Have you heard of XiaoIce?  According to the media it is a “cutting edge artificial intelligence system designed to create emotional bonds with its six hundred and sixty million users worldwide”.  It already accounts for sixty percent of all global human-AI interactions, making it the largest. Here is the terrifying punchline, “It was designed to hook users through life-like, empathetic conversations, satisfying emotional needs where real-life communications too often fall short”.  It is claimed that the AI is better than humans at listening attentively. What?

Are our modern communication skills so atrophied, that we have to switch to a chatbot?  Is this a function of growth, off the back of the pandemic?  We are working from home, so many people feel isolated and as if there is no solid foundation in their human relations anymore.  This is ironic really, because today we are in the most “wired” ecosystem in history.  We have online calls, hand held mobile phones and multiple text chat options. How could we be suffering from a lack of connectivity?

The problem then is not the hardware.  Generationally, we can observe that the current younger generation prefers to text than speak. Texting is less complex than trying to phrase what you want to say on the fly.  Text is also less complex when trying to parse what the other party is actually saying.  We don’t have to interpret the voice tone or the cadence of the message.  Text is flat in tone and very fortunately editable before we send it.

The point about listening though is a good one – we have become very poor listeners.  The wonderful technology we have access to today is a double edged sword, because we are now chained to our devices and the days are twenty four hours long, with no respite.  We have our phones by the bedside, so we can connect to the internet immediately and we do.

What can we do to improve our communication skills?  Here are a few timeless Principles of successful communications.

1. Be a good listener.  Encourage others to talk about themselves. 

This sounds pretty easy, but we don’t do it.  We are so focused on ourselves, we stop listening to what the other person is saying.  We are churning the words around in our own mind, prepping for what we will say in the conversation, such that the concentration is on ourselves and not on the person speaking.

We don’t encourage the other person to speak either, because we want to do all the talking.  We think what we have to say is the higher priority and they are there just to hear us out.  We need to suspend our desire to do all the talking and instead just relax and let the other person do most of the talking.  People are so starved of being listened to, they will be so grateful that we allowed them to talk and they will regard us very highly.

2. Become genuinely interested in other people.

Sadly we are very selfish and are primarily interested in ourselves and what is going on in our lives. It is all “me, me, me”. The young people falling in love with the XiaoIce virtual chatbox are fooling themselves into believing that their emotions can be reciprocated by a machine.  They are seeking attention, someone to listen to them, someone to be empathetic with their situation. It is counterintuitive, but the best way to build relationships is to become “genuinely” interested in other people.  The key word there is “genuinely”.  If we do this, we will become part of their world and our world will improve as well.

3. Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.

The key word here is “sincerely”, otherwise it is just manipulation.  Our sense of self-worth is closely linked to how important others make us feel.  People with low self-esteem and low self-worth are now talking to chatbots, in a desperate attempt to feel better about themselves.

All they need is for us to communicate they are important to us.  Often we don’t do this because we presume “they already know that”.  Actually they probably need to hear it a lot more than we imagine.  So look for areas where we can recognise their contribution or their worth and most importantly communicate we appreciate them.

Chatbots are not a substitute for real human relations.  If our society degrades to the point where chatbots are the main source of human relationships then the end of civilisation is nye.  We cannot allow that to happen.  So let's start using these simple Principles and build real relationships with each other, before it is too late.

When I am running half day or full day training sessions there is no rehearsal. There is a lot of participant interaction in our sessions, so you need to have the participants for that bit, if you were going to do a rehearsal.  Instead, I plan the training down to the last second.  I have a roadmap of the training, which nominates precisely what will need to be happening at every minute during the training and I follow that religiously.  If the timing speeds up or slows down I know where I am relative to the plan, so I can make the necessary adjustments. I need to do that because we must not go over the time allotted for the training.  It is the same with speaking and presenting.  The organisers have a programme to get through and they absolutely don’t want the speaker to go beyond their allotted time.  Are you planning your talks down to the last minute?

What do we see?  Speakers who go too long on their subject or who go crazy and try to cram fifteen minutes of content into two minutes.  They start whipping through their slide deck like deranged people. Sitting in the audience, your head starts spinning because you cannot keep up.  Their point of departure is always, “I will need to move through this next section quickly”.  Why is that?  They knew from the start how much time they had and they knew that when they started the talk.

The “I will need to move through this next section quickly” statement is notification that this person is not professional.  Consequently, their personal and organisation brands suffer.  If they cannot figure out how to give a forty minute talk in forty minutes, do you really want them in charge of some work for you?  We also extrapolate their lack of professionalism to the rest of the people who work down there.  Without really thinking about it, we tar them all with the same brush, so this is a major unforced error we have here. 

The quality of your presentation also suffers because often you had some really killer content, but you cannot really utilise it fully, because you are moving so fast.  All of this self-inflicted reputational damage could easily be avoided if you spent time to rehearse the content.  When you allocate the time for the first rehearsal, you quickly realise that you have too much material for the length of time to present it or the other way around.  In my experience though, it is usually too much information and not a lack of information, which is the problem.  We have this great slide we want to use and oh, yeah, there is that other great slide too.  Before you know it, you have a perfect presentation for an hour, the problem is they have only given you forty minutes.

So instead of embarrassing yourself in front of others, you can make the adjustments beforehand.  The subsequent rehearsals can now focus on the delivery component.  There is always plenty to work on in this regard and it requires dedicated time.  What do busy leaders lack? Time.  The tendency is to short change the preparation for the talk and spend that time on something else.  This is a mixing up of priorities.  Most of that other stuff won’t be you in public exposing yourself to the world as a professional.  It will be internal projects, meetings and reporting, which are hidden to judgmental outsiders.

We need to get the content right, the timing within the limit and then we need to really impress the audience with our delivery.  Senior company representatives having to read their talks is unthinkable, but you still see it.  How shameful that you don’t know your business well enough to talk to key points and instead you read the whole thing to us.  Just send us an email with the text, and we can all stay at home and read it for ourselves.  You need to practice before you get in front of any audience.  What they should see is the polished you, the confident you, the persuasive you, not the frantic, disorganised you.

When rehearsing, video review yourself and have others give you “good/better” feedback. Polish the performance, because that is what it is, a performance.  When you understand that then your approach changes.  We remain business like though and don’t attempt to transform ourselves into amateur thespians.  We present as professionals, in our particular field of expertise.  If you can organise it, video yourself presenting live to the audience and then study that later for areas where you can improve.  Professionals rehearse, review, improve and above all else keep to the time allotted. Are you a professional?

Many Japanese companies have expanded their operations outside of Japan to enlarge their business, as the population decline guarantees to keep shrinking the domestic market.  Many multi-national companies have established a strong presence on the ground here, because they like the rule of law and freedom to conduct their business, without having to hand over their IP to domestic partners.  One of the things which keeps popping up as a request from Japanese and multi-national companies here is the challenge of how to ensure their Japanese leaders have more “executive presence” on the international stage.

What do they mean by “executive presence”?  Usually, they are asking their leaders to be better presenters by getting to the key points concisely, clearly and convincingly.  They want persuasion power.  A big barrier for Japan has always been speaking in English, the international business lingua franca.  Yet, this is not the major barrier to having “executive presence” when dealing internationally in business.

Mindset Inhibitors For Japanese Presenters

There are two mindset aspects which make it extremely difficult for Japanese executives to operate at the international professional presentation level.  One is perfectionism.  Japan is a country with no defects allowed, no mistakes tolerated and no errors entertained.  It is a product and service heaven for consumers here and totally aspirational for the rest of the world.  The idea that “we will make more money, if we allow for a defect rate of 5%”, doesn’t exist here and no CFO will ever be able to push this idea through the organisation. This “no error culture” extends to presenting in a foreign language. 

I had the same difficulty when I first started learning Japanese.  I would be forming the perfect Japanese sentence in my mind, all ready to go forth and launch it into the conversation, only to see the topic suddenly switched to something else.  I learnt to launch forth perfect or otherwise, if I ever wanted to be able to speak the language in public.  Japanese executives have trouble making that leap into imperfection and so are often very, very quiet in international meetings.  They often avoid giving presentations if it is possible and if they have to, then they love to read the whole thing, either off a script or off the slides.  Perfect English, but pretty boring and guaranteed to produce zero “executive presence”.

No “Braveheart Speeches” For Japan

The other mindset issue is that presentation skills are not as highly valued.  In the West, we still hearken back to Athens and Rome, to the great orators and their stirring speeches.  Hollywood has had a field day with this trope. In Japan, there were no Mel Gibson Braveheart style speeches being given by the warlords. Battle commanders would sit in a guarded, cordoned off area and receive reports and give orders from there, as the hostilities raged forth.  There were no modern movie style stirring entreaties, while riding up and down in front of the troops, urging them on to fight and win. The samurai leadership class didn’t make mass public speeches.  If the local authorities needed you to know something, they would post it on a notice board. 

Yukichi Fukuzawa, one of Japan’s most famous Westernisers, opened the Enzetsukan or Speech Hall on May 1st, 1875 on the campus of his new Keio University.  It is still there and you can visit it when travel resumes.  We could call this the foundation of Western style speech making in Japan.  That was only 150 years ago, so compared to Athens and Rome, public speaking is quite a recent phenomenon here in Japan. 

Standing in front of people and speaking has an element of assumed superior status, which usually requires the Japanese speaker to apologise at the start for standing above others, while everyone else is seated.  Often, when I was asked to give one of the 200 plus speeches I have given so far in Japanese, a table, chair and a microphone stand were automatically prepared.  The idea of standing and speaking was thought to be tiring for the speaker and it also got us all seated at the same height.  Quite clever because no awkward “status” faux pas were possible. Being confident and outspoken isn’t valued in Japanese culture. Here we should be humble, shy, modest and self-effacing.

Is There A Japanese Way Of Public Speaking?

Reading your speech, word for word, to achieve linguistic purity and carefully displaying no great confidence as a speaker is the accepted formula.  Not a great platform for achieving “executive presence” in an international environment.  Can Japanese become great public speakers?  Yes, but they have to overcome a few mindset issues first.  We teach public speaking here and sometimes will get pushback about the “Japanese way” of public speaking being different to that in the West. This is a false flag.  It is a wily justification for a lack of competence by poor speakers.  We are producing plenty of professional competent speakers in our classes, so we know it can be done and that Japanese executives can become excellent presenters.  There are common basics for effective presentations that will transcend national borders.

One of our arrogant faults in the mono-lingual, Anglo Saxon West is we presume people who are not articulate, especially in English and who cannot present well, are not up to snuff.  Big mistake.  Skill absorption is the key. With proper training, I believe every Japanese leader can achieve “executive presence”.  Some may take longer than others to throw off their mindset issues. Gaining proficiency means we will all improve international mutual trust and enjoy clearer communication.  This is really one of the last global frontiers for Japan. 

Many internationally oriented Japanese executives here, will eventually catch up in English communication skills.   Korean, Chinese and numerous other Asian nation’s executives, for whom the international language of English is not their mother tongue, have managed it. International conferences are where you realise the gap between Japan and the rest of Asia is vast. Japanese executives can certainly manage it as well.   It might be right or it may be wrong, it may be fair or unfair, but it is a reality. Being capable of giving professional presentations in English is how to garner “executive presence”.

I was confirmed into the Anglican Church when I was twelve years of age.  I remember it was the first time I ever wore a tie in my life. Prior to that, every week I had to ride my bicycle to the church after school and do bible studies with other kids with the Minister in order to pass the test to be able to confirmed.  My parents were not religious at all, but I guess because Christianity is such a central component to our belief systems and literature, that they wanted me to get the basics.

Years later I discovered Zig Ziglar, one of the most famous modern day sales trainers.  He was raised in the Deep South of America where bible studies is very big.  I have read his books and watched his videos.  I am fan.  I noticed he was an incredible communicator.  I also noticed that a lot of his sales stories where like the parables he would have read in his “red letter” bible, that is where the words attributed to Jesus are written in red.  Australians are not particularly religious like Americans are, but I did recognise the power of these parables in communication.  I don’t mean the actual quotation of the parables themselves, but the storytelling structure.

The parable structure always has a learning component wrapped up in the story being told.  Often in business, we want to achieve the same thing for our audience.  We might be giving a “persuade” speech rather than simple “inform” speech” or we may be calling for the audience to “take action” rather than just “entertain” them. 

The parables are always from real life, rather than being a confection created for effect.  This makes it easy for us to identify with the story.  When I mentioned going through the confirmation process as a child, I am sure many readers went through a similar experience, including those who are from Muslim or Buddhist religious belief systems.  Our real life stories make it easy to connect with our audience, because they can understand or emphasise with what we are saying.

The parables are also very easy to understand.  The message is crystal clear.  Do this and things will be good.  Do that and things will be bad.  This simplicity is what makes the storytelling so effective.  Zig Ziglar was a master of telling his stories which each had a lesson there for us in sales to absorb.  They were from his experience or the experience of others from the real world, not from the “how it should be world”. 

This is the danger when we become speakers.  We pontificate from on high, from way above the clouds, as if we were superhumans who never made a mistake or had a failure.  The ego has to be strong to tell a story against yourself.  We have grown up supersensitive to being criticised and so it is like kryptonite, we avoid it completely.  Criticising yourself sounds crazy, so we only talk about what a legend we are.

Zig understood that audiences love a good redemption tale. Of course we like to hear how to do things so that they go well, that parable is always in fashion.  Interestingly though, we often feel distant from this model story of bravery, perseverance against the odds, intelligence, strength and wisdom.  We naturally aspire to those things, but they can feel like they are a million miles away from where we are at this moment.  Now failure, disaster, train wrecks all feel much closer to our reality and of course we want to avoid those.  Parable stories on what no to do are much more popular than the ones on what we should be doing.

When things go pear shaped, don’t miss the chance to take a note on that for a future talk.  The events may feel radioactive at the time, but get it down on the record, so that you can retell it when the pain has subsided.  Particularly include the characters involved, the extent of the damage and the depth of the heroics or stupidity involved.  Don’t be limited to your own disasters.  Comb through the media and books for other people’s disasters, which can then be trotted out as a parable for doom and gloom. 

Storytelling master Zig Ziglar copied the parables, probably without even giving it a second thought, because it was so much a part of his cultural upbringings in Yazoo City, Mississippi.  As presenters we can find our own blue ribbon stories of triumph and catastrophe.  We can wrap these up in simple, true renditions of reality that our audience can identify with and easily recall.  The parables are well remembered for a reason – they work as a storytelling structure and we can adopt it for our own talks too.  In ten minutes, I bet you can come up with at least two or three good incidents that have parable like qualities, which can then be fleshed out into mini-stories of business good and evil for an audience.  Give it a try!

Whenever I hear that Jesper Koll, CEO of WisdomTree Investments Japan,

 is going to give a talk here in Tokyo, I want to attend.  I have heard him speak before and he is very good, so my anticipation level of another great presentation is high.  I am not alone in thinking like this and his talks are always packed. This underlines why being able to present at a professional level builds your personal brand.  The basis for a professional presentation is receiving high level training and then getting a lot of practice to hone the craft.  You might be thinking, “well I don’t get that many opportunities to give talks, so the frequency index is a bit low for me”.  Fair enough, but you can get the training and that is the starting point to get the speaking spots.  All professional business speakers did a lot of speaking for free, before they ever got paid.  In business, we will have to give excellent talks from the very start and then at every opportunity, to build our reputation. This is why the training needs to come first and the frequency becomes a consequence of the training results.

For those who are not in the “established reputation” group, which obviously is the majority, there are things we can do very easily to join them.  While we are working in our companies, there will be chances to give updates, reports, represent the section, etc., and this is where we need to start building our reputation. Fortunately, there is rarely a queue formed on the right to give these talks.  Most people hate speaking in public, because they have no clue what they are doing. They just bumble along, shuffling forward like the army of the dead reluctant presenters.  Good, keep bumbling.  That means we can get the opportunity to volunteer our services instead.

When the top bosses see you give your report and your slides are crystal clear, well presented and your delivery is really excellent, you will be noted as someone who can represent the firm.  It may not happen quickly, but don’t worry, those very same abilities as a competent presenter are also the requirements for leading others.  You are likely to be promoted in your firm because you are seen as a skilled communicator, someone with persuasion power.

Rising through the ranks opens up more possibilities for giving presentations.  Often the big bosses themselves hate presenting too and will be very happy to throw you the speaking spot.  Grab it every time.  Once you get into the public arena, other will start to notice you.  More invitations will come. I have never asked Jesper about this, but I will bet he wasn’t an overnight success as a speaker. I am sure he took years to polish his delivery. As you wise up to how the system works, you will start creating your own chances. You will be nominating yourself to give pertinent talks, on some worthy subjects for the local burghers.  Don’t let “imposter syndrome” hold you back.  Remember that 99% of people giving business presentations range in skill from average to rubbish.  You have every right to be out there and because you have received the training, you are automatically in the top 5% straight away.

Picking topics which are hot is a no-brainer.  This is where your copy writing skills are called upon to draft the gripping blurb advertising your talk.  Don’t rely on the hosts to do this for you.  This is your brand we are talking about here and you must have total control over how you are represented to an audience. This is what the people will see and on that basis they will attend, until such time as you are well regarded speaker and people will turn up to hear whatever you have to say regardless, because they are fans. 

This is what happens for me when Jesper’s name is bandied about as a speaker.  I just go straight to the signup page and register, without reading the finer details, because I know it will be good.  The other dimension is that not everyone will be able to attend your talk but many, many more will see the notification. They will start to associate your name with a particular topic.  In Jesper’s case it will be Japan’s economy, because he is an expert economist and that is what he talks about.  Your name in lights as an expert on a topic is part of building an audience and personal brand for the future.

When we get to the delivery stage, we can also build anticipation.  You are introduced by the MC, who is absolutely quoting from the brilliant introduction of yourself, which you prepared in advance.  I say “absolutely” because you need to nobble the MC beforehand and give firm instructions they follow the script and don’t go off piste. It should be brimming to overflow with credibility and this starts to build a positive anticipation in those who don’t know anything about you as yet.

When the MC introduction is finished and you are on stage, don't start immediately.  Just hold the proceedings for a few seconds, which by the way can seem like an eternity and then start. If you want to see an anticipation build of stupendous proportions, then watch the video of Michael Jackson, when he performed at the Super Bowl in 1993.  He didn’t move a muscle for one minute and thirteen seconds.  At that point, all he did was change his head direction to the left. He then held that new pose until the one minute thirty two mark and then he began his performance.  It takes a huge amount of guts to hold an audience for that long.  Well folks we are not Michael Jackson, so we can only hold our audience for a short time, but we should still hold them in order to build that anticipation.

Keep close the idea of creating anticipation in the mind of your audience and develop your presentations accordingly.  If you start this way, you can anticipate a lot of success for your personal and professional brands.

We normally think of omnichannel in relation to the medium being used to contact buyers.  We can also use this idea when thinking about planning our talk.  We automatically revert to the brain when we start this exercise.  Our logical, rational, analytical mode is needed but that is not enough for audiences.  We need heart, value and sex appeal for our messages to resonate.  We tend however to get stuck on the first rung of the planning ladder, the intellectual angle. We all know though that we are emotional creatures, running around justifying our emotional choices with a veneer of logic.  Our talk need to access all of our human instincts.

We need our brain to be working well. Logic is required to make the argument make sense to our audience.  It means we need to be piling on the evidence, proof, data, statistics and testimonials etc.  The navigation of the talk should be logical, so that it flows like a good novel, making it easy for the audience to follow where we are going with this content.  I have mentioned before a talk I attended, where the visiting VIP just rambled through this maze and mist of an esoteric discussion, peppered with his vague musings, which was totally impenetrable.  It lacked structure, logical flow and clear, concise communication.  It was totally self-indulgent. To this day, I still have no idea what he was on about, but his personal reputation and his organisation’s reputation were both shredded that day.

Some members in the audience will be analytical types who love the logic, the detail, the nitty gritty, the evidence and they will be happy to see it.  They will be calibrating everything we say and running it through their mind looking for inconsistencies, gaps, flaws and mistakes of fact. We will win this group over if we are well organised, however they are not the only personality type in the audience. We have to go omnichannel to appeal to other personality types.

Some will be more swayed by their hearts.  We need to get them in touch with their emotions and feelings during our talk.  Novels and movies are emotional engagement masterpieces in many cases.  We are drawn into the characters in the story and what happens to them.  I am a pretty logical guy, but I remember being captured by the heroine in the Japanese television drama Oshin.  Her rise from crushing poverty to running a massive retail empire was a true story, which appealed to my logical brain, but her travails were all pulling at the heartstrings.

We do not have multiple weeks like a television show or three hours like a movie or hundreds of pages in a novel to emotionally engage our audience.  We can have some elements of the human drama of what we are talking about.  Because we are in business there is absolutely no shortage of drama which we can relate.  There are the full spectrum of characters to draw upon as well, from amongst our colleagues, subordinates, superiors, suppliers and clients.  Everyone loves a gory tale of corporate value destruction, factional bloodletting spitting out winners and losers and the dirty deeds done dirt cheap by business nasties.

Another instinct is the gut and this is where we are appealing to value for money.  Is what we are talking about bringing concrete value to the audience.  Have we proffered some information or insight, which was previously unknown to them?  Are we making their business or personal life substantially better?  Are we tuning into the conversation going on in in the minds of the audience and suggesting questions which they want answers to and then magically unveiling the solutions?  The “what is in it for me” question is always the uppermost thought in an audience’s mind, when they sit there listening to us pontificate about a subject.  I attended a talk by a big shot executive from one of the largest companies in the world.   She was talking about personal branding, so she pulled a good crowd.  However, it instantly became apparent that she was talking about how to brand yourself within a mega monster of a company like hers, when the audience was full of punters from small to medium sized enterprises.  There were zero take-aways and zero value on offer that day.

The last omnichannel is sex appeal.  Is your topic sexy, will it fill the seats?  The title is always a key. A lot of thought needs to go into the best shorthand description which will grab attention.  Sometimes we need a provocative title to break through the daily detritus filling the minds of our potential audience members.  “How to” titles also work because we are flagging you will learn something if you attend. The delivery is another aspect of sex appeal.  We have to be excellent in giving the talk, looking for every opportunity to engage with our audience.  We want them thinking, writing down our stuff and often we have to branch into edutainment.  I am not good at snappy repartee, quick wit, zinger one liners or being a skilled raconteur.  I can tell stories though, which are interesting and insightful, which seems to get me by.

When we sit down to design the talk, we need to be asking ourselves, “have I got all of the omnichannel touchpoints covered for this talk?”.  We know people are quite various in how they absorb information and in their interests.  We have to do our best to appeal to as many people as we can in the one sitting.  In the end, it is the planning starting point which matters most.  If we plan to incorporate these four omnichannel     elements of brain, heart, gut and sex appeal, then we will be more successful.

Usually when we have an opportunity to make a presentation, we get busy thinking about what we will talk about.  The organisers may have set some rails by specifying the theme of the event or they may have asked us to speak on a particular topic.  We are busy and often we start with creating new slides and scanning previous presentations for slides we can recycle.  This is a poor strategy.  What do we bang on about to our staff – plan the event or the project before you get started on the nitty gritty details. However, we neglect our own sage advice when it comes to presenting.

Part of the planning process should involve boiling the key message down to a nub that cleverly, succinctly and concisely summarises the whole point of the talk.  Before we go there though we would be wise to consult others for ideas.  It is a bit odd isn’t it, because we are always recommending collaboration and crowd sourcing of ideas for projects.  How we seek those ideas though is a bit tricky.

Bounding up to someone for your presentation and suddenly saying , “do you have any ideas for this talk I am going to give” may not work all that well.  Teamwork featuring excellent levels of collaboration is a concept, a sacred concept in most firms, but rather undefined.  What is the environment for collaboration?  Are people’s ideas welcomed in your workplace?  Are we able to go outside the workplace and source broader networks for ideas?  Do we have trustworthy networks in the first place?

I had to give a keynote speech to a relocation industry conference in Osaka.  I called my contacts working in that industry and asked them about their issues, headaches and challenges.  I have never worked in that industry and neither had anyone in my company, so I needed that broader network to help me.  The irony was that after all the work I had put into crafting that piece de resistance , Covid put the whole event to the sword. I never did give that talk. It would have been brilliant of course!

Jokes aside, the idea of involving others is a good one, because we only know what we know.  “Two brains are better than one” is ancient wisdom, but how often do we avail ourselves of outside input.  I was getting my book “Japan Sales Mastery” translated and was struggling for the best title in Japanese.  My friend Tak Adachi and I were having lunch and I mentioned my problem.  He said why don’t you just call it “Za Eigyo” or “The Sale”.  My son, later said to me why don’t I drop the katakana for “Za” from the title and just use “The” from English, to become “The Eigyo”. 

This was a smart idea because I am an Australian writing in Japanese about selling in Japan, so the title combines both languages, to differentiate the book as a how foreigner would look at the world of sales in Japan.  I would never have come up with those ideas on my own, so it demonstrated the value of collaboration.

The problem is we all recognise this in theory and we should be applying it to our presentation preparations, but we turn the whole thing into a solitary affair.  We emerge from our cave, brandishing our slide deck and away we go.  Getting more input is a better road to take, but there are some caveats.  People we consult on the spot, will give us the very shallowest of ideas. We need to set this up, explain the theme and then fix a date a few days later, to allow them to digest the theme and work on some ideas.  We are looking for diversity of views here and are not going to make any snap judgments.  We should listen quietly – no interrupting, jumping in over the top of them or ending their sentences.  We then thank them and privately reject, modify or incorporate their ideas.

If we ask them to give some feedback on our ideas, always frame the response.  We want them to tell us what they like about it first and then tell us how we could make it even better.  Confidence is a key aspect when presenting and that includes the preparation phase as well.  This whole effort doesn’t have to take a lot of time, so we are not going to be caught in a time crunch and have to rush things, to be in time for the talk.  More ancient wisdom says we don’t plan to fail, but we often fail to plan.  We can incorporate more ideas into the preparation phase, if we simply plan for it.

The end is near.  The end of Covid that is, as we see vaccinations increase and get us all closer to herd immunity.  When will it end?  There probably will never be an exact end, but it will diminish and our lives will get back to something approaching normality.  That means we will be back in the meeting rooms and speaking venues to give our talks to live audiences.  We have gotten used to online talks, which are the supreme example of impersonal presentations.  The audience are a series of tiny boxes on the screen, some without their cameras on and there is no particular sense of interaction.  We are talking to a camera mounted 10 centimeters or more above where the faces are positioned, so we have little read on the audience reaction to our talk.

Using body language on screen is difficult.  In fact, it is so difficult that almost 99% of speakers don’t use any when they speak online.  They sit there talking and talking, but not involving their hands for gestures or using any facial expression.  Fake backgrounds have taught everyone that if you start waving your hands around they will disappear.  The secret here though is to use gestures, but just don’t wave them around like a pirate captain. When you do move your hands, move them slowly and keep the gestures in the upper shoulder to around ear height range, in order to be easy to see.

When we are live in person, we can rediscover all the benefits of using our full body to emphasise our messages.  When I see speakers standing behind a podium, so that they can operate their laptop or read from their notes, I always think what a waste.  A waste of energy, which could have been distributed to the audience through our full body.  We should move away from the podium and face the audience, so that we can draw on the power of our total body speaking techniques.

This includes using the three distances technique with the audience.  When we want to make a macro point, we can move slightly back from the audience, lift our chin up slightly and employ very large gestures.  When we want a neutral power position, we can be mid-stage and hold our chin level, while employing normal gestures.  If we want to make a micro point, we can move as close as possible to the audience, drop our chin down ever so slightly and use rather smaller gestures.

If it is a big venue, we can cover the left and right sides of the stage too.  When we move though, we should try to avoid speaking while moving.  Walking is a distraction, so we want to minimise this as much as possible and have the audience completely concentrated on our words alone.  We should walk naturally to the very stage apron on the left or right side, so that we are as physically close to that part of the audience as possible.  This physical positioning gives a greater sense of speaker and audience connection.  This is because we are showing we want to move to be with them, rather than remaining a distant, remote speaker on stage, clearly separated from the attendees.

Being in the room, we can now really use our eye power.  Online, we have to train ourselves to look at the camera, but it is a weird experience. The way it works with the technology is such that we cannot see the reactions on the faces below, because we are looking up at the camera lens.  Our talk may as well be delivered by phone, because we are not getting any feedback on the content of what we are saying.  In a live venue, we can see the faces of the audience and can make contact with their eyes.  We should be seeking to hold each person’s gaze, one by one, for six seconds.  This is enough time to make a connection, make the talk feel more personal, yet without the eye contact feeling too intrusive. 

Keeping the lights up, if we are using slides is key, because we want to see their reactions and we want them to see us too.  If any “helpful” individual decides to turn the house lights down while you are speaking, then stop speaking. Pause to build some tension in the room and then release the tension, by asking for the lights to be brought back up again.

We don’t have a chat function live, but you can ask your audience to raise their hands if they agree or disagree with some point you want feedback on.  It sounds funny, but when I have taught classes live, I miss that chat function. It gives you instant feedback from a large number of people and you can comment on their contributions and recognise them, as the chat input pops up onscreen.  Constantly asking the live audience to raise their hands or to all speak up is going to be a shambles. Of course, we have the live Q&A to deal with enquiries and further clarifications, so all is not lost.

At some point soon we will back live. I found there is a transition from the computer screen to the big stage and it takes a bit of adjustment to get back in the saddle. We need to dust off our basic techniques for speaking and be ready to boost our personal and professional brands.  Show time folks!

246: How to be a Star in Business Interviews

Being interviewed by the media can be a high risk affair, depending on the publication, the journalist and the business zeitgeist of the moment.  These types of interviews come up relatively rarely in business.  More common are panel discussions at business events hosted by Chambers of Commerce and more recently interviews on podcasts.  I have been on both sides of the microphone, so let me share some observations which may help you prepare for your interview.

Chamber panels and podcasts are usually not “gotcha” interviews, as we will encounter with some journalists doing media interviews.  Generally, we are going to be treated well and it would be rare that the interviewer really went after you.  Having said that though, we have to expect the interviewer to want to dig down deeper into something you have said.  This can be of two basic varieties. 

One is a high level statement you made where the context and detail is obvious to the speaker.  This may not be obvious to the audience though, so the interviewer will seek more detail and clarification.  In this case, that is not a problem, because we have the depth of mastery of the subject.  The other variety is a statement that may be accepted wisdom or it might be something we have said without giving too much thought to it.  This is when we will get into trouble, because as soon as the interviewer starts to dig in, it becomes plainly obvious we don’t know all that much about it and out pours fluff instead of substance.

The answer here is to talk about things you have experienced, read about in detail, have researched deeply or where you have listened to experts.  This sounds obvious, however we don’t know where we will go with the questions and we can be drawn to stray into areas where our intellectual coverage is pretty thin.  There is nothing wrong with honesty.  Just say, “I don’t have much to say on that subject because I am not an expert in that area. However something I do feel passionate about is…”. Don’t just end it with telling the audience you don’t know much, because we are starting to damage our personal brand. Avoid leaving the conversation hanging in the air with us having admitted we are babbling on about stuff we don’t know too much about. Immediately segue into an area where we are knowledgeable and talk about that.

Always seek the questions in advance.  With media people they will do that, but often they have a couple of silent assassins ready which they will hit you with unexpectedly, to throw you off balance, to gain their “scoop”.  Business panels and podcasts are usually not like that.  Generally, for panels, they will let you know, in general terms, what is the broad discussion they are looking for.  In the case of a panel, it is unpredictable where the conversation will move, but at least there are broad rails bounding the subject matter.  Again, it always better to say you don’t know, than trying to snow the organisers or the audience.  Instead make a comment about some aspect you do know well and preserve your expert status.

For podcasts, you should expect they will have a set list of questions and you should get those in advance.  If the interviewer says something like “I let the muse guide me”, then I wouldn’t recommend joining that podcast, unless you are massively confident about the subject matter.  Generally, there will be prior episodes, so you can get a sense of whether you are in the presence of real genius or a total nutter.  Often there will be a pre-meeting, to go through the episode theme and for them to get a sense of what sort of a guest you will be.  You can also get a sense of who they are too.

Prepare for the questions, but understand you won’t be able to read from notes.  The pace will move too fast for that.  You can glance at your notes, so it is better to have them arranged for easy reference, if you indeed need to do that.  Just having mentally calibrated the questions is usually enough.  Remember you are there because you know about the subject, so it will be easy for you to speak about it.

That is often the real problem.  We do know a lot about the subject and we talk for too long and say too much.  Media interviews are an area where the more concise you are the safer it is.  Panel discussion hosts don’t like guests who want to hog the limelight, so they will unceremoniously cut you off, effectively signalling to the audience that you lack self-awareness. Podcast hosts may just edit the hell out of you.  There is a balance, but being concise comes across a lot better than rambling.  If what you say is a bit too circumspect, the interviewer will draw you out further.  If you hear yourself talking too much, then you probably are, so you need to conclude your remarks on that point and stop.

Rehearse your remarks based on the questions.  Remember these are public occasions and just as you would rehearse for a public speech, you need to do the same for the interview.  This will help you to trim the fluff from your answers and polish them into succinct, clever responses which will shine a positive light on you.  This is just as much your personal brand as giving a keynote speech.  Your fellow panelists or rivals on other podcasts, won’t take this step. Think of these occasions in this way and you will definitely come across as a star.

One consistent issue which often pops up within companies requesting our training is achieving persuasion power with colleagues, bosses and subordinates.  Being unable to convince others to follow your requests, ideas and suggestions is highly frustrating.  Often the issue is how the topic is approached.  In this “time is money”, no patience, miniscule concentration span, twenty four/seven scramble, people drive you to get to your point.  If you are giving a presentation the big boss might bark out “Story, get to the point”.  We are taught at business school to start with the punchline and get that into the Executive Summary, right at the front of the document.  That is fine except it is ineffectual when presenting in person.

The punchline may be an excellent idea – “let’s increase the marketing budget by $1 million to fund campaigns to coincide with the end of Covid”.  The problem though is that the punchline is naked and has no protection attached.  As soon as we offer a statement, we suddenly transform our neutral audience into a raving band of doubters, sceptics, naysayers and critics.  Fair enough too, because we didn’t land the punchline properly.  Comedians don’t start with the punchline.  They set it up, they build the mental pictures for us so we can see the scene in our mind’s eye.  They plug in plenty of context, add interesting characters, nominate a location and secure the build up in a temporal frame for us.

When the punchline is unveiled it is congruent with the set up, makes a lot of sense and we laugh.  Why on earth serious, well educated business people would imagine they can just throw the punchline out there, with no context, background, proof, evidence, data and statistics is a bit of a mystery.  But they do just that and then get cut to ribbons by the baying crowd of non-believers.

Our communication skills have to be good enough that briefly, we can build the basis for the punchline. If we do a good job, the members of the audience are all sitting there thinking “we should fund a campaign to coincide with the end of Covid”, before we say anything about it.  The lead up has been so well constructed that given the background, the best way forward occurs to everyone as the most obvious thing needed.

We have to keep it brief though.  Storytelling is a big part of this, but these are “short stories”, not War and Peace tome like equivalents.  If we labour the point or go too long with the background, some grumpy attendees are bound to tell us “get to the point”.  So we need to have enough context, supported with tons of evidence, which draws out the needed next step. When we explain what comes next, everyone feels they already thought of that answer by themselves.  This is guaranteed to get agreement to the proposal.

The way we get to the structure of the talk is to start with the action we want everyone to agree to.  Having isolated out the action we investigate why do we think this?  What have we read, heard, seen, experienced something, which tells us this is the best solution.  There must be a reason for what we are recommending.  All we need to do is capture that information and add in the people they know, a place they can see in their mind, put it all in a time frame and definitely add in data, evidence and proof to back up what we are saying.

We start with the background and then we reveal the punchline but we don’t stop there.  Recency is powerful, so we want to control what is the last thing our audience hears.  We top it all off with stating the benefit of the action.  The action/ benefit component must be very short.  There needs to be one clear action, so that everyone can understand what we need to do.  Also, while there may be many benefits, we only want to mention the most powerful one.  If we keep piling on the benefits we begin to dilute their power with too much detail.  Clarity must be the driving ambition here.  If we put it into mathematical terms then 90% of the time we speak should be devoted to providing the richest context possible and 5% each for the action and benefit.

If we are doing a good job then by the time we blurt out the punchline the audience will be thinking “that is old hat, I knew that, that is obvious”.  If we can engender that reaction then we have done our job well.  Brief but powerful, clear and convincing - these should be our objectives.

Clients have some common problems with their Japanese leaders.  I know this because the same requests keep coming up.  This is across industries and companies and it is consistent.  Usually Japanese presenters are excellent at assembling lots of data and information.  They can really pack a lot into a few slides.  When they present it is like a waterfall of wonderous content, just flowing forth, without much structure or clarity.  Somehow the bosses have to work out the key points for themselves, because the staff’s job focuses on accumulating hoards of data and then putting it all up on screen.  The presenter is almost invisible, has low energy, speaks in a quiet voice you can struggle to hear and blends well into the wall paper. This doesn’t work so well in international meetings and Japan looks weak and ineffectual to the rest of the far flung company world.

We are battling two giants here.  One is the educational system and the other is Japanese culture.  I earned my Masters Degree here in Tokyo, so I have seen up close and personal what a high school education prepares you for and what universities do with that raw clay.  An argument could have been made, prior to the advent of the internet, that the ability to memorise vast quantities of information and regurgitate it on command was a serious capability.  We can find any thing very quickly today thanks to search engines, so having to memorise gobs of stuff isn’t as important as it once may have been.

I see it in my son’s education when he was at international High School here.  They were required to have laptops and everything was done online.  His generations’ issue is there is too much information. How do you find the best and correct data, how do you sort the wheat from the chaff?  Young people are digital natives, but they are all drinking from the firehose of all data every recorded, sitting just a few clicks away.

We teach our students to start at the end.  Define in as short a sentence as possible, the most important key message you want to impart.  This is not as easy as it sounds. You have to be brutal with yourself.  You have to eliminate all the nice to have, all the interesting to have and refine it down to the must have.  Just throwing up a lot of data on screen doesn’t require as much thinking, as refining the data into the gold nuggets for the audience.  Discerning the key message then allows us to build the structure for the argument and to align the necessary evidence in order to be convincing to our audience.

The first words coming out of our mouth have a powerful role.  Everyone seems easily distracted today, have miniscule concentration spans and are quickly bored.  So we need to say something that really breaks through that wall of indifference and grab their attention.  There is no point launching that blockbuster opening in a squeaky, unsure, timid little voice.  People will be flying for their phones to escape you.  No, we need a strong voice, standing or sitting tall if online, when we kick things off.  We have to be oozing confidence.

“But Story san, my English is so poor, I have no confidence”.  This is another trope we often hear.  Here we have Japanese perfectionism, no defect, no errors and no mistake culture colliding with the Education Department’s failed efforts to teach the population English.  Don’t accept that excuse.  No one cares about linguistic perfection in business meetings, except the Japanese staff when they have to speak in English.  Give them the “no grammar needed” escape jail card for the meetings, to give them permission to speak without fear and let the rest of us work out what it is they want to say.  We are used to this and are all pretty good at it.

Just being able to isolate the key take away and deliver that in a confident manner will be a revolution to business meetings where Japanese have to present.  Not having to wade through all the dross to understand the key point will be a relief.  Having one idea per slide will be a life saver for everyone – make this the iron rule for Japanese presenters.  This forces the selection of only the most important information to be shown.  The result will be a much clearer messaging effort and greater clarity around what exactly is that message.  Confidence sells the message, so the delivery has to be sold in that manner. 

Rehearsal is critical for Japanese speakers and so is coaching.  This applies to whatever language they are presenting in, because you can guarantee the issues will be present in both languages to a great extent.  When giving feedback to anyone, only look at two elements and tell them what they are doing well and then tell them how they can do it even better.  This will build confidence and create a momentum that will maximise capability.  What does all of this cost?  Nothing, so let’s get to it.

Once upon a time, we taught public speaking and presentation skills in a class room, with tons of people all seated together, right next to each other.  We moved to teaching everything LIVE On Line since February 2020, so what has been the difference?  Surprisingly, not as much as we expected.  The one big difference is the lack of opportunity to employ full body emphasis when presenting, because everyone is mainly sitting in front of a screen.  You can use a standing desk, but even so, the camera will cut you off at the thigh level, so we are not getting the full body power.  There are a few tricky things about gestures when using fake backgrounds, which by the way seems to be standard now.  What are the things that stand out most in the online presenting environment?

Smiling is definitely one which has disappeared, when people are on screen.  I don’t know why that is the case.  Perhaps we are more self conscious in front of a camera?  Or is this now such a serious business world that smiling is out of fashion?  Think of any online meeting you have attended recently and ask yourself was anyone smiling when they made their comments or gave their reports?  I was teaching a class on presenting skills online recently and what a difference it made when people would smile during their talks.  Not every subject lends itself to smiling of course but there are bound to be good news in there somewhere and that is the time to trot out that big smile of yours.  It is congruent with the content of the talk, so it works.  It is also such a connector with the audience, it really drives up the engagement factor with an audience.

We have all been doing these online meetings for 18 months now, yet most people still haven’t mastered the medium.  I know it is difficult, because the camera lens is 10 centimetres above the faces on the screen.  However, take a look at the eye line of the participants in the next meeting.  How many are framed in the screen so that there is a half body showing and their head is at about two thirds height on camera?  Many will still have their heads cut off and they are arranged at the very bottom of the screen, like they have been decapitated.  Or they will have the camera lens angle shooting straight up their nostrils – not an attractive look that one.

When we get the camera lens at eye line and we speak while looking at the camera, we are now using the medium as it was designed.  The camera can bring us into the world of the viewer and we can be speaking directly to them through the lens.  When we are looking down at the faces on screen we have broken off eye contact and we seem like we are looking down on everyone.  It is the equivalent of giving a face to face speech without ever looking at your audience, in fact you are speaking to the floor, the whole time.  Now I have seen speakers actually do that, but it is totally ineffective.  The same with the online world – talk to the people through the lens and you will get your message across much more impressively.

We mainly use our voices when presenting online.  Yet what about gestures?  Gestures can support what we are saying by bringing more physical energy to the point.  If you have framed yourself properly then you can use your hands on screen.  There are a few best practices though.  Firstly, don’t wave your hands around, because the fake backgrounds will disappear them at certain points. So, hold your hands at between shoulder and head height, so that they can be easily seen and hold the gesture rather than trying to move it too much.  Also, if you want to show some item on screen, use your own body as the shield and show it in front of you. The fake background won’t be able to disappear it on you when you do it this way.

Most people I see online, are using the same speaking voice range they use all the time in the in-person world.  When we are presenting we are no longer a part of the audience – we are on stage, be it in a venue or online.  That means we need to bring a lot more energy to what we are saying, in order to attract the audience to our message.  When we are online, we also need to compensate for the fact that the camera will sap 20% of our power and we will come across as having less energy that usual.  You may have noticed that most people speaking online sound like they are on “downers”.    We need to get that voice energy up and start directing at it a key words we want to emphasise in our sentences.  Not every word in a sentence has the same value, so we need to pick out key words and phrases and make them hot, by hitting them harder.

Most online presenters have a long way to go with this medium. The experience gained over the last year or so, hasn’t improved them, actually. They are still making fundamental mistakes.  These can be easily corrected and it just takes greater awareness and some practice to get it right.  So let’s think again about what we are doing here and how we are doing it.  Apply these ideas and you will immediately be in the top 1% of online presenters, simply because everyone else is clueless, hopeless and way underpowered.

“Naomi Osaka would have earned at least $200,000 dollars if she made the Top 16 in the French Tennis Open and would have had a $1.7million payday, if she won the tournament. Speaking to the media after each round, is why she gets paid the big bucks, so she should harden up and get to work”.   Some other commentators have focused on her “bravery to talk about her mental depression and her decision to forego the money, to take care of her mental health”.  I don’t fit neatly into either category really, because I get the “part of the job” responsibility in her chosen profession and I also salute her for talking about her mental health struggles, as a 23 year old young woman, facing a cynical, mercenary sports press.  For me, although she may be a sportswoman, her issues also apply to the businessperson who faces the very same dilemmas.  You are getting paid to represent the firm in the public arena, even if it is killing you.

I am not an expert on Naomi Osaka, but I do recall reading her comments about a year ago about her disinterest in becoming a skilled public speaker.  At the time, I thought that was a curious idea for someone in her line of work.  It is typical though isn’t it.  We start working in our chosen career and then as we rise through the ranks, we are given greater responsibilities and that includes speaking in front of others.  Did we sit down at a young age and survey our future career path and conclude that at some point in time, if we do well, we will have to give internal presentations, deal with the press, handle shareholders or represent the company by giving public business speeches.  No!  We just went to work every day and then one fateful day, the bell rang or the alarm went off and we had to make that first talk. 

I doubt whether leading tennis academies allocate any time to instructing their future stars on how to deal with the press, sponsors or the public.  It is the same in companies.  No one ever thinks about investing in your future, by training you on how to handle speaking in public.  In the same way that this inability or choice to not deal with the requirements to speak in public could be a career ending outcome for Naomi, it can also mean we are passed over at work, in favour of those silky smooth, confident, more professional speakers inside the firm.

Recently she wrote about withdrawing from the French Tennis Open, “I am not a natural public speaker and get waves of anxiety before I speak to the world’s media”.  I read in the press that she is worth $77 million, from sponsorships etc.   She has the money to get media training, presentation training and every other form of training needed to enable her to become a master of her environment and be able to deal with the gutter sports press.  Are businesspeople investing in themselves to become masters of their environment?  No.  Like Naomi they are just suffering.

No one is born a natural public speaker.  I know this to be true.  For the first 30 years of my life, I was terrified of public speaking.  Like a whipped dog, I hid in the shadows, praying I would not be called upon to speak in public.  As I rose through the ranks in my career, there came that point, that day, when the bell rang and I had to get up and speak to an audience.  Did I go and get training?  No!  It was some number of years before I took the plunge and got the training.  When I had the training, what did I think about it?  I immediately realised I was an idiot and I should have done this when I was much, much younger and at the start of my career.  Now, over 500 public speeches later, I enjoy it.

What was different between the old me and the new me?  My mindset changed and I stopped embracing my fears and inadequacies.  I stopped running away from the inevitable. The training gave me skills and the coaching brought out my confidence.  Repetition did the rest.  But your mindset has to be right to be able to get the training and to access the repetition.  Naomi Osaka is seven years younger than I was when I did my first talk.  I hope someone looking after her gets her a good coach and she can slay this public speaking demon limiting her career.  If you are in business and that same demon is confronting you, get the training and slay your career limiters too.

Video is tricky. However, it looks so simple.  You just stand in front of the camera and give your talk.  I don’t know why video saps twenty percent of our energy when it is actually broadcast, but that seems to be the accepted wisdom.  That means that just speaking normally into camera will now look a lot less energetic.  Getting the delivery to be fluent is also a challenge.  Either we do it free style or we use a teleprompter.  Both have their challenges.  What do we do with our hands?  This is an interesting one, because the camera lens seems to have some magic power to reduce our gesture self awareness to zero, until that is, when we see it played back in all its gory glory.

I broadcast three TV shows on YouTube every week, so I am doing a lot of video work.  My first weekly TV show was kicked off nearly four years, so I have gained a few insights over that time.  I am not from the media world or have any background in television.  I am a typical businessman who got into this by accident and so it is all pretty much self taught through exposure, practice and repetition.  Yes, I have the advantage of being a High Impact Presentations instructor for Dale Carnegie, but presenting to a live audience and doing it on video is totally different.  Everyone has discovered this fact since we all moved home, to spend a lot of our time in Zoom meetings or their equivalent.

I also teach people how to present to the camera and I have noticed a few things.  Invariably their energy is too low.  They are transferring their usual speaking volume to this medium and it doesn’t work.  They appear lifeless and boring.  No problem, speak louder, right?  That is what I thought too, but I noticed a lot of people find that daunting.  For them speaking with 50% more energy feels like they are screaming.  Remember we are subtracting 20% immediately to counter the camera lens energy deficit, but on top of that they need to bring even more energy to the talk.  If I ask for 50% more energy, invariably I will get about a 10% increase.  This is why having an instructor or coach is handy, because you can’t easily work this out by yourself.

Gestures seem to be another area of mystery.  What do I do with my hands?  The most common choice is to do nothing with them.  This is a big missed opportunity to bring physical power to support your verbal message.  I have found there is a 15 second window to hold the same gesture.  More than that and it become weaker and weaker and more and more annoying.  The gestures need to be coordinated with what we are saying, so that they are congruent.  If what we are saying and the way we are saying it don’t align properly, then our audience gets distracted.  Once upon a time, the distracted audience would be by focusing on our voice or our apparel.  Now it is on their phone.  For half body video composition, we need the gestures to be held between rib height and the head height, so that they can be easily seen.  For some curious reason, a lot of people hold their gestures at low waist level and apart from being difficult to see, this bit usually gets cut off in the editing process.

What we are doing with our face also is important.  Having one facial expression may be very energy efficient, but it looks wooden on video.  Our face should be showing what we are talking about.  If results are good, then look happy.  If they are bad, then look concerned.  If you ask a rhetorical question, then look puzzled.  I think you get the idea.  One thing the camera doesn't like is when we drop our chin down, while we are talking.  It looks like we are talking down to our audience, we also look very constrained.  So we need to keep that chin up the whole time.   Try it for yourself and you will be amazed at the difference it makes, to how we come across to our audience.

If we are just speaking off the top of our head, then we had better be pretty good or the video will be butchered in the editing process, as we have to stitch all those corrected mistakes together.  It becomes very jerky in the final version, which is super distracting from our message.  Zooming in and zooming out at these edits makes it appear less choppy, but you still don’t want too many of these to have to contend with. 

Teleprompters can fix this and a bit of adjusting for font size and speed is needed to find the right balance.  The secret here is to only look at the left side of the screen as the words roll up.  Otherwise, you will find yourself reading from left to right and on screen you will look like you are reading it.  This rather defeats the purpose doesn’t it.  Have a look at my shows on YouTube and see if you can tell I am reading it off a teleprompter?  Remember, our peripheral eyesight is good enough to focus on the left side and still read the words which are on that same line off to the right.

Video is a different game and we need to make this medium a winner for us.  Try these hints for yourself and your image and impact will be much improved.

Too smooth politicians, silky salespeople, urbane company thrusters all set off alarm bells.  We can meet impressive people and we can meet impressive looking people.  Over time we have learnt how to plumb the difference.  The world of presenting is made up of the top 1% who know what they are doing and the 99% who have no real clue.  The 99% group are often card carrying sceptics, who have finely tuned radar for anything that looks different to what they know.  Also, by definition this clueless 99% are our audience when we present.  Are we in danger of turning them off if we come across as too professional?

This is certainly the case in Japan.  Standing out and being outstanding are not welcomed here.  The most insightful cultural norm in Japan is captured in the traditional wisdom of “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down”.  Owning the auditorium, dominating the podium, being a powerful stage presence are all “nail sticking out” issues.  Looking supremely confident, being Mr. or Ms. Smooth, operating at a high level, are all viewed with suspicion.  We have a similar idea in the West. When we meet a “smooth talking salesperson” we get worried about them taking our money.

Japanese culture appreciates humility, harmony, group consensus, not putting yourself forward and modesty.  Hello to all of our American fans out there.  This Japanese viewpoint is absolutely the formula for not getting ahead in aggressive, competitive societies.  Interestingly enough, as an Aussie, I think this Japanese approach is close to our cultural norms too.  In Australian parlance, someone who “big notes” themselves is a self aggrandising, big talker and they won’t get very far Down Under.  A Donald Trump telling everyone how rich he is, how smart he is, would be impossible for an Australian politician to replicate.  As presenters, we operate within the bounds of our cultural rules and limits.

So how do we do a professional job of presenting in Japan, when the whole ethos is against the display of high levels of professionalism?  There is a difference between being very professionally prepared and being a boring oaf on stage.  Talking about yourself, except in terms of self-degradation, is out.  That means we frame what we say about ourselves from a more humble lens.  We do design a blockbuster opening though, to capture audience attention.  We do set up the flow of the talk, so that the navigation is simple and easy to follow.  We do provide evidence to back up any assertions we make.  We do prepare two closes, one for before and one for after Q&A.  We do rehearse numerous times to perfect the content, polish the cadence and make sure we are on time. In other words, we are a total professional in the way we prepare the presentation.

The friction points arise by the way we carry ourselves.  I have lived here for 36 years and I have never seen a Japanese presenter stride confidently to the podium or the microphone.  They walk slowly and hesitantly to the stage centre, stooping, wearing the greyest of the grey clothing, so they can be as boring as possible.  They open up immediately with a series of apologies, to establish that they are not superior to anyone in the audience, even if they are. 

I can’t see me doing any of that when I am presenting.  I will be a little more conservative in my dress, only because I don’t want a pocket chief or tie or shirt ,to compete with my message.  I won’t be bounding up on to the stage like a panther ready to devour my audience.  I will walk tall, with subdued confidence and go straight into my opening, without any time wasted on getting the tech right.  There will be no microphone thumping because I will have tested it all before the event started.  I won’t be fiddling around to get my slide deck up, because I will have someone else doing that for me, while I use those first few vital seconds to engage my audience.

I won’t be making any faux apologies for my poor preparation or poor public speaking ability, because I will be moving straight into explaining the value the talk will bring to the listeners.  I won’t be making flamboyant gestures or utilising any thespian artifices.  I will be business like and focused on helping people through the messages I am delivering.  The way I deliver the talk will be congruent with the content.  It won’t feel slick, but it will feel competent and that is what I want, in order to have my messages accepted.  I won’t attempt to be sardonic, cynical, use any idioms or try to be an amateur stand up comic.  By Western standards, I will come across, as an understated expert in my topic.  By Japanese standards, I will come across as a confident, but business like person, dedicated to their message for the audience.  I will have threaded the needle between the two extremes and that will be a good result.

English versus mathematics?  Easy choice for budding engineers at High School and for when they get to University.  Science is logical, knowable, understandable.  Presenting seems to have little in the way of science and more art involved, so best avoided.  Actually they do a pretty good job of avoiding it, until a certain stage in their careers.  These days clients want to talk to the engineers, so they have to front up and visit the buyer with the salesperson.  If the counterparty is another engineer, then the code is in place and everyone is fine.  Line managers, decision makers, CFOs are different beasts and more difficult.  Even more annoying is the client conducts beauty parades to decide which company’s engineers they are going to select.

This is where the skilled engineer who can present in a skilled way eats everyone’s lunch.  One engineer mumbles, rambles, doesn’t look confident and is struggling with basic coherence.  The other is clear, concise, in command of the material and making the key points like a legend.  Well, the choice for the buyer is made pretty easy.

In other cases, the engineers get promoted and have to represent their section to the senior leaders in the company.  This is often when we get a call.  “Can you help us please.  We have a great engineer leading the team but his communication skills and presentation skills are dismal and the senior leadership have tasked HR to fix the problem, by finding a training company who can help”. 

This sounds good but it is often a difficult task.  The major issue tends to be a lack of awareness around the importance and value of presenting.  These skills are soft skills rather than the hard skills, which their profession demands. They can see them as a bit “fluffy”.  Presentation skills are very much in the eye of the beholder too, so opinions can vary regarding what is a good presentation.  This lack of agreed, concrete measurable aspects can be an anathema to engineers.

Fluffy or otherwise, persuasion power is a real thing.  This requires good skills in the design of the talk, the gathering of evidence and in the delivery.  Design here means does the talk flow logically resulting in a clear conclusion, that is credible, because of the evidence assembled to support the main argument. 

Ace engineer or not, if we start the presentation with a lot of fiddling around with the tech, there is a strong chance our audience is distracted and reaching for their phones to find something more interesting to do.  We have to know that this is the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism and attention spans are functioning at microscopic levels.  No matter how brilliant our evidence is, we will have lost many in our audience in those first few vital seconds, as we establish that first impression between speaker and listener.  Online is even worse because now everyone is granted a free license to multi-task in the background and ignore the speaker.

Our opening has to be a gripper, such that the audience want to hear more, they want to know where you are going with this presentation.  We must speak clearly and confidently.  Easier said than done for laconic engineers, who are not prone to speaking a lot.  Also, not doing a lot of presentations or probably, avoiding to do presentations, has left a confidence vacuum that is filled with nervousness.  Sounding confident to an audience when you are not requires a level of thespian ability, which is usually beyond the grasp of hard skill trained engineers.

Rehearsal is the saviour here and lots of it is required.  We don’t want to spend all of our time building the slide deck.  The delivery is what sells the message and that relates straight back to the fact we have to buy what we are saying first and then communicate that belief to the audience.  If we don’t understand the power of persuasion, we are likely to fluff off the rehearsal component of making the speech professional.

I have never been able to trace this supposed Japanese saying but it does sound good, “more sweat in training, less blood in battle”.  Let’s make our mistakes in practice, get the talk timing right, work on the cadence, the order and the delivery.  If we have the right mindset, then good things will happen and all of these other pieces of the puzzle will fit into place nicely.

Everyone is getting very swish with the tech these days, as we spend more and more hours in online meetings.  Consequently, we are more and more likely to find ourselves in a breakout room to discuss a topic.  When we first started doing this March 2020, as we ran our first LIVE On Line training, we discovered some disconcerting things about the medium.  In many cases they were disparate individuals from different companies and also sometimes disparate individuals from different sections of the same firm.  Initially, we found sending people who didn’t already know each other into breakout rooms perplexed them. For the breakout room captives, there was no hierarchy, no psychological safety and no trust.  Many times, three people in a breakout room would just sit there for three minutes and say absolutely nothing to each other. 

We learnt we had to set up some social order and ground rules for them.  We needed to tell them that a certain person will be in charge of the reporting for the group. That person will keep a record of the points raised and we also nominated another person to lead the discussion to create the points. This left everyone else to be a contributor, with the expectation they would do just that and respond to the leader’s request for their opinion.

We also found that groups were unclear about the exact point they were discussing.  We may have believed we explained it perfectly well, but often they were not sure what to talk about.  Part of the reason was that when they heard they were going into a breakout room with strangers, their minds stopped listening to the instructions.  Now they were focused on who would be in the group, how would they be perceived by strangers and how would they be judged for what they said in a public arena.  With all of this front and center in their minds, the details of the question had receded into the background.

So we asked for a green check or a show of hands, around who understood what was happening.  We would then call on some of those people to tell us the protocol for the breakout room and repeat back the question or issue they were going to discuss.

The third thing we found was that we had to enter each room and just check that there were no questions.  If there were none, then we would leave them to it and move to the next room to check.  Surprisingly, even with all of this formatting going on, we would still enter a room to hear stone cold silence, with no one playing their designated leader role.  If this was the case, we would become the leader and get the conversation going amongst the participants.

I thought this was just Japan, but lately I have joined a study programme run by a global online education organisation.  We were sent off to breakout rooms and it became obvious that most of the people participating from all around the world, really hadn’t a clue how to interact in that situation.  Part of it is language, as English was not the mother tongue FOR some of the participants.  However, many of the factors which applied in Japan were also in evidence around shyness, lack of hierarchy, being judged and trust.

So, if you are sent off to virtual oblivion in a breakout room, here are some tips on how to get the most out of the situation.  Seize that initial shy silence and be the one to introduce yourself and say where you are from.  Next, talk about how much you are looking forward to learning from the other members of the group.  “ I am not an expert in this area and so please give me feedback, if what I am saying makes no sense. Also, let’s all take full advantage of this chance to help each other grow.  So, who would like to get us going and give a comment on the question?”.  That takes about thirty seconds to explain.  If nobody feels sufficiently comfortable yet to kick things off, then you lead with your prepared comment.  I say “prepared comment”, because before this session you have gathered your ideas into a series of bullet points, which you can easily to talk to.  You are not trying to wing it and make stuff up on the fly.  Being prepared is much better than trying to be a spontaneous genius.  And the rest of us can tell the difference.

By being active and asking questions of others in the group, people start to feel more comfortable and free to express their ideas.  It is a good idea to praise people’s contributions, by saying, “Great insight there, referring to XYZ.  Could you go a bit deeper on that point please, I am keen to hear more”.

When you speak, be concise, clear and please don’t try to hog the airwaves.  Say your piece and then ask others for their ideas and comments.  In this way, your reputation as a person of value goes up and your humility is noted and appreciated.  No one enjoys the blowhard who wants to spend the majority of the time making sure everyone else has to listen to their voice.

“That has to come out”.  “Why?”.  “It might offend women in the audience”.  “But this example is totally in context with what I am saying”.  And so it went on.  This was my first bruising encounter with cancel culture.  Living in Japan this third time since 1992, I have been outside the cancel culture debates sweeping America.  Until now.  The speech I was going to give would be videoed and go global, including to America.  Perplexed, confused, insulted – these were the emotions I was confronting upon hearing I had to make that specific change to my speech.  It got me wondering about our ability as presenters to present our thoughts in public.  What does this mean for the future of public speaking?

Living in Japan, I had vaguely heard of cancel culture.  I understood it to be mainly centered on Universities where students were confronting their Professor’s ideas and comments they disagreed with.  I had read in the media about youthful tweets and social media postings coming back to haunt the authors many years later.  I cannot say I ever expected to be cancelled. 

The offending item was an image objectifying women in Japan.  A photo of a maid café young lady done up in a frilly miniskirt in fact.  At her request, I took my anime besotted teenage daughter to visit a maid café in Akihabara when she was visiting from Australia a number of years ago.  The image in the photo corresponded with the outfits I saw being worn by the staff, so the image in question was congruent with the maid café experience.  That is to say it reflected a reality, a truth, we can see any day of the week in Akihabara.  Apparently, such a confronting picture would be too much for women located outside Japan and in particular those living in the USA.

The speech topic was on Diversity and Inclusion in Japan.  The main issue here is gender inequality, although sexual orientation has become more prominent lately.  The context of this speech was that the comment by ex- Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori about women on boards talking too much, can be traced back to the Confucian idea of a woman’s place in society being there to serve men, throughout all stages of their lives.  The maid café photograph was an example of how these women are being objectified to serve male fantasies in the modern era and therefore, there is still a long way to go for women in business to achieve gender equity here in Japan.  The photograph was totally in context with the text and was not supporting the objectification of women, in fact the precise opposite.

So, being told it had to be removed was incomprehensible to me.  I argued about the photograph being in the context of the text and that the central argument I was making made it all congruent.  This next pushback  was the snapper for me:  “Women seeing the photo alone would be offended.  There was the danger they would not pick up on what you were saying in the video and may misinterpret your meaning”. 

“Wait a moment.  You are saying they are not smart enough, intelligent enough to discern the context of what I am saying and therefore the photograph and that paragraph have to be cut?”.  That struck me as being totally chauvinistic and condescending to women.  By now you will have worked out I was having this conversation with another man.  He reported back to me that he had discussed it with some female leaders in that organisation and the consensus was that I couldn’t include it.

Here is the dilemma we are going to face – do we agree with this cancel culture putsch or do we stand our ground.  I felt this was a matter of free speech, free expression and I really struggled with whether I should buckle under this request for removal pressure or should I fight. 

If I remove it unintelligent people win.  If I refuse to go ahead and recuse myself on the basis of the principle of free speech, unintelligent people win.  If I fight, then I create powerful enemies and get bogged down in the cancel culture wars.  Where is the line regarding what is acceptable and what is not?  Who is the arbiter of the line location?  How do we deal with committees making these decisions?  Are they representative of the masses or are they wannabe oligarchs calling the shots?

I removed it.  But I have been feeling very uneasy about that decision ever since.  I have so many thoughts flying around in my brain about this cancel culture issue and I cannot get them to fly in formation as yet.  This was an eye opener for me.  I often make the point that we speakers and presenters live in the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism.  It would appear we are also living in the Epoch of Cancel Culture.  What do we do?  Pick our fights?  Assemble the barricades on principle on every occasion?  Fight or fold?  I folded, but I regretted it. 

What about you?  When the cancel culture brown shirts turn up, what is your plan?  “What is that you say, no plan”.  Time for all of us who speak and present to make a plan, I would suggest.  If you have any bright ideas on resolving this enigma, please let me know!

Our event speaker was a well-coiffed and well appointed senior executive in one of the world’s biggest corporations.  The topic was on building your personal brand. It was a good crowd.  Anticipation gradually turned to disappointment though, as the talk unfolded.  The talk was on how to project your brand “within” this gargantuan monster. How to climb their thousand foot greasy pole.  Before we started, I had “worked the room” pretty thoroughly, combing the ranks of the assembled professionals for any potential clients.  None of them worked for this type of colossus, so the speaker’s sage advice missed the mark entirely.  How could that be, I thought to myself?

Who Is In The Room?

One of the big mistakes for a presenter is not understanding who is going to be in the room.  At what level should you pitch your content?  Are they experts, amateurs, dilettantes?  At the least, ask the organisers for the attendees company name and their positions. If our speaker had done that, it could have become more relevant to those who took the trouble to attend. 

Our Purpose Is?

We need to make a decision about what is the purpose of our talk.  Are we here to inform, entertain, inspire or persuade?  The hosts give us the overall theme. We now analyse our audience, so that we know what angle we should select.  In this previous case, it would have been to “inform” and in that sense the speaker got it right.  An inspire speech will be totally different to a persuade or entertain speech.  Think back to the presentations you have attended. What was the speaker’s approach? Was it just a jumble, a catch all effort?  I am putting my money on “jumble”.

First Three Seconds

We have three seconds to grab our audiences’ attention and create a positive first impression. It has to be powerful enough that they don’t seize their phones and escape from us to the siren calls of the internet.  Why three seconds?  Over the last five years I have been asking class participants, how long does it take you to form a first impression of someone new.  The answers used to range from five minutes to thirty minutes.  Today, they tell me three seconds, five seconds, fifteen seconds.  It is shocking how little time we actually have, so our opening has to be well planned or we will have lost the room.

The Age of Distraction and The Era of Cynicism. 

Audiences are quick to judge, slow to trust and fast to flee from our presentation. We need to have a blockbuster opening. Something that will stop them in their tracks. However, what do we see presenters doing with those first few vital moments?  They are not actively engaging their audience because they are head down, hunched over their laptop, fumbling with their slide deck to get it up on screen. At the next presentation you attend, count the number of first impression killers the presenter is exhibiting.  Have they managed to capture your total attention from the very first few seconds or are you reaching for your phone?

How To Begin

Rehearsal is such an obvious point, but it almost never happens with business presenters.  This one thing will change everything about how the talk is received and how you will be perceived.  Get there early and check all the equipment. Also have someone else load your slide deck for you, if it can’t be primed ready to go.  We need to be 100% present with our audience, so reduce all friction impeding that result. 

Begin by picking out someone in your audience half way back and around the middle of the venue.  Make direct eye contact with that person and for the next six seconds speak to them, as if you were the only two people in the room.  Then at random, move to the next person and just keep repeating this six second process for the entire presentation.  Why six seconds?  Anything less and it doesn’t give you enough time to engage that person one on one.  However, continuously staring at someone burns into their retina and becomes too intrusive.  We want to directly engage as many people as possible in the time we have, so our engagement time split is important.

Wrap Your Information In Stories

We want our message to be fondly recalled, savoured like a fine wine and fully imbibed by our audience.  Many speakers, particularly technical presenters, have deluded themselves into thinking the data is all. They believe they get a free pass on needing to be a proficient and professional presenter, because the quality of their information trumps everything else.  Not true. The audience will remember two things – you and the stories you told.  Sadly none of that cool data you have cavalierly tossed up on screen is retained. 

They will remember you as someone they would like to hear from again or not.  The data wrapped up in stories is the way to make sure your key points are heard and remembered.  Even if they are enjoying your talk, some in the audience have no shame about brandishing their phones to do some multi-tasking and surfing the internet.  Stories stop them in their tracks and they will switch back to us.  Here is the snapper though, how many speakers have you heard use stories well or at all?  If it is so effective, why are speakers just droning on about the details?  They just don’t know and it shows.

The good news is that the speaker proficiency bar is so low, we can easily shine by just avoiding some of these simple mistakes.  We make it hard for ourselves unnecessarily. We want to be a gold medal winner, but finish up being a prize dud.   The choice is yours, so which will you choose for your next presentation?  Why not go for being a winner, a presentations Olympian, every time you speak.

This is horrible.  Man, this is so bad, what were they thinking?  I am watching a video of a leader asking for some major changes to the organisation’s finances and he is doing a woeful job of it.  They have a dedicated Coms team, there are talented people in the leadership group, so I am asking myself how could this train wreck come to pass?  I was also thinking, “you should have called me, I could have saved you a lot of wasted opportunity with your messaging”.  Too late now, the video is out there for all to ignore.  This is a classic case of people who don’t spend any time appreciating the importance of communication and presentation skills, suddenly going for the big ask and then falling flat on their face.

It was serious subject, a heavy subject and the background chosen for the video was given zero thought.  When you are asking for a truckload of dough for a project, you want the background oozing with solid credibility.  You need to look Presidential, capable, considered and trustworthy.  That lightweight scene setting wasn’t given much thought but the talking head only occupies a small part of the screen.  Having people moving around in the background distracts us from the key message.  No one thought about that either.  They should have told those people to buzz off for ten minutes, so the video could get done.

The camera saps twenty percent of our energy.  If you are a low energy leader, you can come across as cadaverous.  You need to ramp up the speaking power.  If the message requires convincing people about spending more money, then you really need to amp it up, to come across as confident, considered and competent.  The body language, gestures and voice modulation need to be on point.  Hitting key words is a must, as are carefully thought through pauses.  We need these to allow the audience to absorb what we have just said.  Rolling thoughts over the top of each other leaves the viewers lost.

The camera is also unforgiving.  If you can’t hold its gaze, then you look like a shifty Souk merchant trying to sell us some dodgy, dud stuff.  You have to look straight into the camera barrel and keep looking at it the whole time.  You don’t want to be sitting too close to the camera when you are doing this though.  A massive close up of your dial isn’t going to work for most people, so better to back up a bit.  It also allows for gestures to be used and more importantly, to be seen.

Looking away, looking down and looking at your notes are a no no.  If it is an important occasion, a key topic, the big ask, then do what the world’s leaders have learnt – use the teleprompter.  You need to refine the script and then read it, word perfect, while looking straight into the camera lens the whole time.  This takes some practice, some effort in the preparation, rather than just pulling up a chair and free styling in front of the camera for a “once over lightly” approach to a serious subject.

I will never forget a gorgeous young American woman I saw on YouTube.  She was the complete package.  She was teaching people how to use the teleprompter.  However her eyes were obviously reading across the screen left to right following the text.  You don’t want that.  You need to be able to zero in on the lens and read the text at the same time.  That takes some time to get right.  You also have to play around with the teleprompter speed setting as well, to find the right cadence for your talk.

There were no gripping stories to give us hope. Just a dry rendition of what he wanted to tell us.  The visuals were not clever.  Cherry picking the minimum damage case smacks of the carnival barker and snake oil salesman.  Show us the real numbers, so there is more honesty about the proposition here for us to consider.  He was trying to be too clever by half and failing miserably.

Our errant, non-persuading persuader really murdered the message.  Once it is done, it is out there.  His personal and professional brands both took a massive hit thanks to that video.  His messaging missed the mark and I doubt people will be persuaded to join him on his programme. 

I am not super opposed to his offering, I get it, but I am vaguely insulted by the lack of professionalism. If he can't get this right, how can I expect he can get anything else right.  It is the remaining coffee stain on the pull down tray in the aircraft when you board, that gets you worrying about whether they can actually do a professional job on engine maintenance if they can’t get this simple thing right, why should I trust them with complex things?

There is no excuse for this exercise in bungled communications.  In this day and age there is so much information available on presenting skills, it is staggering.  For example, in my own case, I have broadcast over two hundred and twenty pieces on the subject, for free, over the last four years.  Don’t allow yourself to become part of the casualty ward of failed suicidal persuaders and communicators inflicting mortal harm to their brand, through lack of awareness and preparation.  Get the training now, so that when it is time to step up and be counted, you can carry it off with aplomb.

There are 13 common mistakes which prevent presenters from owning the room. Here they are - don't do these things!

1. Thump the microphone and ask if people can hear you down the back - get there early and check the tech

2. Have no idea who is in the audience. Find out the experience and expertise level of the audience, so you are not pitching too high or too low with your content

3. Plan the presentation properly. Don't spend all of your time assembling the slides. Design from the close - get it down to one sentence, then think about how you are going to prove it and assemble the evidence. Finally, design the opening - it has to blast through everyone's distractions, so that people can concentrate on your key points.

4. Don't rehearse at all or not enough. Spending all your time on slide production isn't the priority. Practice the speech, check the length, work on the cadence and phrasings.

5. Don't connect presenting to personal brand. Every time we present people are judging us and our firms. If we are good, they think highly of the whole organisation. If we are a dud, they doubt the whole organisation.

6. Don't convert data into relevant stories. Recalling data is hard, but we are genius at recalling stories - ergo, turn your data into a narrative.

7. Not enough power when presenting. Speaking to someone sitting next to you requires a certain level of volume and energy. Speaking to a large audience requires a much higher level of volume and power output. Don't let your sentences trail off and die. Finish with power.

8. Know how to dress for the presentation. Your face has to be the central piece of the presentation - not the slides and not your tie or scarf or pocket chief. If it is a more casual environment, then dress down appropriately. If it is more formal, then full business battle dress is the way to go.

9. Don't nail the first impression. Today, you only have two seconds to form that first impression. Pay very careful attention to how you start. Get straight into it and then thank the organisers after that introductory piece.

10. How to handle Q&A. Understand that Q&A is a street fight - that means there are no rules. If you get a tough or hostile question, then don't answer it immediately. Pause, paraphrase the question, taking the heat out of it, pause again and then respond. You will have bought yourself around 10 seconds of thinking time this way. Your first idea straight out of your head will be relatively poor, but your considered response will be much better.

11. Don't know how to use slides correctly. One colour is preferable with a maximum of two. Use one font. Whatever is presented on screen has to be understood in two seconds. If it is too complex, then strip out the data and put that on a different slide.

12. Can't control nerves. The brain senses fear, it starts pumping adrenalin into your body. Your pulse goes up, you start to feel hot, your palms start to sweat, your knees start to quiver and your stomach feels queasy. You cannot control the release of the adrenalin, but you can control the reaction. Out of sight, do some vigorous pacing to burn off the nervous energy, then sit down and do some deep, slow diaphragm breathing. This lowers your pulse rate and you start to cool down.

13. Don't know how to keep audiences engaged. This is the Age of Distraction, so we presenters have never faced such difficult challenges as we do today. Use silence as a pattern interrupt for those who have escaped us. They will think the talk is over and return their focus to us. Ask people to raise their hand to get them interacting, but don't over do it. Ask questions, which are in fact rhetorical, although the audience won't be sure, so they are mental concentration answering your question.

Succeeding Shintaro Abe as Prime Minister, Yoshihide Suga has now been thrust into the public arena in a new dimension.  When he was the Cabinet spokesman, he made a valiant effort to say as little as possible at press briefings, be defensive and always treat journalists with complete disdain and disregard.  He didn’t need to be appealing or a good speaker, because his job was to look down the whole time read from the prepared script in a monotone and obfuscate at all turns.  Actually, he was the “black hole” of public speaking, drawing all of the press energy into the void and just extinguishing it.  Maybe you will replace your boss one day and have to take over the role of representing the organization to the wider world.  Can you do a better job than Suga?

Keiko Ishikawa, a public relations consultant, was quoted in the media noting Suga’s choice of vocabulary is “not that bad”.  Rather it is “how he attempts to convey the words that is the problem”. The role of second fiddle mouthpiece for the Abe Cabinet and being the Prime Minister in your own right, require substantially different skills.  Actually, there are few skilled public speakers in business, government and politics in Japan, so Suga blends in nicely with the ineptitude and many failings of his peers and colleagues.  The problem is that being hopeless like everyone else does not help you to be persuasive.

Ishikawa noted, “As his facial expressions and words and phrasings almost never vary, there’s no strength in his eyes.  We can’t understand what he wants to emphasis and where his heart is”.  Robotic would be a good descriptor of his approach to public speaking. Yes, I appreciate that Japanese is a monotone language but that is no excuse, although many will volunteer it to justify their personal lack of ability.  Even in Japanese, we can pull the twin levers of speed and strength to gain vocal variation and this is open to Suga too, but he chooses to drone on instead.  We know he is bad, but how about you? If we recorded your talk, would it be a deadly monotone, driving everyone deep into slumberland?

Professor Mehrabian’s research in the 1960s flagged the issue of the way we speak not matching the content of the words being a problem.  When we are not congruent, only 7% of our message is getting through to the audience.  As a speaker, achieving only a 7% success rate of verbal message transmission should get you fired from your job!  With Suga and many other leaders in Japan, facial expressions are wooden from start to finish.  If it is bad news, then look worried and if it is good news, then look happy.  Those reactions would be congruent.  Suga is not doing that, so he is giving up a tremendous persuasion tool – his facial expressions.  Our face is a million watts more powerful than any slide deck on screen.

Ishikawa also complained, “His articulation is bad and could be improved by practicing moving his mouth, speaking clearly and changing the tempo of his speech”.  The fundamental issue here is there is no interest or will to be a clear communicator.  He was the master of obfuscation in his former job and he has carried that like a badge of honour into his new role.  The Liberal Democratic Party has a very comfortable majority and no real challenge from the opposition parties, so a sense of entitlement is strong in their ranks.  “Who cares about being a good public speaker, because the punters are going to have to vote us back in anyway, so whats the problem?”.

The will to persuade listeners is a fundamental professional skill requirement.  We see so many Japanese business executives, just like Suga, pathetically going through the motions reading their speeches, with no passion for their talk.  In some cases, they may want to do a better job, but they worry if they slip out of lockstep with the rest of their hopeless colleagues and do a professional job, they will draw negative comments.  I was coaching a new President to give his first key speech to the company’s stakeholders. The content was terrible.  Dry, boring and devoid of any life or interest.  He rejected the proposed changes to improve it, because he didn’t think his audience would accept a professional version of his talk.  He was limiting himself in order to blend in with everyone’s zero level expectations of a professional speech.  In Japan, this becomes a self-perpetuating nightmare, where the entire country’s leadership remain duds when it comes to public speaking.

There may be hope with the next generation.  The much younger Environment Minister Shinjiro Koizumi was not very good at public speaking at the start of his political career.  The difference was he became serious about his communication skills. He studied rakugo (traditional storytelling)  and listened to recordings of his own talk and speeches.  He made an effort to improve his presentations.  Today he is a million times better than his boss and is talked of as a future Prime Minister.

Japan’s politicians, bureaucrats and business executives are not your role models.  The lesson is that in the Kingdom of the Blind, the one eyed man is King.  When you see everyone is aping Suga and his ilk, when it comes to professional presentation skills, run a mile in the opposite direction.  Rather, become professional, persuasive, gain self confidence and have presence when you speak.  How do you do that?  Like the rest of us, get trained!.

It makes sense to be authentic when presenting, because this is the easiest state to maintain.  As someone wise once noted, “if you are going to be a liar you need a stupendous memory to keep up with who you told what”.  Presenting is something similar.  Maintaining a fiction in front of an audience takes a lot of skill.  In fact, if you have that much skill, why worry about faking it in the first place?  Well, there is a place for fakery when presenting, but we need to know when is appropriate.

We know that the way we think about things influences how we well we do.  Imposter syndrome is a common state of mind though amongst people, across a broad range of situations.  You might write a blog and put it up on your website, or waffle away on Clubhouse or pontificate to an audience, live or online.  But who are you to talk about this subject? Are you saying anything worthwhile or just regurgitating what far cleverer people have already said?  Do you really know this subject?  Is your experience valuable or even relevant to others?  Are you really qualified to give advice to people running far bigger organisations that your own?

Looking over that list, it can be enough to scare you off emerging from the deep depths of your comfy comfort zone ever again.  So, we have to create a positive mindset that “yes”, we have every right to address this subject area, even if we feel a fake when compared to other more famous or clever people.  The funny thing is they suffer the same imposter syndrome too, relative to their illustrious peers.  Academics, for example, are generally a put upon group, because they have to publish their research to get ahead in their careers.  When they publish it, they are now exposing the weaknesses of their intellectual process, their inadequate research ability  or their dubious writing skills, to the entire expert community in their area of defined speciality.

Confidence warrants confidence.  If we sound and look confident, most people are likely to ignore the emperor has no clothes and is not perfect.  They will be carried away with our enthusiasm for our subject, with our passionate belief in our findings and our commitment to share the knowledge. The problems crop up when we become nervous speaking in front of others.  Normally, we are quite even keeled and confident, but with all of those beady sets of eyes drilling holes into us, we start to wobble.  Suddenly, our imposter syndrome fears come flooding forth and soon our usual cool, calm, collected façade is torn to shreds, as we are exposed as a self doubting, insecure, fake.

Now how would the audience know we are a fake?  Well, we very helpfully tell them, by saying daft things like, “I am rather nervous today”.  Or “I am not very good at presenting”. Or “I didn’t have much time to put this presentation together and I am afraid it won’t be very good” and any other of the motley collection of dubious, sympathy seeking, self-serving, cop out proclamations.  Do us all a favour and keep all of this imposter syndrome stuff to yourself.  Here is a secret - we all want you to succeed.

If you are nervous presenting then fake it, such that you appear at least “normal”, rather than being reduced to a quivering tower of jelly on stage.  If your knees are knocking from the nerves, then stand behind the podium until you feel more comfortable to walk around.  If your hands are shaking and you have to hold a microphone, use both hands and draw it on to your chest, so that your body secures the erratically jiggling instrument.  If your throat is parched, then have warm, room temperature rather than iced water, close by and drink it when you need it.  The iced water constricts your throat and you don’t want that, so forgo the usual venue offered beverage and request the no ice alternative.  If you begin to speak and instead of a mellifluent note, out pops a constrained, awkward, embarrassing squeak, then clear your throat and try again.  If you stumble on the pronunciation of a word, try again. If you get the speech points order mixed up or miss one, then fake it and keep going, offering not a hint of anything untoward occurring.

If you act enthusiastically, you will become enthusiastic.  If you act confidently, you will become confident.  Yes you might be nervous, but as Winston Churchill said, “if you are going through hell, keep going”.  That is the point. No matter what happens, the show must go on and that means you must keep going.  If it is a disaster, then dust yourself off and climb back in saddle.  As the Japanese saying goes, nana korobi ya oki (七転び八起き) - “fall down seven times, get up eight times”.

I was watching an “expert” giving a series of video instruction modules on leading dispersed teams, now that many of us are working from home.  I thought this will be useful and maybe I can pick up a few ideas for myself.  It was a rather pedestrian affair I have to say and in one part, dangerously incorrect.  The instructor claims to have a Ph.D., so presumably has done some major original research to warrant that degree.  Shoveling misinterpretations of research done by other academics into the public domain about first impressions is quite shocking. It is even more jarring when that instructional course commands a payment of our hard won cash.

We have many opportunities to create a first impression.  Meeting someone for the first time at a networking event is a mini-presentation of your personal and professional brand.  Talking to people at the venue, before you go up to the podium to give your talk after the luncheon is another example.  Appearing on audio or video live stream and in recorded content are also in that same category.  Obviously presenting on stage or virtually are the arenas given the most attention for building first impressions. Let’s take a look at all of these in turn and also put our “expert’s” fake news to the sword.

Meeting someone in a crowded noisy networking environment is a tough one.  Fortunately in Japan, we exchange our meishi or business cards, so that we have the name and details about what they do.  Counterintuitively, in these situations we should say little.  Many thrusters imagine they need to dominate the air, hog the conversation and talk continuously about themselves.  To build a solid first impression, start with a smile when you meet the person as you shake hands or bow and keep smiling as you hand over the meishi.  Smiling implies warmth, friendliness and confidence.  We like all of those in strangers. 

Next ask them about what they do, why they do it, how long they have done it, where are they from etc.  Why? We want to hear about them.  In this process they feel good to talk about themselves and to respond to our questions about their glorious past, present or future.  As they speak, we can often find commonalities that make it easier for us to connect as strangers.  Also, as we learn more about them, we are in a better position to appreciate who they are.

When it is our turn, we should be brief and try to draw out our shared experiences if we have found any.  We should also get back to getting them to talk about themselves as soon as possible.  Their first impression about us will be someone who is considerate, polite, interested in them and a “good conversationalist”.

When we are on Clubhouse we are live, so there can be no Take Two.  This is a one shot chance to speak to the whole world during that session.  Again, smile when you are speaking.  The audience cannot see the smile, but they can feel it.  Don’t go on Clubhouse without a plan.  Talking about the first thing that pops into your head is why most of the conversation on Clubhouse is rubbish.  Have a small number of bullet points you will discuss so that you can navigate the audience through your content. Rehearse the points beforehand so you eliminate ums and ahs, hesitations, monotone delivery and a thousand other horrible deviations from a good talk. Start with confidence and speak more loudly than normal to overcome the limitations of the platform.  Get a timer and set it to three minutes maximum, so you are forced to be clear and concise.

Live in person requires us to carefully choreograph the first few minutes of the talk.  Get there early and check all of the tech.  Have someone else load your slide deck or fire it up for you at the start of the talk.  You want to be standing in the middle of the stage away from the laptop, engaging your audience from the beginning of your impressive introduction by the MC. Start with a teaser opening.  Some comment which will break into the already packed minds and attention spans of the audience and have them sit up and listen carefully to what you have to say. Next, introduce yourself and thank the organisers, before you get into the speech proper.

Recorded podcasts and videos can be edited, so our first impression sins can be washed away in the editing suite.  Live streaming though is a different story.  The start of these live video sessions is always a nightmare.  When you are doing it all solo, it is very hard to time the start properly and so it is easy to appear awkward and clunky.  Some systems are live as soon as you hit the record button and others have a brief count down until they start.  Having you all set up ready to go by having someone else hit the start button is best. With Zoom calls etc., you can keep the audience in the waiting room until you are ready to go, so that is more easily controlled.

The fake news of the instructor mentioned earlier is that our first impression is formed 55% from dress, 38% from voice tone and 7% from what we say.  You may have heard these dubious numbers bandied about before. Professor Albert Mehrabian, who published this research in the 1960s, added an important caveat to those numbers. This important qualification was entirely missing from the content the supposed “expert” was touting.  Mehrabian said these numbers apply only when what we say is incongruent with how we say it.  Our facial expression and body language have to match up with the content of what we are saying.  If it doesn’t, our audience gets distracted and do not focus on the message anymore.  They are more consumed by how we dress and how we sound.

First impressions in any context should be planned rather than left to random happenstance.  This is your personal and professional brand we are talking about here and they are much too important to treat lightly or be compromised.  Beware of non-expert  “experts”. The barrier to entry for offering online learning coursesis zero and often that is the value of the content too.

When I read this quote from Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon from 1971 that “ a wealth of information would create a poverty of attention” I thought about its ramifications for presenters.  Today, we are firmly swimming against a King tide of information overload, so Simon’s dystopian prophecy has come to fruition.  This is the Age of Distraction for audiences.  They are gold medal winning poor listeners and yet we have to present to them.  We know that storytelling is one sure fire way to snaffle their attention and yet that path is littered with landmines.

Very few business presenters tell stories at all in their talks.  They are enamoured with their high quality content.  Which usually means the results of surveys, research or data collation.  Data is rarely strong enough to linger long in our memories.  This is  because usually there is a ton of data, each morsel, each three decimal tidbit vanquishing the one before and so on and so on, until we recall nothing, as Simon predicted. 

Business presenters imagining their data is enough are fooling themselves, because their messages are not breaking through that wall of distraction and that poverty of attention.  For the few who do tell stories they are freelancing, going free style with no structure.  They just relate what happened.  What is the point of the story?  Is the delivery getting the key messages in front of the audience in a way that they will remember it?  Are the listeners seeing any relevance for themselves in this story?

Where do we start with the story?  Do we get straight to the point, do we go to the key take away?  “Hey, get to the point”. We often hear this from bosses and we mistakenly follow that direction with our storytelling.  Why is it a mistake?  We have to grasp the fundamental difference between writing a report, where we start with the conclusion we have reached from our analysis, otherwise known as the “Executive Summary” and giving an oral presentation.  When we launch forth with our recommendation, we open up the flood gates of rampant critique.

Many who are listening start thinking that we are wrong, have misfired with our analytical findings and have failed to account for important alternate considerations. Why do they react like that?  We have put forth our main point completely naked and unprotected, so that is all they have to go on.  In the sequence, our explanation of how we came to this conclusion follows next.  Critically, the critics are not really listening now because they are consumed by what they think is wrong with it, so the justification portion gets lost for them.

We should instead begin with our context, the background which has informed our conclusion, based on the data and experiences we analysed.  We need to populate this context with people they know, places they can see in their mind’s eye and lodge it in a temporal frame which the audience can process. 

The genius of this approach is that while sitting there listening to us warble on, the audience are racing ahead and reaching their own conclusions about the insights to be gained from this context.  Given a certain set of circumstances, there are a limited number of conclusions to be drawn and the chances are very high, that they will have reached the same one you did. When you announce it, the listeners mentally say to themselves “that’s right”.  Bingo! 

Now instead of facing an audience of doubters, one uppers and thrusters, you are dealing with fans of your work.  The key is to make the insight download very concise.  When we teach this formula, invariably people want to jumble a number of insights together and run through them.  Each additional insight dilutes the power of the one before it and so on.  It is critical to select the strongest, best insight and only pull the velvet curtain back to reveal that one.

The final step is to take the context and the insight and then package it up and place it on a silver tray for the audience to take home with them, when we outline the relevance to them.  Although we have produced an insight, it is an inert outcome.  What does that insight do for us, how can we use it, where will this be valuable for us, when can we apply it? When we receive the insight wisdom with that relevancy formula attached, it makes sense. We feel attending the speaker’s presentation today was time well spent.  We got something worthwhile which will help us navigate the future that little bit better and more easily.   Again, this has to be done very concisely, for the same reasons discussed about explaining the insight.

So the formula is context, insight and then explain the relevance.  If we mix it up we are making things hard for ourselves, so resist any calls to get to the point, by being forced to put up the insight like a sacrificial lamb about to be slaughtered.  Hold it in reserve until the scene has been set.  Sherlock Holmes and Poirot, great fictional detectives always revealed the baddie’s name after giving the background of the crime.  It is a well tested, tried and true formula for storytelling, so try it.