2020 Here We Go – Let’s Build Our Personal Brand As A Presente
The New Year’s resolutions concept is ridiculous, but only because we are weak, lazy, inconsistent and lacking in discipline. Apart from those small barriers to execution of desires, the concept works a treat. The idea of a new start is not bad in itself and we can use the Gregorian calendar fantasy, to mark a change in the year where new things are possible. So as a presenter what would be possible?
There are around 800,000 podcasts in the US and many millions in China. Blogs are in the billions now, video content is going crazy, live streaming is rampant. Every single which way, we are under assault from competitor content marketing on steroids. In addition, there is all of the advertising content coming at us through every medium. Will it diminish? No. What does it mean for us in business?
Personal reputation will be built through our efforts to cut through all of the clatter competing with us. People are consuming information on small screens and are deluged with competing content. The experience is transitory, because the next deluge is coming down the pike. How do we linger long in people’s memories? Well we don’t. Even the few who see our content soon move on. In offices, people sitting next to each other send emails rather than talk. Phone calls put a dread fear into those younger colleagues entering the workplace. The anonymity of the texting facility is preferred to human contact. We are becoming increasingly impersonal, as we are fixated with our internet connected devices.
In business though we need the human touch. We want to do business with people we can judge are a safe option as a business partner. We can check out their social media to get a sense of what they are about. We can watch their videos to get a better idea of who they are and what they know. This is all still rather remote and at arms length. We don’t do business that way. We want to look them in the eye, to read their body language, to gauge their voice tone, to judge their intelligence through their mastery of the spoken word. Other can write your posts for you, but when presenting on stage it is just you baby and you had better have the goods. We want to see what we are getting.
To get cut through, we need to be standing in front of as many audiences as possible. Yes, we can attend networking events as a participant and we should, but we should be striving to do better than that. We should be hogging the limelight, a titan astride the stage, commanding attention and delivering powerful messages. That means seeking every opportunity to speak we can possibly manufacture, being proactive in promoting ourselves, unabashed about pushing our personal brand.
Yes, there will be haters. Two of my staff attended an American Chamber function recently and some helpful fellow attendee started laying into me. They being very loyal staff were really upset about this, told me about it and were obviously frustrated regarding what to do about it. I asked them a couple of clarifying questions. Was the individual or their company a client? No. Were they ever likely to become a client? No. Did they have a personal brand of their own? No.
I didn’t bother asking who it was, because they are obviously a know nothing, do nothing, become nothing nobody. If you want to promote yourself you have to pop your head above the parapet. Expect there will be someone who will want to kick it. That doesn't mean we should self-censor ourselves, because some nobody is jealous about what we are doing. Grasp on to the bigger picture here, have courage and go for it. Those who get it will respect you, haters will hate you, no matter what you do.
Public speaking is the last bastion for those who want to take their personal presence to the top. We are being flooded by information around us, so we need to look for chances to break free from the crowd and establish ourselves as the expert in our field. It means putting ourselves out there to be judged, but we are going to be judged anyway, so let’s control our own destiny. In 2020, resolve to do as much speaking as you possibly can and create as many opportunities as possible to promote your personal brand.
Reflecting On Your Past Presentations
As the calendar year slowly winds down, now is a good time to review and reflect upon the presentations you have given this year in over the past few years. What have you learnt not to do and what have you learnt to keep doing? Those who don’t study their own presentations history are bound to repeat the errors of the past. Sounds reasonable doesn’t it. We are all mentally geared up for improvements over time. The only issue is that these improvements are not ordained and we have to create our own futures.
Do you have a good record keeping system? When I got back to Japan in 1992 I was the Australian Consul and Trade Commissioner in Nagoya. As far as the locals were concerned, I was the Australian Ambassador to the Chubu Region. I am sure the parade of the various Ambassadors in the Tokyo Embassy never saw it that way, but that is how the locals viewed my vice-regal presence. One consequence was you were regularly asked to give long speeches. I say long because a one hour speech would be a dawdle, compared to the two hour monstrosities you were expected to fill.
I started writing down the speech number, the title, who it was for, what language was I speaking and how long was the speech. I did this because Japan loves the devil they know and you would be asked back to speak again and it is embarrassing if you don’t recall the first talk. I am now over 535 speeches on my list. Without knowing it I was compiling a body of work as a speaker. The list noted the topics I covered, which was a useful reservoir of things I could speak about if asked to venture forth a topic for the nominated speaking spot.
I would often use visuals. When I started we were back in the dark ages and were using overhead projectors (OHPs) and breakthrough innovations like colour OHPs instead of just black and white images. For photographs, we used a slide carousel and a slide projector. At some point we moved to powerpoint and life got a whole lot easier, when it came to preparing presentations. Somewhere I probably still have those OHP presentations stored away somewhere, except today you would struggle to find an overhead projector to show them with. We can much more easily store our presentation materials today, so there is no excuse about not doing that.
I keep my presentations in digital files stored by the year in which they were delivered. This is very handy because you can go back and see what you covered when you gave that talk. Some of the images may be plundered for a current presentation, if they are relevant, so it is a nice resource to draw on. You can also see how much you have grown in sophistication as a presenter, by looking at the quality of what you have been presenting. This is a step we shouldn’t miss because we are often so caught up in our everyday, we lose sense of the time progression in our presenter lives.
A more difficult task is to grab the points that are additional to the slides. These may be kept as notes on the print out of the slide deck or in a notes format for the talk. If I have notes, which these days is pretty rare, then they will be very brief. They are flags for me to expand upon when I am delivering my talk. More frequently I will print out two or four slides per page and then write on those pages. I will note some key points I want to make when we get to that slide. If I am not using slides then the notes format plays the same prompt role.
Things occur to me during a talk, which were not planned. Maybe I got a light bulb type of idea or a question exposed an answer and brought some additional information to the forefront. One thing I strongly recommend is immediately after the speech, carve out thirty minutes for quiet reflection on the talk and think about what things you would change in order to make it better next time. The tendency is to rush back to work, which usually means either meetings or catching up on email. They can wait. Don’t schedule back to back activities after the talk – give yourself a little time to think.
What I find hard to do is to store the notes hand written on the pages and the notes on the ideas which occurred to me after the talk. Paper tends to get lost and you throw it out in a bug of spring cleaning and lose it. Either take photos of the notes on your phone or scan the pages and then file them together with the electronic slide deck in the file for that year of talks. This way you never lose the inspiration and record of your thinking about this topic.
Time will pass. You will deliver talks, will get ideas both before and after. Capture them and learn from what went well and how you can improve on it for next time. You need a system and if you don’t have one today, then now is a good time to think about creating one.
Leading An Intentional Presenter Life In 2020
Are we going slowly glide in 2020 carrying all the bad habits and bad baggage from everything we have thought, done and procrastinated on up until now? Or are we going to seize the opportunity of a man made temporal illusion to divest ourselves of the sins and misdeeds of the past and strike out anew? The change of the calendar for some signals a new financial year, when new budget numbers and plans are fixed. For others it has already passed or is soon to fall upon us. Regardless, this opportunity should be seized to review and plan for the next calendar cycle. Rarely though is presenting skill part of that process. Let’s change that this time.
Here are seven things to commit to in 2020 as a presenter.
“Practice makes perfect” may or may not be true for you, but the more we do presentations the more chance we have to become better. Don’t hide from or refuse occasions where you can get up in front of people and talk. Even better, list up organisations who need speakers and make contact. Give them a range of topics you can speak on and see if there is a match of interests. What have you got to lose? Nothing, so go for it.
Let’s change up our professional game as presenters in 2020 and go back to the basics. None of this is complex or difficult. It just requires the time allocation and the mental attitude of wanting to master the art of presenting, rather than being a second rate show for the rest of your life. Turn that around with these seven points. You will become a person of influence and persuasion with those around you and 2020 will be a much better year because of that.
How To Use Video In Your Presentation
Video is the refuge of rascals when presenting. The unskilled Japanese President tries to shift the attention off his miserable presentation skills, by diverting the focus of the audience to the video. Actually, it is a mighty relief in many ways from his dirge like, monotone, monochrome delivery. He was killing us slowly with his lifeless words. The idea is that the video will compensate for the presenter. It also takes up time, so the presenter can whip through the morass of their presentation and get out of there quicker. The scoundrel’s respite.
I personally try to avoid using video because it competes with my face. I want the full power of my expressions to be brought to bear, to convey the key messages I have for my audience. I want to monopolise the flow of the proceedings, so that it moves along with me in charge. There is a place for video though, when it makes sense and when it is reined in and kept under control.
Video is very versatile, as it can combine movement, music, images and still photographs very effectively. It can tell a short story very powerfully. It can bend time to its will. Emotions can be appealed to, physical dimensions made more impressive, speed made real and other people’s expressions and faces conscripted to serve the presenter’s messaging. It can bring both fantasy and reality to us in a powerful way. We are all used to watching video and movies on our phones, DVDs, etc., so we are open to the medium.
In certain industries and businesses, the visual aspect of their branding, packaging, design etc., really lends itself to employing a full video arsenal. Fast motion, slow motion, music combinations entertain the mind and stretch the imagination. Brands do this well, but corporate PR videos usually do it less well. In Japan, the latter is more often than not what we are subjected to, by the boring wannabe corporate Titan trying to command the stage.
Like anything, if it is done well it works. This is the issue though, do you have a great video to show or are you just showing a video for the sake of it? It is rare that a video would be specifically produced for a particular presentation. This normally means we are drawing on the video library of the firm and it would be a rare piece of luck to get the video content available, to chime with the speech you are giving. The planets rarely align so helpfully in real life and what we wind up doing is trying to slam the square peg into the round hole with what we have.
The reprobate presenter just picks up the whole video, as is, and plunks it down in the beginning of their talk. This means that we haven’t really connected with the audience as yet and we are distracting them from focusing on us, by breaking their concentration to look at a video. They usually have trouble actually showing the video because the loading process doesn’t work well on the laptop. They were in a slide deck, had to go out of that and then bring up the video. There may even be a link in the slide deck to the video, but it is hit and miss as to how often that works on the day. You become frustrated because the damm thing worked fine in the rehearsal and now for some mysterious reason, it refuses to work when the punters are assembled.
All of this fiddling about means you have now lost your connection with your audience, who are whipping out their phones to escape to the internet, because you are boring them with the tech. Once the video is over, we have to reconnect with the audience. If the video had a lot of excitement and energy and you present like a beached mullet, the contrast is mega. Everyone hopes you will disappear and more video will be rolled out instead, because it was a lot more interesting than you.
So we need to design the bridge into the video and the one out at the end. I have no memory of anyone doing this well by the way. Probably because the thought it was actually necessary, never occurred to them. We have to make sure the video is kept short and adds value to our message. We must dominate it, not the other way around.
The Winning Formula When Speaking
I was invited to an English Speech contest for Middle School students. The students must have home grown skills and are not eligible to compete if they have spent more than six months abroad, in an English speaking environment. This was pretty grand affair. The organisation running it is run by students at university, who took part in the contest themselves when they were in Middle School. Many of the graduates become business patrons and supporters as they work their way up in their business careers. It a perfect Japanese storm. Japan loves uniforms and the organising body had that covered and Japan loves formality and there was plenty of that on display too. There were some significant lessons on offer for presenters as well.
One of the sponsoring countries had their Ambassador there to present a prize and give a speech. Extolling the virtues of his country and its educational opportunities for these keen students of English is a natural fit. What wasn’t so natural was that he had to read his speech. I have been a diplomat, yet I see this time and time again - Ambassadors who are poor public speakers. Anyone in that position, for that type of occasion who has to read his speech, qualifies as a poor pubic speaker in my book.
By contrast Her Imperial Highness Princess Takamado gave a splendid speech, alternating between English and Japanese. She wasn’t reading it, the content was relevant and interesting. When you are a member of the Imperial family there is tremendous expectation on you and she could have chosen the safe route and have read her speech. Yet, she gave her remarks without notes and spoke freely. It was so much more powerful and connected with her audience. The toast was given by a senior Government official, who did so in excellent English and without any notes either. The only one who couldn’t give his speech without reading it, was the one native speaker involved. Rather ironic I thought.
Then we had the three finalists give their talks. Of course they had memorised their speeches. As Middle School students living in Japan it would be unlikely they would be able to do anything less. A five minute speech is a long time to memorise a speech, but they all did it brilliantly. If the Japanese education system does one thing well, it is rote memorisation. The final speech was given by the winner and it was very surprising. Also surprisingly, the three finalists were all boys, where normally this in area of education where girls usually do better.
The English pronunciation of the finalist was certainly not as good as the second and third place winners. You would think that would disqualify him for winning but it didn’t for a number of very important reasons. When he started speaking I was thinking that his pronunciation wasn’t so good, so how did he manage to win? What followed was a winning combination of factors. We can learn a lot from a fifteen year old Middle School student from the backblocks of Wakayama Prefecture.
His theme was about him trying to improve his poor pronunciation which was congruent with who he was. In other words he was being authentic and appropriate in the eyes of his audience and so he could connect with them. The other boys told stories too but this boy included dialogue with his grandmother in his recounting of his story and this added that additional element of drawing us into the action. When he spoke he did something more than the other contestants.
He spoke with his whole being. The other two finalists with better English pronunciation used their voices, some small gestures and some facial expressions in their talks. The winner however was speaking with his whole body language lined up behind his words. He was moving in a relaxed way that was congruent with his message. He sounded more natural, even though it was a totally canned speech. He wasn’t the best English speaker in the contest, but he was the best communicator in English. That difference is huge. I found the same thing with my Japanese. I started by worrying about linguistic perfection but discovered it didn't matter. Even if my vocabulary was limited, my pronunciation unreliable and my grammar garbled, the audience came with me into my story, when I delivered it the right way.
As adults, in business, we can decide to avoid reading our speeches at all costs. Thinking about our audience when we craft our talk is critical. In the delivery, we should be authentic. That means we don’t worry about occasionally mispronouncing words or stumbling over phrases. We are focused in our delivery on bringing our total body language, our passion, to the subject. We don’t get hung up on perfection, because we are focused on communication. If we do that, then we will be successful in getting our messages across.
How To Review Your Presentation
Athletes and coaches spend a lot of time watching their team’s performance. Strengths and weaknesses are sought in order to amplify the former and eliminate the latter. Close scrutiny is applied to key moments, crucial transitions and pivotal points. Presenting should be no different. Cast your mind back though, to the last twenty presentations you have attended and ask yourself how many speakers were recording themselves for later analysis? I would assert that the answer would be either zero or very close to zero. Why would that be? High performance athletes are constantly using video to check on what they are doing. Why don’t high performance leaders, experts, executives, industry influencers, and assorted gurus do the same thing?
These days the technology is very good. A simple video camera and tripod investment is a minor affair. The camera microphone itself at a certain distance is fine or you can add a shotgun microphone if needed. You just set it up turn it on and forget about it until the end. You may have to be careful with the arrangements such that no one in the audience will be in the shot and you need to tell everyone that is the case in order to remove privacy concerns. Well if it is all this easy why aren’t more speakers doing this?
The smarter ones are. I often coach speakers before major presentations and we always use video. I can tell them what they are doing that needs improvement, but there is nothing more powerful than having that information pointed out to you and seeing it at the same time. If it is just you shooting the video yourself and there is no coach review possibility, there is still enough material on the video for you to make improvements in your presentation.
How do you review the presentation? Look at four possibilities for the next time. What can you delete, add, reduce or amplify? There may be habits you have that detract from the persuasion power of the message. Perhaps you are mumbling or umming and ahing. Confidence sells and to sound confident you must be clear and consistent in your delivery. Look for tell taLe body language tics that have a negative connotation. You might be swaying around in a distracting way that competes with what you are saying. Or you maybe be fidgeting, or striding around the stage showing off to everyone how nervous you are. All of these habits weaken your message with your audience.
Are you engaging the audience with your eye contact? My Japanese history professor at university would deliver every lecture staring at the very top of the back wall and never engage in any eye contact with the students. Don’t be like that. Use every second of the presentation to lock eyes with members of your audience for about six seconds, one at a time and in random order. Are you using congruent gestures during you explanation or no gestures or too many gestures or permanent gestures? Gestures are there to be points of emphasis, so hold for a maximum of fifteen seconds and then turn them off.
Video is also excellent for considering what you might have done, looking for things you could have added to the presentation. Maybe there was a chance to use a prop or introduce a slide to support a point or call for more audience participation by getting them to raise their hands in response to a question. I was giving a talk recently on “AI in the Workplace” and I showed two paintings labelled A and B and asked the audience which one was painted by AI. They had to raise their hands to vote. This was more interesting than just showing them a slide with a painting done by AI. Roughly half of the audience went for either A or B. In fact they were both done by A1 so it was a bit of ruse, but very effective to drive home the point I was making.
If you cannot organise a video or if the hosts are not cooperative, then have someone you trust give you feedback. Don’t ask them a broad question such as “how was it?’. We need to be more specific. “Did my opening grab the attention of the audience?”, “Were my main points clear and supported with credible evidence”, “Was I engaging my audience with good quality eye contact throughout?”, etc. Give them a checklist before you start so you can guide them in what to look for. Unless they are a public speaking expert themselves, they won’t know how to help you best.
In a year, most people don’t get that much opportunity to speak in public, so it very hard to get the right frequency to enable improvement. If you could do the same presentation five times in a row, by the last one you would be on fire, but that hardly ever happens. This is why the video or expert feedback becomes so useful. You can review the presentation at your leisure and improve on your professional public speaking capabilities for the next outing.
How To Give A Motivational Speech
I was attending a Convention in Phuket and the finale was the closing inspirational speech for the week of events. I had to deliver the same speech myself at the Ho Chi Minh Convention a few years ago. This is a daunting task. Actually, when your audience is chock full of presentation’s training experts from Dale Carnegie, it is simply terrifying. The length of the speech is usually around ten minutes, which though it seems shortish, can feel quite long and challenging to design. Being an inspirational speech, it adds that extra degree of difficulty. It comes up though. The organisers ask you to deliver the closing, rousing call to action to fire the troops up for another year. Are you ready to meet the challenge?
There are some key components we must assemble. There must be one clear and compelling message. In a speech like this, we can’t rattle off the twenty things everyone should be doing. They can never remember them all and the whole effort becomes too diffused. It is a single call to action, so what is the action or idea we want to propose. We might use slides or we may not, it will really depend on what we want to say. Often in these cases, we can use images very effectively without any words and we supply the narrative during our comments. Photos and images are powerful for capturing attention and people’s emotions.
A call to action is an emotional commitment that goes beyond logic. We need to hit the bulls eye of what grabs people’s hearts. This is delivered through stories. We take people on a journey of our construction. We plan it such that it leads them to feel what we want them to feel and to think what we want them to think. This planning creates a funnel effect where we keep pulling people back to our central message.
Storytelling technique is a terrific vehicle for the speaker to lead people’s hearts and minds. We populate the story with people who are familiar to the audience. Ideally they can see these people in their mind’s eye. They might be people they have actually met or have heard of. They may be historical events, figures, VIPS, celebrities or people of note who are familiar to our audience.
In Ho Chi Minh for my closing speech at Convention, the timing was such that we had previously suffered from the triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor meltdown in Japan. I spoke with emotion about that event. About having a nuclear cloud pass over your head polluting all the drinking water. Of having massive aftershocks every day for weeks, of the relentless black churning oily water engulfing communities, of the chaos and destruction. I brought that experience alive to drive home my central point.
We flesh out the surroundings of the story to make it real. We are all used to watching visual storytelling on television or in movies, so we are easily transported to a scene of the author’s creation, if the words create pictures. We describe the room or location in some detail in order to transfer minds to that place.
We place the event into a time sequence with a peg for the audience to grab hold of, to make the story come alive. We might do this by nominating the date or we might specify the season or the time of day or night. This type of context is important because it takes the listener down more layers of the story to make it more relevant. They can draw on their memory of similar occasions to approximate this story.
The delivery is where all of this comes together. It is a call to action so the speaker needs to get into high gear to make that happen. There will be an element of theatrics involved for effect. This is not some dubious trick or variant on a parlour game to distract the punters. No, it is taking the key message and driving it hard through exaggeration. Our speaker in Phuket toward the end of his talk dropped down to the push up position and pumped out twenty rapid fire pushups on his fingertips. I don’t know if you have ever tried this fingertip version, but it was pretty impressive for a man of his age group and was totally congruent with his key point about stress equals strength. It was dramatic, it was daring, but it also added that X factor to his talk.
There must be vocal modulation too, from conspiratorial whispers to hitting key words or phrases with tremendous intensity. Gestures will be larger than normal and more dramatic. The speaker will be eyeing the audience with great intensity, with a fire burning in their pupils of complete certainty of the veracity of the key message. There will be a level of super engagement with the audience, to the point they are cheering and responding throughout the talk rather than consolidated clapping only at the end.
Crafting a key message, a powerful call to action for an end worth pursuing and then wrapping it up in storytelling, delivered with energy and flair, is the formula for success when delivering the closing inspirational speech at your conference. Make it memorable and don’t hesitate about going BIG.
How To Personalise Your Presentation
Are we talking at our audiences or with our audiences? There is a vast difference between the two. Most of the time, the talks we attend are in the talking at category. The speaker has some information to impart and proceeds to go into the detail with us. There is a very one way approach, broken only by the Q&A section. The degree of detail and advice can be very convincing and valuable and we are happy to hear it. The speaker though remains remote and removed from us. We have nothing to grab on to, in order to bring the speaker closer to us, to feel some greater simpatico with them. They speak, we listen, they finish, they leave, we all move on.
Our personal brand is driven hard by the “personal” part, yet many speakers are very impersonal in the way they approach the task. This comes back to their starting point, to what they are trying to achieve. In this sense their horizon can be very limited. If you have only ever seen speakers being distant, when it is your chance, you think that is how you are supposed to do it. Most speakers are pouring forth data in its raw form. They are not wrapping it up inside insightful stories, that that grab our imagination and become transfixed in our memories. It is all a very dry affair really.
To make the whole process more personalised we need to switch our thinking. If we look at business, what do we see everyone trying to do? They are trying to personalise their products and services for the buyers. In speaking terms, we need to be doing the very same thing. The irony is that we can have speakers talking about marketing in the most detached manner from their audience. Let s do not be like that.
What is the key message for your audience and why is it important? What will this do for them should they choose to follow your advice? Who is it most suitable for and when is the best timing to get started? These questions should arise at the very start of the planning process. Trying to write your key message on a single grain of rice is a great metaphor for gaining the clarity needed to refine your key message down to its most important parts. This is where we begin.
Who is the message aimed at is a theoretical construct. What we need is to see who is turning up to the talk. Today, some host organisations won’t release the names of who is coming, but you should insist on getting the names of the companies, so that you can get a sense of which industries are in the room. This means that you can now juxtapose a general point you are making on to the business reality of the company representatives in your audience. By specifically personalising the message to their reality, you have just made a massive connection with your audience. If you can keep repeating this throughout the talk, the power of this engagement is immense. Probably you won’t be able to personalise the messaging for every company in the room, depending on the size of the attendance and the time allowed to speak, but you can certainly gain a big share of audience attention when you do this.
When using examples from the industries in attendance, the credibility of those examples skyrocket compared to using a general comparison. It does take some research and more work in the preparation stage, but the rewards are greater. When people in the audience feel you are speaking to them directly, they feel greater connectivity with the speaker.
Even those who didn’t enjoy a direct example from their industry, will appreciate that the speaker knows their stuff, because they bring their points to bear on specific company’s actual situations. We have moved from the general and theoretical to the real and practical. Businesspeople much prefer a good dose of reality in their speakers. So find out who will be in the room, start your talk composition from that point and then build in examples that will resonate with those in the room.
Should I Go Over The Top When I Present?
In our High Impact Presentations Course we have exercises where we ask the participants to really let go of all their inhibitions and let it all hang out – and “go over the top”. By contrast, we are all usually very constrained when we speak in public. Our voices are very moderate, our body language is quite muted and our gestures are rather restrained. This often carries over into our presentations and we find ourselves speaking in this dreadful monotone, which is putting everyone to sleep. Our body language is minimal and our gestures rather weak, perfunctory. The exercises we put everyone through are there to expand their range of possibilities as presenters and to do this, we exaggerate the levels and scope. Of course, in its raw form, it is too much for a professional presentation, but fine as a training tool. I am often asked though, how much is too much, when it comes to being more powerful as a presenter? How much “over the top” is appropriate?
I definitely think there is a place for going “over the top” in a business presentation. The degree to which you push the envelope though is dependant on the subject, your message and the audience. There is no simple scale where the excessive bits are neatly marked in red for our calibration and warning.
If you are giving your talk and you outraged by something, then expressing your outrage during your talk will be entirely congruent. You may do that with a higher level of voice volume, hitting certain key words harder, combined with strong body language, a matching facial expression and bigger gestures backing up the message.
You can’t keep going at that “over the top” level though, because you will wear out your audience and its real impact begins to unwind pretty quickly. Clinical, well planned bursts are more effective, because of the contrast between the storm and calm. It is a bit like classical music with its crescendos and calms.
When presenting, our body language is very powerful and very expressive. It can really jumpstart an idea. We are firm devotees of this concept. For example, in our morning meetings or chorei, we have a couple of set pieces. Each day a different person leads the group. We go through the Vision, Mission, Values, one of Dale Carnegie’s principles, motivational quote, etc. In our Mission Statement component we say, “By providing customised business solutions, based on the Dale Carnegie Principles, we exceed our client’s expectations”. When the chorei leader says the word “exceed” everyone does their version of thrusting a pointed finger as high as possible, upward toward the sky.
At another point in the chorei we talk about our mantra, which is to “10 X our thoughts and our actions”. We used to do this by crossing our arms across our chests, opening up the fingers of both hands, so that we are expressing the symbol of an X shape and the number ten. One of the team had the genius idea of going more over the top. So now we stand with our feet well apart and push both our arms out and upward at 45 degrees, so that the effect is to create a cross symbol, in the same shape as the letter “X”. It is a very dynamic movement and very powerful in communicating the idea behind it.
What has this got to do with presenting in public? The difficult part is to free ourselves from the limitations of normal daily conversation, where we are so restrained and let some pizzazz come into our presenting persona. Our daily chorei gets us used to going over the top. Now when speaking, hitting a key word very loudly or elongating its pronunciation is very dynamic and will grab your audience’s attention. It helps us to break through all of the mental clutter and minutiae that is dominating their thoughts and preventing them from giving us their full attention.
When we combine a key word with a very big gesture, then the amplification of that message becomes very powerful. I noticed this when I was presenting to an audience of five thousand people. The venue was large, the seats at the back were far away and the top tier guests in the last rows saw me as about as big as a peanut from that distance. In this case, you have to use the whole stage, center, left and right sides and the stage apron. You have to employ very exaggerated gestures to overcome the tyranny of distance from your audience seated at the back.
Props are another area where some showmanship can work well. In a speech in Japanese in Nagoya, I was making the point that Australia was very much focused on the Asian region. I decided to reverse an 18th century Meiji era slogan for effect. In the original, Japan was being encouraged to leave Asia and follow Europe. It said “Datsu A Nyu O”. I reversed it to “Datsu O Nyu A, meaning for Australia to stop following Europe and to follow Asia instead.
By itself, reversing the well known slogan was a powerful idea. It was a new construct for a Japanese audience to have such famous a Meiji era call to action, which they all studied at High School, reoriented to a completely new meaning. The ”over the top” contribution was to have it hand written in Japanese kanji brushstrokes, pasted on to a traditional roll such as you will often see with Japanese paintings. I attached small weights to the bottom of the roll, so that when it was unfurled, it dropped like a stone and made a slight snapping sound when fully extended. It was a very dramatic unfurling of a surprising usage of the Japanese language and culture by a foreigner. It was “over the top” but congruent.
We can take the chance to stand out at different times. We need to pick our moments and decide how far we will push things. None of us need another vanilla presentation from some entirely forgettable speaker, but we don’t need pyrotechnics every time either. Find some spots for hitting a word hard, or using a big gesture. Use a powerful facial expression of wonder, disgust, surprise, joy or anger, where it is congruent with what you are saying. “Less is more” though is a good rule and leave the amateur theatrics to the aspirant thespians. But where it works, do go “over the top”.
What Is The Best Way To Introduce Yourself When Presenting?
Usually when we are speaking we are introduced twice. Once at the very start by the MC and then during our segment of the talk. The MC’s role is quite simple. It is to set the stage for the speaker, to bring something of their history, their achievements and various details that make them a credible presenter for this audience. This can often be a problem though, depending on a few key factors.
Are you relying on the MC to do the research on you, encapsulate your achievements and highlight why you should have the right to stand up here in front of everyone and pontificate on your subject? Most people are too busy to do better than a perfunctory job of this and often they won’t appreciate what particular points need more highlighting than others.
It is always best to prepare your own introduction. Keep control of what is being said about you and the areas you wish to showcase. You can decide for each occasion which elements of your history or current focus are going to be most impactful for this particular audience and topic. Don’t make it too long.
I was recently organising a speaker for an event and his self-introduction was very long, a potpourri of his entire life. He obviously couldn’t discriminate between very, very high points very high points and high points, so he cobbled the whole thing together as a unit. I wasn’t the MC that evening but the actual MC ignored the whole thing and just said, “you have seen his biography in the meeting event notice, so I won’t go through it now”. Yes, we may have glanced at it, but we were not remembering it in detail and the chance to reconnect with it was no longer there.
The MC role can be difficult to manage for the speaker. They can choose to ignore everything your wrote and give their own version. Usually this is laced full of errors, exaggerations and miscommunication. Some MCs have pretty big egos and think they are the star of the show and that they can do a better job than any offerings from the speaker. What comes out of their mouth is usually an amazement, because you know what they were supposed to say.
For this reason, my advice is to only feed the MC the key points and deny them the option to seize hold of your reputation and background and pervert it into something totally unrecognisable. You only need them to set the stage and give you a chance to connect with your audience. When it is your turn to speak you can go freely into the details you want highlight.
I would not do this immediately following on from the MC. We need a break and the biography is not the best way to start your speech anyway. The start of the talk has only one purpose and that is to stay the hand of every single person in that audience, from secretly reaching for their phone to escape from you, to the charms of the internet.
Design a blockbuster opening that will grab the attention of the audience and then introduce yourself, rather than the other way around. When you get to your self-introduction, look for opportunities to tell a story that brings some highlight to the attention of the listeners. This is a more subtle way of telling everyone how fantastic you are. This also limits the amount of content you can share with the audience, ensuring it doesn’t get too long and too detailed. We will remember your story more than any other part of your introduction, so choose something that is highly memorable about you. Make it positive rather than negative. You can tell plenty of stories in your talk about how you learnt through failure, but for the introduction, choose those incidents which portray you in a good light. This is what you want people to associate with you – success, ability, innovation, bravery, learning.
Don’t allow your introduction to happen, with you as an interested bystander. Grab hold of the content and feed certain parts the MC to allow them to do their job. Keep other juicy parts for yourself, to set the scene for your speech to be a great success.
How To Control Your Reactions During Q&A
Creating and delivering the presentation sees you in 100% total control. You have designed it, you have been given the floor to talk about it, all is good. However, the moment the time comes for questions, we are now in a street fight. Why a street fight? Because in a street fight there are no rules and the Q&A following a presentation is the same – no rules. Oh that’s not right you might be thinking. What about social norms, propriety, manners, decorum – surely all of these things are a filter on bareknuckle duking it out in public? That is correct but it is not a guarantee.
There are different personality types assembled in the room. In Japan, often the English language presentation occasions are like mini-UNS, in terms of national representation. Different social norms apply in countries apart from your own. The French educational system promotes critique of statements and ideas and that is seen as an illustration of superior intellect. My fellow Australians are often sceptical and doubting and don’t hesitate to mention it, in a direct assault on what has just been said. There are also different personality types in the room. Some people are naturally aggressive and want to argue the point, if the speaker has the temerity to say something they disagree with.
What is considered rude, aggressive or inappropriate behaviour is a relative judgment depending on where you grew up, how you were educated and how you individually see the world. Even in Japanese society, there are occasions where there is heated argument and a lot of the typical Japanese restraint is out the window.
As the speaker we are pumped full of chemicalS when we get up to present. If we are nervous, then the flight or fight adrenaline chemicals are released by the Amygdala inside our brain. We cannot stop this but we can control it. It is interesting that if this state is held for a long period of time, we lose the feeling of strength and have a sense of weakness. A forty minute speech is a long time to be in a heightened state and by the time we get to the Q&A, we may be feeling denuded of strength. Just at the moment when we come under full force attack.
The face of the speaker is a critical indicator during the Q&A. I caught myself shaking my head to indicate disagreement with what was coming my way in the form of a question during the Q&A. Without initially realising it, I was sending out a physical sign that I wasn’t accepting the questioner’s bead of disagreement to what I had been pontificating. From an audience point of view, this looks like you are inflexible, closed to other opinions and just dismissive of anyone with an opinion that differs from your own.
Even if you are not a rabid head shaker like I was, the expression on your face may be speaking volumes to your audience. You might be displaying a sceptical visage of doubt and rejection of what is being said before you have heard the whole argument out. You might even be pumping blood into your face so that it goes red in colour. There is a female businesswoman I know here, whose skin goes bright red when she is in the public eye and begins to look like one of those warning beacons. There is probably nothing she can do about that, but it is definitely not a good look. Or your general demeanour is one of disdain for the questioner and you look arrogant and disrespectful of alternative opinions.
Given the chemical surge leading to denuding of strength I mentioned earlier, we may look like we are defeated by the questioner and this impacts our credibility to show we are true believers in what we said and are fully committed to that line of argument. We don’t want to appear like we have collapsed in the face of pushback during the Q&A. Maintain a brave front, even if it is all front. The audience won’t know the difference.
Nodding during the questioning is also a big mistake. We do this in normal conversation, to show the speaker we are paying attention to them and this bleeds over into public speaking events as well. I learnt this when I did media training. The television media love it when you are nodding, because they can take that bit in the editing and transpose it to sync with the voice of the person disagreeing with you and it appears you are accepting their argument. Very sneaky isn’t it, but when you pop up on TV agreeing with your questioner attacking all that you have said, it is too late. Even if there is no TV there, don’t look like you are agreeing with the questioner and control that nodding right from the start.
So during Q&A maintain a totally neutral expression on your face and don’t allow you head to nod. If you feel anxiety from the question, take some slow deep breaths to slow down your heart rate and breathing. Keep supremely calm and remember that really aggressive questioners look like dills or grandstanders to the rest of the audience who usually place their sympathy with the person under attack. We do have that Colosseum thing in us however, where we like watching blood sports and Q&A can come under that category.
So we have to appear above the fray, in control, calm, reasonable and assured of what we are saying. Control your temper, don’t cut them off mid-question, leave a pregnant pause after they have finished, to allow some of the tension to dissipate, then lob in a cushion or neutral statement to give you thinking time and then answer their question.
Here is a killer technique for obstreperous questioners. When you start to answer their question, give them 100% eye contact for six seconds to show you won’t be intimidated. Next switch your six second eye contact to various other members of the audience and never look at the questioner again. By publically and completely ignoring them, you take all the air out of their puffed up ego and you decimate them through denial of attention.
How Many People Should Present?
Often, we are presenting as a team and more than one speaker may be involved. Is that ideal or are we better off to have only one speaker? Usually we are talking for around 40 minutes, so the time isn’t all that long to split over multiple speakers. Are we better to limit it to one or two, or does it actually matter? Personally, I prefer one speaker if possible and if necessary then two as a maximum. There is the rhythm requirement for both speaker and listener. Chopping and changing all the time makes it hard for the audience to identify with the speaker and absorb the message. For the speaker too the chance to get one’s cadence rolling gets truncated when you have to hand off to the next speaker.
Having multiple speakers is common at events, but usually they have the full time allotted to them and they don’t share it around. There are some reasons for this and one is that the speaker is the star of the show. We want to be careful about having two suns in the sky. If one of the speakers is very polished, professional and very competent as a presenter and their comrade is a shambles, then the audience attributes your firm’s level of professionalism to the shambles, rather than the excellent presenter. The reputational damage from this is huge because the audience finds the lowest level of skill and plots you there. You have also just clearly demonstrated that your firm is incapable of professional consistency.
Even if both speakers are competent, there is the issue of maintaining the same level of energy in the room. Remember, the audience is stone cold when they get into the venue and we have to warm them up. We are in the Age of Distraction and today audiences are shameless about pulling out their mobile phones and scrolling through their email or social media as they multitask. We speakers want them single focused on us and not escaping to the tantalising delights of the internet. The first speaker has to break through that wall of disinterest and mild to throbbing cynicism and grab everyone’s attention. They have to win the audience over and they use all the weapons at their disposal, ranging from the quality of the material involved to the delivery techniques employed.
They do their job and now there is handover to the other speaker. The audience cynicism meter springs back into action as they now have to sum up the new speaker to see if they will keep listening or get out their mobile and escape the room. What are some best practices for the handover. I don’t think I ever see this done well. Usually it is some poor bromide like , “Taro will now talk about X” and up steps Taro to the microphone or the podium.
Instead, why not say, “we have found some fascinating applications of this material for your business. This will be of interest to every business in the room today, because we are all facing the same issues of staying relevant in business. We have an expert here to guide us through the traps and obstacles, someone who has been working on these issues for decades, please welcome my good friend and colleague Taro to the podium take us through how we can prosper and differentiate ourselves over the next decade”. When our colleague begins moving to the stage, we are already clapping vigorously to inspire the audience to also clap. On stage, we ceremoniously welcome him or her with a warm handshake and a big smile and then depart to our chair, leaving the limelight to them.
They have to be presenting at the same level of energy we were so that the transition seems as seamless as possible. There should be no time lost switching laptops or dickering around with the technology. If that needs to be done, they should launch straight into their remarks, while someone else does that for them. Their immediate job is to focus 100% on the audience and connect with them straight away. We talk about having a strong opening to grab the audience when we start. The second speaker also needs to have that too. We can’t just leave it with the first speaker, because the audience will have forgotten that by now and here they are face to face with an unknown quantity. The second speaker has to design their opening to grab their listeners attention too.
When we get to the Q&A this needs to be worked out ahead of time. What you don’t want is vaudeville, where a question is raised from the audience and both speakers look at each other quizzically, wondering who will answer that one. One of the speakers will act as the navigator, either taking the question themselves or passing it over to their colleague. In this way there are no doubts about who will answer it and also a few seconds available for the colleague to gather their thoughts and think how they will answer the actual question.
It will be predetermined who will offer the final close after the Q&A. A good practice is to make it the first speaker, so that they can reconnect themselves and the speech from the second half back to the first half. It ties a nice, neat bow on the whole proceedings. The point is all this must be planned out in advance, so that all contingencies are catered for.
Okay, So How Should I End My Speech, Make It My Triumph?
This is a tricky part of designing and delivering our presentations. Think back to the last few presentations you have attended and can you remember anything from the close of their speech? Can you remember much about the speaker? This close should be the highlight of their talk, the piece that brings it all together, their rallying cry for the main message. If you can’t recall it, or them, then what was the point of their giving the talk in the first place? People give talks to make an impression, to promulgate their views, to win fans and converts, to impact the audience, etc. All weighty and worthy endeavours, but all seemingly to no effect, in most cases. What can we do to stand above this crowd of nobodies, who are running around giving unmemorable and unimpressive talks?
The keys to any successful talk revolve around very basic principles. Vince Lombardi, famed American Green Bay Packers football coach would always emphasise that the road to success in his game was blocking and tackling – the basics and so it is with public speaking. Design must not start with the assembly of the slide deck. Yet this is how 99% of people do it.
Instead start with designing the final closing message. In other words start with how you will finish. This forces clarity on you, drives you to sum up the key takeaways in one sentence and gets to the heart of what it is you want to say. It is also excruciatingly difficult, which is why we all head for the slide deck formation instead.
Once we have sieved the gold nugget from the dross, grasped the key point of the talk, then we are ready to work on the rest of the speech. The main body of the talk will flow naturally from the close, as we assemble data, facts, examples, stories, testimonials and statistics to support our main point. We then array this vast army of persuasion ready for deploy at our summation. It must flow in a logical progression, easy to follow for the audience and all pointing back to support our main contention.
The opening and close can have some connection or not. The role of the opening is very clear – grab the attention of the assembled masses to hear what it is we want to say. We can state our conclusion directly at the start and then spend the rest of the time justifying that position. Or we can provide some general navigation about what we are going to talk about today. Or we can hit the audience with some nitro statement or information, to wake them up to get them to listen to us.
At the end there will be two closes, one before the Q&A and one after. The majority of speakers allow the final question to control the proceedings rather than themselves. If that last question is a hummer, a real beauty, right on the topic and allowing you to add extra value to your talk, then brilliant. How many times have you seen that though? Usually the last questions are a mess. All the better, intelligent questions have been taken, the best insights have been plumbed and now we have some dubious punter who wants a bit of your limelight. Their questions can often be off topic, rambling, unclear or just plain stupid. Is this how you want your talk remembered?
The final two closes can reflect each other and be an extension of what you have already said or you can split them up and give each its specific task to make your point. The close before the Q&A can be a summation to remind your audience of what you spoke about and prime them for questions. Obviously recency, the last thing people will hear, will have the most powerful impact, so the second close must be very carefully designed.
Be careful of the event hosts wanting to take over immediately after the last question and not allowing you the chance to make your final close. You might have gone overtime or they need to vacate the venue or face a bigger bill or whatever. They can be thanking the audience for coming and wrapping things up with their news of their next event, before you can blink an eye. You need to word them up at the start that you want to make a final close after the Q&A and then you will give them the floor.
The other component of the close is the delivery. So many speakers allow their voices to trail off and allow their speaking volume to descend at the peroration. You want to be remembered as someone passionate about your subject, excited to be there to share it with this audience and a true believer of your message. That means you need to drive the volume up, hit the last words with a lot of passion and belief. Make it a rousing call to action, to storm the barricades and to change the world. That is how you want people to remember your message AND you as a speaker as they shuffle out of the venue and go back to work or home.
When Should You Take Questions During Your Talk?
Having an audience interested enough in your topic to ask questions is a heartening occurrence. Japan can be a bit tricky though because people are shy to ask questions. Culturally the thinking is different to the West. In most western countries we ask questions because we want to know more. We don’t think that we are being disrespectful by implying that the speaker wasn’t clear enough, so that is why we need to ask our question. We also never imagine we must be dumb and have to ask a question because we weren’t smart enough to get the speaker’s meaning the first time around. We also rarely worry about being judged on the quality of our question. We don’t fret that if we ask a stupid question, we have now publically announced to everyone we are an idiot.
Some speakers encourage questions on the way through their talks. They are comfortable to be taken down deeper on an aspect of their topic. They don’t mind being moved along to an off topic point by the questioner. The advantage of this method is that the audience don’t have to wait until the end of the talk to ask their question. They can get clarification immediately on what is being explained. There might be some further information which they want to know about so they can go a bit broader on the topic.
This also presents an image of the speaker as very confident in their topic and flexible to deal with whatever comes up. They also must be good time managers when speaking, to get through their information, take the questions on the way through and still finish on time. In today’s Age Of Distraction, being open to questions at any time serves those in the audience with short concentration spans or little patience. Not everyone in the audience can keep a thought aflame right through to the end, so having forgotten what it was they were going to ask, they just sit there in silence when it gets to Q&A. Their lost question may have provoked an interesting discussion by the speaker on an important point. Having one person brave enough to ask a question certainly encourages everyone else to ask their question. The social pressure of being first has been lifted and group permission now allows for asking the speaker about some points in their talk.
The advantage of waiting until the end is that you remain in control of the order of the talk. You may deal with all of the potential questions by the end of the talk and the Q&A allows for additional things that have come up in the minds of the audience. It also makes it easier to work through the slide deck in order. The slide deck is alike an autopilot for guiding us through the talk, as we don’t have to remember the order, we just follow the slides. Of course if we allow questions throughout, we can always ask our questioner to wait, because we will be covering that point a little later in the talk. Nevertheless the questions at the end formula gives the speaker more control over the flow of their talk with no distractions or departures from the theme.
Time control becomes much easier. We can rehearse our talk and get it down to the exact time, before we open up for questions during the time allotted for Q&A. If we have to face hostile questions, this is when they will emerge. Prior to that, we have at least gotten through what we wanted to say. We had full control of the proceedings. If we get into a torrid time with a questioner, early in the piece, it may throw our equilibrium off balance or cause some consternation or embarrassment to the audience, detracting from what we want to say. The atmosphere can turn unpleasant very quickly which pollutes everyone’s recollection of you as the speaker. Also, if we don’t know how to handle hostile questions, our credibility can crumble. A crumbling credibility in a public forum is not a good look.
So my recommendation is for the seasoned pro speakers to take questions whenever you feel like it. For those who don’t present so frequently, err on the side of caution and take the questions at the end.
Unleash The Power Of Your Theories And Data When Presenting
It has been a while since I attended a business school presentation. From time to time the prominent foreign business schools fly in one of their big gun professors to rustle up some business in Japan by delivering a lecture on a topical subject. They are always good because the professors are either proving insights from their own research or are curating the best of what other specialists have to say on the subject. I was at one the other day on the subject of leadership. We all need help in the leadership arena so I was all ears for some pearls of insight and wisdom.
Being a business school, we had theoretical constructs, lots of groovy diagrams and a mountain of data. The presenter was very well spoken and well presented. He looked and sounded the part. I was sitting there thinking that something was missing. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but the sense of incompleteness was strong. I moved on and went back to work and got back into it. Later it dawned on me what was the missing piece on the business school presentation puzzle. It was devoid of life.
The talk took place in a mental “clean room” like you see on television when they show how high tech memory chips are made, hermetically sealed off from any polluting elements. The expectation of a presentation from a business school should be that there will theory aspects aplenty and there were. There was no “dirt” though. By that I mean no stories from the coal face about how things got very messy or failed. No tales of woe, despair or desperation. No leadership meltdowns that destroyed the business. No lessons to the wise about what not to do.
This is the danger of giving “lectures” when we are presenting. We might have tremendous expert knowledge and experience. We are easily led into pontificating about how things should be done. We can provide sufficient data to sink a small island, we can back it all up with well researched theories explaining the rationale. The content though sort of hangs in the air. It starts to resemble hydroponic plant cultivation. Lot of nutrients and water going into the development stage, but no solid connection to the ground. The tomatoes are juicy and red, but the taste is a bit shallow and disappointing.
We should go high and have theories and constructs but we also need to provide context and this is where the blood and the mud of the stories comes into it. There is no doubt that the good professors presenting this content didn’t just dream it up together over a couple of beers down at the academic’s dining hall. They visited companies, talked with real people, collected the data, captured stories of what actually happened and then weaved their theory out of the detail.
Giving the audience a glimpse into that chaotic world in those companies researched, where things didn’t go so well and where the mistakes were coming fast and furious, would be an exciting whirlwind ride for the audience. Significantly, I will guarantee that we won’t remember the inner construct of the theory, but we will remember the meltdown at the headquarters of that company before they crashed and burned.
The lesson for the rest of us is to always make sure we are populating our presentations with stories from the front line, telling the tales of the survivors and adding plenty of graphic colour, when describing the corporate gore. When you are doing your planning and get to a point of importance in your talk make a note “inject story here” in the text or in the slide deck. This will be a good reminder to ground your potential frothy excesses in fact and reality from the front line. These stories will linger long on the memory banks of the audience, much longer than their recall of your data, theory or you.
The secret is to keep asking yourself, “how do I know this to be true”. Invariably we know this to be true because of something which has happened and that is the story we need to tell, in a short form version, during our talk. Go back to the source of data or theory. Also, tell stories involving yourself. If you screwed it up, then tell us about it. We will love you for it and feel a stronger bond with you as a person, rather than as a distant and remote “presenter”. I am a very private person, so it took me a long time to get over sharing my experiences with others, particularly the failures. What I found was a strong positive reaction to me and an increase in my credibility with my audience. So inject your stories into your talks and you will find the audience will go for it and do so every time.
How To Persuade When You Are the One Presenting
Being persuasive is not down to luck or accident, it is the result of good planning and execution. This is the problem. The vast majority of speakers do not prepare properly. The slide deck gets all the attention, the data gets lots of love, the logistics are thoroughly checked. The planning component? Not enough going into that effort unfortunately. How can we become more persuasive? There is a formula for this, in fact a magic formula
This formula is simple but pure genius. It has four steps : Step 1. We open with the incident: who, what, where, when. We believe something to be true. Why is that? We have come to that conclusion through something that has become known to us. There is a back story there somewhere driving our conclusion. We tell part of that backstory. In Step 2, we get into the evidenceto provide context to support our recommendation. This is woven into the incident we are relating. In Step 3, we suggest the action needed and make our recommendation
In the final step, Step 4, we focus on the benefits, telling our audience why our recommendation will help them
Before we present anything,we need to analyse our audience so that we hit the right note with them – not too complex and not too simple. We need to consider a few angles for the talk. This is a vital precaution very few speakers ever take and then get themselves into trouble and wonder why. How much does my audience know about my topic. What will be the benefit to this audience. What would be some skeptical or negative attitudes toward what I am going to say? How much resistance can I anticipate. How can I overcome that resistance?
Where possible we should be trying to tailor the talk to the needs of the audience.
We need to look atthe audience point of view regarding how their current situation is relevant to the topic. What are the challenges they are facing. What do they consider to beimportant or unimportant concerning my topic? How could they benefit by taking the action I’m recommending?
After understanding where your audience is, you can use the magic formula to
capture attention, build credibility, eliminate nervousness, call others to action and get results.
We must apply good discipline such that we don’t start rambling on about some long winded story of how we came to our epiphany. We need to be sharp about getting to the point or we risk losing our audience. Ninety percent of the time should be devoted to telling the incident but we do it concisely.
We relive a vivid, personal experience relevant to the topic. When did it happen, who was there, where was it, what happened (establish who, what, when, where, why)?
Include animation and vocal variety. We next draw out the evidence. As part of the storytelling, we include the context behind the incident, as a way of backing up what we are saying. Audiences can disagree with our analysis of the ramifications of the incident but they cannot disagree with the incident itself.
At this point we make our recommendation. We specify what action we want our listeners to take. This component of the process represents only five percent of the time allocation.
The next five percent is when we provide the benefit of taking our recommended action. The whole piece is tight and compelling. Hearing the background forces the audience to come to their own conclusions about what they think should be done. Probably they will have come to the same conclusion we came to. This is an ideal outcome.
Here are some key pointsto remember in the magic formula
So think about an opportunity coming up where you can apply the magic formula to persuade others? Think about why you are making this recommendation to the audience. There is bound to be some context or a background reason why. Can you create a story which captures that context, so that the client can easily agree?
The ability to persuade people is one of the most critical business abilities but it is possessed by very few. Use these ideas and become one of the top 0.1% in business in Nippon.
Your War Stories In Your Presentation Are Boring
Gaining credibility as a speaker is obviously important. We often do this by telling our own experiences. However, having too much focus on us and away from the interests of the audience is a fine line we must tread carefully. When we get this wrong, a lot of valuable speaking time gets taken up and we face the danger of losing our audience. They are like lightening when it comes to escaping to the internet, to go find things they feel are more relevant.
We must always keep in the front of our mind that whenever we face an audience, we are facing a room packed with critics and skeptics. We definitely have to establish our credibility or they will simply disregard what we are saying. The usual way to gain credibility is to draw on our experiences. A great way to do this is telling our war stories. The focus is usually on things that are important to us, so we certainly enjoy reliving the past. In fact, we can enjoy it a bit too much. We begin telling our life story because we are such an interesting person. We are certain everyone will want to hear it, won’t they.
Actually, their own life story is much more fascinating for them. So, we should be trying to relate what we are talking about to their own experiences and their realities. When we want to tell our stories, we have to be committed to keeping them short and to the point. As soon as an audience gets the sense the speaker is rambling down memory lane, they get distracted, bored and mentally depart from the proceedings. I was listening to a senior company leader giving a talk and he went on and on about how he started in sales and all his adventures. He was obviously enjoying it, but what did something that happened forty years ago in America have to do with the rest of us here in Tokyo?
A good way to keep the audience engaged and focused on themselves is by asking rhetorical questions. These are questions for which we don’t require an actual answer, but the audience don’t know that. This creates a bit of tension and they have to focus on the issue we have raised. The focus is now on the same points the speaker wants to emphasise. Because of the question, they have to mentally go there themselves. It is much more effective than having the speaker try and drag them there.
Rather than just telling war stories, we can ask them to compare the story we are going to tell with their own experiences. In this case, the speaker’s example is just a prompt for them to identify with the situation being unveiled. This is better because they are relating the issue to their own reality. They can take the speaker’s example and either agree with it or disagree with it. Even if they disagree with it, their different stance will be based on their own facts rather than opinion. We might say, “I am going to relate an incident which happened to me in a client meeting. Have any of you had this experience and if so what did you do? Listen to what I did and see if you think I made the best choice or not”. We have now set up the comparison with their own world. This gets their attention in a natural way, rather than me banging on about what a legend I was in the meeting with the client.
Talking about ourselves is fun but it is dangerous. How should we incorporate it? As we plan our talk, we have to work out the cadence of the delivery to includE our war stories. If we are talking too much about ourselves the audience may lose interest and mentally escape from us. If we have designed in content which will involve them, we can keep them with us all the way to the end. This doesn’t happen by itself. We have to carefully implant it when designing the talk. It is also very important to test this design during the rehearsal. Better to discover any issues in rehearsal rather than testing the content on a live audience. Sounds simple enough, but remarkably, 99% of speakers do no rehearsal at all. Doubt that statistic? How many speakers have you heard where you got the sense they had carefully rehearsed their talk? Case closed!
In developing our attention grabbing cadence during the talk, rather than waiting to Q&A to deal with any pushback on our opinions, we can go early. We can anticipate what those objections might be and handle them during the main body of our speech. We pose them as rhetorical questions. Some people in the audience when they hear these objections will be thinking “yeah, that’s right”. We then use our evidence drawn from our experiences, our war stories, to demolish that potential objection and ensure we maintain control of the issue. This technique also engages the audience more deeply in our presentation, as they start to add perspectives they may not have thought of before. There is also a strong feeling of comprehensiveness about our talk too. It shows we are aware of different views, are not afraid of them and have an answer to remove them as a consideration.
Successful Presentations Need Good Structure
It is a bad sign when a presentation makes me sleepy, especially if it is at lunch time. It is very common to have speakers address a topic over a lunch to a group of attendees. After lunch, you might explain away a bit of the drowsiness, but during the lunch is a warning sign. The speaker had good voice strength, so nobody was struggling to hear him. He was knowledgeable on his subject having worked in this area for a number of years. He was speaking about what his firm does everyday, so he is living the topic. So what went wrong?
Thinking back to the talk, I wondered whether his structure was the issue? When a speech doesn’t flow well, the audience has to work hard. Actually, they choose not to work hard and instead just drop out and escape from you. This was one of those cases.
If we think about giving a speech, we have to plan it well. In his case, he had prepared slides, but the style of the lunch and the venue meant it was a no slide deck presentation. He had some side notes written down on his laptop screen to follow. That is fine for the speaker, because it aids navigation through the topics. The problem was that the points were not ordered or structured well. This made it hard to follow, as it tended to jump around, rather than flow.
We design our talks from the idea spark. In one sentence, we need to isolate out what is the key point we want to make to our audience. This is not easy, but the act of refining the topic gives us clarity. We create the opening last, because its role is to break into the brains of the audience and capture their full attention for what is coming.
The middle bits between opening and closing is where the design part comes in. Think of the sections like chapters in a book. The chapters need to be in a logical order that is easy to follow. They need to link to each other so that the whole thing flows. To create the chapters we take our central conclusion and ask why is that true? The answers will come from the points of evidence or our experiences. We need to get these down and then get them in order.
It might be a simple structure like “ this is what happened in the past, this is where we are today and this is where we are going in the future”. We could use a macro-micro split. This is the big picture and here are the details of the components. It could be advantage-disadvantage. We investigate the plusses and minuses of what we are proposing. It could be taking the key points of evidence and breaking them down to make each a chapter in its own right.
The key is in the sequencing. What is the logical flow here to move from one chapter to the next? We need a bridge between chapters to set up what is coming next and to tell our audience we are changing the focus. We need to constantly loop each chapter back to what is the central point. We can’t just put out evidence and leave it there, expecting the listener to work it out themselves. We have to tell them why this is important, what it means for them and how they can use it.
Visuals on screen do assist in this process. It does make it easier to follow because we are hitting more points of stimulus with our audience. When we don’t have slides, we need to use word pictures to draw the audience into our topic. I am struggling to recall any stories he told about the topic, which is the best place to create those word pictures.
So break the talk up before you go anywhere near the slide construction. What is the point you want to make? What are the reasons for that and turn them into chapter headings. Check that the flow of the chapters is logical and easy to follow. Then create a blockbuster opening to grab attention. If our speaker had spent more time on the design then the talk would have been more accessible to the audience. Get that wrong in this Age Of Distraction and you have lost them immediately.
Tech Presenters Please Stop Making Stupid Errors
I am sitting there with a crowd of people attending a presentation on blockchain technology. Some are very technical people active in the crypto currency area, some run their own tech businesses. Our presenter has amazing experience in this area, having worked for some very big names in the industry. He also has his own company to promote as well as himself as a leader in this field. He has some recommendations for us based on where he sees the industry moving over the next couple of years.
The coverage of his subject was logical and easy to follow. It was clear he really knew what he was talking about. The slides by the way, overall, were excellent. Very professionally done by a designer and they reinforced the credibility of his company. Very clear, for the most part, with not too much information on each slide and plenty of white space. Some fonts were a bit smallish and if you were seated at a distance, probably rather impenetrable. Apart from that quibble though, they were well done.
I was astounded though, by the way he presented his material. I calculated that during the entire presentation, including both the Q&A as well as the main body of the talk, he had eye contact with his audience for about 1% of the time. Where was he looking? He interspersed his eye contact between looking at the floor and the monitor he was using to show the slides. In fact, it was almost like some extremely primitive tribe living in the remote mountains of Papua New Guinea, encountering a high spec, large form monitor, showing amazing scenes for the first time. They would be amazed by what they were seeing and their eyes would be glued to the screen. This describes our modern, urban, high tech presenter to a tee. He seemed hypnotised by the screen and just kept looking at what was on it the whole time.
Mercifully, he wasn’t reading the content to us, line by line, like some other dim presenters I have had the misfortune to encounter. He was transfixed though on the screen and just totally ignored his audience. Occasionally he would break free from the siren call of the monitor and amble around the front of the room, wandering to and fro, staring down at the carpet tiles.
He did have good energy, was obviously expert in this area and had some passion for his subject. He did prefer to speak in a monotone, where every single word gets the exact some strength treatment and there was no vocal variety. I liked his gestures, although they tended to be held a bit low. It would have been better to get his hands up higher, so they would be more visible.
He didn’t seem to be lacking in confidence. I spoke with him briefly before we started when I exchanged business cards. He didn’t come across as some nerdy, painfully shy techie, who wants to avoid contact with human kind as much as possible.
I put this dismal display down to a lack of knowledge. He knows a lot about the tech but knows close to zero about how to explain it to an audience. He didn’t seem to understand that to convince an audience of your point of view you need to work on them. Like a lot of technical people, he must have believed that by just putting the data and information up on the screen, the goodness and sanctity of the content would carry the day. He must have imagined that his part in the process was not relevant. Even during the Q&A, he completely ignored the source of the questions – the rows of people seated in front of him. He just continued to stare at the screen. The words up on the screen at that point were “Thank You”, so not a lot to look at.
The basic rule of presenting is to use all the tools at your disposal. Eye contact with your audience is so powerful as a persuader. We wrap that up with our vocal variety, pauses, gestures and body language.
Hold the gaze of one individual in your audience for six seconds. Longer than that it becomes too intrusive. Speak to one person, on a point while holding their gaze, then switch your gaze to another person. Don’t do it in order, because people will predict what you are doing and switch off , because they know their turn is not coming yet.
Rather divide the room up into six sections. Front to the left, middle and right and the same for the rear half of the room. Then at random move your gaze around picking up people, making eye contact with them and converting them to your point of view on the subject.
Our presenter missed a big opportunity to persuade his audience to use his firm. He failed to sway us with his point of view, because he under powered the persuasion bit. The quality of your content may be the best on the planet but that does not remove your role in explaining it. Back up what you are saying with knowledge of presenting as well and unlike our speaker, become the total package.
How To Be An Inspiring Presenter
At the start of our class on High Impact Presentations, we ask the participants to think about what type of impression they would like to have linger with their audience, after their presentation has been completed. How about you? When people are filing out of the hall, what things would you like to hear about your presentation, if your were able to eavesdrop on their conversation? Being clear is always a favourite and please listen to Episode 144 “How To Be More Concise, Clear and Persuasive When Presenting”, where I go into more detail on how to do that. Another high ranking popular desire is to be more inspiring.
Now “inspiring” can be defined in many ways, but for the purposes of giving presentations, we can think of it as lifting people up, getting them to take action, to challenge new things, to push themselves harder than before. Actually that is a pretty tall order in a forty minute talk. Unless we are a professional motivational speaker, the majority of our talks will probably be focused on dispensing information and offering advice on how to solve business problems.
What would a business audience find inspiring? It could be a tale of daring do, where great adversity had been overcome through the human will. Conquering dangerous elements of nature, one’s circumstances or fellow man, often come up in this regard. The problem is business people’s activities usually are far removed from conquering the poles, vertiginous mountain ascents or vast ocean crossing exploits. These are very specialist pursuits, which are out of our purview.
The arc of the story of rags to riches is a popular trope. This works in business, because we are looking for hope in the face of tough odds. When we hear that others made it despite all the trials and tribulations, we take it that maybe we can do it too. It can be a personal story or it can the saga of a firm or a division and its imminent elimination, coming from back from the cusp of destruction to rise again and prosper. We are magnets to lessons on survival. We prefer to learn through the near death experience and ultimate triumph of others, than try it on ourselves.
You might be thinking your life is rather dull, your industry absolutely dull and your firm perpetually dull. How could you liven up a talk with stories than were inspiring to others? Maybe you can’t. Perhaps you have to draw lessons from other industries or personalities and weave these into the point you are making in your talk.
I like to read biographies and autobiographies for this reason. I enjoy interviews with outstanding people, telling how they climbed the greasy pole and got to the top. Strangely, obituaries are also a good source for this type of information. They are usually brief summaries of a person’s life. They often contain snippets of great hardship or success and frequently both. Don’t just skim over these heroes tales, instead collect these rich stories. These can be your go to files for greatness, when you want to introduce an idea that needs some evidence.
There may be legendary figures in your industry or your firm. These are stories you can retell for effect, to drive home the insights you want illuminate. Okay it wasn’t you, but the audience doesn’t care that much. They like to learn and they love hearing about disasters, so the mess doesn’t have to be your personal catastrophe.
Usually the founders of your firm went through tough times. There are bound to be tales in there you can use. Or you can draw on recent recessions, the Lehman Shock, the 2011 triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant meltdown to find episodes where all looked grim, but a legendary team battled on and survived, while many businesses around them disappeared.
You may have some personal experiences that are also relevant. This can be quite hard, because you are sharing something quite personal with the world. As an introvert, it took me a long time before I was comfortable to talk about my own experiences. When I did though, the impact on the audience was immediate. I could sense the feeling of closeness with strangers, as they listened to my tales of error, overreach, miscalculation etc. I still have trouble with this, so I do prefer the woes of others to my own, but definitely my own stories are always so much more powerful. I just need the temerity to tell more of them.
So pepper your talk with uplifting examples from others or from your own experiences, that justify the action you want them to take or boost the feeling of confidence you want to instil in your audience. The raw material is all around you. Just start looking for it and begin compiling it. When you hear something you can use, capture it immediately for later employ. Dig into the vaults of your own experiences and draw out examples that will make you magnetic for your audience. Telling these types of stories is how speakers have inspired audiences down through the ages. The reason we still do it today is because it works a charm.
Aya McCrindle recently graduated from our High Impact Presentations Course and did her first TED talk. She was well and truly ready for it, because of the training preparation she received. Aya has her own company, Aya Jean Style Coach, where she helps people with mastering first impressions. In her area of expertise, she is the brand. She runs her classes as the leader and that means being credible with her students. All leaders need excellent persuasion skills and this is where the High Impact Presentations Course comes in. If you need to be able to communicate at a high level, if you need to be persuasive, if you need to be able to motivate people, then don't waste your time trying to work it out by yourself. Do the course. It has a proven track record of over 100 years. It is taught in over 100 countries in thirty five languages. It is the Rolls Royce of presentation training. Don't you deserve the Roller?
I Hate Sitting Through Underperforming Presentations
This global company is a household name in Japan. They have spent a fortune getting the brand name known here. They had some tough times early on too and got a hammering from the media about aspects of their business model. A lot of negative publicity was generated, so the name is well known, but not in a helpful way. The President is giving his talk about the company and the industry to a mixed audience here in Tokyo. It was sadly underwhelming. Sitting there was a form of torture for me, who teaches this stuff. Well what made this an under performing presentation and what can we learn from it?
The meltdown in the media from a few years ago is a common memory. But what a great “return from the dead story” lies therein. There must have been amazing characters involved. Even the foreign head office President had to get involved and apologise. There was drama aplenty and lessons numerous falling out from the catastrophe. We all love to learn by hearing about the errors of others. We gobble that stuff right up, because we have that Schadenfreude thing going in the background.
Instead, we got a very one dimensional, flat talk about the business model and not much on the lessons learnt. It was delivered with a very passionless effort, that failed to ignite anyone in the audience. The speaker looked tired and sounded only slightly interested to be there talking to us. His facial expression was single throughout. There were no highs and lows of the journey reflected in his expression. He seemed to make sure to match his voice to his wooden face and spoke throughout in a deathly, dull monotone. This means he gave up the chance to punch out specific words for emphasis, to bring phrases to life by turbo injecting them with power or alternatively, dropping the strength out for contrast. It was bland.
In fact, this was a major brand damaging exercise from go to woe. By that, I count both his personal, professional brand and also the corporate brand. He mentioned that he had given a couple of these talks to various audiences already and I was thinking that is pretty sad. Why sad?
I was reminded of that story about Campbell’s tomato soup. I can’t remember who was the ad guy in charge of the advertising account for Campbells, but the owner complained that the advertising agency was promoting all of the other soups, except tomato. The ad guy’s reply is very informative for speakers. He said the reason was that their tomato soup was orange in colour and not all that good. If he promoted it vigorously, more people would try it, become unimpressed and Campbells would suffer severe brand damage.
This is what happens to speakers like this one. They nefariously roam around destroying their personal and company brands, by exposing more and more people to their zombie presentation performance. He needed to be a lot more energised in his talk. This was potential high drama, full of powerful stories that would stick with us, long after the talk was over. Here we had a great redemption story of how they came back from the brink of expiration in Japan, to recover, regroup and re-conquer the market.
The delivery had one gear and that unfortunately was stuck in low gear. We never had spurts of speed or energy. We just dawdled along at three kilometres an hour until it ended. We all need to become passionate about our story, telling it with a lot of voice strength and using our body language to good effect.
We take the audience with us on a trip to Space Mountain at Disneyland. We are strapped in, and then we whiz into the blackness of their downfall, curving at high speed around the media assault, dropping precipitously into a deep dive of lost business from which it looked there was no return. Next, we soar skyward as we get over the disaster and rebound the company, people and the brand.
We needed that passionate retelling of the journey, the highs and lows, the lessons, the characters involved. All we got was a slide deck with lots of data on it. What a lost opportunity. We all have many stories, good, bad and educational. We need to use these to engage our audience, so that they feel like they have been with us through that hair raising ride and have touched back down with us, exhausted but elated at having survived the ride.
Remember, people won’t recall the detail of your talk. They will forget all the statistics. Even if they wrote them down, they won’t consult them ever again. They will not remember all those groovy slides you crafted and assembled so meticulously. They will remember the stories though. They will remember you and how you came across. They won’t forget how much you excited them or didn’t excite them. Treat every chance to talk as a great brand building or exploding opportunity. As the speaker definitely be passionate, tell energising stories and be memorable in a good way. This is how you build both your personal and company brands to good effect. The negative alternative is not a very pleasant contemplation.
How To More Concise, Clear and Persuasive When Presenting
We run training on presentations and public speaking continuously. These three requests to be more concise, clear and persuasive, often come up from the participants, regarding the nominated areas where they want to improve. In this Age of Distraction, if you miss the first two, you can kiss goodbye to number three. As soon as an audience hears you rambling, they are scrambling for the mobile phones to exit your talk. When you are mystifying your audience, they bolt for digital device safety.
I am the only English native speaker in my team here in Tokyo. My staff all have very fluent English and are skilled communicators. One of them however, as much as I love her to death, drives me nuts. When her brain has fixed on a topic she launches straight into the main body of what she wants to tell me. It has become a bit of a running joke in the office, because I will stop her and ask “what is the subject of this wonderful exposition?”.
We can do the same things when we are speaking. We are so deep into our subject, we forget that the people listening are unable to follow our thread, because we haven’t set up the topic properly. We have phases of our talk. The opening is the dynamite, the nitro. We light the fuse and blow everyone out of their complacency, sloth and slumber in order to get them to pay attention to us.
In the main body of our talk we need to be thinking in terms of five minute blocks. At around this frequency, we need to be switching it up, to keep our audience attached to what we are saying. We might do this through a powerful story, an impactful slide, an insightful quotation, or a killer question. When we make a statement in the main body, we need to make sure we are bolting on some evidence to prove what we are saying. Data, statistics, survey results, testimonials are all excellent sources of credibility for our provocative claims.
The arrangement of the blocks needs to have a logical flow. It might be by theme, chronological, micro to macro, problem-solution-result or any number of easy to follow formulas. The point is to choose one and use it, rather than allowing the muse to take you on a journey without direction.
Bridges between the sections are useful guideposts too. For example, “We have covered XYZ, now let me explore ABC”, or “In a moment let’s investigate the influence the economy may have on our projections”, or “There are three key things we must be vigilant for, the first is….”. These are threads to stitch the whole presentation together into a format the listener can follow without having to work hard at all. If we make our audience work hard, we often find they are all lazy escape artists and we have lost them.
Time is the weapon of choice for the speaker when it comes to learning to shave words, hone sentences and trim excess. Rehearsal is absolutely key to getting the timing correct. On how many occasions have we all had to sit there and listen to an unprofessional speaker tell us they are “running out of time” and they will have to “whip” through the last slides? How do we feel? Cheated, big time! We came to get some key information from the talk and skipping over key slides to satisfy some arbitrary time constraints has us worried we are not getting full value from the time we are allocating.
When the stop watch is running, you learn to sharpen up the prose, glean the essentials and focus on the most important things only. Rambling away soon trips you up and you realise you need to cut the excess and stick to the most powerful points only.
When we get to the end, we wrap it up with two closes, one for the pre-Q&A and one for the very end. These are our opportunities to underscore our punch lines, hammer our main conclusion, reinforce the ideas we are promulgating and leave the audience with a thought pounding so loudly in their ears that it won’t get easily displaced by something else. The close puts a nice bow on the whole enterprise, wrapping things up sweetly.
Action Steps
Man, Your Monotone Is Killing Me
Normally we expect Japanese speakers to be boring, because their language is a monotone and so they apply the same formula when speaking in either Japanese or English. That is okay in a way, because it is a cultural thing. However, for foreigners there is no excuse. If you are giving your talk in a monotone, expect to lose your audience. Forty minutes of listening to some speaker’s monotone delivery is enough to make most people suicidal. Regardless of how gripping the topic, the grip of slumber proves more powerful and relentless.
This was me recently. I turned up at the appointed time for the talk, all full of vim and vigour, eagerly awaiting the unveiling of this troubling topic. The speaker came with a grand resume, a prince among princes on this topic. It wasn’t princely. He wasn’t even the jester. It was more like a lecture from the hooded hangman or the grim executioner.
My eye lids grew heavy as he droned on and on. Seated unwisely toward the front, I struggled to observe the common courtesies, as my eyes willed to close. It was excruciating. I was sitting there thinking, why is such a vital topic being garrotted here in full view of everyone, by the way he delivering this talk? What is it about this delivery that is driving me to sleep?
I think there were three factors at play in particular. The monotone itself is a noise we often refer to as white noise. Your refrigerator often gives off this low hum. It is there all the time. Well not your Japanese refrigerator, because the living spaces are are too small here to put up with that, so Japanese technology ensures they are a silent as the tomb. I mean your big western model, in your big kitchen, in your big house. The speaker’s monotone mimics this white noise that has no highs and lows to keep us interested. I don’t recommend you telling any speakers soon that their talk was as exciting as the white noise of your refrigerator, but you are certainly allowed to think that.
The refrigerator monotone also has the feature of being continuous. This was our speaker too. He just warbled away for the entire time with almost no pauses. Pattern interrupters like pauses are good for the brain, to keep audience attention on what you are talking about. They are like little warning buzzes that something has changed and we should pay attention to the speaker. Pauses are translators for us. We can take a moment to translate what was said into our own understanding. Continuous talking ensures each idea is drowned by the succeeding wave of the next idea.
There are no key words in a monotone. Every sentence has equal value and every word in a sentence is tremendously democratic and the same as every other word. I like democracy in political systems but not so keen on this in speeches. I want key words highlighted by voice modulation. I have just finished narrating the audio version of my next book Japan Business Mastery. I don’t have a great DJ style baritone voice. In fact, after 48 years of doing all that yelling, the kiai, in karate training, people tell me I have a rather husky voice. Sadly no one says “sexy husky voice”, they just nominate it is husky. Nevertheless, I don’t ask better qualified professionals to do it, because they won’t know which are the key words I want to hit harder than others. This isolating out particular words for attention, is what makes the talk more interesting. We are guiding the listener along a path we have predetermined about how they should think about what we are saying.
It was painful. Talks shouldn’t be painful should they. We go to be informed or persuaded or motivated or entertained and possibly all four if the speaker is really good. Check yourself by taping your delivery. Are you using voice modulation, pauses and punching out key words for emphasis? If you are not, then bring some pillows for the audience members, because that will wind up being your most valuable contribution to the proceedings.
Action Steps
Visual Elements In Presentations
There is no question visuals are super powerful in presentations. This can range from your eye contact, body language, gestures all the way up to actual live fireworks. Think about sporting presentations where they make heavy use of visuals to stir emotions. The half time show is full of music, fireworks, action. The team scores a goal and the big screens are zeroing in on the action that just occurred. The boxers are introduced as they enter the arena and fireworks are exploding behind them, like they are modern messiahs here to save the masses. You might not think of it this way, but this is what you are competing with today, as the lines get blurred between how events are presented.
There you stand, with just your slide deck advancer in your hand. You are facing an audience fully tooled up on the most realistic computer games, viral videos, light show events and quick cut video action. You are thinking your information quality will carry the day, because you speak in a monotone, are deadly boring most of the time and embolden us with the passion of road kill. Sad to say, but none of this ever worked well and it certainly doesn’t work today.
The quality of your information has zero significance if no one is paying attention to what you are saying. In this Age of Distraction, audiences are leaping on to their phones at the first sign of tedium. Even when binge watching their favourite television series, they have the implement of destruction - their phone - at the ready to take up and multi task.
The question today is how to integrate all of this cool stuff into our presentations without it overwhelming us, the presenter. Slide shows are an ever present danger, as the audience loses their connection with us and are absorbed by what is up on the screen. The worst thing you can do is hand out the slide deck beforehand, because you are on slide two and they are on page eighteen. The disconnect with what you are saying becomes close to total at this point.
Videos can be very good for presenting things in an attractive manner. I was watching a video at a presentation recently and the supporting video was very slick. It managed to capture the action, the drama, the excitement in a way that formed a positive impression. This is the key word though – impression. It doesn’t last. We have our attention monopolised for a short period of time and then we are back to distraction HQ.
What I notice with most presenters who are using video is they let the video run wild and they don’t attempt to control it. By this I mean, they just play the video. We should have an intro for the video and an outro for after. We shouldn’t just let our audience watch the video as if every aspect has the same value. We want to be hitting key messages in that video, in the same way that we hit key words in our sentences to create greater emphasis for our messages.
The video will have one scene or a couple of scenes which help us with our messaging and rather than just running the video, we want to focus our audience’s attention right there. We need to set that up. For example, “In this video please look for the scene with the interview with our Chief Scientist. What she has to say is fascinating and may change your perspective entirely”. When we hear a set up like that, we are now in a heightened state of anticipation. We are wondering what is she going to say that will change my perspective?
Once the video is over, we need to wrap a bow around the key messages and refer back to the evidence we presented in the video to back up our point of view on the subject. For example, “What I like about the message in that video is that we can control our future, if we choose to take that route”. This sentence would be referring back to your key message from your talk, so that the whole thing is congruent. This is how we control the video, rather than what has become the norm – the video controls the speaker or it is just fluff, that has no lasting impact and everyone has forgotten it within the next thirty seconds.
As presenters, we have to ensure the focus is fully on us and that the audience is completely riveted to what we are saying. The Age of Distraction is also the Age of Destruction for Presenters. We need to control the visual elements, so that they are always our servant and never our master.