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
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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.