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.