One Of Your Most Vital Presentations

Usually when we hear the term “presentation”, we think of a public arena, a big crowd and a lot of formality.  These public occasions are important because this is your personal and professional brand on show to the world.  There are other presentations though, which are in the family bosom of the company, away from the bright lights and the fanfare.  This is when you are addressing the troops, people who see you day in and day out.  They know who you really are.

In these cases we may need to recognise people, perhaps hand out awards, celebrate a birthday or work anniversary. This is our crew but don’t take them for granted.  We can’t be laid back about it and think it is not as important as a public soiree.  We still have to prepare properly.  This is inside the family, so the temptation is to see the stakes as being lower. Actually, these types of speeches are the hardest ones to give and we need to be at our best.  Engagement and motivation are closely driven by how we make our people feel.  How much attention we give them and how we treat them, are critical elements of our authentic leadership.

Typically though, we don’t prepare, we just wing it and so end up with a pretty ordinary facsimile of a proper presentation.  Wrong thinking!  Well what we should we do?  Here is a simple four part formula for these occasions.  Firstly, explain why the award is being made.  It may be for dedicated service, high quality job performance, a major sales achievement, etc.  Probably everyone knows already, but we need to remind them and set the scene for the presentation.  For example, “Mary has won the sales over $500,000 medal” which is pretty boring. Compare it to, “Mary beat out hundreds of other salespeople to make it into the very exclusive half a million dollars club of outstanding salespeople”.  We need to set the context for the award at the start.

Secondly, talk about the team member’s role as part of the team.  We need to connect them with the group and how they contribute.  We might say, “Mary is a high performer and she is a fantastic team player.  Her willingness to help the team win, shows the mark of a true professional.  I know many of the people in this room today can attest to her openness and availability to assist wherever needed and share knowledge with others.

Thirdly, we talk about the award itself, why it is deserved and how we are all proud of the recognition this has given to our whole team effort in the organisation.  We say, “Mary has been a model of persistence. She has done all the steps of the sales process, consistently and professionally.  Her achievement today is also driven off the back of the number of referrals she got from clients which led to new business with other companies. We preach this referral idea and Mary is a model to remind us to make this succeed for all of us as well”.

Fourthly, we congratulate the recipient on behalf of everyone.  “Mary, I am very proud to make this sales award to you today. Congratulations from all of us, we want you to receive this recognition with our best wishes and hopes for even further success in the future”.

The danger of these presentations is to go too frugal or too exaggerated.  We do want to create some buzz around the award but at the same time, it has to be real.  Exaggerating the importance of the award or the winner’s achievements makes the whole thing sound like a parody, a fakery.  Telling the audience “Mary is genius personified, a true legend in the business.  She will stand in the hall of fame of salespeople in this organisation for time immemorial”, is obvious overkill and creates serious doubts about the integrity of everyone involved in this award ceremony. 

Japan is a country of institutionalised flattery so we have to tread carefully here.  If you have ever been on the receiving end, then you know how embarrassing these types of effervescent comments can be.  The remarks have to be sincere, true and tempered with reality.

 If we over praise one person in the group, the danger is the others will become jealous and shun them.  In some cases, it may be better to present this speech to Mary alone, without an audience.  A nice lunch with the boss and the award presentation one-on-one may be better than gathering everyone together.  Japanese people get nervous when they are singled out for too much recognition. They know the knives will be coming out straight afterwards.  In this sense, Japan is a bit tricky and you really have to know the person involved and the group itself, to decide which is the best plan.

The point is to treat this as a major speech, that directly hits the team’s motivation and commitment. When you think of it that way, then you give the talk the proper attention it warrants and you can make these occasions a great opportunity to engage the team even more successfully.

Firing Up An Audience

Whenever I am in the USA, I love watching the different television preachers in action.  I am not looking for salvation particularly, but I am looking for hints on how to work an audience.  Now obviously competing with their promises on how to get to heaven is going to be difficult, but we can see some things that work which we can use in business for ourselves. 

They are master storytellers, usually using Bible incidents to make a point in the here and now.  The parables in the Bible are all mini-episodes, which teach a point about success.  As speakers, we have a topic to address, a key message we want communicate and the platform to do so.  How can we add stories to our talk which will bolster the point we are making?  The best stories are the ones people can see in their mind’s eye.  It is a bit like reading a novel, after you have seen the video series or the movie based on the book.  You can easily picture the scenes, the situation, the characters, the backdrops, etc.

This is what we should be looking to create.  Short descriptions of incidents that inform a certain course of action.  There should be people involved, preferably people they know already.  We want locations they can imagine.  We weave our point into these stories and draw conclusions for the audience on what course they should take. 

For example, if we wanted people to think about the importance of keeping key staff, we could tell a story like this one: 

“The “top gun” sales guy gets the call from the big boss and is ushered into the plush Presidential office. There he encounters the spacious room’s dark paneled walls, the impressive hardbound books on the shelves, the massive mahogany desk, the expensive paintings, the carefully coiffed secretary - all the accoutrements of power and success.  Top gun had met his annual sales quota in just two weeks and was expecting the accolades deserving from such an achievement.  The discussion however was on lowering his commission rate, because he was making more money than the President.  Ross Perot left IBM and went on to create Electronic Data Systems and became a billionaire.  We want to make sure we create reward systems that keep our top talent and we as leaders need to take our egos out of the equation”.

Probably everyone has seen a movie scene with this type of décor or they could easily imagine it.  Now I could have just suggested the punch line – “throttle back on our egos, amply reward our stars and keep our top talent” but the lead up sets the scene for the audience and makes it more powerful. 

I could have ramped it up even more by engaging the audience with some showmanship by then saying, “Bosses in the room, if you don’t want to lose your top talent, say “no way”. Now I would say this, while cupping my hand to my ear, to draw out some responses. If it wasn’t energetic enough, I could continue by saying, “Ah, I didn’t catch that?” again, cupping my hand to my ear fishing for a response. After they answer “no way”, I could say, “That’s right! I am with you, I don’t want to lose any of my key people either! Now let me give you some ideas on how we can achieve that”,

So we put it all together: “The “top gun” sales guy gets the call from the big boss and is ushered into the plush Presidential office.  There he encounters the spacious room’s dark paneled walls, the impressive hardbound books on the shelves, the massive mahogany desk, the expensive paintings, the carefully coiffed secretary - all the accoutrements of power and success. Top gun had met his annual sales quota in just two weeks and was expecting the accolades deserving from such an achievement.  The discussion however was on lowering his commission rate, because he was making more money than the President.  Ross Perot left IBM and went on to create Electronic Data Systems and became a billionaire.  We want to make sure we create reward systems that keep our top talent and we as leaders need to take our egos out of the equation. Bosses in the room, if you don’t want to lose your top talent, say “no way”. Ah, I didn’t catch that?  That’s right! I am with you, I don’t want to lose any of my key people either! Now let me give you some ideas on how we can achieve that”.

This is a simple example of combining storytelling, with a bit of showmanship.  We need to use this in moderation though or it can quickly feel manipulative.  It will however lift the energy in the audience and grab their attention, as you download your key points.  Try adding some stories into your next presentation and see where you can add in some showmanship as well, to engage with the audience members.  Let’s become more memorable as presenters, but in a good way!!!

The Japan Gap Between Speaker And Audience Is Still Vast

Lawyers in Japan are an elite group.  Senior lawyers are the elite of the super elite.  When I landed in Tokyo on April 1st, 1979, Tokyo was completely different city than what it is today.  A low rise, rambling, conurbation maze of small streets and ugly grey buildings, long stained by air pollution.  Like the city itself, many things were a surprise back then, including Japanese lawyers. In those days, the pass rate of the Japan bar exam was 1.4 percent and the average time it took after University graduation, to pass the bar exam was seven years.  With the launch of many new law schools in Japan and changes to the system, the bar exam pass rate has now climbed to 29%.  So if you meet a senior Japanese lawyer, they will be part of the older cohort of the super, super elite.  I was expecting a lot from these super lawyers, yet in some respects I was severely disappointed.

I attended a legal symposium, involving these super elite Japanese lawyers and some invited international lawyers coming in from outside of Japan.  The whole affair was conducted in English, and the level spoken by the Japanese attendees was very high. It was impressive. These are very smart people, often playing a key role in resolving international disputes and enabling international commerce.   In the Japan group, all had their legal practices and also lectured at leading Japanese Universities, on different aspects of the law.

Yet, the communication skills on offer were incongruent with their elite educations and high societal status. I can never resolve how intelligent people can manage to stand up in front of an audience and position themselves such that they fully ignore one third of their audience.  We were seated in a theatre style arrangement with raised seating.  A fairly wide room, it obviously functions as one of the main lecture theatres.  As professional legal educators they are all are used to speaking to large groups of students and so could be expected to speak to the whole group, rather than just those seated to their right.  This is not a tricky skill, but there was obviously no self-awareness, so you have to conclude this is how it is every time they give a lecture, be it in English or Japanese. 

So here is a hint to ourselves. Whenever we are standing before an audience, always make sure we position our feet such that they are facing ninety degrees directly forward and just turn our necks and upper body, when we want to involve each side of the room in eye contact.

Actually there wasn’t any real eye contact underway either.  Speaking to everyone and nobody at the same time, is a common lack of professionalism in many speakers in Japan.  In normal everyday conversations, making continuous direct eye contact can be too confronting for the normal societal standards of human interaction here. From a young age, Japanese people are taught to look at the throat, chin, and forehead of their interlocutor, rather than their eyes. 

When we are speaking to an audience though, we are in a different role now and have different requirements.  Winning the audience over to us, getting them to listen carefully to what we are saying and drawing them in to our point of view, are all aided when we use eye contact. 

In the whole symposium, I don’t think I saw anyone using eye contact properly.  We don’t want to bore a hole in the eyes of our audience though. That is why we seek to hold eye contact for around six seconds, before we move our gaze and make eye contact with another member of the audience.  When we do this, we really engage our audience. Those on the receiving end of the eye contact feel as if we are talking directly to them, as if there was no one else in the room.  This is a powerful connector.

In typical Japanese fashion, the main speakers were allotted a table to sit behind, decorated with a microphone stand.  In this seated position, out came the sheets of the speech transcript to be read to us in a monotone voice.  Extremely painful and ineffective.  One guest speaker from overseas however was very modern, reading from his iPad.  He even used voice intonation when reading, to stress certain words.  The same scenario – same seat, same microphone, reading the speech, but what a difference this made.  By spotlighting key words in each sentence, the speech came alive.  We should be doing the same thing when it is our turn to speak.

Now as a native speaker of English and a truly senior international expert in the law, I wondered why this speaker had to read the speech at all?  He could have stood and delivered that speech, without notes and in a more professional manner, fully utilising all the tools at his disposal. We should be more brave. 

We must always keep in mind one key advantage we have over our audience.  Only we know what we are going to say.  If we forget something or if we deviate off topic slightly, well, only we know that.  So whenever possible we should stand and deliver, no safety net, in full gaze of the audience without notes and use our eye contact to draw everyone in to our message.

The last part of the day was devoted to panel discussions.  Notes don’t work in these situations and everyone did a splendid job of speaking about complex legal matters in English off the cuff.  A couple of things to keep in mind for ourselves, if ever we are engaged in a similar panel discussion.   Learn how to use the microphone correctly, so we can be heard clearly.  I notice, so many people don’t speak across the mesh of the microphone properly, so they are not getting completely picked up by the audio technology. 

Another thing to be careful of is eye contact.  The speakers on these panels religiously devoted their looking lines to the panel members, ignoring their audience completely, as they answered questions or offered comments.  No, no, no! When we receive the question or are asked to comment, we should be addressing the panel members as well as the audience.  We should be using our eye contact to convince the audience of what we are projecting, by appealing directly to them. 

What often happens though is the speaker will exclusively look back at the moderator who asked the question, instead of engaging as many people as possible in the room.  This applies to any opportunity we may have for doing the Q&A.  Look at the questioner initially for the first six seconds of the answer only. Then branch out and engage as many of the audience members as you can, with six seconds of eye contact, as you make your answer.

These are highly educated, super elite people in Japan and yet they make these fundamental presentation errors.  So it tells us that being well educated and being in a prestigious job, does not automatically anoint us with the magic fairy dust of successful public speaking professionalism we all need.  Remember, these are our personal and professional brands we are holding out there for all to see. To bolster your brand, get the training, because today is the age of persuasion power and we must master this skill if we want to be fully successful. Connecting with our audience is one of the key business skills we need to add to our repertoire when presenting.

If You Want Your Audience To Be Enthusiastic Act Enthusiastic Yourself

There is an old truism in sales, “sales is nothing more than the transfer of the enthusiasm of the seller for the product or service to the buyer”.  What are we doing when we are speaking?  We are selling!  “Hang on a minute there Greg.  I am a professional, I am not a car or vacuum cleaner salesman”, you might be saying to yourself.  That sort of self talk is dated and dangerous.  Make no mistake, we are all in sales, regardless of whether our business card has salesperson written on it or not.

When I speak with lawyers what are they complaining about?  How important and how hard it is for them to gain new clients.  They are out there selling themselves to clients to choose their firm rather than the rival company.  The same with accountants, doctors, dentists, architects, engineers, etc. All of the professions are facing the same hurdle.  How do they appeal to buyers and how do they differentiate themselves from everyone else, when they also have the same skill sets, experience and brainpower on offer.

So if we are up at the podium, out there on stage, standing up in the room to speak, we are selling. Firstly, we are selling our personal brand. Depending on how good a job we do, this will sell the company brand. We humans are a curious bunch really. If we hear a speaker and they are impressive, we carry that feeling across to the whole firm.  Likewise, if they are a dud, we conclude they are all duds down there.  So don’t miss it - personal and professional brands matter.

The next thing we are selling is our message, the conclusion we have reached, the insight we have gained. We have prepared our talk with some points we believe are true and important and we are there to share them with the audience.  One issue though is our level of commitment to the audience and the message. 

I was at a talk once being given by a senior guy who was very well known around town, a long-timer in Tokyo, a published author and an accepted authority in his field.  The expectation of something really great was in the mind of everyone in the audience.  The speaker did give his talk, in the allotted time, on the designated subject.  However he left his enthusiasm in a parcel on the bus seat by mistake.  He spoke with no passion about his subject, no enthusiasm for his area of expertise and no interest in the punters who had made the effort to hear him.  It was really shocking and I have totally doubted his supposed expertise ever since.

Of course, we have to a strong base in the subject matter.  In fact we should be subject matter experts if we are going to get up in front of people and talk.  There is another person I know here who is trying to develop a business as a coach, has a stylish stylist and is trying to get speaking spots on an area of certain expertise.  The only problem is that he is not an expert at all on the subject he has chosen to speak about.  This can only end in tears, however beautifully outfitted and coiffured he may be, but still tears, because there just isn’t enough expert  content there to back up what he is saying.

Given we have the expertise to speak on the subject and given that we realise we are selling ourselves, our company and our message to the audience, then we need to add the magic ingredient of enthusiasm.  The way to be enthusiastic is to speak on a subject or an aspect of a subject, which lights your inner fire.  Inside your profession there are bound to aspects which you feel very strongly about, so talk about those and your enthusiasm will naturally emerge.

Relive things that happened in your experience that has become a foundation of your belief in what you are telling the audience.  Tell the story of what happened to you and how it impacted your views.  Talk about the lessons, the trials, tribulations, the highs and the lows.  Your feeling for these stages of the tale will shine through and the audience will be right there beside you. When you relive the whole journey, the good, the bad, the mediocre, the inner passion you have for what happened, will burn forth and captivate your audience.

In the retelling use all the resources at your disposal to bring that belief to the fore.  Use your eye contact to engage the audience, voice modulation to add crescendos and lulls where appropriate, gestures to cut through audience distraction and grab their attention. 

By combining our belief in our message, with an enthusiastic delivery, we will carry the audience with us, along the journey of belief that we have trod already based on our real world, hard won experiences.  That combination is unbeatable.

Including Dialogue In Our Presentations

Normally when we give presentations, they tend to be pretty dry affairs.  We marshal the facts, relate what happened, tell stories perhaps but in a one dimensional way.  We are relating what happened, but are not making any attempt to bring it alive.  However, what do we seek when we are looking for entertainment or education – we are looking for dialogue.  Our television dramas, movies, novels, biographies are all using dialogue to good effect.  We should include snippets of dialogue in our talks too.

Now we are not writing a screenplay, which is mainly dialogue, but that doesn’t mean we can’t drip a little bit in here or there in our talk to illustrate a point and bring it to life.  We are taking the role of the narrator telling our audience what happened and then including the conversation we were hearing from the person we are featuring in the talk.  We do this in normal conversation when we say, “she said that ‘it was preposterous idea and I will never have it mentioned under my roof again for as long as I live’”. We may even be telling this incident mimicking the style of the speech of the main protagonist, especially if they speak a dialect or with a heavy accent.

Why not do the same thing in our talks, to make our key point stronger?  Let me give an example of something that happened to me in 2010 in Miami.  I was attending my first Dale Carnegie International Convention and hardly knew anyone there.  In the evenings there would be various parties to attend and on this particular occasion I had the honour of meeting Dale Carnegie’s daughter Donna Dale Carnegie and she introduced me to Mike. 

Now Mike stood out in that crowd of Dale Carnegie people, because he had a long ponytail and was wearing a Hawaiian shirt.  It turned out that Mike was the contractor who did all the stage audio sound etc., for the Convention and had been doing it for years. 

“I always finish my year with the Dale Carnegie convention because you hold it in early December”, he told me.  He also got me attention when he said,  “I really like your organisation”.  Being new to the Dale Carnegie world I was curious, so I asked him why he said that. He whispered to me in a conspiratorial fashion, “The things that people are saying out in front of stage and what they are doing behind the stage are the same”. 

I asked what he meant by that.  He continued, “Well I do a lot of these same types of events and we are all hooked up on the mics, so we can hear what is going on behind stage, as well as out on stage. There are plenty of folks who say one thing to the audience, but carry on quite the opposite off stage.  I found in years of dealing with Dale Carnegie people they are genuine and they live the principles they espouse and I like that”.

In this example I have just modeled here, I am reproducing a conversation I had in Miami in 2010 and am using the point to say Dale Carnegie is great and the things we do are great, etc. This story is being used as evidence to get the listener to agree that Dale Carnegie is indeed great.  I could say all of the same things and relate that story, just telling the details of what happened.  However, when I include the dialogue, it brings the whole thing to life.  People in the audience can picture a guy in a Hawaiian shirt, with a long ponytail, whispering this information to me.  I can even cup my ear, as if I was listening to him, when he told me that secret part. They can hear his voice as I relate the story, which makes it more credible.

This requires a bit more work to do in the planning but not that much.  After all, this is something that happened to you. It was an incident where you were told something by the main character in the story.  All you have to do is tell what happened in their voice, rather than your own voice.  If you do this you can take your storytelling to a much higher level. Let’s give it a go and add another string to our bow of storytelling expertise.

Plumb Your Own Experiences For Content When Presenting

It is ironic how talkative we are on some subjects, but how lost we are when it comes to giving public talks.  If you were asked by friends about your holiday trip to Italy, you could probably go on for hours quite comfortably telling us about the food, the sights, the locations you went to and what you saw there.  That romantic boat trip on Lake Como, the earrings you bought during your Murano glass factory visit in Venezia, that huge Florentine steak you had in Firenze, the dip in the Trevi Fountain in Rome, the colour of the sea in the Blue Grotto near Capri – you could go on at length about all of these adventures because they came from your experiences.  So what have you been doing at work all these years in your profession? Haven’t you accumulated a host of experiences there too? Didn’t you have ups and downs at work, when projects went well and when they combusted? Haven’t you worked with colleagues who were rock stars and others who were idiots?

Going straight to the slide deck composition stage for creating your presentation is a big mistake. Go to your experiences first. What was the best deal you ever did? What was the most successful project you ever completed?  What was the biggest disaster deal you ever suffered?  What was the train wreck project from hell you were responsible for? Where have you seen people succeed and what did they do to be successful. Who have you seen digging a hole for themselves and then just keep digging?

In our lives, we have harvested a lot of experiences, which we can use in our presentations.  If we were better organized, we might have had the forethought to keep notes, so it would be easier to refer to them when we are looking for material.  Well there is a hint right there – keep notes from now.  You can just jot down in your Evernote or something similar, the key points you will want to recall later in a talk.

Storytelling is not some Hollywood script writer level requirement for speakers.  It is just telling our stories from real life, the lives of people we have observed. We can also share and acknowledge incidents from authors who have captured their experiences on paper, but in our own words.  We just have to be observant and be able to see a good connection between a point we are making in our presentation and an example where we can relate it as a story. 

We know with planning our talk we should start with the conclusion of our talk first, boiled down to its essence.  We then pick up the main points we are going to use to illustrate why our viewpoint or our conclusion is correct.  We then design the opening to grab people’s attention, amidst the mad world they live in, which seems to permanently distract them. 

Now when we are fleshing out the key points we want to make, in the main body of the presentation, we are searching for evidence to back up our claims.  This comes in the form of data, expert authority and stories to make the point come to life.  This is the time to drop into the vault of our collection of stories and find good matches between the point and the story.

This may seem hard at first, but when you reflect on why you think something, about an issue there is usually a good reason for it.  Something happened which you witnessed or were aware of, which influenced your take on the matter.  There will be a story in there somewhere.  Usually these are either successes or failures.  We all have a rich storehouse of these, but we haven’t thought to employ them before.  We thought of evidence as hard evidence composed of statistics, surveys, testimonials, academic writing, etc.  Stories are evidence too and much more memorable and therefore more powerful, than numbers in reams of spreadsheets or a mess of graphs thrown up on screen.

If you are a regular consumer of my content, then you will know that I am often using things I have seen in other’s presentations to bring forth a point, either good or bad. Sadly, it is usually the negative example I am using, but not exclusively.  These are just stories from real life that make my point of instruction about giving presentations.

We can all become careful observers of things going on in our business lives, which we can sew into the fabric of what we will be saying in our talk.  There is no shortage of actors and characters out there in businessland from which we can draw.  Let’s start our collection today if we don’t have one and keep adding to it, if we do. Some of this stuff you couldn’t make up by the way, which is always exciting.  The point is to capture it and employ it.

What Is The Right Length For Your Speech

This was a gala affair for a very worthy cause.  A grand setting. Beautiful ladies in evening gowns, men resplendent in their tuxedos. The host of the charity event was duly introduced, to give an opening speech.  The speech actually started quite well.  He told a powerful story about a young person struggling in their life. The trials, tribulations and barriers described in the lead up to the point of the story were gripping.  The punch line was delivered and it was a direct hit to the heart.  The person he was describing to us was a very close relative.  This had real impact with the audience, it made it personal. Taking an abstract idea and then driving it home with reference to your own reality, brings an audience to you. They are sympathetic, some will be empathetic, but all will be moved.

This was a high point of emotional engagement and then he continued.  And continued and continued.  You could feel the power of the speech, the grip on the audience, was slowly being eroded.  The attention of this luminous gathering was being lost, reduced, dissipated.  Sitting there, I wondered, at what point should he have stopped while he had everyone in the palm of his hand?  When it is us up there, how do we know when is enough is enough? 

Perhaps his attachment to the loved one was driving him to keep going, elaborating and expanding on his message.  Maybe he felt there were many things which needed to be said to this audience.  No doubt there were many worthy points to be conveyed that evening.

The problem is, this is what we want.  But what does our audience want?  If we want to reach them, we have to give the audience what they want, so we can keep them with us.  Once we indulge ourselves and prioritse our own interests, no matter how admirable, we are in danger of disconnecting our audience from our key message.  This is what happened on this occasion.  He should have finished on a high, while he had everyone’s emotional support.

For most speeches we are asked to do, we will have a strict time limit set by the organisers.  We don’t have a chance to waffle on and keep babbling beyond that time dispensation.  When you are the organiser however, there are no limits on you and this is dangerous.  We need to be sensitive to how long we can expect to absorb our audience in where we are taking them with our talk. 

The issue goes back to design of the talk.  Even if you don’t have someone foisting a time limit on you, you need to foist one on yourself.  Once you get to the arc in the story, the countdown to disinterest starts immediately. We have hit them with a powerful point or a powerful story.  We have got them emotionally or logically. This is when we must strike and deliver the key call to action.  The linking of the emotional or logical grip on them and the action requirement we have for them, has to be made as proximate as possible.  Once we start padding out the story or start adding additional things, we lose their focus. 

So in revisiting this particular case, the plan would be to lead the audience along a path of our own design. They don’t know where we are going with the story, when suddenly we reveal the surprise which leaps out and grabs their emotions. Now we have their full attention.  This is the time to deliver the key call to action.  Then we wrap it up, so that the last thing they have ringing in their ear is the action item we want them to take. We do this while their hearts are still feeling warm, benevolent and predisposed to do what we are saying.

If the point of the talk is to hear our own voice and get no traction with the good cause we are promoting, then that is a different scenario.  If however, we want people to get with our programme and part with their cash or whatever, then we need to bring the speech to a clear end.  This speech I have used as a case study could have been a third of the length and had one thousand times more impact.

When working out how long to talk on a point, we have to be parsimonious with our scope.  Better to leave an audience tonguing for more, than feeling sated or even worse, feeling overfed.  The message we want to get across is our one point of focus.  In our planning, we carefully arrange everything prior to that point so we can set it up during our delivery.  We want no more and no less to get the buy in.

Take your speech in the design phase and keep chopping bits out, until you have laser beam clarity around what you want to achieve with your listeners.  Is this hard to do?  Absolutely, because we fall in love with our own prose or the sound of our voice or our opinion or all three.  We have to be disciplined and need consistency of view – the audience view, rather than our own.  Less is more is true when speaking, especially if you are in the philanthropy business.

How To Get Speaking Gigs To Promote Your Personal Brand

A businessman reached out to me after attending my recent speech on “The Seven Deadly Fails Of Selling In Japan”, which I gave to the American Chamber of Commerce here in Tokyo. He wasn’t interested in hearing about how to sell in Japan, but he was frustrated that he was too low profile in his industry.  The consequence of being invisible in your industry sector is that people don’t look for you or find you very easily.  Having people call you up to help them in their business is the preferred way to get new business. It is vastly superior to spending time and money running around trying to find buyers yourself.  Great! How do you do that?

This gentleman’s business was in a very defined niche and there were rivals who were dominating that niche. They were getting the lion’s share of the business as a result.  He was sick of getting the crumbs and wanted to raise his profile so that his phone would start to ring.  His enquiry to me was about doing our High Impact Presentations Course, so that he would be a more skilled presenter.  However, he mentioned he also needed to engineer the speaking spots as an expert authority, to use these speaking skills we are going to impart to him.

This “get found by buyers” aspiration is all part of our personal branding efforts.  One mental shift we have to make though, in this world of content marketing, is to understand that we are all publishing companies now, as well as being in our mainstream businesses.  By this I mean, we have the ability today, to project our ideas around the world and very inexpensively, to an extent never imagined before.  We can start by writing or talking if we can’t write.  Writing blogs or recording blogs and then transcribing them into text is a good starting point.  Great Greg, but what do I write or talk about?

In your area of speciality, there will be problems facing your buyers.  You already know what they are, because when you meet your clients, this is what they talk about.  Just give yourself fifteen uninterrupted minutes sitting there with a pen and some paper. You will soon be able to come up with the most important issues in your industry.  These points can be fleshed out further into blogs.  As I mentioned, you may prefer to talk about the issues and then transcribe them.  It doesn’t matter.  Get the IP (Intellectual Property) out of your head and on to paper.  You could weld all of these issues together into a longer article. This would be suitable for publication in an industry magazine. The various Chambers of Commerce also usually have their own magazines and are always looking for good content. 

Submit your article for publication and expect that they will edit it for you.  This activity gets you in front of the readers, both those who actually read what you have written and those who only noted the headline and your name.  The latter outcome is also fine because you are building an association of a topic and your personal brand.  Often these organizations have an on-line version of their magazine and you will appear in that too.  This is handy for getting picked up by search engines.

Take that same article now and go back and break it up into single issue blocks.  Each of these is a blog post in itself and so add an intro and a conclusion. Load them up to your website, blast them out in your email newsletter, post them on all of your social media. 

Contact event organisers who run conferences in your industry and suggest yourself as a speaker. Send them a copy of your long article, preferably once it has been published in a magazine, for extra credibility. They will be very happy to hear from you, because they are always looking for presenters.  In some cases, they might want you to pay to appear. This might be doable or prohibitive, depending on the event. 

When potential clients or event organisers want to check you out, they will do a search on your name. These blogs and articles you have written, which are pieces of evidence of expertise on this subject, will pop up. It looks better to have a number of relevant posts, than just one long article, so try and populate your feed with multiple examples of good content.  You don’t have to go crazy and post hundreds but more is better than less.

If you find there are podcasts on your subject, contact the podcast hosts and suggest you do a guest spot. If you have a lot of material or can consistently source great guests, then start your own podcast.  You may not broadcast it every day or every week, but you will need some degree of frequency and regularity to get any traction. You can use social media to publicise your podcast episodes.  Again, this activity can be referred to buyers or conference organisers, as proof of your expertise.  The search engines start to attach all of this activity to your name and when people search for you, up comes all of this expert authority.

These days shooting video is super easy.  Facebook live videos take away all editing and you can send them out later through social media.  Or you can shoot video on your iPhone or Ipad.  The camera quality today is excellent.  Just buy a frame to hold your device, screw the holder into a tripod, attach a separate microphone, stand about a meter away and you are off to the races. In iMovie you can edit the content and then upload it to your YouTube channel.  You can take the transcript of the video and use it for articles and blogs.  You can imbed the video itself into social media posts and add the text back in as well. The audio can be stripped out and used in your podcasts or posted in social media with a link.

All of this is multi-purposing. It creates more chances for you to be found.  When you are found, people can gauge the level of expertise you have on a subject and then make a judgment about whether they want you to speak at their event or not.  Even if you don’t make it to the stage at the event, your chances of getting found by potential clients goes right up.  What does it require?  Not much money but it does take time and effort.  The best time to start all of this was yesterday and the second best time is now!

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.enjapan.dalecarnegie.com

and check out our - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Author of Japan Sales Mastery, the Amazon #1 Bestseller on selling in Japan and the first book on the subject in the last thirty years.

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

Creating Your Personal Style When Presenting

When we are writing, we can create a style of our own.  The way we use certain vocabulary, the phrasing we apply in our sentences, the types of subjects we tackle.  What about when we are speaking?  What would we like to be known for?  When people hear we are speaking, are they saying to themselves, “I need to attend that talk”?  The answer to can we create our own style is definitely “yes” and you don’t have to look far for role models.

Simon Sinek launched a new career off the back of his now famous TED talk, emphasising the WHY behind what we are all doing.  Anthony Robbins is famous for his massive amounts of energy and self confidence when presenting.  Rowan Atkinson for his sly and dry wit. Brian Tracy for his very science based approach to his subjects.  Zig Ziglar for his storytelling. Locally here in Tokyo, Jesper Koll has a distinct use of casual dress, powerful rhetorical questions, data (and colour!) saturated slides and references to when Germany will win the next World Cup. 

One aspect of building a following is getting numerous, sustained gigs over long periods of time, so that you become well known, like Jesper.  There are many economists in Japan, but few performers like Jesper. He can mix it up, combining dry economics with pizzazz, to make the whole event enlightening and entertaining at the same time.  I am a fan and I always attend.

What about the rest of us, who for many reasons, don’t get that many chances to speak publically in a year?  How can we build a brand?  The first thing is to decide what you would like to become well known for?  Is it your sparling wit, your cutting analysis of complex problems, your supreme confidence on what you are saying, your expert authority, the quality of your data?

Generally speaking, we will have a relatively small number of content areas we will cover.  For example, I never hear Jesper speak about Japanese politics because that is outside his specialized knowledge.  In my case, I cover three topics – sales, leadership and presenting.  That is a bit unusual, but as we are a training company, it makes sense because these are our core areas of expert authority.  I write blogs, shoot video and speak on these subjects.  Here is a hint, you can do the same thing.  Your blogs can be thought leadership pieces or data heavy contributions or considered commentary on a subject.  

Some friends say, unkindly, that I have a good head for podcasts, but I shoot my videos anyway. Audiences search out content in different places, so it makes sense to try and meet them where they are looking. Good head or nay, I choose to get my content out there.  It is often through our blogs and videos that we become known for expertise or interest in different subjects.  When people are looking for a speaker, they can see the quality of what we can do and this may inspire them to invite us to speak.  The impetus is on us though, to make it easy to be found.

If you are a witty type, then certainly be witty when speaking.  This is a natural extension of you and it is congruous with your presentation style.  If you are not witty, then spare the rest of us from failed attempts at stand up comedy, when speaking on business topics.  Cautionary note to Aussies and Brits – avoid all of those culture centric sardonic witticisms. They rarely translate to broader audiences.

If you have access to excellent research and quality data then make this something that you are known for.  Jesper is a well established economist in Japan, so he can easily access his own original research data and other worthy published sources.  When you go to his talk, you know you are going to get some new information. This draws a fan base of repeaters like me.  We can do the same, because in our different lines of business we come across golden nuggets of information, which are not so easily available to all the punters out there in audience land.  We can become known for the quality of our content.

The delivery is the key though.  Boring people are not attractive and won’t build a following, no matter how good their information is.  So don’t be boring!  Engage your audience when you speak, speak clearly and confidently.  I remember reading one of Anthony Robbins’s books about how he sought out speaking spots, as many as possible, when he first started. He did this to short circuit the learning curve for himself.  I am sure many of those early speeches were horrible, but by getting the repetition done, he could find ways to become the speaker he is today.  We should do the same and grab every opportunity to speak however humble it may be.  We can improve and become better at our speaking craft and we should be committed to doing so.  The last thing the business world needs is another boring presenter!

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.enjapan.dalecarnegie.com

and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Author of Japan Sales Mastery, the Amazon #1 Bestseller on selling in Japan and the first book on the subject in the last thirty years.

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

Presenting By Video Conferencing

Technology is getting pretty good these days so joining meetings remotely is becoming more and more common.  Years ago the platforms were not that stable and the actions and voice synchronization had a problem with delays.  I had a job interview with a panel by video conference which was horrible.  The panel looked very small on the screen because the system could only handle a wide angle shot for that many people. I on the other hand, was a close up for them.  They would move their mouths and about three seconds later out would come the words and the same for my end.  It was all very disconcerting I must say but I got the job anyway. 

Today the tech is much, much better but the presenting part is no easier.  Here are a few ideas for when you are doing a presentation remotely. Make sure you get there early and check the sound and video connections are working perfectly.  In some cases, you may need to be wearing headphones and speaking into a separate microphone connected to the computer.  I am doing a guest spot on Jeffrey Gitomer and Jennifer Gluckow’s “Sell Or Die” podcast shortly and these are the requirements for me to participate.  Fortunately, because I do three weekly podcasts, I have the necessary high quality microphone and headset.  Make sure to check what you will need equipment-wise your end, well before the set date.  If you can organize it, definitely have an iPad, extra screen or a phone hooked into the same system, so that you can see what the audience can see. 

This is useful during the set up, to see how you look to the viewers and also for during the actual broadcast, to see how you are coming across.  You only need to glance at yourself during the real meeting, because otherwise it looks weird if you are talking to someone off camera. 

Most of these systems allow for recording, so when you rehearse, use the exact same system and record yourself speaking and then take a look at the results.  Most people don’t think to do this, but we have to see the presentation through the eyes of our viewers.  You may notice that you have little habits that become magnified, when it is just your face on screen.  You may find there are slides in the deck that on the small screen are hard to read and need simplifying.

When you use slides, this is very similar to a webinar format.  If you have done webinars before, you know how disconcerting it is to be talking to others and not being able to easily gauge their reactions.  Even with the better tech today, the team members will either be in a wide shot of the whole room, in which case you can’t really see their faces or the tech will only feature the face of whoever is talking, so again you can’t see the other participants.  You just have to accept that your read of how what you are saying is going down, will be limited and carry on anyway. 

The camera in your computer is always set above the main screen, so you are always looking at a point below the looking line of the audience.  If you can manage it buy a separate camera, that you can arrange to be more face level, so you can talk to the camera, rather than talk to a point 20 centimeters below the screen camera.  This also allows you to have better posture and sit up straighter in the chair.  Try it and you will see it makes a big difference to how you relate to the viewing audience.

When you see a screen, it is an illusion really, because the visual aspect is really superseded by the voice.  Also slides will reduce your “face time” on screen as well.  The voice is a powerful tool for communication and in these instances it becomes even more important than usual.  Don’t speak too quickly.  The tech is good but we still need to slow the pace down a bit for the audience to hear what we are saying.  You don’t know the quality of the speakers at their end.  They could be those small, cheap, portable speakers and so the acoustics may not be great.

Many of the things I am going to mention also apply when we are speaking to a live audience.  Voice modulation is key to avoiding a slumber inducing monotone.  Hitting key words brings greater emphasis to important parts of the message.  I recently did over seven hours of narration for my bestseller Japan Sales Mastery for the audio version. 

Sadly, I don’t have the classic, deep bass DJ voice.  What I could do though, which a sexier voiced narrator would find impossible to do, is to know which words to emphasise in every sentence.  By isolating out key words with either additional volume or by dropping the volume to a covert whisper, we can really grab the listener’s attention.

Pauses become very important when speaking in these situations, because we need people to constantly adjust their hearing and digest the content of what we have just said. Rushing ideas, one after another, over the top of each other is ineffective.  Plan to have slightly longer breaks than you would do with a face to face presentation.  Also don’t be thrown if there are long periods of silence on their end.  If you ask a question and no one answers, it can often be that they are not able to organize who will answer amongst themselves, if they are all tuning in remotely.  In that case, just repeat the question and be patient. Wait for the answer.  The ball is their court now, so there is no pressure on you.

Eye contact should be made with the camera at all times, where possible.  This is similar to if you were doing a video shoot.  You need to be making love to the camera lens.  My weekly YouTube TV show “The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show” is me talking straight to the camera.  It was difficult at first, to keep staring into the camera lens, but with practice I found you can get used to it.  Don’t look away or to the side if possible.  It looks like you lack conviction or self confidence in what you are saying. 

You are probably going to be seated, so your gestures will be smaller than normal, but still use them. At this close up range, your arms won’t be making the gestures, as much as your hands.  The sweep of the gestures will be more compact and you will probably want to hold them for slightly longer than usual.  As I said before sit up straight, don’t slouch and adjust the chair height to allow you to do that.  If you can arrange the tech so that you can do the presentation standing that would be ideal.  It gives you more access to your body language and gestures.  It also feels more comfortable than being constrained while sitting.

If it is phone only and no video connection, then the earlier ideas about voice come directly into play.  This is harder in one way, but there is also less pressure, because no one is looking at you.  Also, you are not trying to discern the expressions on their faces through the medium of a small screen.  Rehearsal is still very important and you should record how you sound across the phone lines.  Pay special attention to pauses, because the only mental stimulation they are receiving is auditory.  They need time to filter what they are hearing, so don’t be in a rush. You may have had to send the deck ahead of time, which means they will be on page eight, while you are still on page two. There is nothing you can do about that, so keep going regardless.

The basics of presenting apply whether you are in the hall, on the phone or on live video.  The rehearsal element is even more important.  Getting online early, to check the tech becomes critical.  Remember the tech, the screens, etc., are all there to play second fiddle to you, the presenter.  You must dominate the medium, no matter what it is.  Plan to be successful and you will be successful.

Can A Presentation Be Conversationalist And Still Be Business Professional?

Sometimes we read that when we are presenting it should be just like a conversation with your friend. The idea is we should be relaxed, inclusive, totally focused on the people we are speaking to.  Now will that work in the boardroom when presenting to the senior executives, none of whom are particularly friendly?  Will this work with an audience of legitimate experts in your field?  Will this work with clients when pitching for their business. 

We need to determine from the very start what it is we are trying to achieve.  Are we going to pass on a lot of recent and relevant information that our audience will appreciate, because they can then use that in their work or use it to add to their own presentations?  If it is a technical topic and the attendees are experts, then an inform style speech will work very well.  Should it be chatty?  Probably not. The audience may feel we are not taking them seriously enough.

This doesn’t give us a blank cheque now to be dull and boring.  We need to tailor our talk to our audience and to how much they know about the subject.  Too high level and full of insider jargon and we, the great unwashed, will feel stupid, isolated and diminished by the speaker.  Then we will get angry at our unfair treatment. 

We need to be using power in or power out to highlight certain words we want to stress.  We should be using gestures which are congruent with what we are saying.  Our eyes should be on the audience the whole time picking up visual clues as to how well they are receiving our message.  We should be telling stories to make the points easier to recall.  Where possible we should include aspects of our own experience both good and bad, to be added to the mix to make it real for the listeners.

If the object is to impress your audience and convince them of your suggestions. then we need lots of evidence in the talk.  This is not a backyard over the fence chat.  This is well structured to layer on so much evidence that the audience can only agree with our ideas.  We need oodles of logic, facts, data, statistics, testimonials, evidence etc. We may need a little showmanship to bring these dead numbers to life.  A distance expressed as a numeral is an abstract idea for most people.  But if we expressed it as so many football pitch lengths, then people would have a much better idea of how far we are talking. The same with volumes.  If we compared it to a Sports Stadium or an Olympic pool, then the concept of sizes is easier to grasp.

If our aim is to persuade or get people to commit to action, then we need to be highly energised.  If we don’t look enthusiastic about the idea the audience may well be asking themselves why they should bother to get behind this suggestion from us.  We will need plenty of word pictures to draw out the end result such that the audience can see it in their mind’s eye.  Getting from the abstract to the concrete as fast as possible is critical.  We need to be describing what the future looks like after they take up our ideas and suggestions.  If it was a course in financial accounting, for example, we need to be talking about the types of complex analysis the graduates will be able to perform.  Now comes the important bit, relate that new found facility to the business and how it will either save or increase money.  We cannot leave the outcomes at the general directional level, we need to nut out the concrete gains.

If our job is to entertain the audience, then the conversational manner is a good one. This is disarming, because we are inviting people to relax through our own informality.  The storytelling will be on fire.  We will be relating incidents and filling them out with people, places, seasons and all manner of detail to make the scene come alive.  This is the verbal equivalent of the novelist setting the scene for the action.  The writer doesn’t just say an exchange of spies took place.  The author constructs the drive to the bridge, outlines the surrounds, paints in the atmosphere, injects interesting personalities into the mix. As the speaker we need to be doing the same thing. 

Chatty, witty talks are fine for when we should be chatty.  At other times, we need to be more circumspect and formal. Not dull but formal and the difference is mightily important.  In some cases we may need to come armed with a battalion of bar charts and tie our audience up with our line graphs and then  hit them with our pie charts.  We belt them with detail and data until they surrender.  We might also need to be at our pulpit, preaching our doctrine, making our calls for obedience to our ideas and words.  Fully indoctrinated, we attempt to infect others. Definitely not a chat.  Or we might need to be topical, on point, deep in the zeitgeist as they say, informing others of what is the state of play.  The key is to decide which approach you will take from the very start, before you even get anywhere near a slide deck.  Do that and you will be well on the way to exceeding your audiences expectations.

Tag Team Pitching For Fun And Profit

In business, we are asked to present as a team.  We may be pitching for new business and the presentation requires different specialist areas of expertise.  This is quite different to doing something on your own, where you are the star and have full control over what is going on.  One of the big mistakes with amateur presenters is they don’t rehearse.  They just turn up and fluff it.  They blow up their personal and organisational brands. When in a team environment, you absolutely cannot neglect the rehearsal component.  There will be many sessions needed before you are ready to face an audience, so you have to plan for this.  Do not leave this until the last moment after you have all been diligently assembling your slide decks.

The batting order is important.   Don’t put the brainy nerd up front. They may be the legitimate expert, but unless they are the best presenter keep them in reserve.  We want the best person to lead off, because this is how we create that all important first impression.  They may come back for the close out or have another equally skillful person secure the positive final impression.  The technical geeky people can be safely placed in the middle of proceedings.

As mentioned, don’t allow all the available team time to be sucked up by creating slides for the presentation.  This is the mechanical part and we need the soft skills part to be really firing. That takes time and repetition.  Set deadlines for deck completion, well in advance of the event, so that the chances to get everyone together are created.

Having worked out the order, do dry runs to see how the whole things flows.  Practice little things like each presenter shaking the hand of the next presenter as a type of baton pass between the team.  It shows you are a tight, united unit and connects the whole enterprise together. 

Also, make sure each presentation can be given by everyone in the team.  People get sick, planes get cancelled or delayed, all manner of circumstances can arise.  At the appointed time, you are down some key members of the team.  In this case the audience expects the show to go on and for you to cover the missing person’s part. 

This cannot be the first time this idea has occurred to you,.  You need to plan for this at the very start.  As you all rehearse together you hear their section over and over, so jumping in and working through their part of the deck shouldn’t be an impossibility. The questioning part might be different, but the presenting part should not create too many difficulties, if you are organised.

Have a navigator for the questions determined at the start.  When questions land you want that process to be handled seamlessly.  I remember being on a panel for a dummy press conference, during media training. One ex-journo in the audience asked us a very curly question and we all just looked at each other, having no clue as to who would take that infrared missile.  Our work colleagues in the audience just burst out laughing, because we looked such a shambles. 

Anticipate what likely questions will rise, nominate who will take care of which sections and if anything indeterminate hits the team, understand that the navigator will take care of it.  The navigator, will also control the questions.  If it is straightforward, then after thanking the questioner, they will just say, “Suzuki san will take care of this topic” and hand it over. 

If it is a bit tricky, tough or complicated and is going to be hard to answer, the navigator must control things.  They need to build in a bit of thinking time for the person who is going to have to take this one.  They need to “cushion” the answer.  By this I mean they will say something rather harmless, but which buys valuable thinking time for the person. This allows them to brace themselves for their reply. 

It would sound like this, “Thank you for your question.  Yes, it is important that the budget allocated helps to drive the business forward. I am going to ask Tanaka san to give us some insight into how to address this budget issue -  Tanaka san”.  That sentence takes around 12-15 seconds to say.  Tanaka san knows she will get this one, because it is within in her designated area of expertise to answer during the pitch.  The navigator provides her with some extra time to compose her strategy for her answer. 

Another technique, which you can only use sparingly, is to simply ask them to repeat the question. You got it the first time, but you may want to build in some extra thinking time to come up with the best answer. Do this too often and the games up!

Inject Yourself Into The Presentation Content

When we are presenting, we can be mentally separating out personal selves from the content of the talk. There will be facts, data, statistics, details, examples, evidence, etc., which is all rather far removed from the individual presenting.  It is almost like we are doing third person presentation rather than first person. Technical people in particular like to remove themselves from the proceedings and only talk about the facts.  This is a big opportunity wasted.

I am an introvert, so I understand about the reluctance to inject oneself into the story.  People who know me will be doubting that statement entirely.  They will say I am outgoing, confident, vocal, not shy and retiring at all.  The Myers Briggs personality analysis results define an introvert as someone who when they get tired, likes to retire from the fray, rest up and then return.  The extrovert grabs energy from others and so wants to occupy the center of the fray. 

As an introvert, talking about myself or my family was something that I was highly hesitant to do. In fact I managed to give hundreds of public speeches, while safely keeping myself out of the narrative. This was a big mistake. 

Now we don’t have to hang all the family’s dirty laundry out for all to see, but we can inject something of ourselves into the talk.  We can refer to our experiences with a particular subject.  We can tell stories of what happened to us when we did something we are recommending people to do or not to do.  When we do that we make a very strong connection with the audience and with a sense of reality.  Now the talk has moved from the theoretical to the practical.

We all want to know what the reality is.  That is why we appreciate the opportunity to read consumer comments on products or services they have bought.  We are looking to cut through all the company propaganda and get some sense of what is really going on. You Tube is full of videos of people reviewing products and commenting on their experiences with them.  We love the chance to get more objective information before we make our purchase.

Well, audiences are the same.  They want to know what really happened.  This means if we can inject our experiences and insights into the presentation, the audience speaker credibility gauge starts to really move the needle in a very positive direction for us.  To do this we have to be willing to share stories and episodes of what happened.  Sometimes these are hard to relate because maybe we are not being shown in a perfect light. 

The funny thing about audiences is that they don’t like people who are perfect.  Too smooth, too polished, too slick comes across like a rat with a gold tooth.  Your internal danger beacons starts flashing and the loudspeaker broadcast is telling you “danger, danger”. Our audience likes to hear about the struggles, foibles, mistakes and failings of others.  They don’t regard these people as weaklings to be discarded on the mountainside like in Sparta.  Instead they identify with our human frailties.

Humour is tricky with presentations, but self-depreciating humour never goes down badly.  I was watching one of the masters of sales presentations –_Zig Ziglar.  He was relating his tough, early days in sales, going to host’s kitchens and cooking up a storm for the invited guests who were his prospects.   In passing he casually mentioned that even though he was struggling early in his career he did sell quite a bit - his car, his furniture….  It was quite funny the way he told it and the joke was against himself, rather than against another person.

If we want to connect with our audience, we shouldn’t be afraid to poke fun at ourselves, tell of our failings, mistakes, disasters, train wrecks, etc.  The audience will appreciate the honesty and also the peek inside about what not to do.  It took me a long time to be able to do this, being an incredibly private person, raised in the isolation of the Australian bush.  But when I did manage to start injecting more of myself into my talks, I found a stronger resonance with the audience and more acceptance of what I was saying. I realised I should have been doing this a lot earlier.

Shooshing Your Noisy Audience Is Ridiculous When Presenting

When a presentation event unintentionally turns into comedic relief, you know you have a major credibility problem.  Imagine it is after work, a cavernous hall filled with hundreds of people, the booze and small talk all free flowing.  The MC attempts to introduce the main host of the event, to make some worthy remarks. The hum continues as people are more riveted by their own conversation than anything the crew on stage has to say. In a stroke of pathos, the MC starts shooshing the audience to attempt to quieten them down. 

The audience aren’t buying any of this Mother stuff from the MC and keep chatting regardless.  This leads to even more ridiculous shooshing, only louder and more strident this time.  The MC doesn’t appear to have had any presentation training.  So they have reverted to parental authority over the naughty boys and girls in the audience, to restore some semblance of order.  We have now descended into comedy, but more a comedy of errors.

Almost giving up, the main speaker is now trotted out by the MC for more of the same.  This speaker thankfully didn’t try any shooshing of their own, but the MC was on a roll and unhelpfully weighed in from the sidelines, with more shooshing, during the speech.  The main speaker was not skilled, interesting or commanding, so their words were subsumed into the general low drone echoing across the hall from all the crowd hubbub.  There were other subsequent speakers and they also were buffeted by the strong winds of disinterest.

Should we blame the speakers for being unskilled and boring or the audience for being ignorant and rude or both?  Well I don’t think we can blame the audience and even if we did, what difference would it make?  Should we have burly security guards on hand, to frog march noisy offenders out of the hall. We could try this to spread the general idea that we the organisers can’t be brooked and require better manners from the assembled rabble.

In reality, I think we have to accept that if you release free flowing booze into the audience then their conversations are going to be more attractive to them, than anything else happening on stage.  In many cases in Japan, they hold the booze back for that very reason.  If you are well behaved and don’t talk over the speeches, we will reward you with a drink when we get to the toast. 

This Pavlovian style training tends to inject more discipline into the proceedings.  It is not completely foolproof and some hardened conversationalists, maybe the non-drinkers in the audience, will still continue their tete-a-tete during the main speeches.  It is a much smaller group though and generally everyone is listening to the speeches.  The negative thing about the Japanese methodology though is the speeches are usually too many in number and too long in length.  If you are all that remains between you and drinkees, then remember to make it short and memorable, then get off.

Well what can we do when it is us up there on stage, at the podium, surveying the great unwashed, unreformed and unruly rabble.  They are shamelessly standing there staring back up at us, while willfully chit chatting, with no sign of embarrassment or remorse. 

The first thing is to design your talk to be powerful, impactful and short.  Waffling on about nothing of great import or of any consequence to the audience is a guaranteed formula for being ignored.  Our main speaker did a great job of doing just that.  Naturally people were not moved and the MC, in vain, had to bring out the shooshing nuclear harpoon to corral the audience. 

If you are in this position, think very carefully about what you can say at the start to get the audience engaged.  Talking at them won’t cut it.  We need to be speaking with them and this is where getting crowd involvement works like a charm.  Ask them a rousing question.  Get them physically and mentally involved.

This occasion actually really lent itself perfectly to this task.  It had a sporting theme and the audience was chock full of opposing supporters covering a large number of competing teams. 

If our MC or the speaker had asked the audience to nominate which team was going to win the competition, then audience involvement would have been tremendous.  Additionally the pro technique is to say, “I didn’t catch that, who is going to win?”  By doing this you get the audience to really ramp up their energy and volume.  They want to talk, so give them their chance to really rock it, but only for a moment.  There is a particular mass rally, large crowd effect we want to tap into, as there is tremendous energy therein, which we want to direct.

Following that raucous reaction, thank them, then pause.  You will now have a still quiet in the room. This is when you had better say something really gripping.  You have the complete attention of the masses and they are now open to you.  They are having a good time at last. 

As you proceed into the talk, the low hum at the back will return.  Expect that, so again ask them another leading question in a few minutes time. This will allow them to burn off all that excess chat energy they have, so that they will be calm and listen to you again.  You can’t keep doing this ad nauseam, otherwise it feels manipulative. People won’t respond anymore, they won’t like you and will leave with a bad taste in their mouth.

The answer to keeping audience interest, is to be interesting.  Use word pictures, tell relevant stories, lift your speaker energy right up to the top of the scale to command the room.  Rock stars can do this, because they have massive amplifiers, electric guitars and a full drum kit to work with.  You don't have any of that, but you have to become as powerful as a rock star on stage, to grab easily distracted people’s attention.  Your projection of your “ki” or body energy, big gestures and powerful voice strength are the equivalent of the amplifiers, electric guitars and full drum kit.

In our presentation training, the participants are at about 15% energy levels when they first enter the training room.  We the instructors have to project our own energy levels up to 130% or 150%, to lift the audience up to 100% of their potential energy.  Speaking in front of a noisy crowd requires the same strategy. In this case, you have to go above their energy levels and seize control of the room. They are already at close to 80% to 90%, so we have to go to 150% to stay in command of the proceedings.

Our speaker did none of that and was totally forgettable. The MC was just annoying and the whole episode was a shambles.  Those on stage were all speaker road kill. 

If you are ever in the nominated speaker position to address a noisy assembly, take the ideas outlined here and you will be heard and well regarded.  You will emerge with your reputation really enhanced, because skilled crowd lion tamers are few and far between. 

Bland Is Bad When Presenting

Smart, capable people amaze me when I see them presenting.  This recent speaker was someone I had met in business a few times previously and this was my first time to see him present.  In our earlier conversations, he was knowledgeable, intelligent and professional.  He was an experienced person in his industry and had substantial international work exposure.  He was tall, broad shouldered, square jawed, handsome and personally well presented. His presentation itself was a dud. He had great information, probably some of the best available.  He had good perspective to put that data in context.  The delivery though was lifeless and it was killing the quality of the content.

This is a big mistake we can easily make.  We add too many slides because we think the audience will really benefit from this additional information.  Now we are rushing to get through it all in the allotted time and this detracts from our professionalism as presenters.  Or we want to put too much comparative information on the one slide.  The two or three graphs we are showing are complex and because at a reduced scale to fit on the slide, they are hard to read, so we lose our audience.  We might really go crazy and start putting up whole spreadsheets of figures on the slide and just wipe our audience out completely.

Another problem with delivery can be too much jargon, which forces large swaths of the audience to drop out and go searching for their internet connection on their phone.  They want to spend their time doing something more useful, like checking Facebook or Instagram, rather than listening to us. We may be speaking at a rapid rate of knots, because our nerves and corresponding adrenalin release are driving up the speaking speed. We are like the surf, with each successive wave wiping out the one before it.  In this metaphor, the content of the previous wave is usurped by the next wave, such that the audience cannot retain the previous point we made.  They soon lose touch with the direction of the talk.

In our speaker’s case, his voice loudness was such that with the microphone, we could clearly hear him in the room.  His speaking speed was actually, if anything, a little on the slow side.  The real killer though was his speaking intensity. What do I mean by intensity?  It was very, very low key.  This can often be the deep pit that technical speakers fall into.  They are numbers, rather than words, people and so they deliver their talk with a detached, “I am not really here” presence.  If this was a paper they had written  and they weren’t there then this is fine.  The problem is as if it were an academic or technical paper and the difference between us reading it for ourselves and them giving the presentation is abysmally tiny.

Intensity comes from within and from our mental attitude to the talk.  Are we there to be supremely grey and just inform the audience of the content?  If this is the idea then this presenter was totally successful.  Is this enough though.  In this modern, fast paced, highly competitive world how can we choose to come in last?  If we get a chance to showcase our organisation and ourselves we have to make every post a winner.  We need to better understand the full potential of the situation.  If we can present information in a way that really makes the audience sit up and take notice, then they will think highly of our firm and of us. 

He was grey, bland, forgettable, uninteresting, uninspiring, nice but boring – a speaker wall flower type, disappearing into the background, while standing in the foreground of the venue stage.

There was no tonal variation in his delivery.  He didn’t punch out key words to drive home their importance.  His face was wooden and rather neutral, deadpan looking throughout, rather than excited and passionate about his subject.  He had no crescendos and just settled for lulls all the way throughout the 40 minutes of audience torture.  His body language and gestures had been put away for storage, waiting for a rainy day perhaps, because he didn’t bring them to the hall. Now when you are a big guy like him, being dynamic is relatively easy, because you have mass and when put in motion, it can have a strong impact on your audience. 

He also chose to follow the arrangements by the event staff, none of whom have ever given a public presentation in their entire life and who are completely ignorant of professional presentation requirements.  Following their direction, he stood behind the podium obscuring his body language potential, had the lights dimmed to accommodate the screen and what was being displayed.  He was already grey in delivery terms but his stage positioning and lighting had him almost disappear from plain sight.

He is a great teacher of presentations.  In the Japanese language there is an expression called “hanmen kyoshi” or teacher by negative example.  This is the role he played superbly on this occasion.  We can learn a lot by doing the opposite of what he was doing.  It also makes us realize that being tall, broad and handsome doesn’t mean much, if you don’t know what you are doing as a presenter.  Having great data and information will not retain the attention of our increasingly attention deficit modern audiences, because we cannot keep them riveted to us and off their mobile phones.  The minimum requirement is a clear understanding of the importance of solid delivery skills, on top of which we pour on our unsurpassed content. Not only do we have to understand these points, we have to deliver the delivery!

Don’t Get A Grip When Presenting

Good posture never goes out of fashion.  Standing up straight shows confidence, allows good breath control and projects energy. Given this is pretty simple, then why is it we get this so wrong when presenting?  The problem is temptations aplenty in the presenting environment.  The various acting awards or music performance awards are broadcast all around the world, to celebrate people making their living as professional presenters.  Acting is presenting and so is singing, although we do not often think of the performances in that way, but fundamentally that is what these artists are doing. 

Now this is one group you would expect to do this well.  Yet, we see award recipients murdering their acceptance speeches.  They stand there shoulders curved, hunched over the stand microphone, bending low from the waist to accommodate the tech, rather than the other way around.  These are people who spend an inordinate amount of their time around microphone technology as users.  Yet they seem incapable of mastering this sound dispersal device.  We get a terrific view of the top of their heads, which when we have a bald or balding pate on display, makes the whole experience even more memorable.

If you are ever in a position like that, where the height of the microphone stand makes the distance from the top of the mounted microphone to your mouth seem too far, then change the scenario.  Actually, hopefully you will have arrived early and will have checked the equipment beforehand so will know if the microphone thus mounted will do the trick or not.  You should have already alerted the organisers to your preferred tech arrangements and because it is going to be an extended presentation, you have requested a hand microphone or a lavalier microphone.

Let’s presume you have not had that chance, because it is an award ceremony and your remarks will be brief.  Don’t worry because the solution is devastatingly simple.  Remove the microphone from the stand holder completely and bring it closer to your mouth when you want to speak.  If the microphone is wedged in there and is not relenting or responding to your efforts to remove it, then go for more radical measures.  Pick the whole damn thing up holus-bolus and speak into the microphone, so that you can be heard by everyone.  Don’t be bossed around by the tech – show it who is boss around here.

The other great good posture denier is the podium.  I always recommend dispensing with the podium entirely, if you can do that.  These days we can have our slides there to help us navigate our way through the speech.  The ubiquitous slide advance clickers free us from being trapped behind the podium and having to hit the arrow keys to move through the slide deck. We can advance the slide show from anywhere on the stage and thus be able to access our full body language, to add to our communication piece. 

What we often see though, is the speaker, usually male, applying a vice like grip on the outer edges of the podium, in an effort to stop it escaping from the stage at any moment. Male speakers also love it because they don’t know what to do with their hands, so choking the life out of the podium takes care of that problem completely. This double grip arrangement eliminates the possibility of using gestures, to back up the words, because the podium has now become a function of the speaker’s balance.  This is because the speaker is standing back from the podium and leaning forward, head down, shoulders hunched over the microphone attached to the low flying microphone stand.  When your weight is back like that, you tend to get stuck in that position and wind up delivering the whole speech with that poor posture.

If for some sad reason you are using a podium as a notes bench or are even worse, using your laptop screen as your notes bench, then stand up straight and slightly back and away from the podium.  From here, you can’ t easily grip the furniture and this frees you up to use your gestures.

Good posture shows the mark of the professional, who is in control of their environment, the furniture and the tech.  Now all they have to do is concentrate on their audience and that is why we are there in the first place, isn’t it.

Go Broad, But Also Go Deep When Presenting

When you hear an excellent presentation, it is easy to be well satisfied.  When you are giving such a presentation and the audience are wolfing down your information, it is also easy to be self satisfied.  The good is the enemy of the great we say, don’t we.  The difficulty is when things are going so well, to know exactly how to take them to a higher level.

I was attending such a presentation recently and the speaker was very, very good.  The content was right on topic, for an area which has real attention grabbing power for audiences.  The room was a sell out. That is always a good thing isn’t it. The information itself was new, well designed and cleverly arranged in terms of the cadence of the argument. The actual delivery was probably one of the best that that particular business audience will see in a long, long time.  All good, so how to make something already working extremely well even better?

This is not easy, but I did notice one thing which I thought could have been added and it may be something that we can all consider when we are constructing our own presentations. When we are delivering an “inform style” of presentation, of course we need to be clear, concise and on topic. We also need to have fresh information that is new to the audience, so that they feel they were in the box seats for a very value deep presentation.  This presentation knocked it out of the park in that regard.

When we are doing that inform type of presentation, we can be spending quite a big chunk of our time on the broad brush strokes of industry direction, the shape of the trend, the predictions for the future. This is great because as audience members, we are getting treated to a business equivalent of a massive star show of the outer galaxies, like we will see in a Planetarium .

Future direction is good, but to really take our talk to the highest possible level, we need to do one more thing.  We need to connect this broad and scale based projection analysis to the day to day reality of our punters in the audience.  The talk I attended could have gone one more step and have reached out to the audience, with some steps they could take to connect the information with their daily challenges.  It didn’t have to morph into a complete “how to” presentation, but the inclusion of a few takeaways would have been the super icing on the cake.

The problem is that usually we are so wrapped up in the macro scale of what we are talking about, particularly when we are involved in discussing broad directional changes in an industry, that it is easy to get stuck at that general direction level. We are fully focused on the big picture.

We need to pick up around five things the audience can walk out with, which they can put into immediate action, to link the macro with the micro.  There are bound to be things that our audience can do, as a result of hearing this speech, which will better prepare them and their companies for the coming changes. Everyone wants to know what is coming down the pike and what they need to do be ready for it.

The addition of these concrete steps brings the talk even more alive and makes it more relevant for our audience.  Why five? Of course, we could probably list ten or twenty items, but the smaller number is easier for the audience to apply, without feeling overwhelmed.  Trying to make too many changes too quickly, usually results in nothing getting done. Five is also good as a quantity because it has volume, which gives the talk a greater feeling of worth and credibility.  These five points are sufficiently significant, without being off putting.

So the next time you are giving a presentation of the “inform” variety, look carefully at your macro points and try and pull out some practical steps, some juicy takeaways, that the audience can feast on and integrate into their own businesses straight away. If you do this, they will leave the room with a sense of they have seen the future and they are better prepared with some practical steps to deal with it.

Vacuum Up Cool Stuff for Your Presentations

Do you have one of those diaries that includes a daily quotation on the page?  Or maybe you subscribe to a service that sends you uplifting quotes?  I have noticed that social media is also a great hunting ground for cool quotations too, as people share them around.  We probably note these and then move on with our lives.  For the presenter though, these are gold.  We need to be collecting these sound bites to lob into our presentations.

We might kick off the talk with a pithy quote or perhaps end with one.  This is a great way to start proceedings by setting the intellectual frame of reference for the audience.  Get them thinking and pondering about what we are saying. Ending with a great quote is like an excellent desert after a great meal, we leave feeling better.

Conveniently there are books of quotations in general and then there are collections of quotes from leading individuals.  If Winston Churchill had received a buck for every time he has been quoted, the sum would dwarf the wealth of the robber barons from Silicon Valley.  The point is, there is no shortage of material, only a shortage of imagination and awareness about using it.

The daily news is usually a tedious and depressing rendition of distant disasters, deadly deeds and dirty tricks being orchestrated somewhere on the planet.  It is also a good source of interesting tidbits we can inject into our talks to assist us in making a key point in our argument. Instead of just using it for the wrapping up of the vegetable peelings and fish bones, scan the pages for more gold. I find using a pen to mark an article helps me to locate it later and then cut out the piece that attracted my interest.  Then it is peelings bound, as it heads off to the trash.

We need to be looking for evergreen tidbits, because news rapidly becomes irrelevant.  We may not have a convenient speaking spot looming on the horizon to coordinate with our little explosive.  Capture them for later use.  You might be thinking, I don’t fancy trying to store all these random bits of newsprint, getting dusty and tatty somewhere in the house.  These days we can take a photo with our phone, upload that to a cloud corral like Evernote and store it there.  Usually we are after short bits of fierce and fiery additions to our text, to illustrate a point we are making, so we don’t need the whole article.

Other speakers are also occasionally a good source of quotes and stories.  Let me give an example of one I heard recently.  Mr Nagato, the head of Japan Post was relating a tale about former Prime Minister Mori.  Prime Minister Mori probably spent more time playing rugby than studying English when he was a lad, so his linguistic challenges were many. 

Japan was hosting a G7 meeting and he had to greet all the heavy hitters as they arrived.  His minders had been working him over, to be able to get out a couple of simple phrases without the aid of interpreters. You can sense impending disaster already can’t you!  So the phrases were “How are you” to which most people would say “I am well thank you” or something similar and Mori would then reply  “me too”.  This is the normal give and take and nothing too exotic or overly ambitious.

So Bill Clinton rolls into town and rather than following the script Mori says “Who are you” by mistake, to which Bill says “Hilary’s Husband” and without missing a beat, Mori says “Me too”.  Bill carries on with “Good luck” and moves on inside.

Now that was a great story and Nagato san had very cleverly worked that into his topic, which had nothing to do with that G7 episode.  We all laughed and felt good about Nagato san and his talk.  This was no accident.  He had calculated this as a way to relax his audience and win them over to his side. It worked like a charm.

My point is, we are all swimming through a daily storm tide of quotes, tidbits, curiosities and stories which we can purloin and insert into our presentations.  This will make us more memorable and spice up our talks. All we have to do is open our eyes, start looking for them, then reach out and nail them down for future insertion.

How To Liven Up A Speech You Have To Read

Watching a friend of mine deliver his speech to my Rotary Club reminded me of the perils of reading speeches.  In his case, he was giving the speech in Japanese and so he chose the route of linguistic perfection over audience engagement.  We do this in our own language too when the speech content is complex or of high sensitivity.  Politicians have learnt they usually get themselves into trouble when they are adlibbing, compared to when they are reading from a carefully prepared and fully vetted speech. 

Do I recommend reading the speech?  No, but sometimes the stakes are too high or the situation demands you read the whole thing. My Japanese is not perfect, but I prefer to engage my audience than lose them by having to look down to read the content.  Depending on the formality of the situation though, I might choose to read it.  How can we liven this process up though?

What could my friend do when he was reading his speech to make it more engaging for his audience. He could have departed from the text and just spoken directly to the audience, while maintaining full eye contact for some of the sentences.  Looking down at our speech means we have to break eye contact and this creates a barrier between us and the audience.  By having a few sections where we replace sentences in the text with bullet points, to which we can speak will give us that chance to make continuous eye contact with members of the audience.  His Japanese ability was sufficient for him to do that.  For most people, they will be operating in their native language anyway.

We can do a similar thing with slides.  We might show a picture, a graph or some key words and just talk to them, rather than read from the notes.  The visual aspect supports what we are saying, so we lessen the burden on our words to sell the message.  If we are doing it in a foreign language like my friend, we can have the perfect grammatical clarity needed up on screen to describe what we want to say and then just deliver the same key message in our own more natural if imperfect language.

He could also have used stories more in his speech.  Stories engage our audience and we can transport them to specific locations, seasons of the year or times of the day through telling our stories.  They key thing with stories is to tell something about locations or people with which the audience will be familiar.  I heard a great one the other day from the head of Japan Post Mr. Masatsugu Nagato.  He was speaking to the Economist Conference Network in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and doing so in English.  He told an amusing story about when previous Japanese Prime Minister Mori met US President Bill Clinton when japan was hosting a G7 meeting in Okinawa.  The point I want to make here is his audience were familiar with Mori, Bill and Okinawa.  We should do the same.  Try to get your audience seeing the scene in their mind’s eye.

Rhetorical questions are also great for getting engagement.  When we ask a question of our audience, we are forcing them to concentrate on what we are saying and think of the answer.  Depending on the occasion, sometimes it is hard to know if the speaker really expects an answer or not.  That is the ideal situation.  We want to create some tension in the room because that creates connectivity between the speaker and the listeners.  By throwing out questions we get everyone on the same wave length, at the same time and that builds our connection with our audience. We don’t need twenty of these, just a few will do the trick.  For example, in a twenty minute speech, probably one every five minutes or so would work well.  Remember, we need to step it up in our speech about every five minutes to keep everyone attentive.  This might be using questions, employing the slide deck or telling a story.

So we don’t have to become captives to the text and lose our engagement with our listeners.  These have been some simple ideas we can use to keep the talk interesting and engaging.  It doesn’t matter if you are speaking in a foreign language or your native tongue.  These ideas will work a treat.

The Importance of Analysing Your Own Presentation Performance

The presentation has come to a close and we are relieved it is all over.  We pack our stuff up and get back to work.  Back to the office now and the emails have been flooding in during our absence, there are meetings a plenty to join and tonnes of projects begging for our attention.  The memory of having done the presentation quickly fades and we find we have lost the opportunity to build on our experience.  We usually don’t get all that much frequency with our business presentations and so every shot we get is a great chance to grab lessons from it and improve.  But we don’t.

We don’t because it wasn’t factored into the planning at the start.  If it is an afterthought, it will get overcome by all the other pressing matters requiring our attention the moment we hit the door of the office.  So as part of the planning process we should include a review of what we did, compared to what we planned to do.  We need to gauge how it went and which parts we thought resonated more with the audience. 

When is the best time to do that?  Immediately the presentation is over.  Don’t organize your schedule so that you have to go into client or internal meetings straight after the presentation.  Head for a coffee shop, sit down, relax a bit and start making some notes.  If you are a high energy presenter like me, you will be drained at the end of the presentation anyway and a brief rest is a good idea.  I leave nothing on the table when I present, I try to put it all out there and give every ounce of energy and passion I possess.  It is exhausting.

So go back to the presentation in your mind. Were you able to get there early, check out the venue and meet audience members as they filed in, getting to know about their interest, why they came, gauging their level of expertise on the subject?  Did the MC quote from your carefully crafted introduction or did you have to fill in the missing bits yourself. How was the opening? Did it go as planned?  How was your speaking speed – did you speed up or were you able to keep it at an even, easy to follow pace?  Were you using voice modulation to keep the audience interested or was it all the same strength from beginning to end?

Were you consistently making six second eye contact with members of your audience, so you could connect with them, sell them on your key points and judge their reaction to what you were saying?  Were you able to use your gestures to emphasise your argument?  Were you able to keep the order of your key points after the opening?  If you were using a slide deck, were you dominating the screen or was it dominating you.

Were you controlling the proceedings well, marshaling the various stages of the presentation.   For example, did you go into your first close, receive the applause and then call for questions, nominating how many minutes there were for questions?  Were you remembering to paraphrase the questions, so that everyone could hear them. Did you control the final impression by adding your second close, so that the last thing the audience heard was what you wanted them to hear?  Did you come down off the podium and mix with your audience at the end to extend your personal brand?

Having done this checklist of how it was supposed to flow, then think about how it went.  Were people nodding to your points, were the questions hostile or more on point wanting more detail?  How many people stayed to talk with you?  How many compliments did you receive which were genuine as opposed to flattery?  How did you feel it went?

Now ask yourself, what did I do that was good?  Then after listing these up start asking yourself, how could I make this better for next time.  This will include general points which will be relevant for any topic and any occasion. Do not get into beating yourself up over what you perceived went wrong.  Keep the momentum going forward, keep it focused on the positive.

If you were able to record your talk, then certainly play it back and have a close listen to it.  If you were able to video it, even better. Seeing and hearing yourself is a great antidote to the paucity of presentations you may be able to give in a year.  These records help to keep you focused on improvement.

Don’t bother asking what people thought.  You will get a whole bunch of uninformed opinions from people who hardly ever give presentations.  If you want to get expert opinion, then invite an expert to attend and have them give you professional level advice.  The average punter will only give you critique and work on destroying your confidence.

This whole exercise will probably take about 40 minutes. Time enough to relax over a coffee or a tea and reflect on where you can improve.  Make sure you write it down and keep it as a record, which you can consult before your next presentation.  Keep doing this and you will definitely improve.

How To Speak To 5000 People Audiences

The chances of this happening and happening regularly are remote for most of us.  The happening regularly part is the key, because when you are dealing at this scale, you need to get practice to really master the big stage. Nevertheless, in case you find yourself in front of a very large audience, here are a few hints on how to adjust to the increased size of the event.

Get there early and go and sit in some of the most far flung locations.  It might be the last row at the back or the rear seats on the elevated third tier of the venue.  What you will notice, is that anyone on stage is quite small at that distance.  You realize you will seem like a peanut to audience members seated at the far extremes and so you need to “big up” your presentation to suit the tyranny of distance.

The stage area is usually quite long and wide in big venues, but you need to be investigating the front of the stage.  Often there is an orchestra pit or a defined space between the front row of seats and the stage itself.  You will be standing very close to the apron of the stage, so that you can be more easily seen by your audience.  The thing is to try not to fall off the stage when you are presenting.  That is why you need to check it out beforehand, so that you know how far is far enough forward.  You may laugh, but once you are into it and your eyes are searching for faces up on the third tier at the back, you are not looking down where you are walking anymore.  Often those stages are curved and not in a straight line and so it is easy to forget that and down you go.

Definitely go for the pin microphone, so that your hands will be left free for gestures.  These gestures will have to become much larger than anything you have been used to before.  Remember you are a peanut waving your arms around to those in the cheap seats at the back. This means go for double handed gestures as much as possible, to fill up more of the stage with your presence. 

Normally when we hold our hands out, palm up toward an audience in a sign that says “you can trust what I am saying”, the arms will be within the bounds of the sides of our body. On the big stage those hands will be almost drawing a straight line across your body so the hands are super widely spread.  If you are raising your hand to indicate something high, like a number, usually it would be slightly above head height.   Not this time.  You need to raise your hand as high as possible above your head to have any impact.

Don’t overdo it, but get your audience involved by asking them to raise their hands if they have had this or that experience.  Pick something which is fairly common, so as many hands will go up as possible.  This is using crowd dynamics and crowd psychology. When a huge number of people do that same thing, at the same time, it infects the entire audience with that energy and agreement.  You will also get a huge energy boost as their energy connects with you on stage. That is a serious high. Trust me, when any audience leans in toward you, it is electric and at scale.  What an incredible feeling. It is like a drug and you want more of it. I don’t know how rock stars calm down after having hours of that amount of monster energy directed at them.

The other thing is having your ki or chi marshaled for the task.  Ki or chi is the intrinsic energy we possess and it is most famously seen in martial arts like aikido and taichi.  When you are on stage, you have to try and push your energy, your ki, to the very back wall of the hall.  You have to mentally project your energy that distance.  Your voice helps with this task.  You have to be directing your voice all the way to the last rows of seats. I don’t mean yelling, because you are set up with a microphone and if you start yelling you will only distort the sound.  What it means is push your voice strength to the back walls.

Your eyes also come into play here.  You need to be breaking the audience up into a baseball diamond.  Left, center, right field, inner field and outer field. These six sectors have to be worked hard by your eye contact to be picking out individuals and looking straight at their faces.  Now if your eyesight isn’t up to the task, don’t worry.  Only you will know that the person you are directing your gaze to is a blurry outline in the crowd.  The act of looking straight into the eyes of audience members means that at a certain distance, the twenty people seated around that person, all believe it is them you are looking at.  In this way, you can engage with many more people, no matter how far away they are seated.

Normally I am not keen on having speakers wandering around the stage when presenting. You have seen this I am sure.  The speaker is nervous and they are going up and down, up and down, up and down, the whole time they are speaking, totally detracting and distracting from their key message. 

I want you to use the left, center and right sides of the stage.  However walk slowly to the extreme edges, stop, settle and talk to the audience on that side.  Walk back to the center and talk to those located in the center seating, then walk to the right and do the same for that side of the venue.  Keep repeating this walk and stop, settle process throughout your talk. For those in the front row, definitely don’t forget to look at them, because you are so close and can have the greatest impact with that group because they feel your presence most immediately.  Don’t fall off the stage unless you want to make it a really memorable speech.

Presentation Practice Frequency

The usual frequency for most people for giving formal presentations is once in a blue moon.  In other words, we don’t do so many in a year. This presents a problem, because as we know, repetition is key to learning and improvement.  If we were giving formal presentations 50 weeks a year, we would see remarkable improvements as we honed our craft.  In business though, this rarely presents itself as an opportunity.  We may be lucky to give two or three presentations in a 12 month period.  In this case, how can we improve our skills?

The obvious method is to proactively increase the frequency.  Instead of hanging around waiting for someone to invite you to speak, you need to get out there and beat the bushes for opportunities to present. There are many organizations who are constantly on the look out for speakers.  Rotary Clubs need speakers every week.  Chambers of Commerce need a constant flow of speakers as well.  There are innumerable interest groups who would love to have someone come and speak on an interesting and relevant topic.

This throws up the issue of what to speak about.  There will be a natural alignment between your own areas of experience, expertise and knowledge and popular demand, which will determine the types of subjects you will be able to speak upon.  If these areas are such that there is a common interest in this subject, you will find there will be groups who will be interested in having you speak.  The trick is to let them know you exist as a speaker.

This is where you need to be strategic.  Investigate what sorts of groups exist in your area who regularly feature speakers. Make a matrix between the subject areas they cover and your own range of interests and capabilities.  If there is a match, then contact them and ask if they are looking for future speakers.  The person tasked with finding speakers will be very happy to hear from you, because they have a difficult job finding good speakers.

If you are an unknown quantity, then there may be some hesitancy about taking a punt on you as their designated speaker.  A simple way to demonstrate your ability is to do speeches on relevant subjects, video them and out them up on YouTube and your website.  You don’t need a live audience for these speeches and it is quite sufficient enough for people to see if you have the goods or not, when they are considering you as their potential speaker.  The videos don’t have to be “War and Peace” either.  Short videos will suffice to demonstrate your expertise.

Once you get a chance to do a formal presentation, to a live audience, make sure you get it on video. The audience laughing at some humour during the speech, applauding, asking questions, etc., all adds to the atmosphere and makes the video a type of show reel for yourself, to demonstrate your goods.  You can point the event organizers to the videos, to give them an idea of your ability. Remember your main competition are the totally hopeless and those devoid of any clue whatsoever about public speaking to business audiences.

When the speech is set, then use your social media to blast out information about the speech.  The number of people who see the posting and the number who can turn up are going to be vastly different.  Don’t worry, the fact that many people see you are a public speaker, talking on these various subjects, will alert people to the fact that they can ask you to speak for them. 

After the speech you post the video to a link to your website so that people can see you in action. If you have the technical capability, you can turn a 30 minute speech into 5 or 6 videos through editing of the original.   A speech has a number of points you cover and each of these can be lifted out into a separate video. 

So you finish up with the complete speech and then a video for each of the sections of the speech. Again blast all of these out on social media and on to your website for maximum exposure.  With all of this content floating around you start to become a known face and people will start contacting you.  We get into a virtuous cycle here where success breeds success. Consequently, our frequency of practice goes right up and we solidify our learnings and improvements.  In short order, we will be joining the ranks of those in the most professional speaker groups. This is really great for personal and company brands and that is what we want.

How To Get Self-Belief As A Presenter When You Don’t Have Any

We don’t get the chance to do so many public presentations in business, so it becomes a hard skill set to build or maintain.  The internal presentations we give at work tend to be very mundane. Often we are just reporting on the numbers and why they aren’t where they are supposed to be or where we to date are with the project.   These are normally rather informal affairs and we are not in highly persuade mode when we give them.  We should be clear and concise, but we probably don’t really get out of first gear as a presenter.

Obviously, giving public talks is a lot more pressure than the internal weekly team meeting report. We need to be operating at a much higher level and the complexity index is much, much higher.  This translates into pressure and often comes with a big dose of self-doubt.  This is called the imposter syndrome. Should I be the one talking on this subject? What if they have questions I can’t answer?  What if they don’t like it or me?  What if I underperform as a presenter?   What if I white out and forget what I want to say?  The scenes of potential disasters are played out in our minds, as we talk ourselves into a panic.

How do we stop that negative self-talk and get a more positive view on our potential to do a really first class, impressive, professional job?  It is not a level playing field. We need to realize that the world of business presenters is full of people who are quite hopeless and boring, so the audience has been trained to expect very, very little.  We don’t have to be a super star, we just need to be competent and we will automatically stand out from the crowd of losers murdering their presentations out there everyday.

What does competent look like?  It means we are well prepared.  This doesn’t mean we have 50 slides in the slide deck ready to rumble.  It means we have thought about our talk in the context of who will be in the audience and what level of expert knowledge they have of the subject, so that we know at what level to pitch our talk. 

It means we have designed it by starting from the key punch line we will deliver in the initial close and then we have worked backwards to select the “chapters” that will bring home that point we have selected.  We have seized upon an opening that will grab the attention of our increasingly attention deficit audience They are all armed with their mobile phones, ready to escape from the speaker at any hint of unprofessionalism or potential boredom.

It means we will have rehearsed the talk at least three times, to make sure it flows well and fits the time slot we have been allocated.  We will make sure the slides are supporting us, not hogging all the attention and upstaging us.  They will be so clear that our audience can deduce the key point of each slide in two seconds, because of how we are presenting the information.  The slides provide us with the navigation of the speech, so we don’t have to worry about what comes next. We also have our talking points in front of us, if we need to refer to them as a backup, reducing our stress levels.

It means we are not head down the whole time, reading from the printout or the laptop screen.  We are eyes up and looking at some of the members of our audience.  We are looking precisely at those who are either nodding approvingly or at least have a neutral expression on their face.  This builds our confidence on the way through the speech. We are avoiding anyone who looks obstreperous, negative, hostile or angry.  We do this to keep our mental equilibrium under control and positive throughout the talk.  We keep all of our doubts, fears, insecurities and worries to ourselves as a secret.  We definitely don’t show any of these to our audience.  We are fully committed to the idea that the “show must go on”, no matter what unexpected things may occur during our speaking time.

Those whom we have chosen to look at, are getting about six seconds of total eye contact concentration each time, as we make our points.  We then move on to the next person and keep repeating this as we build a one-to-one feeling with members of our audience.  They feel we are speaking directly to them and this is powerful. We are backing up our eye contact with our gestures, voice modulation and pauses. This helps to drive home the key points we want to make.  We are purposely asking rhetorical questions to keep everyone engaged.  In terms of pure volume, we are speaking about 40% louder than normal.  This projects our voice for clarity and at the same time our confidence.  Audiences buy speaker confidence and we are keeping ourselves busy selling it to them.

We are using our first close we developed as we go into Q & A and we are confidently prepared for their questions.  We are confident because we have built up reserve power through our study of the subject. We have kicked off Q & A, by publically stating how many minutes we have for questions.  We do this to give ourselves a dignified retreat, a smooth way of departing the talk if we need to, in case things get out of control and a bit too hot.

We know how to cushion any salvos, thinly disguised as questions, that might come our way. A cushion is a general statement that doesn’t agree with or disagree with, what has been mentioned in the question.  This cushion buys us crucial thinking time before we have to respond. We end the talk with our final close, to make sure our key message is resonating with the audience.  This is purposely designed to be the last thing they hear, as they walk out the door.

“We don’t plan to fail, we fail to plan” is an old saw and still true.  The key to success in building self-belief as a speaker is to be really well prepared and thoroughly rehearsed.  When you make the time to fully prepare before the talk, to become ready, you head off all potential disasters and meltdowns that might otherwise occur. This is how to build self-belief – hard work, detailed preparation and lots of practice before you give the talk.