crammed and dense?  I discovered the reason when I was a university student here in Tokyo.  Back in 1979, I attended an academic conference on Sino-Japanese relations, which was my chosen field of study at that time.  One of the professors was relating a point about the difference in thinking between Chinese people and Japanese people.  Zen travelled from India, through China to Japan and so at various points in history, Japanese Buddhist priests would go to China to study.  There was an allegorical zen tale regarding a well and a bucket, which in the Chinese version, made a macro point about the condition of humanity in the world.  The good Professor made the observation that when that allegorical tale was translated into Japanese, in addition to the macro point, there was a tremendous amount of micro detail about the construction of the well, how the rope was made, the dimensions of everything, etc., etc.

Japan Is A Data Consuming Tornado

This is the point – Japanese buyers have an insatiable need for data.  You simply cannot oversupply data to a Japanese client and they will just keep sucking it up, like a tornado devours everything in its path.  So, when we present our highly refined, trimmed down slide deck or submit our carefully manicured written proposal, the Japanese side often feels like they have just missed their lunch and are starving, ravenous for more information.  Written materials in particular can be a problem.  We are trained in the West to be succinct, to focus on the core information, to get to the point.  Japan is just not that way.

The language itself is circuitous, vague and indirect.  We are a bilingual operation here in Tokyo, so we are constantly switching between languages. Even after 37 years here, I am still amazed at how many more words are needed to express the same concept in Japanese than in English. 

So should we become Japanese when we present?  To be successful here we need two presentations.  We need the global best practice slide deck, the one which gets to the key points quickly and clearly.  The information on screen must be able to be grasped in two seconds.  If it takes longer than that, the slide is too complex and needs to be simplified further.  When we deliver it, we use our eye contact to engage the audience, our voice modulation to provide variety to keep the audience with us and use our gestures to highlight key concepts, phrases and words. 

Bring Supporting Multi Volume Compendiums

We should also bring a massively thick compendium of supporting information, so high you couldn’t jump over it, to go with your presentation which was focused on the highlights.  After the meeting or after they have received your written proposal, there will be staff designated to comb through this data to find all the problems associated with working with you and doing business with your company. 

Japan has a highly risk averse culture, especially in business.  The people you are dealing with are not going to get massive bonuses and rewards for risk taking.  In Japan, the ratio of CEO pay, vis-à-vis the median employee’s pay, is 58 times greater, compared to 670 times in the USA.  The upside isn’t big for risk taking here, but the downside for making a mistake is massive. The people you are dealing with or the people in the presentation room, will not be making any decisions, until the forensic due diligence has been completed. For that purpose, they have a data devouring demonic need for information.  Always be fully professional in your delivery, but carry a very big bag full of information and hand that over. Trust me, no one will complain about the weight. 

Once you understand the conversation going on in the mind of your Japanese customer you can meet them there and things will become much easier.  Don’t try to be Japanese.  Be yourself, but be smart, professional, well organised and come packing heavy with data – lots and lots of data.