Info

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.
RSS Feed Subscribe in Apple Podcasts
THE Presentations Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
2024
March
February
January


2023
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2022
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2021
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2020
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2019
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2018
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2017
December
November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January


2016
December
November


Categories

All Episodes
Archives
Categories
Now displaying: November, 2019
Nov 25, 2019

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.

 

 

 

 

Nov 18, 2019

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.

 

 

 

 

Nov 11, 2019

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.

Nov 4, 2019

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”.

1