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THE Presentations Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

THE Presentations Japan Series is powered by with great content from the accumulated wisdom of 100 plus years of Dale Carnegie Training. The show is hosted in Tokyo by Dr. Greg Story, President of Dale Carnegie Training Japan and is for those highly motivated students of presentations, who want to be the best in their business field.
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THE Presentations Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
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Now displaying: June, 2019
Jun 24, 2019

Is How I am Dressed Important When Presenting?

 

There is an old saying about lies, damn lies and statistics.  An often misquoted statistic in the presenting world is that 55% of your impression on an audience is based on how you are dressed.  Some coaches are advising on this basis and it is only partially true.  Professor Mehrabian’s research at UCLA did nominate that particular percentage, but he did so with an important caveat.  When what we are saying is not congruent or matching with the way we are saying it, then the audience gets distracted and starts focusing on how you are dressed 55% of the time.  When he published that research there were no uber powerful  thermonuclear distractors like we have today, in the form of smart phones.  These instruments of presenter attention destruction are rapidly connecting us with the internet and whisking us away from the speaker.

 

If we are doing our job properly as speakers we will not be losing our audience. One of my team attended a presentation I gave recently and she reported to me that the audience members were listening to me all the way through.  That is what I thought too, because the entire speech had me focused like a hawk on my audience, to make sure I was holding their attention.  I don’t mention this to say what a smarty pants I am, but just to highlight how difficult it has become for all of us to hold an audience today.

 

My style of presenting is extremely high energy.  My karate training background has taught me how to harness my “ki” or “chi” and channel it to the audience.  I still have pretty good tonal variety so I can really work on keeping the audience with me.  The downside of all of this is that I generate a lot of heat.  Often when we are presenting on stage there will be spotlights trained on us and these can make us feel very hot as well.  When I am getting dressed that day,

I always make sure of a couple of things for my presentation.  A white shirt is an absolute must.  I love my blue business shirts, but what I found was the heat generates sweat around the neck area, especially when wearing a tie.  That lovely light blue shirt can become two tone. The collar becomes wet and changes to a darker blue.  This is distracting for the audience who are sitting there saying to themselves, “Oh look at that, he has a two tone shirt now!”.

 

The other thing I pay careful attention to is never doing any presenting unless I am wearing a jacket.  There are probably few things as unattractive as a speaker wearing only a shirt, lifting up their arm to reveal a very sweaty armpit area, that runs right down the side of their body.  Most unappealing and again very distracting to an audience.  I keep my jacket on, buttoned up, the whole time like a suit of armour.  I know that my shirt is soaked during the speech, because of all the heat I am generating. It goes without saying, that an ill fitting suit creates a poor impression.  The way the collar of the jacket sits on the neck tells you everything. If there is a wide gap between the two, this creates a sense of pattern interrupt and your audience gets distracted by it.  Also save your bright coloured jackets for a party. A bright red jacket works well for a magician, but not so great for a speaker.  Always look for ways to make your words conspicuous, rather than what you are wearing.

 

Sometimes we are asked to be a speaker on a panel.  This can be tricky.  We are usually seated up on stage in front of the audience, so there is nothing separating us from the viewers.  When men cross their legs, if they don’t know what they are doing, we get a very unfortunate close up of their hairy ankles, shins and calf muscles.   Short socks work when you are standing, but are a danger when you sit.  I always wear long socks right up to the knee, to spare my audience the brutality of my hairy legs.

 

I am quite daring when it comes to wearing bright ties.  I leave them at home though when I am presenting and select something a bit more muted.  Such a bright colour sitting right next to your face is bound to be an unwanted competitor for the attention of your audience.  I do like pocket squares, but I make sure they are also very discreet. A puffed up large pocket square may be a dandy’s delight, but like a bright tie, it sets up competition for the attention of the audience.  Be careful with cufflinks too.  I have some very bright colours in my line up, but I go for the less flagrant when I am presenting.

 

One of my pet peeves in Japan are the number of guys here who wear their tie, such that there is a gap between the top of the knot and the top button of the shirt collar.  They allow it to loosen off and the gap appears without their knowledge and again this is distracting for the viewers.  You also come across looking like a kid, who can’t dress himself properly.

 

I also purposely shorten the length of my ties when I am presenting.  Men’s dress rules say the tie should only extend to a point midway down your pant’s belt.  What I find though is that the closed button of a single breasted suit always has an opening between that button and the bottom of the front of the jacket.  The consequence is a tie worn at the correct length, will actually be peaking out from under the jacket, again distracting my audience.  By making it a bit too short the protrusion problem is lessened. Again, I never take off my jacket, so my major tie length faux pas is hidden away.

 

The shine on my shoes should be mirror like.  Standing up on stage everyone can see your scuffed, down at heel, miserable excuse for shoes.  This says “slob”, “poor quality control” or “poor self awareness” pretty clearly.  It is not helpful for supporting a professional image.  The belt should match the shoes so brown for brown and black for black.  Pretty simple right, so how could you mess that up? Yet, I see guys with a brown belt and black shoes.  This says you are “clueless” to your audience, so if you even can’t get this right, why should we believe anything else you have to say.

 

I always place the nametag holder I am given by the organisers on the table where I am sitting or on the lectern.  I don’t wear them because they are usually plastic and as I move, they catch the lights focused on stage.  Without knowing it, you are sending out Morse Code signals every time you move, as the plastic flashes the audience.

 

I have only referred to men in this piece on dressing for presenting, but many of the same things, for the most apart, apply for ladies too. I don’t have the guts to do a specific commentary on how ladies should dress when presenting.  My only hint would be don’t confuse fashion outcomes with presenting outcomes.  Make the focus your face, rather than the clothes.  Don’t dress in any way which draws the audience away from looking at your face.  Our face is the most powerful tool we have.  It is much stronger than whatever is on the screen and our voice.  Don’t allow anything to compete with it.

 

 

Jun 17, 2019

Senior Executives In A Public Speaking Competition Was So Revealing

 

Speech contests and debating contests are usually for younger people at school or university.  It is not often you see the most senior people from major corporations going head to head in a public setting.  I was at an event where there was a vote to take place for some prestigious seats on the board of a non-profit.  If the number of applicants equals the number of seats, then it is a perfunctory competition where the winner’s names are just announced.  In the case of more hopefuls than places, then things hot up. 

 

Each person had two minutes to make their pitch.  Now remember, these are very experienced and senior people, in some cases heading vast organisations.  I was fascinated to see how they would fare. With one exception, English was not their native language.  However, they have been in international business their whole lives and many have lived in numerous foreign countries running the local business for the multinational parent company.  Language skill wasn’t even a factor.

 

As you might expect, some were better presenters than others.  However, overall they were pretty underwhelming, given the types of big jobs they were holding.  They knew they would have to speak and compete for places with each other and that they only had two minutes.  They had the opportunity to prepare, to rehearse what they would say.  This was not a spontaneous idea on the part of the organisers. The first thing I noticed was how poorly they had all prepared. Talking about your resume and how big your big corporate is, is fine but there was no thought given to what the audience wanted to hear.  Everything was presented from their own point of view.

 

A few minutes spent planning and preparing would have come up with a fine list of audience expectations of this board. They would have found which hot buttons they needed to push.  This is not hard stuff.  They will represent our interests on the Board and so what would our member interests be?  Having divined that, we should then craft our message to present around how our experience, organisational muscle and personal attributes will deliver for the members.  We only have two minutes so we have to prune hard to fix upon the most high impact points that will resonate with the audience.  We then need to rehearse to make sure we can get this inside the strict two minute limit.  We don’t want to be rushing it or confusing our audience with too many varied points. If we do that they have no hope of keeping track of what we are on about.

 

Now when we deliver our talk we have to engage with our audience.  We will be going one after another, so we have to break through and override the message of whoever preceded us and implant our message, such that the successor speaker cannot root it out.  Sadly, none of this was happening and they were not engaging their audience at all.  What are they like when addressing the troops back at the office I was wondering? Going by this effort not much chop!

 

The common thing I noticed that was missing from all the speakers was eye contact. They were not using their two minutes to physically engage with enough people.  Using six seconds of one on one eye contact, we can directly engage with at least twenty people in the audience.  Toward the rear, because of the distance, the people sitting around the target person also believe the speaker is talking directly to them as well, so we can increase that twenty number quite substantially. 

 

Delivering your resume in a monotone means you are missing the opportunity to hit key words for greater effect.  Now when I say hit, I mean that in the sense that you can choose whether to add voice strength or withdraw voice strength to gain variety in your delivery.  Our gestures are another way to bring power to what we are saying.  Some of the speakers chose to speak while holding their hands behind their backs, denying themselves the opportunity to use gestures. When we don’t show our hands, we are triggering a deep mistrust in the audience. This is because since we lived in caves, we have learnt not to trust people whose hands we cannot see.

 

It was all pretty bad.  Corporate leaders need to be excellent communicators and that includes giving professional presentations.  This is not something we are born with.  We learn it and we further develop it, over the course of our careers.  There was a lot of personal, professional and company brand damage done the other day, at the face off for the Board seats.  When It is your turn to speak, be ready and blow your competitors out of the water.

Jun 10, 2019

Facial Animation Needed For Presenting Success

 

We have all seen it.  The presenters face is expressionless, wooden, devoid of emotion or life.  It is usually well paired with a horrific monotone delivery, to really kill off the audience.  Presenting is a serious business, so these presenters present a very serious physiognomy.  Scowling is thought to be good too, to show the gravitas they bring to the occasion. These are powerful people, who by definition, must look powerful.  Technical people in particular love this no frills approach and smiling is definitely off their list of possibilities.

 

To be fair, there are presentations where levity, smiling, frivolity are inappropriate. A remembrance ceremony for the fallen heroes and heroines in battle, would be an occasion for an austere face. Losing all the shareholder’s value through some idiocy would be another.  A serious face however, doesn’t have to be an expressionless face. Recalling lost loved ones in a heartbroken community, can see the presenter’s face stricken and tortured with pent up emotions.  When I read the eulogy for my mother at her funeral, my face was ashen and pained.

 

In business though, for most cases we can use our faces as an additional communication tool with our audience.  We are using tonal variety in our voices, our hands for gestures, our eyes for audience engagement.  We should also be using our faces too.  A raised eyebrow can speak volumes.  It can indicate curiosity, incredulousness or doubt.  Turning our face to the side and tilting our head to go with it, can show scepticism or cynicism.  Pursing our lips together then pushing them forward in a pout shows disagreement or disapproval.  Pulling our head back from the neck shows shock or surprise.

 

When you think about it we are incredibly active using our face in normal conversation. If we filmed you speaking and played it back you would be amazed at how much facial expression you are employing. Stand you behind a podium or put you on stage in front of an audience though and maybe all that natural communication ability sails out the window and is replaced by wooden you instead.

 

When we look at theatre performances, television, movies, comedic acts we can see facial tools being well employed to drive home messages.  I enjoy the popular drama from Italy, Inspector Montalbano and the Italian culture really makes great use of the face to communicate emotions. They are just talking, but it looks like they are arguing and of course the gesturing is on fire.  We should stop watching these shows just for the entertainment value and start re-watching them for what we can learn about how to employ our face when presenting.

 

In the same way when we are speaking we hit key words with a louder or softer volume for effect, we should start employing our face to do the very same thing.  When you want to raise doubt about some proposition someone else is putting forward, look for a suitable facial expression to back up that message.  When you want to appear sceptical of some idea, then bring your best sceptic face to the fore.

 

This is very hard to coordinate when you are starting out.  These days I have so much going on with my voice, eyes, gestures, body language I am not even aware of it.  Watching myself on video with the sound turned off, I can see how much natural variety I am bringing to the talk.  It wasn’t like that at the start.  My very first public presentation in my life was in Japanese to the Sundai Yobiko cram school students, where I managed to finish a 25 minute speech in 8 minutes.  I am sure my face was not only wooden but also bright red from all the stress I was feeling.

 

Like anything to do with public speaking this facial involvement takes practice. Presenting in front of a mirror is a good chance to see how animated you are.  Video is better though and these days everyone has a smart phone with a very good quality camera lens included.  Try doing the same piece with repetition to see if you are bringing your face into the communication.  Also check you are doing it congruently with the content you are addressing.  Over time, you will start creating appropriate facial expressions for that piece of the content without even noticing it.  To be a more effective public speaker, get your face more involved!

 

 

 

 

Jun 3, 2019

Why Japanese Presenters Fear Q&A

 

Obviously we all have some trepidation when it comes to Q&A, but Japan is quite far behind the rest of the advanced countries when it comes to public speaking. The level of presentations here is abysmally low and excuses abound.  People here talk about a “Japanese style” of doing public talks. What they actually mean is they speak in a monotone, with a wooden face, use no gestures, make no eye contact, employ no pauses, Um and Ah with gay abandon and are supremely boring. They kill everyone with 8 point sized font, four different font types and five garish colours, turning their slides into a psychological weapon of war aimed at decimating their audience.  Because everyone is so bad, this is thought to be a “style”, obviously different from “Western” presentations.  It isn’t a style.  It is just bad.

 

Not being properly educated in how to give professional presentations, the trickier bits like Q&A are even scarier territory.  For any speaker, once the bell sounds for Q&A, the struggle is on. As the great American philosopher Mike Tyson once said, “everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face”. Relatively speaking, Japan is a kindergarten for Q&A compared to Western audiences.  The ferocity of questions here is kids stuff.  So you would think that everyone would be very chipper about handling the Q&A, but that is not the case.  Here are some areas of the concern we found, when we polled our Japanese students of presenting.

 

  1. If the audience is not familiar to us we get nervous

The chances of having a lifetime of speaking to familiar audiences would be statistically impossible, I would say.  The inference here is that it is less daunting to speak to a “tame” audience who, because they know us, won’t unleash fury upon our heads during the questions component of the talk.

 

Unfamiliar audiences should be the considered the norm. The way to deal with that is to be well prepared and to have rehearsed beforehand.  I would guess 0.001% of Japanese presenters have rehearsed their talk. 

 

  1. Not sure if I understand the question properly and also not sure if it is okay to ask them to repeat the question

Japanese society is very polite, so that is why until recently, you would be lucky to get any questions at your talk at all.  The thinking has been that it is impolite.  The nuance is you are saying the speaker wasn’t clear enough in their oration.  Also I don’t think any Western audiences would even consider the possibility that it isn’t allowable to ask the questioner to repeat their question.  In Japan, that request implies the questioner wasn’t clear enough and is a veiled criticism, repeated in public, so there is a possibility that the questioner will lose face.

 

Definitely and politely ask the questioner for clarification on their impenetrable question.  Japan is a polite place, so ask politely and put yourself at fault and not the speaker. You might say, “Thank you for your question.  I really want to answer it correctly, so would you mind repeating it once more for me?”.

 

  1. Not clear on how to answer the question

This will happen to all of us.  I do a lot of public speaking here in Japanese and I always find the Q&A the most difficult.  This is not for the ferocity of the questions, but because of the fog of the language.  Japanese is a highly circuitous language and vagary is a prized achievement. Sometimes, I have no clue what they are asking me.

 

If we can’t answer the question then we are human.  We cannot always be the font of all knowledge and there will always be occasions where we just don’t have an answer for that question.  We should apologise and fess up straight away. “Thank you for your question.  I am afraid I don’t know the answer to it at this point.  After the talk let’s exchange business cards and I will do my best to come back to you with an answer after I do more research on that topic”.

 

  1. No questions emerge because the audience weren’t paying any attention to the speaker

Most talks in Japan are supremely dull, so naturally the audience escapes to a more interesting place like their smart phone. Suddenly the Q&A springs up and as they haven’t being paying attention, they have no idea what to ask about. The call for questions goes unanswered, so there springs forth this painful, embarrassing silence, as everyone carefully scrutinises their shoes, ensuring zero eye contact with anyone. The speaker is left high and dry and the talk finishes on a low note of disinterest.  It feels like all of the oxygen has been sucked out of the room and the speaker deflates and then in short order, departs.

 

If no questions are forthcoming, ask your own question: “A question I am often asked is….”.  This will often break the ice for someone else to muscle up the courage to ask their own question.  If nothing is still forthcoming, then repeat this once more, call for more questions. If none emerge then give your final close and finish the proceedings.

 

Here are two basic rules for answering any question.  Always repeat the question if it is neutral, to make sure everyone in the audience heard it and to give yourself valuable thinking time before attempting to answer it. If it is a hostile question, then paraphrase it by stripping out all the emotion and invective and make it sound neutral.  For example, “Is it true you are losing money and that ten percent of the staff are going to be fired before Christmas?”.  “Thank you, the question was about current business performance” and then you answer it.

 

We will face Q&A when giving our talks.  Changing our mindset about welcoming the opportunity is a good place to start.  We can add more information, we couldn’t squeeze into the talk. We can elaborate on a theme.  We get a chance to engage more deeply with our audience.  When we shoot down a vicious, brutish, hostile question and destroy it, this makes us a legend of pubic speaking and adds serious lustre to our personal brand.  Bring on the questions!

 

 

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