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.

How To Rehearse Your Presentation

We have planned our talk, all we need do now is deliver it.  We have designed it, starting with the key punch line we will deliver in the first close of the speech, before we get to the Q & A.  This is the essence of our message and it is from this key idea that we have derived the key talking points we want to make, that will be the “chapters” of our speech.  In a thirty minute speech we will probably get to three to four of these, depending on the amount of depth we need to get into.  Finally, we develop the opening and then do the final close design for after the Q & A.  With this outline, we start to see if this will work in reality.

We have fleshed out the construct, have inserted stories into the talk to back up key points and have a first draft.  Now designing something on paper and then giving it out aloud are quite different beasts. We often find that when we run through the talk aloud, the logic of the order isn’t strong enough or the points seem a bit unclear.  Unless there is some special reason to do so, we are not reading out the draft like a complete script. 

We have sketched out speaking points, to which we will talk.  These are the bare bones of the talk and this is what we use for the initial run through.  When we do the speaking run through of the draft, we may find that additional or better points occur to us and this is when we do our editing.  Some parts may be weak in promoting our argument, so we need to spend a bit more time bolstering those. 

As we are not reading it, we will find that we will vary the content in the delivery every time we give it in rehearsal and probably in reality.  Nothing at all wrong with that.  Only we know what we are going to say, so there are no content police to catch us out on any variations from the original.  It actually doesn’t matter too much, because invariably we are refining and further polishing the speech. 

So naturally this means we are running though the actual talk a number of times.  How many times?  No one answer here, but I would reckon we are talking probably between three to five times. If we have a thirty minute talk we have clocked up two and a half hours in rehearsal time quite easily.  Most busy businesspeople lack two and half hours for practice , so it is more likely to fall into the three times maximum category. Obviously the more often we give it before we bring it to an audience, the better but we have to be realistic about our time availability.  The three times realty is vastly better than the usual occurrence, which is zero rehearsal.

As we are practicing and further polishing the construct, content and quality of the stories we are going to be using, we will get a better sense of how long all of this will take. The usual no practice version of public speaking leaves most people with absolutely no clue as to how long they will need for the talk.  Most are more likely to overshoot than undershoot.  When we go too long, we run into trouble with the constraints of the occasion.  The organisers start subtly telling us to “get off”. 

This practice run through is when we realize we have to prune our work of art and this is extremely difficult.  Some parts may need to be dropped altogether – oh no!  This can be painful because we love all of or children and can’t bear to lose any of them.  Nevertheless, we have to be showing some tough love to our draft presentation, otherwise we can’t get it finished in the time allotted . 

We don’t want to find ourselves in the position of having to shunt the end together in a whirlwind of download that baffles the audience and leaves everyone with the impression that we are so disorganized, we can't manage to put together a thirty minute talk.

If we have the time and resources, having others listen to our speech is good but this is often difficult. By the way, limit them to good/better feedback, because otherwise they will straight to negative critique and you won’t like that at all.  If we can’t do that, then videoing the talk so we can see ourselves is very good. All you need is your phone or ipad and a holder thingy attached to a tripod and you are in business and no film crew required.  If that can’t be done then use the voice memo on your phone to play back how it sounds. 

When I am traveling to give talks, I find the Hotel room with the lights out allows the windows in the room to become a mirror and I can see myself pontificating, gesturing, pausing and delivering with aplomb.  

Time is the killer when it comes to rehearsing.  Remember the trade off though – 90 minutes of your time, versus eternal damnation as a hapless and hopeless presenter, who has just publically incinerated their personal and company brands.

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.

Rhetorical Questions When Presenting

Are we talking at people, to people or with people when we are presenting?  The “talking at” part is easy to pick.  There is no attempt at rapport building with the audience.  No stories and lot and lots of data dump going on. Technical experts love this type of presentation, because they can spend all the time sharing the data.  Because they are an “expert” then they feel self justified to tell people stuff.  They don’t put much value on this presenting lark, because it is hardly a serious activity and people are here for the information – right?  “All style, no substance” being the ultimate putdown of skilled presenters by this techie crowd.  Detail is layered upon detail and density is never thought to be an issue. Especially when it comes to their slides, which are so dense, as to be impenetrable. Jargon is preferred too because that cuts down the need for explaining what you are talking about and overall, less words are needed.  The point is not to persuade anyone but to hammer them with detail.

The “speak to people” presenters are more capable of building rapport.  They are keen to get their message across and are careful about how they do that.  They do try to engage with their audience.  They think about the slide design to make sure it is it sharp looking yet easy to understand. They avoid jargon because they know it breaks the audience into an “us” and “them” divide.  They are also aware that it also can come across as pretentious and somewhat condescending.   They are conscious they are up on stage and they want to impart valuable knowledge to the audience.

The “speak with” presenters take things further.  They get there early and try to meet the participants as they come in.  They engage with them and find out their interests and motivations for joining this talk.  They take some of these conversations into their talks and reference the people they have been chatting with earlier.  “Suzuki san made an excellent point to me earlier about ….” They know by doing this they can dispense with that mental barrier between those doing the speaking and those doing the listening. The audience and speaker have become one.  They try to get the audience physically involved by asking them to raise their hands in response to their questions. 

The “speak with” presenter does all of these things of the “speak to” presenter and more.  They know that if they speak in a conversational tone this makes it easier to draw the audience in.  They use their eye contact to connect with members of their audience, so that they feel they are almost having a private conversation.  They wrap their key points up in stories to make them easier to remember and to understand on the first telling.  Where possible, they try to make those stories their own personal experience.  They are adding a degree of authenticity and vulnerability, without it becoming too much. They know where to draw the line to make the point, without the delivery becoming too clingy.

They use a mix of rhetorical questions and real questions.  A rhetorical question is posed not for the purpose of extracting an answer, but to grab the attention of the audience.  We know that audience concentration spans are becoming shorter and shorter.  Sometimes we are being ignored and we need to corral everyone mentally back into the room. The beauty of a rhetorical question is that the audience are not quite sure if they are required to come up with a response, so it creates a bit of tension in the room.  This tension is enough to grab their attention.  Real questions can’t be used too often, as the act becomes tedious and creates a feeling of “ I am being manipulated” in the audience. Rhetorical questions however can be used quite a bit more, because there is no response required.  It helps us to guide the audience’s thinking along a glide path of our choosing, because we control both the context and the direction of the discussion.  Framing the questions frames the debate.

So if you see your audience flagging, getting distracted or surreptitiously whipping out their phones under the desks, then hit them right between the eyes with a rhetorical question to get their full attention again.  In the battle for audience attention, it is a zero sum game.  Either they are listening to what we have to say or they are escaping from us.  We need powerful weapons to keep them focused on us and not the myriad distractions on offer.

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.