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THE Presentations Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

THE Presentations Japan Series is powered by with great content from the accumulated wisdom of 100 plus years of Dale Carnegie Training. The show is hosted in Tokyo by Dr. Greg Story, President of Dale Carnegie Training Japan and is for those highly motivated students of presentations, who want to be the best in their business field.
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THE Presentations Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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Now displaying: June, 2018
Jun 25, 2018

Giving Presentations: It Is Harder Than It Looks Folks

 

When you are an instructor and coach for presenters or a regular presenter, you tend to be immersed in that world and your sense of the degree of difficulty involved becomes numbed. I was reminded of this when we were doing a video shoot in Japanese the other day.  We have employed an actor to appear in our videos advertising our core courses.  I shoot a video almost everyday, but I am doing this in English.  I have been debating with myself about whether I should be doing them in Japanese as well or whether we should have a native speaker do it.  I can speak Japanese but naturally I have an accent.  Also while I constantly struggle with English grammar, Japanese grammar perfection lifts the degree of ask so much higher.

 

In the end, we went for the Japanese native speaker and hired an actor to do the shoot.  This was fascinating for me.  As soon as we started, I realised that the skill sets to be an actor and to be a presenter are quite different in Japan.  Reading lines on a teleprompter is a skill and is quite difficult and tiring because of the concentration involved.  That is why the newscasters always takes breaks by alternating between two people or cutting to the visuals on screen and using just voice.  With practice you can get better at this and he did too.

 

What was missing though was the ability to smile, use congruent facial expressions and gestures while all this teleprompter flow of words was whizzing by.  As presentation trainers we know how to juggle many balls in the air at the same time.  We are using our eyes to engage with the audience.  We are also checking to see if we are getting agreement or resistance to our message.  We are adding in our facial expressions to back up the eye power.  Our gestures are chiming in to strengthen a point we are making.

 

If it is a point we are making, about which the evidence is not yet clear, a quizzical expression on our face combined with a hint of doubt in our voice tone really drives home the message that we are not sure what is going to happen next.  If it is something we are definitely certain will happen next, then slowly, confidently nodding our head as if in agreement works very well. We add to it by strengthening the tone of our voice, our confidence level, when delivering the words and powerfully looking at members of the audience using our eye strength.  This combined effect creates high levels of credibility for what we are saying.

 

Our actor needed some serious coaching on these points.  This surprised me, but then I remembered “we are in Japan”.  The base level of understanding of what is required to give a professional presentation is very low here.  In fact, the actor was making the excuse that Japanese don’t know how to give proper presentations, which was why he was struggling with all of this stuff. The concept that just because Japanese are poor at presenting means we can all ignore professionalism wasn’t an idea I was buying that day.  But it does throw up the fundamental concept here that being poor or mediocre when presenting is somehow acceptable.  It isn’t.

 

A study published in 1967 by UCLA Professor of Psychology Albert Mehrabian pointed out an audience focus ratio of 7% from verbal, 38% vocal and 55% body language.  The key caveat, which is often missed when quoting these research numbers, are the words “when incongruent”.  What Professor Mehrabian meant was that “when what you are saying is not congruent with the way you are saying it, only 7% of what you are actually saying is getting through to your audience”.  The rest of the time they are distracted from your key message by your voice and your clothing.  This was the problem we had with our actor.  He needed my coaching on how to get the words to be supported by the expression on his face, his gestures and his body language, so that we can make sure the viewer receives 100% of the message in the words he is delivering.

 

So if even actors can’t automatically do this stuff, how much more difficult is it for everyone else here in Japan?  I attended a business talk given by the President of one of the most well known brands in the world, on a very sexy topic.  It turned out to be a nothing sort of presentation.  Not bad, but not powerful either.  I doubt anyone of us can recall one word of what was said. Our speaker had no impact and left no key messages with us.  Personally, I would call that a rank failure as a presenter, big name brand or otherwise. 

 

The answer isn’t DNA, pedigree, big brand or luck.  It is training.  Get trained in how to present and join the top 1% in business who can stand up and capture their audience.  I said capture their audience not just speak at them.  There is a world of difference between the two.  Remember in Japan, the 99% are really, really hopeless, so entry into the top 1% has a very low bar here.

 

 

Jun 18, 2018

I’ve Got My Eye On You

 

Eye line in Japan is a tricky subject.  This is a non-confrontational, high harmony, consensus culture.  Looking people straight in the eye is just too aggressive for polite society here.  Children are taught to look at the forehead, the chin, the throat rather than the eyes of the person they are speaking with.  This idea carries on into established and accepted societal norms of interpersonal interaction.  Foreigners burning the retinas of their Japanese counterparts by maintaining continuous strong eye contact makes Japanese people feel very uncomfortable. As a foreigner living here, after a while you find yourself shying away from making eye contact. This creates another set of problems for when you are dealing with other foreigners here, or when you are going overseas.  In the West we are trained to “look a man straight in the eye”.

 

So, what happens when we are doing presentations and public speeches in Japan?  Where should we be looking?  Most Japanese speakers have no training and less of a clue about what they should be doing, when speaking in public.  They are not much of a role model for us.  No point modeling yourself on the hopeless.  But won’t the audience react negatively to us if we are making eye contact with them?

 

We need to distinguish between a social conversation and a presentation.  The former is by nature informal and the latter is a more businesslike affair.  We are not a member of the audience chatting with our neighbour.  We have been given the opportunity to speak to an audience, we are on stage or at the podium, we have the microphone, we have everyone’s attention.  We are in the limelight.  Our job is to inform, engage, persuade, impress, differentiate. 

 

I was at a presentation about matching your wine glass with the variety of wine you are drinking. Our presenter had obviously given this type of presentation many times.  One thing he did very well was engage with his audience, who were all senior businesspeople.  He kept moving his eye line around the attendees, but not in a linear fashion. He was breaking it up, looking left, front, right, left, back etc.  By keeping it unpredictable, the audience members couldn’t drift off and lose touch with what he was saying.  Our brains are quite smart.  If we understand that the eye line is going around in a set order we get distracted and our thoughts are also subsumed by something other than what the speaker is talking about.  Even worse today, they will be whipping out their phones and playing around with email or social media.

 

By engaging our eyes, to keep continuous contact with our audience, we can really control the proceedings.  Be it Japan or anywhere else for that matter, we have to regulate the length of our eye contact.  Making eye contact is good.  Holding it for too long is not so good.  Boring a hole into the head of our audience member becomes oppressive.  Staring at someone continuously is hard to take for the recipient.  Too short and it becomes fake eye contact, which has no benefit.  Too long and it creates an uncomfortable feeling in our audience member, which pretty much defeats our purpose.  There is no hard and fast rule but around six seconds allows sufficient eye contact to drive home the point we are making without it becoming too oppressive. 

 

Combining voice, gestures and eye contact together professionally is the Power Three of public speaking. If you want to make a macro point, a big picture point, then make eye contact with someone at the very back of the room.  You should also open up your arms in bigger gestures sizes to make the point feel more inclusive in a big room.  By the way, as an additional bonus, depending on the size of the audience, the twenty people sitting around that person you have selected, will all imagine you are looking directly at them as well.  So despite the distance you can engage with more people, more powerfully, in the time allotted to you.

 

If you want to make a micro point, a strong assertion, a powerful statement, then pick someone in the front row and address them directly.  Stand on the very apron of the stage when you do this, if you can. Your physical proximity is also a big trigger for credibility, because you are turning the body language up to max power. Even those seated at the back will pick up on the power of your assertion, despite the fact you are not speaking to them directly.  They will recognize this is an important statement, by the way you have presented it.

 

 

Jun 11, 2018

Outstanding Japanese Presenters

 

I spend a lot of time complaining about how poor is the professional quality of presenters in Japan. It is true, so when you come across people who can present properly, it so refreshing and gives you hope that the rest of them can do it too.  I attended an American Chamber event here in Tokyo recently and the speaker was the President of Nestle Japan.  In fact, Mr. Kozo Takaoka had become the first ever Japanese to succeed to the role of President for Nestle in Japan despite their 104 years in operation here.  Watching his presentation it was easy to see why he was the leader of this well established operation in Japan.

 

He spoke in English, which was totally impressive, because so few Japanese company Presidents can give a half decent talk in English, unless they were reading it.  He definitely didn’t need to read his speech. He was too busy engaging with his audience.  He did this with his eye contact, as he spoke to us.  He kept his focus on his audience, who were mostly representatives of small-medium sized enterprises.  He was using a slide deck, but it was subservient to him and what he wanted to say, rather than the usual Japanese penchant of being the second fiddle to the screen.

 

The slides were well designed and well presented.  Easy to understand and grasp within two seconds of viewing them.  That two second rule is a good one.  If your slides are too complex or too busy to be understood in around two seconds, then you need to simplify them.  That is often best achieved be eliminating the slide entirely.  Often they add little actual additional benefit to what you can convey in words.  We tend to use them because, well that is what everyone else is doing. We do this on autopilot, without really analyzing what strength that slide deck medium can bring to the message you want to convey.

 

One thing I liked was Takaoka san’s use of video.  They were very short and relevant to what he wanted to explain.  What I really find irritating about Japanese company President presentations is how they will bung in a 10 minute video to pad out their talk. It is usually something cooked up by the PR or Marketing department and is aiming to be a propaganda triumph for the firm.  Sadly, because it is all propaganda, we quickly switch off and take very little notice of it.  It is also rarely related to the point the speaker is making.  The real point is that it saves the speaker from having to speak, which sort of defeats the purpose doesn't it.

 

The flow of Takaoka san’s talk was also well designed.  It followed a logical order and was well supported by his delivery, his slide deck and his short videos.  You would think this was a relatively straightforward thing but it surpasses the ability of most Japanese presenters.  He was able to draw out highlights and then could show something in visual form, which backed what he had just said.  Seeing is believing and if the point we want to make can be reinforced visually then we should be trying to achieve that outcome.

 

His use of humour was also spot on.  When we think about humour in speaking we are often drawn to compare ourselves to stand up comedy speakers, which is a very unwise move.  They are there 100% to entertain, rather than to inform, persuade or convince.  The latter areas are where we are placing ourselves when we are in the role of speaker to a business audience.  Takaoka san’s humour was unforced and very natural.  He was prepared to laugh at himself, which always goes down well. When we try to be funny as a speaker it usually flops. Professional comedians are refining their work on the content, timing and delivery side continuously, whereas we probably only get to speak publically a few times a year, if we are lucky.

 

Takaoka san also spoke from his own experience so he had total authenticity.  Telling us about someone else’s marketing successes and failures has a certain distant, academic feel to it.  He was there, he was doing it and he was relating those coal face incidents, so it became real and credible for his audience.  Where ever we can, we should always trying to draw on things which have happened to us in business, to make the points we want to get across.  They don’t need to be read to an audience, because we lived through them and so have no problem remembering them in detail.

 

Takaoka san was the full package and it was the best Japanese presentation I have seen to date. This type of role model forces all the excuses to disappear, because being Japanese is not a legitimate excuse to be unable to do a professional presentation.  But that is often trotted out as the excuse.  “We Japanese are no good at presenting, whereas you foreigners are all good”.  Two totally fallacious points if ever there were any.

Jun 4, 2018

Powerpoint Free Presentations

 

Visuals on a screen are very powerful communication tools when presenting.  Being able to show graphs can really drive home the point. If numbers are not so easy to follow or accessible, then proportion differences, trend lines, bars, pies, colours can be persuasive.   Explaining complex sequences with diagrams is good too.  This makes the potentially confusing more accessible.  Photos are really great for presentations.  “One picture is worth a thousand words” was used in an advertisement way back in 1918 in San Antonio Texas, although the base idea has been around for centuries.  Images are powerful communicators.  Just the image by itself or with one word, or a line of text are also spicing up the speakers communication effort.

 

The problem is everyone is doing it.  We all have our power point deck ready to go when we present.  We are not differentiating ourselves from other presenters.  Often the slides on screen don’t actually add much to the presentation either.  There is a herd mentality going on here.  They say in banking, that it is acceptable to fail conventionally, but not by doing exotic stuff.  The same in presenting.  It is fine to be boring and dull, as long as you follow the railway track of what ever other presenter is doing.  If that boring shtick suits you, then keep doing that.  By the way, let me know how it is working out for you.

 

If you want to stand out amongst the average, the Lilliputians of Presenting, the nondescript and forgettable don’t always go for the slide deck.  Mix it up a bit.  I saw Howard Schulz of Starbucks fame, give a presentation in Tokyo.  He had one slide.  That was the Starbucks logo.  He was able to talk with just that image in the background and he kept the interest of the crowd.  He spoke about something he knows a lot about – his company.  We actually know a lot about our subject matter too and we can do it with out any slides.

 

One downside of slides is that it seeps the audience attention away from the speaker.  We are shifting our eyes away from the speaker to what is on the screen.  This is often compounded as an error, by some helpful “know nothing” who switches the lights off at the same time.  Now the screen has won all the attention because the speaker has disappeared into the darkness, the void, and only their voice is apparent like some pre-recorded content for the light show.  The entire repertoire of the facial expressions and body language available to the speaker have been neutralised.

 

The screen based presentations have the advantage of being milestones and markers along which the presentation can flow.  You don’t have to remember what comes next, because all you have to do is push a button. This is a quite handy.  You can put something up on screen and talk to the point and this flow will progress logically and smoothly.  When you are free-forming, you are up on the high wire and have no net.  We have to remember though that only we know the order.  If we mess it up and put one bit in the wrong place only we will know. The audience will be oblivious for the most part and we can just blatantly carry on, as if nothing happened. So the downside is not that great.

 

You can still keep your order by writing out your speech, as a full speech or as points.  This is your navigation to keep the speech on track. The key is not to read it out to the audience.  Talk to the points instead.  We want our eyes fixed on the audience members throughout. That means eliminating any and all distractions.  Ideally, we don’t want our eyes dropping to glance at a page and then having to look up again.  It is not the end of the world if that happens, as long as you keep the glancing bit quick.  Better to think in silence with your chin up and looking at your audience, than with your head down scanning a piece of paper on the rostrum.

 

So save yourself a lot of time worrying about the finer points of slide deck creation and instead concentrate on the key messages you want to get across.  Also when delivering with no bright screen in play, the audience has nowhere to go, but to look at you.  Make sure you return the compliment by looking at them throughout the talk.  Eye contact, eye contact, eye contact is the rule. Giving an audience a change from the usual makes you memorable.  By contrast, you seem quite at ease up there on the high wire.  The audience members know they can’t do that, so the respect factor for you goes right up.  Your talent and skill as a speaker stands out more powerfully and the contrast with the punters out there, chained to their slide deck, becomes more pungent.

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 dalecarnegie.comand 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.

 

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