Until a number of weeks ago, I had only vaguely heard of Volodymyr Zelenskyy.  I read he was an actor who played the role of the Ukranian President in a television drama production and then turned that into reality, by winning the election and becoming the leader.  I was thinking of a reality TV star like Donald Trump or a B-grade movie actor like Ronald Reagan both becoming the leaders of America and put him in the same basket.  In terms of presentation skills, Reagan gave some very good speeches in his time as President and although we credit him, we should also be crediting his speech writers.  Trump generally tended to avoid set pieces as far as speeches went and preferred speaking to a few key points in his talks, offering a much more spontaneous style.  As masters of media, they were both effective in using the bully pulpit to get their messages across.

Zelenskyy’s comment back to the Americans that “I don’t need a ride, I need ammunition” when offered an escape from the Russian invasion, was a spectacularly successful one liner.  I doubt that a room full of his media advisors had spent hours anticipating and preparing that response. It sounded impressive because it came across as spontaneous and genuine.  In one sentence he said, “we Ukrainians may have been written off by all the military and political experts but I am their leader and we are not giving up”.  Many of us had the image of previous Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani fleeing the country, as the Taliban pushed into Kabul.  Zelenskyy’s stock as a leader went straight up with that comment and he was perceived as a brave person and a real leader.  Coming up with a breakthrough one-liner is certainly not easy but definitely worth the effort to try and craft a zinger.  Try it and see what you can come up with.  We only need one in a speech to have real impact.

Zelenskyy has obvious comfort in front of a camera from his work as an actor and he knows how to work the medium.  I broadcast three TV shows a week on YouTube every week, plus produce vast quantities of video content relating to leadership, communication, sales and presentations.  So after thousands of hours in front of a camera, I have become more comfortable with it, but it wasn’t natural or easy for me. Most business leaders only ever have a fleeting and random relationship with the medium. As a result, few business leaders can really work the medium and get the maximum gains from it, so there is still some way to go. If I can do it, trust me, you can do it too and probably you will do a better job than what I am doing.

All modern politicians today need to gain this skill and they do learn it, so there is no differentiation here particularly. Zelenskyy has done a good job though using his speaking opportunities with the various politician audiences of countries sympathetic to Ukraine.  He has been beamed into joint sittings of the upper and lower houses of these countries political elites and has proven very adept at adjusting his angle of approach.

Japan’s example was a reminder for Americans of the Pearl Harbour attack that reeked such disaster, death and havoc in Hawaii and brought the USA into the war.  The Japanese Tohoku earthquake, tsunami, triple nuclear reactor meltdown in Fukushima was a reminder for Japan of the damage that event caused and linked it to the current destruction that Russian missiles and long range weapons were inflicting on the villages and cities in Ukraine.  For the French it was calls forLiberte, Egalite, Fraternite to be applied to the Ukraine in their hour of need.  The speech to both houses of the British parliament rekindled memories of Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s calls for national sacrifice to fight to the bitter end against Hitler, no matter what.  When speaking to both houses of the Australian parliament, he mentioned the Malaysian Airline flight MH-17 which was shot down over the Russian separatist controlled Donbas region, in which 38 Australians died.  None of Zelenskyy’s references were random and we should be doing the same. We need to spend time to select examples, stories and use these rhetorical flourishes to get our messages to resonate with our audiences.

The point here is that he tailored his messages very carefully to gain maximum appeal with his audiences.  Yes, there is an element of emotional manipulation involved here and I am sure everyone in these audiences were aware of that.  It nevertheless worked, because he was able to link his country’s current dilemma with the emotional wellsprings of his audience and to get everyone to feel a sense of shared commitment to Ukraine’s successful outcome in the war against Russia.  This ability to connect at an emotional level with our audience is an absolutely critical skill which presenters need to work on continuously.

We always stress the importance of knowing our audience before we give a presentation.  In theory this is what is supposed to happen, but how often have you attended a talk and really felt this was tailored to your interests and needs. Most business talks feel like the speaker is talking at us, rather than speaking with us and there is a world of difference between the two.  We must plan how we are going to forge an emotional connection with our audience, rather than concentrating on downloading a bunch of stuff, which will all too soon be forgotten.

“Who is going to be attending and how can I meet the conversation going on in their minds about the importance of this topic I am going to be addressing”, is what I have in my mind when I am preparing my talks.  The audience will have some thoughts about the topic. They will have some points they wish to hear more about and may have some need of ideas, insights, answers or recommended actions.  What would these encompass?  This is the type of analysis we need to be undertaking ourselves, when we are getting ready to give a talk.  Preparation is the key, but that requires that we make the time available to do it properly.  Remember, every time we get up and present we are putting our personal and professional brands on display.

Zelensky’s dress code for these talks is usually a military T-shirt, rather than a business suit.  He is projecting he is a man of action and is ready for combat.  He knows his audience will be dressed in suits and he could wear a suit too, but the stark contrast in dress lends more urgency to his appeals for support. In the same way, we need to dress for battle too. Depending on who you are talking to, it may mean a business suit of armour or it may mean something more business-casual.  We are anticipating how our appearance will make it easier for us to connect with our audience.  When I dress in the mornings, I consult my diary first to see who I am meeting that day, what I am doing and what impression I want to make.  On that basis, I make my selections with the plan in my mind to have maximum impact on my activities for that day.  Style, colours and combinations can quickly alter the image we want to project, but first we have to make decision about what we want to project.  How do you decide what to wear each day?  Is it based on what is clean or pressed?  Grab your diary and do some thinking about what sort of a day you want ahead of you.

It is good that we go to this degree of trouble about how to project our appearance, yet do we also spend the time thinking about how to design the content of our talks, so they will resonate with the audience?  We should spend the time to research who will attend, what they are interested in and then zero in on those points for maximum impact. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s example offers us a chance to reflect on what we are doing to further develop our own communication skills.

Slava Ukraine!

It is a tricky balance to be clear, concise, articulate and also plausible.  I was thinking about a podcast interview I heard by a titan of industry.  He had obviously been trained in how to handle the media, so as soon as he spied the microphone, he went into media interviews 101 mode.  Media interviews by their very nature are a fake environment.  Those being interviewed are taught to be glib, keep it short, think in sound bite terms, don’t reveal too much or you will get yourself into trouble.  Many journalists are looking for a scoop, a chink in the corporate armour, a gotcha moment.  You may come away from the interview with the gold still in your teeth and relatively unscathed, but how did you come across to the audience?

We don’t sound authentic.  Well this is entirely natural.  You are under siege, so forget about authenticity and focus instead on survival.  We don’t sound conversational because we are avoiding conversation and trying to chop our thoughts up into media bites bite sized pieces.  We are always aware that unscrupulous editors can rearrange our comments with a later recorded overlay, that makes us look bad.  There is a lot going on in the mind when being interviewed. 

Here is a little word to the wise.  If you are ever being interviewed by the media, whether it is audio or video, always assume the camera or audio recorder is still rolling when the journo says “thank you - that is the end of the interview”.  They have learnt from experience that this is when we relax and they get us to make an off-hand, untoward comment, which we will make in haste and later regret at leisure. This offering gives the interviewer a big score and big kudos from their boss and journo colleagues back at headquarters.

The interview I referred to earlier started out wound up like a tight spring. The corporate titan’s propaganda blitz on the worthiness of the company came across as a total fizzer.  Pumping out the party line is a dud in these interviews. Trying to make the firm look good in an obvious, self-congratulatory manner is self-defeating.  It begins to sound like the type of drivel a lot of people posing as PR types try to foist on us, to get us to like the company.

Fortunately, finally, the interviewee realised this wasn’t a gotcha, media style interview and just a humble podcast seeking insights.  Once he relaxed, the entire line of the conversation moved from fake to real.  You could literally spot the transition point. The quality of the answers, the elongation of responses and the credibility of the speaker all lifted.

It was almost as if there were two people being interviewed – the fake and the real.  We have to be clever with interviews and work out who is the audience, what is the interviewer’s “form” from past interviews and understand how we can add value to the conversation in a relaxed and natural manner.  We want to connect with and engage the listeners.  If we try to be too smart, too smarmy, we will trigger warning signals in the minds of our listeners.  We have all been trained to be wary of the smooth talking conman and anytime we hear something that smacks of that effort, we become uneasy about the person and what we are hearing. 

Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, is infamous for dropping in very erudite, learned words into his speeches.  He went to Eton College and Oxford university, so he is well educated and he doesn’t brook from flouting that fact.  He also drops a “big word” and then as a throw away remark says “look it up” to acknowledge that he knows he is using vocabulary which is beyond the understanding of his audience and he does it in a humorous way to reduce the rejection facet.  I always feel undereducated about my English ability, so I have bought a number of his books, because they are positively brimming with vocabulary which is rare or entirely new to me, in a desperate effort to expand my vocabulary range. 

The point is Boris somehow manages to get away with it, but for the rest of us, let’s do our best to be clear, without being glib.  Let’s be concise without masking our valuable thoughts.  Let’s strive to be articulate and do so in order to add value, rather than to come across as a smarty pants.  If we deem the interview to be “safe”, then let’s relax during the interaction and try to connect with the audience in a way they will appreciate.  Explaining complex ideas or information in a simple manner requires a certain level of genius and this is what we should be striving to achieve.  Let’s drop the corporate doublespeak and be authentic in our revelations about the contributions our company makes to the world.

I was sitting in the lecture theater, as usual in the front row, so that I could catch everything that was being said. University was a big deal for someone who climbed out of the trench and put the shovel down on a Friday and hit the campus the next Monday. Calling me earnest about my studies doesn’t even get close. On this occasion we had a guest lecturer, who was giving a talk on the battle of Sekigahara, a turning point in Japanese history which would usher in hundreds of years of rule by the one family, the Tokugawas.

The Professor was reeling off the ten reasons why Tokugawa Ieyasu won the battle and I was diligently scribbling down all of these logical, worthy points.  At the end of the ten points, he then said these were not the reasons and then spent the remainder of the lecture explaining his view on the real reasons for Ieyasu’s success.  This was very clever.

By providing sound, credible reasons first, he had established his command of the literature and the related scholarship.  It all sounded very convincing to me and what is more I had invested myself in recording it all.  The bait and switch technique now elevated him above the rough and tumble of academic insurgencies over the finer points of history, to stand above the fray and position himself as the one who really knew his stuff.  His reputation was enhanced by a conjurer’s trick of making the penny disappear and then draw it out from behind your ear. 

Academic illusionist or not, it worked like a charm.  Think about the standard business presentations you have been exposed to.  They are usually pedestrian affairs, involving the doling out of data and information, specialised only in delivering the talk in a deadly boring manner. 

Today we presenters face the most difficult presentation environment in history.  It has never been this bad. Our audience are glued to their phones and live in the internet for disturbingly long periods of the day. They have microscopically short concentration spans, are quickly distracted and constantly moving, ever doom scrolling and unable to settle.  Then we turn up for our little party piece representing our industry and firm.  Getting and keeping  people’s attention has become the search for the holy grail for presenters.

Are we allowed to use magic tricks to grab and hold their attention?  Absolutely we are!  This is a zero sum game we are involved with here and we either get our point across or we don’t even get a desultory reception.  Technology and social media have made us experts at pattern recognition.  This has always been a strength of our species, which has kept us going, as we anticipate trouble before it arrives.  This means that as speakers the pattern interrupt aspect of what we are doing becomes very important.

The lecturer mentioned earlier took us down a predictable path, with a fulsome list of plausible explanations.  He then executed a pivot and pulled off a pattern interrupt telling us all of that was codswallop.  We were invested in what he had told us and I for one, had written it all down, so the shock was palpable when he said to forget about all that stuff.  “Hello, hello”, I thought, “what is going on here”. He had removed the central pillar of our commitment to the content and now promised to replace it with a much sexier version.

When we are giving our talks, this can sometimes be added to our repertoire of techniques for commanding the attention of the audience.  We can start with a predictable, safe version for the crowd, leading them up the garden path with content which is persuasive, plausible, cogent and rational.  Throwing all of that overboard creates a vacuum.  Our brain doesn’t like that and wants the correct version to be implanted, so we are all ears to hear the truth, the real story.

We have also self-elevated ourselves above the fray and self-selected ourselves as the superior being, the enlightened purveyor of the most accurate knowledge and best quality information on the subject.  This is a major credibility boost and the audience is wide open to it, because of the way we have set it up.  The flip side is you have to have the goods. If you say the standard interpretation is rubbish, then your next contribution had better be totally worthy of the rock star you are purporting to be.

Obviously, we wouldn’t put ourselves up on the high wire without a safety harness, if we were not confident we could carry this off.  This is where we need to have real knowledge and better research on the subject than our audience.  We also have to deliver the talk with a passion for sharing key information with our audience.  They will absorb the trick if they feel the intention was pure.  Just being a trickster won’t work.  We have to deliver unexpected value and exceed audience expectations.

I was recently asked to be interviewed by a University senior for a project he was doing on communication in business.  I don’t know if I was a good choice.  After I left High School, I was working for an insurance company during the day and joined then dropped out of a night course on Communication at the Queensland University of Technology. The “communication” study idea sounded great, but what I found was the course was very theoretical and not what I was expecting.  Subsequently, I have become a disciple of content marketing, which basically means you see your company as a publishing firm, in addition to your main thrust of your business.  We push out copious quantities of information on speciality topics for free, to signal to potential buyers, that we are experts in these areas.  In that sense, I agreed to the interview, because I have released 4 books, 1480 podcasts and have written thousands of blogs, so I thought maybe I qualify.

In the course of our interview, he mentioned that he was going to give the commencement speech at the graduation ceremony later this year.  We have all seen these types of affairs.  The student selected to give the talk, begins by thanking the University, the Dean of the Faculty, the worthy Professors and teaching staff and congratulates all of the fellow graduates.  Boring and predictable. 

As we know, the opening of our talk has to be a gripper.  It has to keep the audience away from their mobile phones and instead transfixed on us.  Anything which smacks of clique, predictability, platitudes or bromides will dissipate the attention on us.  “I would like to thank the university…” is a death knell of an opening, so let’s avoid that one.  In business it is the same thing.  “I would like to thank the Chamber of Commerce…”, is another dud opening.

This senior had been at that institution for four years, so he will be brimming with experiences, memories, events accumulated during that time.  We have been in our companies for many years, working away in our industries, so we have accumulated tons of stories.  Our stories are a good place to start.  We need to look at who is in our audience and divine an occurrence which will be relatable for the listeners, something topical, pertinent and uplifting.  It should be uplifting.  We don’t want some downer memory being trotted out for such a festive occasion.

There should be a series of stories in this talk.  The first one has to be short though.  We are going to get to all the usual words of appreciation to everyone, but before that we can grab attention with a quick story.  If we had some defining moment at the university, something which was profound and which shows the institution, the professors or the students in a shining light, that would be a good choice.  If it is a business talk then we can look for something about this association or the hosts organisation we can say nice things about.

After we deliver this little episode, we get to the ordained appreciation piece and then we should look for other stories we can tell in the time remaining, to make a point about the experience we have collectively had. In a five minute commencement speech, there will be time for maybe one more story, but in a forty minute business talk, there is plenty of scope.  Anytime we have data we wish to impart, then carefully bundling that up inside a story is bound to get it remembered, rather than just trying to deliver the information by itself.

Stories work better when they have some key elements included in the retelling.  Placing people the audience knows in the story is very powerful.  It could be a contemporary figure or a historical figure, it doesn't matter, because we can easily see them in our mind’s eye and that is what we want.  We need to include the season, the location and the timing.  Again, we are laying breadcrumbs for our audience, to get them to the same visual image and join us inside our story. For example, “Two years ago prior to Covid, on a muggy Tokyo summer day, I made my way to the gorgeous wood panelled Boardroom of our client in Otemachi, to meet Mr. Tanaka the new President”.

We know how muggy Tokyo is in the summer, we remember life before Covid, we know there are a lot of expensive high rise office buildings in Otemachi, we can see the luxurious Boardroom scene and may we even know this President Tanaka through the media or through industry contacts.  We are in that room. 

When we engage our audience to that extent then we are able to get our key messages across more easily.  Let’s avoid being predictable and instead seek out openings and stories which will keep our audience rivetted to us and what we are saying.

Kata, the way of doing things and Kanpekishugi or perfectionism are wonderful traits in Japan.  Everything works well and as expected. Things have an order here and there are certain ways of doing things which will brook no adventurism.  Things must also be done properly, no half measures.  As a transplanted wild Aussie, I fought against both for many decades.  “Why does it have to done this way?”, I would ask my wife, who would just answer, “because that is how it is done”.  “Near enough is good enough” I would assure her, but she wasn’t having any of that either.

This mindset flows into language usage too.  If speaking in a foreign language like English then it must be perfect or the speaker feels shame.  Sometimes the amount of exposure to the language or the amount of study hasn’t been sufficient to be perfect, but that is never accepted as an excuse.  The burning, hot flush of shame exists regardless, if a mistake is made.

The pressure ratchets up when Japanese business people have to give a presentation in English and they embrace all sorts of craziness in that pursuit.  A recent case came to my attention regarding a very senior Japanese executive in a global firm, who has to give talks internally as well as externally.  His pursuit of perfection drove him to read religiously from the prepared notes, word for word, so that it would be grammatically perfect.  He also had the forethought to arrange some Sakura or “plants” in the audience, to ask him predesignated questions for which he had carefully curated answers. Everything was perfect, except it wasn’t.

The senior leaders are grooming him for a huge job and when they see this type of behaviour they worry.  This degree of over engineering presentations isn’t authentic from their point of view.  They want him to be natural, imperfect, understandable and capable and confident enough to handle questions from an audience, without having to nobble the proceedings.  Here is where perspectives diverge.  He seeks perfection in a foreign language and his bosses are okay with imperfection in English.

When you think about it, how many people do you know who are perfect speakers of their own language?  Not every native speaker is perfect.  We make a mess of the tenses sometimes, getting the verb wrong, using “is” instead of “was” for past tense.  I have heard very well educated native speakers say “somethink” instead of “something” or “everythink” instead of “everything”. 

I have a Ph. D., an MA, and a BA with Honours. Am I 100% confident in my own command of my language of English?  Certainly not.  I am always paranoid about mispronouncing words I don’t know or hear very infrequently. English grammar has defeated me since Year Three of elementary school.  I am certain I make mistakes in these podcasts, I just don’t know where.

If we cannot claim purity in the linguistic applications of our own language, then we certainly know we are not able to operate at perfection levels in a foreign language.  Yet this is exactly the type of crazy pressure which Japanese business executives place on themselves.  They need to lighten up a bit.

The high powered Japanese Executive in question has not had my coaching at this point, as discussions continue.  One of the first things I will be teaching him is to get rid of any perfectionism baggage holding him back.  You don’t have to be a perfect speaker of English when giving presentations because nobody cares.  If they are fellow Japanese, they cannot say anything, because they are not perfect either, so no casting of the first stones of criticism by them.  If they are foreigners, then they have likely grown up listening to non-native speakers mangle the grammar and mash the pronunciation of English.  They accept it for what it is and if they cannot understand what is being said, they just ask for it to be repeated.

Studying Japanese here for the first time back in 1979 I made a revolutionary discovery.  If you wait to manufacture the perfect sentence to lob into a conversation, you will never get to speak. The conversation will have moved on to another topic before you get a chance to use it.  Therefore, perfect or otherwise, SPEAK.  Get it out and if they don’t register what you mean then say the same thing in a different way, until they do get it.

If we are doing a presentation, then there can be perfect text on screen as we speak imperfectly to the content, rounding out the information further.  We can also take comfort that audiences don’t remember the detail of the talks, but they do remember the speakers.  They will overlook imperfections in speech from a dynamic, passionate, energised speaker, because they will remember the speaker as impressive.  A perfect rendition in English by a native speaker, delivered with no passion in a monotone, will dispatch that person to oblivion in the memory of the audience.  Perfection isn’t needed but passion for the subject and for the audience is.  Focus on those two things and the world will be right, non-native speaker or otherwise.

Being persuasive is a key element to business success.  You can argue the rights and wrongs of that statement, but it is the reality.  We cannot avoid the fact that being able to present to others and get their agreement is a critical skill which we all need. Now we meet vigorous, go, go, go people and so when they give a presentation, their passion, motivation and power come to the fore.  For them, they are not even thinking about being a high impact speaker, this is who they are.  For others though, they are demure, calm individuals who speak quietly, even softly.  Both types are being their true self and being authentic, so isn’t that enough?  Actually no.

Being an authentic individual and being a professional and successful speaker are related but not derivative.  Being authentically boring isn’t much help.  Being authentically monotone in your delivery doesn’t work.  Yelling at people for the entire forty minutes of the talk, so that all the audience hair is being blown back like we see portrayed in cartoons is not humorous in real life.  Authentic yes, but grossly ineffective.

Regardless of the style of the presentation, the content and the structure of the talk have to be well constructed.  This is a given.  However the impact of the delivery is not a given.  The best, highest quality information with the best navigation for the talk can be a disaster if we are yelling at the audience the whole time or speaking so softly that hardly anyone cares what we are talking about.

You might think it is easier to calm down the fast talking, high energy speaker, so that they can get some variety into their delivery.  You think this would be the easier of the two to fix.  Not in my experience.  They are both tricky and for different reasons.  People who speak fast get on a roll and away they go. They disconnect from the audience and have created a new audience of one – themselves.  They are talking to themselves, the way they like and are not focused on the listeners at all.  Because this is their normal speed range, slowly down really kills them.  They find it so uncomfortable and fake, they hate it.

The softer presenter, when encouraged to put more energy into the delivery and ramp things up they stop going any further, because they feel they are screaming at people.  I tell them to double their output and the most they manager is a five percent lift. Well they aren’t screaming at anyone and there isn’t much appreciable difference from what they normally do, so there is a lot of scope to become more energised, but it feels uncomfortable and they stop.

These are the two extremes of speakers – the loud and the quiet.  Should they do us all a favour and not become presenters?  Every single one of us can improve what we are doing, me included and certainly it is not game over for these representative extremes.  This is where coaching comes into help them develop range in their energy and voices.

A good metaphor for public presentations is classical music.  We are not sitting there subjected to crescendo after crescendo.  Nor are we being put to sleep with a constant lull in proceedings.  There are passages in the music which are intense and some which are almost inaudible.  There is distinct power in both and we have to learn to master both.

Not every word in a sentence of a presentation is equal.  Some words require more emphasis than others.  That doesn’t mean those words have to always be yelled out.  It can be equally powerful to deliver them like an audible whisper, a conspiratorial sharing of some key information.  The point is to decide which words or phrases need emphasis and then decide how we are going to deliver them.

For those who speak quietly, the conspiratorial whisper will be easy to pull off.  The high energy speaker will be dying to speak so quietly.  The going hard part presents the opposite problem and the quiet speakers believe they sound crazy at that amplification.  We video our presentations and when we do the review, the quieter speakers are always amazed that they don’t sound or look like they have lost their minds.  The most common reaction is that “this person on screen looks very positive and committed to their message”.  That is a good thing for a speaker to be doing isn’t it.  The boisterous speakers comment that “this person looks very professional and considered”.  Again, a good result by any measure.

The key is to get the coaching and to do lots of rehearsal.  Usually business speakers give their talk once – when they are in front of their audience and usually they get no coaching beforehand.  This is pretty adventurous stuff, given these are our personal and professional brands that we are putting out there on display.   If you are too quiet or too loud, then you need to work on your range and find the strength in what you are good at and add to your presentations, elements you are not good at.  The coach will make that happen for you because it is very, very difficult to do it by yourself.  What you think is soft is still yelling and what you think is yelling sounds soft.  Our range sensitivity is not well calibrated enough to make the adjustments by ourselves.  Get coaching and do rehearsals would be my advice.

Presentations have a cadence.  Notices are sent out to the mailing list or promoted through some form of media.  Interested people sign up and attend the event.  There is a hosting organisation representative delegated to get proceedings underway. I went into detail on that component last week, so if you have missed it, please go back and listen to that episode #280 on “How To Introduce A Speaker”. When the presentation is over the host organisation has to wrap things up. Usually, in well organised events the role of the MC and the person thanking the speaker are separated.  The MC will call on the person designated to give a vote of thanks to the speaker and then conclude the event once that part is completed. If that is you, it is important you do a good job, because all of this is coming at the end of the event and this is contributing to people’s final impressions.  Those final impressions will also include how they think about you and this will be one of the last things they remember.  Last impressions can be deadly, if we don’t plan for them to succeed.

If we have been given that task to thank the speaker, we need to pay careful attention to what the speaker says, so that we can refer to it at the end.  If we can get hold of the slides or the speech outline before the presentation, this will make our job that much easier.

We have to remember that we are in the public eye, when we carry out this role.  This is like a mini-presentation of our own.  Again, these are our personal and professional brands on show, so people are judging how well we can do it.

However, it shouldn’t become a complete summary of the speech, so that we come across as wanting to compete with the speaker.  Have you ever seen that?  The person thanking the speaker decides to take this opportunity to promote themselves and they try to hog the limelight. People are mentally heading for the door and their next appointment and here is some windbag raving on, wasting everyone’s time. We need to keep it short, sharp and terrific.  I didn’t pay much attention to the final thanks to the speaker because most of them were very pedestrian or they were a self-centered rendition of this person’s own views on the subject.

That changed when I heard Thierry Porte, then President of Morgan Stanley Japan, give the thank you speech at an event I attended.  The actual presentation was a disaster.  The banker giving it had put up his actual text document on screen and was scrolling through it.  The font was abysmally tiny and basically he was reading to us what was on screen.  It was a dagger in the heart of his firm’s brand at that point, because this guy was obviously clueless about giving presentations. Then Thierry, who later became my boss at Shinsei Bank, gave his comments thanking the speaker for his talk.  Actually his short comments were a lot more impressive than the actual presentation.

I didn’t know Thierry at that point, so it was my first exposure to him and today I cannot remember the detail of the points he made years earlier, but what I do remember was that I thought they very intelligent and concise.  It was impressive and I recall thinking, “this guy is really smart” and I made a point of exchanging business cards with him. It also showed me the power of being able to thank the speaker in an intelligent way and make an impression with the audience, promoting your personal and professional brands at the same time. The point is to think like that – “this activity is going to add to or subtract from my personal and professional brands”.

So how should we carry out this important role?  We have a formula for this we can rely on called the TIS model.

1. T-Thanks. We might thank the speaker using their personal name if appropriate.

This degree of familiarity will vary depending on our personal relationship with the speaker and the culture we are in.  Japan is a very formal country, so it is more likely we will be using their title or highly polite forms of address like sama instead of san.  So I would say “thank you Suzuki sama” rather than “thank you Suzuki san”.  There is a world of difference in Japan between those two polite forms.  Recently, I attended an online webinar and the person giving the presentation was a bengoshi or lawyer and the person giving the final remarks addressed him as “Sensei”, which is a very polite reference taking into account his prestigious line of work.

2. I-Interest. We pick up one area of the talk which we think would have been of most interest to the audience. This is an important decision because there are probably a lot of fascinating things the speaker was able to cover in the 40 minutes of their talk. We have to be listening carefully to the content and at the same time making a judgement about which particular aspects we think will have resonated most with the audience.  We don't have that much time, because as soon as the applause dies down, we are up on our feet making our contribution to the event.

3. F-Formal Thanks. If the MC is doing their job, then they will take over from us and wrap things up. In this case, we would just thank the speaker and then hand over the baton to the MC.  If it is down to us however, to bring things to a close, then we make a formal statement of thanks for the speaker, using their title and full name.  We ask the audience to join us in applause, thanking the speaker for their presentation.  For example, “May I ask everyone to join me, to again express our warm appreciation for Dr. Greg Story, giving us this wonderful presentation today”, at which point we start applauding to signal to everyone that they should now start applauding too.

There are always different levels of understanding of simple roles in a presentation event and the thing I notice is how few people actually understand how to do them properly.  From now on, pay careful attention to how the MC opens and closes proceedings and to how the person designated to give the thanks, carries out their role.  You quickly realise it is very easy to get into the top 1% of professionalism in these areas, because most people are not much good.  What a great opportunity to build our personal and professional brands!

Today we are going to look at how to introduce a speaker, something which we may not do so often, but still an important facility which we should do well.  I am sure we have all seen the MC introduce the speaker.  I am also sure we have seen very few do a good job of it.  One of the problems is that the MC hasn’t connected this role with their personal and professional brands.  They are mumbling and bumbling along.  Often they don’t see this role as particularly vital and so do a very offhand version of the introduction. 

They make a mess of reading the Bio they have been provided by the speaker or even worse they dispense with the document altogether and they freestyle, giving their own half baked version of the Bio.  This is particularly annoying from the speaker point of view, because we will have written that introduction to maximise our credibility with the audience and also to stimulate their interest in the content to come. Having been on the receiving end of these MC introductions, I notice they will often leave important parts out, get the order wrong or make mistakes with the dates.

Basically, what they deliver is an insult to the speaker because they are not taking the proceedings seriously enough. Remember, it doesn’t matter how long we have in the public limelight, we are being judged by the audience.  Even if we are an audience member and we ask a question after the speaker’s presentation, we are being judged by everyone present.  If our question sounds stupid or our delivery is awful, everyone present is making a mental judgement about us.

The MC role is important because this is how we quiet the audience and grab their attention for the speaker’s message.  We are preparing the audience to accept the speaker into our midst. There is a delicate balance needed here though.  You may have also seen the MC start to take over the presentation.  They begin the introduction and then start telling us what the speaker is going to cover in too much detail.  The MC should be brief and get us to the main speaker smoothly and should intrigue us with their introduction, so that we want to hear more.

We can use the TIQS model when it is our turn to introduce the speaker at the event.

1. T-Topic. We start by referring to the topic or title of the talk.  This reminds everyone what the talk is about.  Yes, the notice went out and everyone signed up but that could have been weeks ago.  It is best practice to again focus on the formal topic of the talk, to make sure everyone is mentally geared up for the presentation.

2. I-Importance. We highlight the importance of the topic. We are reinforcing why it is in the interests of the audience to attend today and justifying this use of their time.  The MC role includes that of salesperson for the talk.  As the representative of the hosting organisation, the MC is selling the organisation’s value in being able to procure such high quality speakers for the audience members and thereby indirectly encouraging them to attend future talks.

3. Q-Qualifications. The well organised speaker will have supplied their introduction.  When we are the speaker, we need to make sure it has been professionally presented. We also have to directly ask the MC to use what we have prepared.  Often the MC ad libs with our content and they don’t do a good enough job.  We need to be insistent they stick to the script we have prepared. When we are the MC the speaker’s document will outline who they are and what they have done.  We should check if there any things which need further clarification before we present it to the audience. The introduction is the chance for the speaker to promote their credentials to be the speaker on this topic.  If the speaker hasn’t done this, then we need to do some simple research to be able to introduce them properly.

4. S-Speaker Name. Having built up some anticipation, we now reveal the name of the speaker.  The audience already knows this, because they have seen the promotional material advertising the talk. Nevertheless, we take this chance to build some buzz before the speaker begins.  We now call upon the audience to join us in applause for the speaker and call the speaker to the stage, to start their presentation.

If there is no one to introduce us, then we should do it ourselves and start by stating our name and our organization.  Next, we talk about the topic we have chosen for today.  We now talk briefly about our qualifications to give this talk.  The introduction to the talk is an important element in the event and we need to give it proper care and attention.  Done well probably nobody notices, but done badly it jars and distracts from the professionalism of the event and the talk.  Let’s all make sure this part of the proceedings is a winner, whether we are in the speaker or the MC role.

Today we are going to look at inspiring people to embrace change. Not grumbling and finally accepting change.  Not resisting change, until the bitter end. We are talking about “embracing” change.  This is a big task.  We may have all done that exercise where we fold our arms across our chest, but with the bottom arm on top this time.  It is a simple change, but instinctively we don’t like the change.  If we can’t deal with such a simple change, how hard is it going to be to get people to accept big changes.  

How can we persuade people to go for the changes we are recommending?  Here is how we design the talk.

1. We start with clearly defining what it is we want to change.  We have to make sure this is crystal clear to ourselves and everyone else involved.  If you have ever designed a questionnaire or a survey and haven’t been clear enough on the question, about what you want, then you know it throws the whole effort out of kilter and you can’t use the results. So, the change has to be communicated to people and that means we have to be concise and clear about what the outcome is that we want.

2. This isn’t the order we present the talk in, but for design clarity purposes we start at the end. We need to design two closes. We have to decide how we are going to close the talk before we open up for questions.  The second close is for after the Q&A.   The latter is particularly important. We don’t want some random, off topic question hijacking our audience’s attention and have them forgetting the key point we were making. 

Remember we want our recommendation to be ringing in the ears of the audience once the talk is over. So the second close is the last thing they will hear from us and we have to dominate their memory banks with our messaging.

3. We should be anticipating likely questions we will get.  We don’t want to be surprised by a question we are not prepared for.  We can see our own credibility and the credibility of our suggestion about the needed changes crash and burn, if we cannot properly handle the questions thrown at us. 

4. We have to justify the reason for the change.  This has two parts, one being the statement of why we need the change.  We have to be clear about asking for the change so that there is no doubt about what we say we need. The other part is an example why we need the change.  This example has to be clear and compelling.

5. Now we need to come up with three quite viable solutions for fixing the problem we have specified.  We can’t have two ludicrous solutions and one which looks like the perfect idea.  This type of approach will come across as an attempt to manipulate the result and our credibility will be damaged.

6. To demonstrate balance, we need to nominate the pros and cons for each of the three suggestions.  Having chosen legitimate alternatives, there will be real pros and cons and we need to outline what these are in detail.  We want the audience to feel we are being objective in our approach.

7. We purposely make the third suggestion the one we prefer.  We know that recency means that the listeners will best remember the last thing they heard.  It has to be the strongest of three strong alternatives. 

8. We need to specify that we are recommending option number three and then provide convincing evidence of why we are recommending that solution.  We have to make sure the audience feels the other two options could work and that this last one is clearly the best option.

9. Lastly, we design the Opening.  As always, the opening has one main task and that is to break through all of the distractions going on in the minds of our audience.  People today are so preoccupied with their phones and social media, that we have a gargantuan struggle ahead of us to pry their phones out of their hands and have them give us their full attention.  This is the hardest time in history to be a public speaker, so we need to be up to the task.

So the order of delivery is as follows: 1. Opening, 2. Statement of Need, 3. Example of the Need, 4. Solution One – pros and cons, 5. Solution Two – pros and cons, 6. Solution Three – pros and cons, 7. Our recommendation that we choose Solution Three and why, 8. Close number One, 9. Q&A, 10, Final Close

If we follow this structure, then we have a much better chance of people adopting our suggested course of action.  Getting people to make changes is extremely difficult.  Getting them to make the changes willingly is even more difficult, so we need this type of special preparation in order to be successful.

Today we are going to look at motivating others to action. Actually, this is a devilishly difficult task. Getting anyone to change what they have been doing and take a new action is extremely complex.  We all talk up a storm about this or that should change, but we are not keen about changing ourselves. In fact, we expect everyone else make the necessary changes and we want to stay exactly the same. 

In our training on the topic of mindset, to underline the power of our habits, we ask people to make small changes.  For example, put your wristwatch on the other wrist or fold your arms across your chest, such that the arm that is usually on the bottom is now on top.  Try it for yourself and like most people you will feel a bit uncomfortable with the change.  Appealing to others on the level of logic works well, but people need their emotions to be engaged for them to take action.  We act on emotion and justify it with logic. Let’s look at how we can design a talk which will motivate others to take an action we recommend.

Here is the design order, which is different to the delivery order.

1. We start with the end in mind and decide what is the concrete action we want people to take. This action has to be clarified and made not only easy to understand but also made to seem easy to complete.  If the action required sounds complicated and onerous, our audience won’t be motivated to make it a reality.

2. We might think it is a good idea, but will our audience be convinced? This requires some clear benefit to taking action. Everyone thinks in terms of what is in it for them, so we have to supply that component.  It also has to be powerful or the work to achieve the benefit may not seem worth the time and effort.  The outcome of the action has to seem much more advantageous than sticking with whatever it is they are doing now.

3. Telling people what to do will induce resistance. That is why starting with the action is almost guaranteed to fail. Instead, the incident, the context, the background  providing the evidence that this is a good idea comes next in the planning. 

Storytelling is so powerful and this is where we have to make good use of it.  There must be some reason we think taking this action is a good idea.  What have we experienced, heard or seen that makes us think that is true.  We need to reach back into our memory and capture the very basis for our belief.  Our job now is to tell that as a story involving the people, the place, the season and the time.  Ideally, we should include these elements in such a way that the listeners can see it all in their mind’s eye.  People they know, a season they can relate to, a location they have seen or can imagine etc.

This structure is called the Magic Formula. When we deliver the talk, we reverse the usual order and we start with the Incident, then we finish off with the action and the benefit.  The key here is the majority of the time is spent on the incident, the context and the action and benefit are honed down to the most key elements. 

If we have more than one action, we are splitting the focus of the audience and we don’t want that.  If we pile on the benefits, then each additional benefit we add dilutes the effect of the first one and so on.  We must focus on the most convincing benefit and highlight that one alone.

One huge advantage of the Magic Formula is it is very hard to oppose what we are saying.  Normally if we put up an idea, we are faced with a room full of critics.  They are firmly fixed on why our idea won’t work and why their idea is better.  By starting with the incident, we are taking our audience straight into the background, the context. 

Often hearing the context, they conclude the same thing we have concluded.  By the time we get to the action part, they are already there ahead of us and have concluded the same thing themselves.  This is genius, magic, because we have now secured their agreement to undertake the action before we have even made the recommendation.  If you want others to take an action you want to sponsor then this is the winning formula, the Magic Formula  to make that happen.

So how have your New Year resolutions been unfolding?  Change is tough, as is forming new habits by adding in new concepts and at the same time removing old negative habits.  Resolve requires consistency, patience, perseverance and application – all of which need extra energy on top of what we are already doing.  As presenters we have time, talent and treasure at our disposal to take ourselves up a few rungs on the ladder to success every year, if we can break out of the pull of gravitational forces holding us to where we have always felt comfortable.

Time is Life.  We know that and what we decide to do with it becomes the summation of our lives.  In all facets and periods of our lives, the ability to be persuasive is the big divide.  We either live our lives according to someone else’s plan or we decide our own way forward.  To be able to achieve that we need the cooperation of others.  Once upon a time, perhaps and it is a big perhaps, we could do it all ourselves.  That is a distant memory in today’s highly complex, global and interlocking world.  Being persuasive brings people with us and we can meet the goals we have set.  The issue is if we are not persuasive, then they may not choose to follow us, but seek someone else who is more persuasive.

The beauty of being a presenter is that we are sharply focused on one of the most important business and life skills.  Those like the old me, who will run a mile if asked to present or speak in public are really missing out.  The fear of embarrassment and possible humiliation overrides the ability to plumb the benefits of having this facility.

The talent lies within us and the trick is to unleash that talent.  It is not an inborn talent.  We learn how to become a more convincing, persuasive speaker over time.  The biggest obstacle is lack of knowledge of what to do in order to master the art of public speaking.  Those in denial do not sign up for classes, coached by professionals. They don’t purchase the videos, audio sets and books written by experts on the subject.  They don’t listen to the free podcasts available.  They don’t tap into the vast experience of others and so short circuit the learning process.

Talent comes from nurture and we have to invest the time to nurture our abilities.  Content marketing has become one of the greatest educational breakthroughs in human history.  Putting out great content for free has never been done before on this global scale.  The intellectual property was proprietary and if you wanted to gain access then you had to pay for it.  The idea of giving away your Intellectual Property for free sounded like nonsense.  Yet today what do we see?  A vast array, in fact an overwhelming array of insight, information, data and analysis sitting out in the public domain at no charge.  If you want to do something there is probably a YouTube video on how to do it.  How good is that!

We must invest our time though in a calculated manner, because we are all drinking from the firehose, given that the free content volume is immense.  Educating ourselves in a considered way will help to sort through which content is the most valuable.  Of course, the only valuable knowledge is applied knowledge.  We need to be taking what we are learning and then adopting the better ways of doing things and making them our new default positions, our new habits.

Not everything we need is free and some investment of our treasure is needed. The content marketing logic is that you get to taste the quality and if you think this is what you need, you purchase more of this content.  Do you have an ongoing education budget allocation for polishing your persuasion skills? Where is the best allocation of treasure to gain the most powerful outcomes?  How much do you need to be spending every year to become an outstanding professional?  There is an old observation about do rich people have libraries because they are rich or did they become rich, because they have libraries?  I firmly believe education, however humble or basic, is critical to personal growth.  The more money we can pour into our education, the more successful we will become.  It can’t be an intellectual curiosity in business, it needs to be applied.

We have time, talent and treasure to help us become better presenters, more powerful persuaders and boost our personal and professional brands.  No matter if your New Year resolutions went off the rails already, time to regroup and reset for the coming year.  It is never too late to start again.  The second time for us will bring more context and perspective to where we need to apply ourselves for greater success.

Today we are going to look at communicating with greater impact.  So the first question is what do we mean when we say “impact”?  Most talks are totally forgettable.  Test this hypothesis yourself – how many of the many talks you have listened to, can you remember either the speaker, the topic or both?  Generally, we struggle to remember either, because there was no impact for us.  We were not touched emotionally and logically by the presentation.  Logical presentations with really great data and insight are fantastic, but these do not stick because we are under constant bombardment from new data.  Statistics from a year ago are now irrelevant today, because we have moved on.  The content in written form is difficult to bring alive, but when delivered by a trained presenter the same content can be scintillating.  I don’t mean reading it word by word, but taking the content and really being excellent in the delivery of the content.

Speaking in a boring manner must be the evolutionary default setting of the human race, because this seems to be the easiest way to give a talk.  The only problem is we might be impressed to be on the giving end, standing up there on stage pontificating,  but those on the receiving end are not paying attention.  They are bored by us and our talk and they escape to the internet to find more interesting things to do.  Two or three clicks on a mobile phone and our audience are in distraction heaven, completely oblivious to us and our message.

A monotone delivery is guaranteed to lose the audience and therefore your message isn’t going to resonate with anyone.  That constant same tone is like a version of presenter “white noise” and it makes us drowsy. We need to have some variety in our delivery, which will keep our audience listening to us from start to finish.  There are some simple techniques presenters need to master to avoid being sent to presenter oblivion by our audiences.

Here are some points to work on:

1. Word emphasis – we should try to add extra stress to key words or phrases when we speak. Not all words have the same heft and we don’t want harmonisation across the whole sentence. We want certain elements to stand head and shoulders above their neighbours. This makes a tremendous difference to how our message is received. 

Let’s take an example with this phrase: “This makes a tremendous difference”. Say these phrases out loud to yourself and listen to the difference in impact when I stress key words:  “THIS makes a tremendous difference” or “this MAKES a tremendous difference” or “this makes a TREMENDOUS difference” or “this makes a tremendous DIFFERENCE”.  Just be adding some stress to certain key words, we can change the meaning of the sentence. 

2. Pauses – when we stop speaking, that is a “pattern interrupt” and if some people have been escaping from our presentation, this will bring them back to us. When we insert a pause, it creates a contrast between our sentences and it grabs people’s attention.  The next time you give a talk, try doubling the length of the current pauses you are using in a couple of parts of the talk.  It has that pattern interrupt feature and generates anticipation of what is going to come next.

3. Pacing – we can really slow words down to give them emphasis. L-E-T-S S-L-O-W   I-T R-I-G-H-T  D-O-W-N  We can also go very fast for contrast, but not for too long or we will lose people.  We are looking for emphasis here to give us impact with the listeners.

4. Modulation – Japanese is a monotone language, so it doesn't have the same natural tonal variety of most western languages. However, it can have differences of speed and strength injected into the delivery to create variety. If a classical music orchestra only played the crescendos or only the softer lulls of the piece, it would be extremely boring.   If we speak with the same strength, soft or strong throughout, we will lose people.  Highs and lows are what create variety. 

5. Phrasing – we can use alliteration or rhyme with certain words to create memorable phrases. For example we can go from “hero” to “zero”.  This a good example of a phrase which sticks with an audience.  Look for places where you can create these memory links to you and your talk, so that people won’t forget either.

6. Movement - gestures are super powerful and when congruent with what we are saying, can really add a lot of strength to our statements. Hold gestures for a maximum of fifteen seconds, because after that, their power goes right down and they are no longer effective.  Be very careful about running around, up and down the stage, pacing to and fro – this is a real distraction from your message.  The rule is to move for a distinct purpose only.  Design that in from the start so you know what you are doing and why you are doing it.

These six points will create impact with your audience because remember, everyone else is stuck in the same groove like an old vinyl record and they are losing their audience.  You however will be seen as a person of value, absolutely enhancing your personal and professional brands.

The Q&A is a great chance to clarify any points which were not clear to the audience.  This is an opportunity to really reinforce some points we made in the talk, to make them even more impactful with the audience. We can also draw on our reserve power and add extra content which we couldn’t include in the speech.  Apart from when we were mingling with our audience before the talk starts, this is the next opportunity to interact with our listeners.

We have to take some precautionary steps to prepare for the Q&A.  When we are designing the talk, we have to think of the likely questions we may get, so that we are well prepared to answer them.  We also have to understand that the Q&A is like a street fight – there are no rules.  Members of the audience can argue with us, call us a charlatan, debate with us and dismiss everything we have said. People can also ask us anything they like, however off topic. 

There are a couple of steps we need for dealing with hostile audiences. From the very start we should clearly state how long we have for questions.  We may find the hostile audience is quite hard to deal with and then we suddenly say we have to go and we look like a coward running away.  Once we have stated the time limit for questions, we can just say, “we have now reached the end of question time” and then we can go into our second close and leave with our dignity intact.

After stating the time limit for questions we say, “who has the first question”.  This is a subtle hint that we are expecting a lot of questions. If we don’t get any questions, we just say, “a question I am often asked is….”.  We state our own question and then we answer it.  Usually this gives people in the audience the courage to ask their question because the ice has been broken.

The type of people who go after a speaker are trying to show everyone how clever and tough they are.  When we receive this type of question we look straight at the person, but try not to move our head.  In polite society, we sometimes nod when people ask a question to give them encouragement, but we don’t want to look like we are agreeing with them and the thesis of the hostile question. 

We look straight at the person, no nodding and just hear them out.  We keep calm because we know we have a sure fire way of dealing with hostile questioners.  Once they have finished, we stop looking at them and now look at the rest of the audience.  We paraphrase what they have said. 

We do this in a special way, where we take all the sting out of the question.  For example, if they said, “Isn’t it true that your company is going to fire 10% of the workforce, just before the end of the year, when it is impossible to find another job”.  If it wasn’t a hostile question, we could just repeat it because often people sitting in other parts of the audience couldn’t hear what the questioner was saying.  

We absolutely do not want to say, “The questions was, is it true that we are going to sack 10% of the staff before the end of the year”.  Instead, we paraphrase and purposely weaken the invective.  We could say, “the question was about staffing”.  Now we turn back to face our hostile questioner. 

By paraphrasing, we have given ourselves between five to ten seconds to consider how best to answer the question.  We proceed to give the first six seconds of the answer, while maintaining eye contact with our questioner.  After that, we never give them any eye contact again for the rest of the event.  They feed off attention, so we now strategically cut off their supply of attention and we look at the other audience members and talk to them.  We keep making six seconds of eye contact with the others in the audience until we finish.  The hostile questioner becomes deflated, because they are not getting any of the limelight and attention they seek.

The other people attending the event will be amazed at how professionally you handled the situation, which they know had it been them, they would have had no idea what to do.  Our personal and professional brands have just been elevated.

We now say, “who has the next question?”.  If it not hostile, we can repeat the question so that everyone can hear it and we then answer it.  Again, we start the answer by directing our eye contact to the person asking the question and then move our eye contact to others in the room for six seconds each.  If we want a bit more time to think about our answer, we can just insert a pause.  Or we might use a cushion.  This is a brief neutral statement that buys us thinking time.  For example, we could say, “Thank you, I am glad you have raised that point”. We wrap things up by saying, “We have time for one final question.  Who has the last question?”.  We answer it and then we go into our second close. 

Generally speaking, we want our answers to be concise, so that more people can interact with us by asking questions.  It is also advisable to be brief because we will get ourselves into less trouble with our answers!

What is a complex subject?  That really depends on the audience.  If they are all experts in that subject area, then the presentation can and must be done at the same high level.  If they are not knowledgeable on the subject, we need to avoid assuming too much prior exposure to related information and not use jargon and acronyms. There are varying levels of difficult themes when presenting.  It is relatively rare that we have to present highly complex content in a standard business talk.  Rather, this type of activity would take place at specialist conferences and at industry events, where the audience are experts or at least dilettantes. This is usually an inform type of presentation, where we are going to clearly explain a technical or complicated matter and pass on insights, data, statistics etc.

We have a number of guiding requirements when we are designing this type of presentation.  

1. We need to develop flexibility in making complex material simple and understandable. We often work inside our own mental framework, where we know what we are talking about and assume that is the same for everyone listening.  We need to step outside our bubble and see the content from the audience’s point of view.  How can we deliver the message in a way which will overcome their barriers to understanding?  How can we communicate in a way which makes the subject seem simple to grasp?

2. We must seek ways to communicate the information in an interesting manner. Storytelling is brilliant for making dry facts and figures spring to life and attain a relevancy which appeals to our listeners.  We should definitely never resort to speaking in a brutal monotone when delving into the bloody entrails of the subject.  Voice modulation, pauses and hitting key words harder than others, will provide the light and shade needed to create variety in the delivery, making it easier for everyone to follow our key messages.

3. Let’s relate to the audience at their level. This can be tricky because there is rarely the same level of expertise in the room.  We have to aim for the lowest common denominator and speak at that level, without alienating the actual experts in attendance. 

4. We must follow a logical progression of ideas otherwise the complexity of the subject will lose members of the audience. It is hard enough to deal with difficult subjects without making the delivery hard to follow as well.

5. We shouldn’t forget to develop emotional contact with the audience. Well designed visuals can connect to everyone’s emotions.  Like storytelling, the slides can bring a dry idea to life and make it compelling. Showing the results before and after in visual form, especially using photos, is both powerful and convincing. Importantly, we must have one idea per slide as our standard, to make sure the audience can understand the point of the side in just two seconds.

6. As always, when thinking about how to approach the nitty gritty of the talk, we begin by designing our two closes. What is the key information we wish to inform our audience about.  We must work hard to strip this down to the minimum number of words required because that will aid gaining clarity.  The second close can just be a repeat of the first close or we could express the key point in a different way.

7. Now we work on the core message. Depending on the length of the talk, we will build a certain number of chapters, each of which provides the evidence and proof to back up what we are telling everyone about our subject.

8. Finally, we design the opening. In the case of complex information we can use an analogy. How does this work?  An analogy is very useful when we are trying to explain complex concepts in a simple manner.  We are comparing the similarities of two dissimilar things.  For example, “designing the corporate strategy is like ordering a gelato”.  In this example there is nothing similar between designing corporate strategy and ice cream.  We are taking two dissimilar things and connecting them to make a point. 

9. Having stated the analogy, we now have to explain what we mean, so that the audience can get the point. We continue, “When we order the gelato, we hope this is going to be what we want and will give us the flavour and taste outcome we want, but no matter how good it looks in the refrigerated cabinet in the store, we won’t know the truth until we actually taste it.  This is the same with corporate strategy.  It may look perfect on paper and the design seems to make logical sense, but we won’t know if it works until we apply it”.

Obviously, this is the design stage where we start with the end, but in fact we are going to deliver the talk in this order: analogy, analogy explanation, main body, close number one, transition to Q&A, close number two.

Whenever we have a complex subject to present, we need to approach it differently from our usual garden variety talks.  The basics don’t change – we need a good design and an excellent delivery, but the mindset needs some revision before we begin the process.  If we do this then our talk will be well received and we will continue to build our personal and professional brands.

Persuasion Power Eats Everything For Breakfast

Intuitively, we know that people who can command an audience, energise teams, excite customers and secure decisions through their persuasion power are successful individuals.  Did they gain persuasion power because they were successful or did they become successful through their persuasion power.  We know it is the latter.  Given we all know this, then why are so few business people successful as speakers.  I attended a chamber of commerce AGM, which just shocked me.  It hadn’t dawned on me that as part of the proceedings those aspiring for a position on the Board, had to get up and say why they should be selected.  When I realised this prospect was looming, I thought to myself, “this will be interesting”.  There were some very serious corporations’ very serious heavy hitters assembled to joust for seats on the Committee.

No Free Pass for Corporate Captains Of Industry

What a revelation.  Almost none of them could string a five minute talk together extolling their own virtues.  I was wondering how on earth they were allowed to represent their brands with such an underwhelming facility in persuasion power?  Why didn’t their companies invest in making them presentation and promotion advocates advancing the brand’s credibility.  As often happens though, they didn’t get the training, they just got the responsibility for their big enterprise’s revenue production.  They toiled long and hard in the engine rooms of their companies becoming outstanding individual performers.  Often they started as technical people, typically engineers, who were excellent in their field of specialty.  Promotion after promotion led them to run the operation.

Getting to the top and being able to successfully promote the brand are not the same thing.  The apex of the organisation narrows down to only a limited number of contenders for the top positions.  Those who have the technical skills, the experience and the ability to persuade others will self-select themselves for the top job.  The logical conclusion is to not wait until you get promoted to garner the facility to persuade, but to grab that skill set so that you are the one who gets promoted.

Self Promotion That Elevates Personal Brands

Promoting oneself and being really good at what you do are also not a given.  We have to be intelligent, competent, industrious, patient and strategic.  At the same time we should get training and grab every single opportunity to promote our personal and professional brands through presenting.  Once we gain more ability, we will be given more opportunities for bigger events and larger venues.  Being able to present to a large audience is good, but being able to keep presenting to large audiences is even better.  We scale up our capacity to dominate any sized venue, as we learn the intricacies of each step on the ladder.  The chances though of getting a series of large events from the very start are low.  We have to put in the sustained work and build up our presenting nouse, skills and confidence.

My recent TED talk was speech number 546 for me, so you would think that would be a dawdle for such an experienced presenter.  What I immediately realised though, was the scale was different.  It wasn’t a typical large venue, it was a vast global audience.  Normally, if you underperform in your talk, only the assembled business people know about it.  If you do a poor job on your TED talk, then you are exposing your personal brand to the entire world and exposing it forever.  In my case, it is even worse, because I teach presentation skills professionally. I also have my global Dale Carnegie colleagues and all of my competitors, watching like hawks.  I also recently published my book on presenting in Japan, raising the bar on expectations.  On the other hand, if you are under the spotlight and you do a professional job, then your brand becomes global and your credibility goes up.

The Catastrophe Secret Escape Hatch For Presenters

It looks like there is no safety net with presenting on the big stage but that is not quite true.  Yes, you only have yourself to rely on for the success or failure of the talk.  No one can sweep in from the wings of the stage and rescue you from a self-induced disaster.  What people see on stage is only the tip of the presenting iceberg.  Be it the experienced presenter or the novice, there is one huge escape hatch from speaking catastrophe and that is rehearsal. 

This is such an obvious thing, you have to wonder why I even raise it?  What is amazing though is that the vast majority of business talks are given once, delivered to the live audience and that is it.  Investing time and effort into the rehearsals will do more for a person’s personal and professional brand than any other factor.  I teach company presidents how to deliver their speeches and the before and after versions are comprehensive validations for why everyone should rehearse as much as possible.  I am there to coach and provide feedback for them, but any speaker can get valuable feedback in rehearsal if they know how to do it.  Never ever ask “how was it?”.  A torrent of confidence crushing critique will land on your head immediately.  Instead ask, “what was I doing well and what can I do to improve it?”.  Do that every time and you will maximise the effectiveness of the feedback during your rehearsals.

“Persuasion Power Eats Everything For Breakfast”

“Persuasion power eats everything for breakfast”, should be our business community mantra.  We know this is true, but are we doing anything about honing our presenting facility?  Hope is not much of a strategy for becoming a persuasive speaker.  Getting professional training, rehearsing and seizing every opportunity to give talks are the keys to success.  With greater responsibility comes the requirement to be highly persuasive.  So let’s get to work and become highly persuasive, fully primed to step up.

The prediction business is always fun.  We nominate our plans so that God can laugh, according to the old Yiddish proverb.  Nevertheless, we need to make some plans don’t we.  The Gregorian calendar beginning of the year is as good a time as any to think “start”.  The last two years has seen the entire speaking business metamorphise into an online venture for the most part.  Standing in front of a crowd is now somewhat of a distant memory for most of us.  Internal meetings have gone the same way and we chime in from home on what is happening with the results so far this month or quarter or whatever. 

The world seems to have sunk into the abyss of the ordinary, when it comes to persuasion power. Meetings have moved from the usual insomnia inducing exercises in the physical meeting room to the online room, but faithfully retaining the insomnia inducing capability.  The best part of this has been the boredom of listening to colleagues drone on, is leavened by just turning your camera off and doing other more interesting stuff in the background, without drawing any boss wrath.  Of course, our colleagues are doing the same thing to us too, when it is our turn to speak.

Online webinars have also sunk to the bottom of the ocean, where the crush of the weight of the water saps any life from the talks.  People are so amazingly adaptable.  They have learnt how to move their usual boring delivery online and without any apology.  Once upon time the speaker would only be impinging on the time and patience of a small crowd of people, but with the wonders of Webex, Zoom, Teams, etc., the tech has created a weapon of mass destruction.

Is this your plan for 2022?  Are you writing in your organizer, “I can’t wait to bore people to death again this year”?  I doubt that would be the case, but I also doubt that among the many goals being set for this year, becoming a master of persuasion is in there.  How could that be the case?  The complexities of communication have only gone up with the advances in society and business. 

We operate in the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism.  Social media armed mobile phones have allowed us to spend every second of our downtime endlessly scrolling for something more interesting.  Our concentration spans are being measured in nanoseconds today.  We have become the most distracted generation in global history.  How can we gain persuasion power in this tech induced mess?

Our other problem is no one wants to believe anything they hear anymore, as everyone is more anxious about falling victim to fake news.  It isn’t much respite from the pressures on modern communication to know that even if we are getting our message listened to, a lot of people are doubting anything we say.  Science itself is in doubt and now “alternative facts” is a thing. Where will all of this end and what does it mean for us as presenters, persuaders and advocates?

There are some sure bets, some certainties that we can rely on though.  These include the fact that the majority of people in business will remain hopeless communicators and persuaders.  They won’t analyse the current reality for opportunities to stand out, to break through the noise and get their messages heard and believed.  They won’t understand that while what we say is important, how we say it is more important to being effective as a presenter.  The ability to wield language and to wield its delivery are potent tools for success in business.  If everyone was well versed in being persuasive, our task would become more onerous and competitive very quickly.  Well, that isn’t going to happen, because our colleagues and competitors will just wander into 2022 and repeat the same mistakes they made in 2021. 

Let’s add “I will become a master of persuasion” to our list of things to be achieved this year.  Standing above the hoi polloi isn’t easy, but this is one area where we can seize the advantage.  If we haven’t studied this art of public speaking, let’s commit to doing that.  If we haven’t taken the training, then let’s get that into our schedules for this year.  The great unwashed will do nothing, so let’s take action and differentiate ourselves from those who are either ignorant or lazy or both.  Persuaders of the world, arise in 2022 and seize the opportunity to polish our craft and take success into our own hands.

What is our presenter vision for 2022?  If it has any element of success involved (and it would be a pretty rare resolution that didn’t have that), then being persuasive is going to be integral to the success of realising that vision.  If you are trying to climb the corporate ladder, then getting your thoughts sorted and have others listen and agree is persuasion power.  If you are the boss and you want the team to get behind your new ideas, direction, project, fresh business initiative etc., then you need them to follow you and that means having persuasive presence.  If you are a peer and you seek the cooperation of your colleagues from other divisions, then you need to persuade them to elevate your needs up their priority list.  If you want your clients to buy and buy right now, then your persuasion skills have to be excellent.

Great.  How do we become more persuasive in business?   Being a force of nature won’t work.  No matter how much belief, passion and enthusiasm we have mustered, the person we are talking to won’t care much, unless they see something concrete in it for them.  We should plan our interactions, so that we get the best result.  That makes a lot of sense, however, we can’t always have that opportunity.  We may be in the midst of a discussion and we suddenly need to weigh in with our idea.  We have no time for careful, detailed planning and scoping of how the conversation should run, because the situation it so fluid.  What do we do?

Habit is a powerful tool in business.  It means we can engage in high level activities without needing any preparation time.  Therefore we need to build habits, so that we are in flow, reacting spontaneously without thought.  The habits we choose can be destructive though and defeat us in our quest for persuasion.  Interrupting others when they are speaking would have to be at the top of the “stop doing” list.  This is always a problem, because it says to the other person that what they are saying has no value and we are more important than them.  Finishing their sentences for them would probably rank as number two in the deadly habits list.  It says we are more articulate and clever than they are. We have anticipated where they are going with the conversation and we can get there more effectively than them, because we are smarter than they are.

Instead, we need to make CEP our new persuasion habit.  I know everyone needs another acronym like a hole in the head, but they are a handy short form to help us remember the content, so please bear with me on CEP.  The “C” stands for “context”.  We start not with our proposal or suggestion, but with the background.  This is a very strategic choice that guarantees we can reduce rejection and resistance for our idea.  When we leap into our plan or idea, we will face two levels of resistance.  The quick thinkers will be telling us why that idea won’t work or that it has been tried before and failed, etc.  The deeper thinkers will be doing the same thing, but they won’t necessarily voice their opposition at that moment, because the bolshie, assertive few are dominating the airwaves.

Starting with the context is genius because there is nothing to disagree with.  The listeners are just hearing the background which has led you to draw certain conclusions based on the details and facts of the case.  The quick thinkers will be racing ahead of you and leaping to conclusions about what should be done.  The deeper thinkers will be doing the same thing, just at a much more substantive level. 

The “E” stands for the “execution” that you are recommending to the group.  Our recommended actions won’t be whimsy, accidental or fantasy.  Based on the facts of the case there are some logical things which should happen as a result.  The listeners in many cases will have arrived at the same conclusion as we have or are well on the way toward it.  They will be more likely to agree with our idea, because they feel they have discovered it for themselves independently, based on the facts they have heard.

The final “P” is for “payoff”.  The idea of recency says that people tend to remember best what they heard the most recent, so we save the best for last.  They have raced ahead of us to what the execution piece should be. The next thing they hear is the payoff from taking that recommended action, which makes it even easier for them to agree with our idea.

The key is to make this process our standard operating behaviour.  Instead of jumping in and blurting out our idea, naked and undefended, we go straight to the context first.  By making this our habitual way of introducing ideas and suggestions, we create a new habit, one which substantially eliminates opposition to what we are saying.  If you make this one decision to adopt the CEP habit for 2022, then your persuasion power will get a tremendous boost.

Let’s look at the designing the closes.  Notice this is plural, not singular. There are two closes required when we are speaking.  Usually there will be Q&A at the end and we have to account for that.  We design our first close to wrap up our talk.  We open for Q&A and then we have lost control of proceedings.  Make no mistake.  Question time can become a street fight with no rules. Anyone can ask anything they like, no matter how tangential, irrelevant and obtuse it may be. We cannot control it, so we just have to deal with it. 

The problem is the final question may concern something absolutely unrelated to what we talked about.  The result is the audience walk out of the room with that information forefront in their minds, rather than our carefully crafted, especially tailored key message.  We cannot allow that to happen.  We need to design a second close so that our message dominates the final impression of our speech.  The audience must walk out of that presentation with our key message ringing in their minds or we will have failed in our fundamental task. We can give slightly different versions of the same information for each close.  The key is to prepare two closes at the very start

In the delivery of our talk, we need to end on a crescendo in this last close.  Many speakers let their voice trail off and then just peter out to nothing.  This is a very consistent problem and speakers do not seem to be aware they are allowing this to happen. We know that final impression is key and the point is we determine what that will be.  Let’s have a rousing message at the end and let’s hit that message hard.  Here are some closes we can use:

To Convince or Impress

1. We repeat the major benefit. We will have a number of take aways for our audience and a good plan is to select only the most memorable and most powerful and repeat that benefit to the audience.  Always focus on the highest priority messages, rather than diluting the key message with a host of other lesser messages, all competing for the listener’s attention.
2. Use a quotation. We may be very smart and have lots of great things to say.  That is just using ourselves though as the reference point.  Sometimes we will employ the credibility of an established expert or powerful influencer and draw on a quotation from their words.  These are usually very famous phrasings so the audience will recognise the quote immediately.  We can curate pithy sayings and have them ready to go when we need them.  We all run across these at different times so the trick is to keep track of some which we can use in our presentations and have them handy to draw upon.

To Inform

1. Repeat your key point. In the inform talk we will have been passing along a lot of information, much of it very detailed.  It can be confusing for an audience to know which information to focus on.  We select the one piece of information we believe will be the most important and we repeat it again.  We don’t want to make the audience work hard to follow what we are sayings.  By determining the key points, we do the work for them so all they have to do is absorb what we are saying, rather than having to analyse it for themselves.
2. Recap the steps of a process or plan. In the inform talk we are often providing so much information that we have to group it into brackets for the audience to understand.  We may outline “the nine steps” or “the four key data points” etc.  This numbered packaging up of information makes it much easier for the audience to navigate through our talk and keep up with what we are saying.  At the end, we select one of the key information pieces and then remind the audience about it.

To Persuade

1. Present the action and benefit. We won’t be keen to take a recommended action unless we think there is something in it for ourselves.  By combining the action needed with the benefit, it is clear to the audience the value of taking our advice.
2. Final Recommendation. We select the key course of action we have been talking about.  We restate it at the very end and this makes it very clear what we hope the audience will do from now.

The final impression is in our hands, to mould and shape in the way we want it. We must dominate the final message and jettison any distractions which may have arisen during the question time.  The key is to design the close very carefully and deliver it with power and conviction.  If we do that, then our messages will resonate with our audiences and that is why we are doing this in the first place, isn’t it.

We flagged this point last episode and today we are going to look at the use of evidence when giving presentations.  I often mention the two modern dilemmas of being a presenter.  We now live in the Age of Distraction where audiences will rapidly escape from us to the internet, if we haven’t sufficiently captured their attention.  Sometimes, even when they are interested, they are still multi-tasking.  They are listening to us and scrolling through their social media at the same time.  This habit has solidified and it is a nightmare today to get our message across.  The other dilemma is we are in the Era of Cynicism.  Fake news is now a thing and our audience’s sensitivity to the validity of information has become more acute. 

Both of these drivers make our job even harder than in the past.  If we fill our presentations with “editorial” or “opinion” we are likely to lose the attention of the listeners.  They are there to gain some benefit from giving us their attention and as riveting as our opinion may be to us, it may not ignite much interest in the audience.  If we don’t bring some concrete insights, backed up with proof and evidence then the hands will be reaching for their phones immediately.  The Era of Cynicism means the evidence had better be highly credible and employing numerous sources.  Talking about findings from your own research is good, but could be greeted with doubt, if you don’t mention the detail on how the findings were assembled.

When we are designing our talk, we have access to some useful tools. DEFEATS is a handy acronym for remembering the different types of evidence we can draw upon to convince or impress our audience that what we say is true.

D-Demonstration. This might be something that can be shown physically during the presentation or something that we can show on screen, using software, audio or video.  It has to be congruent with the point we are making and provide a visual reinforcement of our key point.

E-Example.  The best examples are those which are most relevant to the members of the audience.  We should try and know who is in our audience and think what would be an example that will resonate with as many people as possible.  If the example is from the same industry and a similarly sized organisation then it becomes more meaningful for the audience.  I attended a talk given by a senior executive from a major organisation, who used examples within that context.  The problem was that the audience were all small to medium sized companies and there was nothing to relate to.

F-Facts.  Facts are provable and can be verified independently.  A claim is not a fact.  We need to be able to cite where the fact can be checked, if we are asked.  When we show graphs, for example, we should have the source of the data prominently displayed.  Most people won’t bother to check the data, but they feel better knowing they can do so if they wish.

E-Exhibits. This is usually something physical we can show to the audience.  In some cases, it may also be shown as an image.  In both cases we have to make sure the audience can see it easily.  If it is a physical object, hold it up around shoulder height, rather down around the waist.  Also, don’t wave it around – hold it still, so it easy for the audience to see.

A-Analogies.  We referred to Analogies in Openings Part One in Episode #264.  We are trying to simplify something complex for our audience. We compare two things which have no natural connection to make the point clearer.  For examples, we compare flying a passenger aircraft and speech making.  There is no natural connection between them.  Now we connect them.  “Flying a passenger plane is like giving a speech.  The take off and landing for aircraft are the most dangerous periods of the flight.  In the same way for speeches, openings and closing determine our impression with our audience”.  This connects two ideas and makes them more accessible for the listeners.

T-Testimonials.  Social proof has become extremely powerful today.  Testimonials are not our primary form of evidence, but they lend credibility to what we are saying.  A recognized expert supporting what we are saying gives our point more power.  In our case, the most famous investor in the world Warren Buffett is a huge fan of Dale Carnegie and often mentions the impact the training had on his career.  We could never afford to pay him to do that, but he does it anyway, because he is a true believer and that make it even more powerful.

S-Statistics.  The best statistics are third-party numbers.  If we quote our own research, that is okay, but it is not as convincing as also having an independent organisation’s statistics.

When we are designing our main argument, as we get to the key points, we should be trying to match them with hard evidence to prove the point.  If we do that, then we will have a much better chance of keeping the audience with us right through to the end of our presentation.  If we can do that in today’s distracted and cynical environment, we will  have been highly successful.

In some recent episodes we looked at how to open the presentation. Today we are going to look at designing the main body of our talk. The design process of our talks is counterintuitive.  We always start with the end, then do the main body and then the opening last. The close defines the key message we want to impart to the audience.  The opening breaks through all the competition for our audience’s attention. The main body is made up of the chapters of the talk.  In a thirty minute to forty minute speech, we can probably get through three to five key points, to back up our key assertion.  This is where we make our case, so it has to be well planned.

In the main body we need a lot of evidence.  We will deal with evidence in much more detail next week.  The key is to focus on the strongest supporting arguments to back up our key message.  There will be many choices about how to make the main argument, but we have limited time, so only choose the strongest possible content.  I support the Japan Market Expansion Competition (JMEC) here in Japan.  I advise teams on how to write and present their business plans, in order to win the competition.  Often, I notice that there are real gems, actual diamonds in their main body, but they are being trampled into the mud and you have trouble noticing or appreciating them.  We have to identify our strongest points supporting our contention and then give that evidence pride of place, so that the listener gets the point immediately.  We should never make the audience work hard to understand what we are saying.  Audiences have decreasing levels of concentration, so we need to get the gems up the front, to hook the listener’s interest. This keeps them with us for the rest of the talk.

Like a good novel, the chapters need to logically flow one into each other.  We have to make sure the audience can follow our line of reasoning.  The way we navigate the story for the listeners is critical. Using stories to illustrate our points is a must.  Dry statistics and facts are not enough.  People won’t remember them, but they will remember a gripping story.  Try to get people, places and seasons into the story, preferably those already known to the audience. Our objective is that the audience can picture the scene in their minds.

Remember, we are all being fed a steady diet of videos, films and novels where the power of the story is taken to the greatest heights.  In the visual media, writers for these works are often crafting away in high powered teams and getting paid a lot of money to find ways of drawing us into the story and keeping us in their grip throughout. Then we occasional speakers turn up to give our little talk.  We have to understand we are competing with the professionals and the audience is expecting us to be professional as well.  If we cannot match their expectations, then our personal and professional brands are damaged.

The unveiling of the main body has to be well thought through.  Each chapter needs a change of pace.  It might be raising our energy or going the other direction and lowering the tension.  It doesn't matter which way we go, but we cannot keep going at the same pace throughout the whole talk.  We need variation to keep people with us.  In sales, we talk about designing hooks to jag the interest of the buyer.  Presenting is the same.  We need hooks that will jag the interest of the audience and they will be wanting to know what comes next.  This doesn’t happen by chance.  We need to carefully design these hooks.

For example, we might start a chapter of the main body with a statement, “Losing ten million dollars was the best education I ever received in business”. Everyone hearing that wants to hear the rest of the story.  What happened to you?  Why did you lose the ten million?  Why was it such a great education?  What happened next? This is an example of a power hook.  We need a series of these scattered throughout our chapters. If we can do that, then the main body will never be a drag on the attention of the audience. If we do it well, they will be on the edge of their seats, eager to find out what we are going to say next.  If we don’t, the audience will be reaching for their phones, to escape to the siren call of the internet.

The main body does all of the heavy lifting to make our case.  It is also the segment which occupies the majority of the time for the talk, so it must be crafted extremely well.  Break it down into segments or chapters and pile on the evidence. Don’t just read out a bunch of dry data points.  Get the data assembled into stories which will resonate with the audience.  I once had to read the Australian Ambassador Ashton Calvert’s speech in Japanese, when I was Consul General in Osaka, as he couldn’t make the event.  These types of speeches are prepared by Embassy staff for the Ambassador.  It was a classic tale of trade statistics and no stories.  I was giving this speech, thinking to myself, we could have done a lot more with this content to make it more engaging and grab the emotions of the audience.  Departing from the script in that type of case would get you fired, so you have to do it word perfect.  An opportunity gone begging, was my conclusion and a good lesson for me when preparing my own talks.

The main body has the advantage of following your grabber opening, so you have everyone’s attention.  Don’t blow it.  Keep the hooks coming in the chapters of the main body and keep the audience with you right through to the end.

This speaker has it all.  You are sitting down the back of the room, yet you can sense their inner energy, confidence, surety of what they are saying.  You feel they have charisma, that compelling attractiveness as a presenter.  You want to be like that too, but how?  Let’s see how you can increase your presence and appeal as a speaker. 

What the audience won’t see you doing is rehearsing on them.  This sounds infinitely logical, yet so many speakers deliver their talk once. They are practicing on their live audience.  Is this what professionals do?  Of course not.  Professionals walk on stage after they have given their talk many, many times in rehearsal.  They have worked out the correct length, the high points, the cadence, the humour and every small detail needed to make the talk a success.  For feedback, they never ask, “what do you think?”.  Instead, they ask “what was good?” and “how could I make it better?”.  They use video and audio review to improve.  If they are travelling to make the talk, they know that with the lights out, a hotel room’s windows become mirrors, so that they can check their delivery.

Fully Prepared

When you get to the venue, the speaker is already there and in fact has been there an hour earlier checking everything is ready.  They get a sense of the room.  They sit in the cheap seats and see how they will appear up on stage.  They make sure their slide deck is loaded and working correctly.  They know how to work the slide advancer correctly and have worked out the sound levels for the microphone.  You never see them bashing the microphone and asking “can you hear me down the back”.  They have told the venue crew to leave the lights up and not dim them down to suit the screen.  While waiting for people to arrive, they have diplomatically instructed the MC to read their introduction exactly as it has been crafted to project their personal brand.

They are standing near the door as people arrive, introducing themselves and asking what attracted them to today’s topic. They are working the room before the event kicks off. They give each person they engage with 100% of their attention, listening quietly, never interrupting them, finishing their sentences nor jumping in with their own clever comment.  They are building tremendous good will with as many people in the audience as possible before they get anywhere near the stage.  They remember your name and the main details of what you said.  They are genuinely interested to meet you and find out what you are doing.  They have demolished that invisible barrier between speaker and audience.

They are perfectly dressed for the occasion.  They look the part of success.  Every detail has been thought through.  They don’t allow bright ties, puffy pocket chiefs or big scarves to compete with their face.  They know their face is a million watt power source and they make it the main reference point for the audience, rather than being dominated by the slides.

Dominate The Space

The MC calls them on to the stage, after reciting their turbo charged credibility resume, exactly as requested.  They walk to the center of the stage and start immediately, spending no time switching computers and loading their files.  They have arranged for such pedestrian logistics to be handled by their support crew. They have purposely freed themselves up to absolutely nail the first two seconds impression window.  They know that we live in the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism and all we have is two seconds for the audience to decide their first impression of us.  They don’t waste that opportunity.  Their opening is a real grabber that cuts through all the competition for audience mind space. They reference a couple of the people they were speaking with earlier in the audience.  “Mary made a good point about….”, “Bill had a wonderful insight on today’s topic….”.  They are broadcasting to everyone that we are all one unit today and there is no longer any space separating speaker and listener.

They are projecting their ki bouncing it off the rear walls, pumping out high energy to their audience. What they say is clear, concise, well structured, supported by slides which are on point and Zen like in their clarity.  The key message is crystal clear and their evidence is unassailable.  They are engaging each individual audience member in six seconds of eye contact creating the feeling that the speaker is talking directly to them and no one else.  What they say and how they say it is totally congruent.

Control The Final impression

They finish the talk with their first close and smoothly transition to Q&A stating how many minutes for questions. They paraphrase the questions, so that everyone in the audience can hear what was asked.  As they answer, they give the questioner six seconds of eye contact and then work the room with six seconds of eye contact each for the other members of the audience. They don’t try and duck difficult questions.  They mention, “I don’t know, but I will find out and get back to you. Who has the next question?”.

At the end of question time, they seize back the initiative to focus on their key message.  They don’t allow the talk to finish with a question which may be totally off topic.  They use their second close to repeat their key point and have that ringing in the ears of the audience as everyone departs the venue.  They determine their final impression with the audience. They have organised their schedule to be able to invite audience members to swap business cards and chat after the talk. They are gracious and charming with everyone and cement their fan base for the next talk.  They have it all, they are charismatic.

Reading this headline you might be thinking, “Oh yeah, this guy says he is an expert?  Is that really true?”.  In this fake news world, that is an entirely reasonable caution.  Would the following qualify me:  this TEDx talk was my 546th public speech, I am a Master Trainer for Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan and I am a certified High Impact Presentations Instructor having taught thousands of people how to present over the last twenty plus years and I am about to publish my book Japan Presentations Mastery?  I thought it might be interesting to pull back the velvet curtain and reveal how I prepared for this talk, expert or otherwise, but at least someone with substantial public speaking experience.

TEDx has certain restrictions around what you can talk about and how long you can talk for.  The TED mission is to research and discover “ideas worth spreading”.  I needed a topic which was a fit for the format and I had up to thirteen minutes to deliver my talk. There are many things I could have addressed on stage, but I thought “Transform Our Relationships” would have universal appeal, because TED talks are broadcast all around the world.

The first thing to consider was how to end the talk.  I needed to clarify what was the central message I wanted to impart.  The title was the central message, so “transform your relationships for the better” became my choice of the close.  I also linked the close back to some remarks I made right at the start, so I was able to tie a neat bow on the talk. There are no questions in the TED format, so there was only need to design that one close.

I next did some research on what others were saying about transforming relationships.  I found a report entitled “Relationships in the 21st Century”.  When I read the report, I thought the findings were rather unremarkable and that it would be perfect for debunking at the start.  Even a slightly controversial start can be an attention grabber. I left the final design of the opening until the end though.  The start has only one aim and that is to grab audience attention to listen to what it is we have to say.

I had the end clearly in mind and a vague idea about the opening, so now I needed to build chapters for the talk.  Thirteen minutes is quite short, so every word is gold.  I thought Dale Carnegie’s human relations principles were the perfect tool which I could pass on to the audience to apply in their own relationships.  There are thirty human relations principles, so that was too many.  I selected seven. 

Each principle formed a chapter, so that made the construction of the talk quite easy.  I needed some flesh on the bones of this skeleton of the talk though, so I selected some easy to access examples of how to use the principles.  Some of these story vignettes were created to make the point and some were actual examples from real life.

I needed a bridge between the start of the talk and the Dale Carnegie human relations principles, which would set the scene for what was to come.  I drew on some well known influencers – Mahatma Gandhi and Isaac Newton.  I wanted to make the point that the secret of achieving a transformation was to start with yourself, rather than expecting everyone else to change to suit you.  Gandhi’s quote is well known: “become the change you wish to see in the world”.  Perfect. 

Also, every high school student has studied Newtonian Physics and so remember his proclamation that “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”.  Perfect.  I could make the point that if we want to transform our relationships, we can change the angle of approach with others and we will get a different reaction.  This was extremely easy for an audience to grasp as a concept to transform their relationships.  I made this a core message linking each chapter back to the central thesis of “start with changing your angle of approach”.

My final design task was to go back and polish the opening, so that it would grab attention.  I selected the conclusion from the report and then denounced it as too obvious.  By doing so I have now engaged the audience to anticipate what I am going to say, if I am not accepting this report’s conclusion as sufficient enough to understand relationship building in the 21st century.  I wasn’t doing this for dramatic effect. I honestly thought it was all too obvious.  If it had delivered some earth shattering insight, then I would have used that instead as an authority reinforcement. 

Rehearsal is so critical in giving talks. I soon discovered I had too much material for the time allowed, so one of the human relations principles had to be jettisoned overboard.  I had organised the talk into chapters, so each one was complete in itself.  Rather than trying to water down the other chapters to squeeze in chapter seven, it was better to keep the others powerful and reduce one chapter. I then took all of that content and then wrote it up a complete script.  I don’t normally do this step. However, I knew there was no way I would remember every single word of a thirteen minute talk, but this script gave me the core content to draw on.  Obviously, I wasn’t going to read it to the audience – that would be a fake expert! I recorded it and played it over and over to myself about ten times, until I had absorbed flow of the talk in my mind.

I did another three live rehearsals with the cut down materials and kept editing to make sure I could get through it in under thirteen minutes.  At the beginning I had toyed with the idea of no slides so that all of the attention would be on me.  In the end, I decided that slides would help me with the navigation.  This talk goes around the world, so my personal and professional reputations were on the line here, especially when you go around saying you are an expert on public speaking.  I thought it was better to be smooth in my delivery and not to lose my place or have a brain whiteout while on live streaming camera, especially as that means no edit rescue capability.

Once I had selected the slides I wanted, I made sure I owned the use of these slide images.  I could have just taken some images down off the internet, but there is a copyright issue right there.  We all need to respect the IP of the owners of those images.  I also made sure I had pictures with people in them where ever possible. This is always of more interest to an audience.

On the day before the talk, I did five full blood, full power rehearsals and recorded them, so I could check how I sounded.  On the day of the delivery, I recorded ten full power rehearsals at home, one after another, checking the time to make sure I didn’t go over the thirteen minutes limit.  Full rehearsal, full power, with many repetitions is key.

Of course this was very tiring, but I didn’t worry about peaking before the event.  I knew my nervous energy would kick in once I was on stage under the lights, facing the live streaming cameras and the assembled audience.

On the day, there was a technical issue with the screen in front of the stage.  It is located so that the speaker can see what is being displayed on the main screen behind them.  I wasn’t worried.  I had confidence thanks to my rehearsals, that I could do the talk without slides, if I needed to.  For whatever reason it worked perfectly for me, so I reproduced my delivery as I had practiced it over and over and over.

In the Green Room I didn’t chat with the other speakers.  I concentrated on slowing my breathing down to make sure I was calm and quietly read the full script again.  When I was being wired up for the talk, I made sure the head attachment microphone was pulled out away from my cheek and mouth, because I knew I would be pr4ojecting a lot of power to my audience. I didn’t want any audio dissonance from my being loud, to find its way on to the recording. 

As it turned out, four seconds before I was due to go on, they needed to fix a technical issue, so they decided to show a TED video instead.  Naturally I was fully psyched up ready to go and then had to stop everything.  This type of stop-start thing can throw your equilibrium off balance.  I had had this experience before when I was a karate athlete in competition finals, when there was an interruption and a sudden delay before you go on to the mats to fight.

I immediately moved away from the people there in order to keep my concentration at full peak condition.  I happened to notice there was a mirror around the corner of the back stage area.  While they ran the video, I began quietly starting my talk while looking at the mirror, so that I could see my gestures etc., as I got ready to go on.  We cannot allow anything to cause us to lose our concentration or peak energy levels, before we hit the stage.

I walked confidently to the round red carpet, which was my spot from which to talk, paused to enjoy the applause and create some anticipation. I then hit the opening hard with a strong voice and a big double arm gesture.  The rest of the talk went pretty close to my plan.  The key thing to note is, only I knew what the plan was!  At the end I bowed, stayed there to receive the applause and then unhurriedly, I walked off, again showing confidence.  First and last impressions are being formed as soon as we move to and from our positions and we have to have those planned as well.  Someone rushing from the stage leaves a different impression to someone staying there momentarily and then walking off with purpose.f

Today we are going to look at Part Two of Opening our speech.  In the last episode we used an analogy, the startling statement and starting with some good news.  We also covered the dos and don’ts of how to use questions with the audience.  Here are two more openings we can apply to our talks - storytelling and using compliments.

Start with an incident

Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools in the speaker’s toolkit.  Every day we are bombarded with stories.  It could be dramas on television, novels we are reading, movies we are watching and even the news programmes.  When we were children our parents read stories to us at bedtime and so we are incredibly open to stories, in a way we are not open to hearing opinions or statements.

Stories do not have to be long.  Today, with an abundance of impatience, massive distraction everywhere and people’s ever decreasing micro concentration spans, the opportunity to tell a long story in business is gone.  We can tell a short story and still take our audience with us employing their mind’s eye to be with us in the location, in the season, with the people and absorbed with the drama of the situation.  Let’s look at some varieties of stories we can employ for a business context.

1. Personal experience. This is the most powerful story because it is real life. We love to learn from the successes and even better, the failures of others.  Which speech opening would grab your attention more, ”Let me tell you how I made my first ten million dollars” or “Let me tell you how I lost my first ten million dollars”? 

I think we would all want to hear how I lost the ten million, because that sounds more dramatic and we can learn from other’s mistakes.  Relating corporate victory after victory and outlining the perfect coalition of circumstances to explain what a triumph it has been for our organization is reeking of propaganda and our audience cannot identify with what we are saying.

Telling them war stories of failure and redemption tend to work extremely well, because in exposing our failures, we have shown we are like everyone else and the audience can more easily identify with us.

2. Third Party. We have a limited number of personal experiences to draw on, but we have unlimited experiences available, if we include those of others.  Sometimes we prefer to use a third party, if we need some strong evidence or credibility.

We are exposed to third party stories all of the time, but we let them slip away.  It may be something we saw on the news, or in documentaries or we read in magazines or in biographies. We come across a great story, but we just move on without thinking, “well that will be a great story for a talk, let me capture that and store it away for a future speech”.  We should be trawling through whatever we are reading with a part of our brain looking for speech material and having a good system to be able to access it easily at a future point.

3. When we add our personal experiences, the experiences of others and then the entire history of experiences in the world throughout history, we have an unbelievable resource available to us to draw upon.  There is an avalanche of material coming to us down through the ages, where people have faced similar situations to what we are facing today.  We are often accessing this information, but not capturing it.  We should capture it for our talks.

Pay a compliment

1. We can relate our topic to all of the people in the room in the audience.  For example, “Have you heard that most people are scared of public speaking? This is only because they have not received any training.  No one is born a gifted speaker, it is a learnt skill.  If you get the training, then your fear of public speaking will disappear completely”.  Every person has been scared of public speaking at one time or another, so they can immediately bond with us when we bring it up.  They will be all ears to hear what we have to say on the subject

2. We relate our topic to the broader organisation, rather than to individuals. For example, “Your organisation has such a phenomenal reputation for excellence. Let me tell you why”.  When you hear that opening, you are very interested to hear what comes next, because you like compliments and you are also keen to make sure what the speaker says is accurate.

3. We can relate what we are saying to one person.  For example, “I was chatting with Tanaka san before we started and she made a very insightful comment”.  Everyone will want to know what Tanaka san said and Tanaka san will be delighted with the recognition.

The speaker first impression is vital.  We have to plan to make it a success and there are many tools available to us. Try the tools I have included in Parts One and Two of how to open your talk. Remember public speaking has never had this degree of difficulty ever in history. The internet is a click away and people will leave us in a heartbeat, if what we say doesn’t sound interesting or valuable.  The way they determine if it is worth listening to, is from how we start.  We must get the design right or our messages will not transmit to the audience and if that is the case, we have missed a great opportunity to build our personal and professional brands.

First impressions are now down to seven seconds or less.  Our opening begins from the moment we are introduced, even before we get up on stage or move to the center of the stage.  We must walk briskly, confidently and elegantly to our speaking position.  I remember seeing US President Biden on television, walking very swiftly to convey he was still dynamic, despite the years and the grey hair.  He was trying to control a narrative about his suitability to be the US President. He understood the power of first impression.  As speakers we must understand the speech starts well before the speech.  What we write for the event information and what we hand over to the MC to read about us on stage, all are setting up a first impression. The conversations we have with the attendees before we speak are all building a first impression.

What we do on stage is important. If there is a logistical change over of laptops or files, try to get someone else to do that, so that you can straight into your opening.  We are wasting valuable “first impression” seconds with our head down looking at the laptop screen, rather than looking at the audience.  We need to be able to move straight to the center of the stage and get going with our well designed opening.  We have to be able to stay the hands of the restless in the audience to not go for their smart phones and disappear into the world of the internet.

The first words out of our mouth have to grab the attention of the audience, so we must raise the vocal strength of our opening, to break through the mental distraction of our audience members.  We should walk to center stage and then purposely pause slightly before we begin.  This raises the anticipation level of the audience and quietens any chatting that may be going on in the background.  How can we start, what should we say, how do we do it – let’s explore some techniques.

The captivating statement technique uses three methods to get the audience engaged.

1. This is where we can try to make complex subjects more easily understood by comparing two things, which have no natural connection, with each other. For example, “Launching a strategic initiative, is like driving a car. Learning to drive a car looks easy, but in fact is quite complicated. Launching this new strategic initiative looks easy on paper, but we need to expect it will require a lot of good preparation in order for it to be successful”.  We open with the analogy statement and then explain the analogy to make the point clear for the audience.

2. We use this to grab attention by introducing a pattern interrupt with our audience.  We provide some information which is not only new, but potentially shocking.  For example, “The latest statistics are clear - we are running out of young people in Japan.  If we don’t get busy planning to win the war for talent, we will go out of business”.  This will get everyone’s attention.  People are vaguely aware that we are seeing a decline in the population in Japan, but here we are connecting it to the very survival of the organisation.

3. Good news. This relaying of some good news will lift the positive feelings of the audience for the talk to come.  We mention some industry statistics or consumer trends or R&D breakthrough news.  There is always a lot of doom and gloom in business, so going the other direction is also a great way to grab attention. They are now anticipating this will be a valuable talk. 

4. The question technique has three aspects.

1. Gain information. We can ask a real question which requires an answer by having the audience raise their hands.  This gets audience involvement, which is good, but we shouldn’t overdo it. 

2. Get participation. Raising hands, calling out answers, getting people to stand are all good physical actions to have the audience feel part of the talk.  Again, don’t overdo it.

3. Create agreement on a need or interest. We could also ask a rhetorical question which doesn’t require an answer from the audience, because we are going to supply the answer.  This allows us to get everyone engaged with their thoughts on the topic.  We ask it in such a way that it is easy for the audience to agree with.

The opening has to be planned carefully.  We only have one shot to make a good first impression and this is where we do that.  We will continue in the next episode with other techniques we use to open our talk.

Every time we speak, we are representing our professional and personal brands.   People judge us and then they project that same judgment on to our organization.  If we are very professional, then they see everyone in our organisation in a positive light. If we are bumbling and disorganised, then they see our whole organisation the same way.  If we want the audience to believe our message, then they have to believe in us first.  This is why having credibility is so important when speaking.

If we overstate our organisation’s capabilities, it arouses suspicion and damages our credibility.  Remember this is the Era of Cynicism and fake news. Any time we make a statement, then we need to back it up with evidence.  The evidence has to resonate by being vivid, interesting and memorable.  We have to show the benefits of what we are suggesting because facts by themselves cannot be enough.  In particular, we need to show how they can apply these benefits in their own organisations.

We want to present a positive image of our organisation but how do we do this without it being rejected as corporate propaganda?  Being confident when we deliver the key messages makes a tremendous difference.  Uncertain speech, hesitation, struggling for words, using filler words like um and ah, all conspire to defeat our efforts to appear confident in what we are saying.  Fluency in delivery is what we need and that takes practice.  We don’t have to memorise great chunks of content.  We can use the slide deck for navigation purposes to guide us through the flow of the talk.  We just talk to the point of the slide, because we have designed this talk, so obviously we know what we want to say.

We must project tremendous enthusiasm.  I am thinking of two speakers who surprised me with their total lack of enthusiasm for their own amazing companies.  One was a luxury marque car brand and the other a resource captain of industry.  Both had phenomenal sagas of defeat and triumph, of business breakthroughs and of spectacular R&D success.  It would have been much more interesting if they had included these in their talks. They managed to replace these exciting stories with the bland and boring.  If they had spoken as if possessed with total belief in the righteousness of their company’s contribution to the world, they would have had much greater impact with their audiences.  They would have attracted fans for themselves and their companies.

The structure for a talk to impress an audience about our organisation looks like this:

Opening.  The opening has only one purpose. That objective is to create a positive impression so powerful, it breaks through all of the distractions occupying the minds of the listeners.  The first sentence out of the speaker’s mouth has to command our attention and interest. Pithy quotes, grabber statistics, total killer stories, will all do the trick.

Message.  We need to clearly state the key messages.  Within the first five minutes of the talk are the audience clear on where we are going with this speech?  Have we honed our key messages down to the bone, to eliminate psychobabble, pap and make sure we have eliminated our data dump proclivities.  We need to reiterate the most important message in the speech close, before we bridge to the Q&A and again, during the final close at the end, after the Q&A.

Evidence.  We must establish credibility and inspire trust, respect and confidence in what we are saying by using powerful evidence.  So often speakers make sweeping statements and audiences are left to ponder whether that statement about their company is true or are we listening to a re-incarnation of Joseph Goebbels, one of the most evil and notorious propagandists in history?  Carefully inspect every utterance where you are making a broad statement and then check to see if there is sufficient evidence accompanying it.  You will surprise yourself with how often we make statements and offer no proof whatsoever.

Closing.  As mentioned there are two closes.  Close number one, prior to Q&A is designed to capture the essence of your message, in order to reinforce its potency for the audience. The second close for after the Q&A is designed to leave the audience with a favourable, memorable impression of you, your organisation and your message.

The impress talk structure is not complex, but the delivery requires a lot of rehearsal.  Practicing on your audience is self delusion in the making.  So many speakers give their speech once – when they are in front of the assembled mass of sceptics, doubters, critics and cynics.  Anytime you are talking up your own organisation, then you are really asking for trouble.  Get the required fluency in the delivery, so that you are radiating confidence and credibility.  If you do that your message will be bought by the audience.  If you don’t, your personal and professional brands will take a big hit.  The choice is embarrassingly clear.