Let’s look at the designing the closes.  Notice this is plural, not singular. There are two closes required when we are speaking.  Usually there will be Q&A at the end and we have to account for that.  We design our first close to wrap up our talk.  We open for Q&A and then we have lost control of proceedings.  Make no mistake.  Question time can become a street fight with no rules. Anyone can ask anything they like, no matter how tangential, irrelevant and obtuse it may be. We cannot control it, so we just have to deal with it. 

The problem is the final question may concern something absolutely unrelated to what we talked about.  The result is the audience walk out of the room with that information forefront in their minds, rather than our carefully crafted, especially tailored key message.  We cannot allow that to happen.  We need to design a second close so that our message dominates the final impression of our speech.  The audience must walk out of that presentation with our key message ringing in their minds or we will have failed in our fundamental task. We can give slightly different versions of the same information for each close.  The key is to prepare two closes at the very start

In the delivery of our talk, we need to end on a crescendo in this last close.  Many speakers let their voice trail off and then just peter out to nothing.  This is a very consistent problem and speakers do not seem to be aware they are allowing this to happen. We know that final impression is key and the point is we determine what that will be.  Let’s have a rousing message at the end and let’s hit that message hard.  Here are some closes we can use:

To Convince or Impress

1. We repeat the major benefit. We will have a number of take aways for our audience and a good plan is to select only the most memorable and most powerful and repeat that benefit to the audience.  Always focus on the highest priority messages, rather than diluting the key message with a host of other lesser messages, all competing for the listener’s attention.
2. Use a quotation. We may be very smart and have lots of great things to say.  That is just using ourselves though as the reference point.  Sometimes we will employ the credibility of an established expert or powerful influencer and draw on a quotation from their words.  These are usually very famous phrasings so the audience will recognise the quote immediately.  We can curate pithy sayings and have them ready to go when we need them.  We all run across these at different times so the trick is to keep track of some which we can use in our presentations and have them handy to draw upon.

To Inform

1. Repeat your key point. In the inform talk we will have been passing along a lot of information, much of it very detailed.  It can be confusing for an audience to know which information to focus on.  We select the one piece of information we believe will be the most important and we repeat it again.  We don’t want to make the audience work hard to follow what we are sayings.  By determining the key points, we do the work for them so all they have to do is absorb what we are saying, rather than having to analyse it for themselves.
2. Recap the steps of a process or plan. In the inform talk we are often providing so much information that we have to group it into brackets for the audience to understand.  We may outline “the nine steps” or “the four key data points” etc.  This numbered packaging up of information makes it much easier for the audience to navigate through our talk and keep up with what we are saying.  At the end, we select one of the key information pieces and then remind the audience about it.

To Persuade

1. Present the action and benefit. We won’t be keen to take a recommended action unless we think there is something in it for ourselves.  By combining the action needed with the benefit, it is clear to the audience the value of taking our advice.
2. Final Recommendation. We select the key course of action we have been talking about.  We restate it at the very end and this makes it very clear what we hope the audience will do from now.

The final impression is in our hands, to mould and shape in the way we want it. We must dominate the final message and jettison any distractions which may have arisen during the question time.  The key is to design the close very carefully and deliver it with power and conviction.  If we do that, then our messages will resonate with our audiences and that is why we are doing this in the first place, isn’t it.

We flagged this point last episode and today we are going to look at the use of evidence when giving presentations.  I often mention the two modern dilemmas of being a presenter.  We now live in the Age of Distraction where audiences will rapidly escape from us to the internet, if we haven’t sufficiently captured their attention.  Sometimes, even when they are interested, they are still multi-tasking.  They are listening to us and scrolling through their social media at the same time.  This habit has solidified and it is a nightmare today to get our message across.  The other dilemma is we are in the Era of Cynicism.  Fake news is now a thing and our audience’s sensitivity to the validity of information has become more acute. 

Both of these drivers make our job even harder than in the past.  If we fill our presentations with “editorial” or “opinion” we are likely to lose the attention of the listeners.  They are there to gain some benefit from giving us their attention and as riveting as our opinion may be to us, it may not ignite much interest in the audience.  If we don’t bring some concrete insights, backed up with proof and evidence then the hands will be reaching for their phones immediately.  The Era of Cynicism means the evidence had better be highly credible and employing numerous sources.  Talking about findings from your own research is good, but could be greeted with doubt, if you don’t mention the detail on how the findings were assembled.

When we are designing our talk, we have access to some useful tools. DEFEATS is a handy acronym for remembering the different types of evidence we can draw upon to convince or impress our audience that what we say is true.

D-Demonstration. This might be something that can be shown physically during the presentation or something that we can show on screen, using software, audio or video.  It has to be congruent with the point we are making and provide a visual reinforcement of our key point.

E-Example.  The best examples are those which are most relevant to the members of the audience.  We should try and know who is in our audience and think what would be an example that will resonate with as many people as possible.  If the example is from the same industry and a similarly sized organisation then it becomes more meaningful for the audience.  I attended a talk given by a senior executive from a major organisation, who used examples within that context.  The problem was that the audience were all small to medium sized companies and there was nothing to relate to.

F-Facts.  Facts are provable and can be verified independently.  A claim is not a fact.  We need to be able to cite where the fact can be checked, if we are asked.  When we show graphs, for example, we should have the source of the data prominently displayed.  Most people won’t bother to check the data, but they feel better knowing they can do so if they wish.

E-Exhibits. This is usually something physical we can show to the audience.  In some cases, it may also be shown as an image.  In both cases we have to make sure the audience can see it easily.  If it is a physical object, hold it up around shoulder height, rather down around the waist.  Also, don’t wave it around – hold it still, so it easy for the audience to see.

A-Analogies.  We referred to Analogies in Openings Part One in Episode #264.  We are trying to simplify something complex for our audience. We compare two things which have no natural connection to make the point clearer.  For examples, we compare flying a passenger aircraft and speech making.  There is no natural connection between them.  Now we connect them.  “Flying a passenger plane is like giving a speech.  The take off and landing for aircraft are the most dangerous periods of the flight.  In the same way for speeches, openings and closing determine our impression with our audience”.  This connects two ideas and makes them more accessible for the listeners.

T-Testimonials.  Social proof has become extremely powerful today.  Testimonials are not our primary form of evidence, but they lend credibility to what we are saying.  A recognized expert supporting what we are saying gives our point more power.  In our case, the most famous investor in the world Warren Buffett is a huge fan of Dale Carnegie and often mentions the impact the training had on his career.  We could never afford to pay him to do that, but he does it anyway, because he is a true believer and that make it even more powerful.

S-Statistics.  The best statistics are third-party numbers.  If we quote our own research, that is okay, but it is not as convincing as also having an independent organisation’s statistics.

When we are designing our main argument, as we get to the key points, we should be trying to match them with hard evidence to prove the point.  If we do that, then we will have a much better chance of keeping the audience with us right through to the end of our presentation.  If we can do that in today’s distracted and cynical environment, we will  have been highly successful.

In some recent episodes we looked at how to open the presentation. Today we are going to look at designing the main body of our talk. The design process of our talks is counterintuitive.  We always start with the end, then do the main body and then the opening last. The close defines the key message we want to impart to the audience.  The opening breaks through all the competition for our audience’s attention. The main body is made up of the chapters of the talk.  In a thirty minute to forty minute speech, we can probably get through three to five key points, to back up our key assertion.  This is where we make our case, so it has to be well planned.

In the main body we need a lot of evidence.  We will deal with evidence in much more detail next week.  The key is to focus on the strongest supporting arguments to back up our key message.  There will be many choices about how to make the main argument, but we have limited time, so only choose the strongest possible content.  I support the Japan Market Expansion Competition (JMEC) here in Japan.  I advise teams on how to write and present their business plans, in order to win the competition.  Often, I notice that there are real gems, actual diamonds in their main body, but they are being trampled into the mud and you have trouble noticing or appreciating them.  We have to identify our strongest points supporting our contention and then give that evidence pride of place, so that the listener gets the point immediately.  We should never make the audience work hard to understand what we are saying.  Audiences have decreasing levels of concentration, so we need to get the gems up the front, to hook the listener’s interest. This keeps them with us for the rest of the talk.

Like a good novel, the chapters need to logically flow one into each other.  We have to make sure the audience can follow our line of reasoning.  The way we navigate the story for the listeners is critical. Using stories to illustrate our points is a must.  Dry statistics and facts are not enough.  People won’t remember them, but they will remember a gripping story.  Try to get people, places and seasons into the story, preferably those already known to the audience. Our objective is that the audience can picture the scene in their minds.

Remember, we are all being fed a steady diet of videos, films and novels where the power of the story is taken to the greatest heights.  In the visual media, writers for these works are often crafting away in high powered teams and getting paid a lot of money to find ways of drawing us into the story and keeping us in their grip throughout. Then we occasional speakers turn up to give our little talk.  We have to understand we are competing with the professionals and the audience is expecting us to be professional as well.  If we cannot match their expectations, then our personal and professional brands are damaged.

The unveiling of the main body has to be well thought through.  Each chapter needs a change of pace.  It might be raising our energy or going the other direction and lowering the tension.  It doesn't matter which way we go, but we cannot keep going at the same pace throughout the whole talk.  We need variation to keep people with us.  In sales, we talk about designing hooks to jag the interest of the buyer.  Presenting is the same.  We need hooks that will jag the interest of the audience and they will be wanting to know what comes next.  This doesn’t happen by chance.  We need to carefully design these hooks.

For example, we might start a chapter of the main body with a statement, “Losing ten million dollars was the best education I ever received in business”. Everyone hearing that wants to hear the rest of the story.  What happened to you?  Why did you lose the ten million?  Why was it such a great education?  What happened next? This is an example of a power hook.  We need a series of these scattered throughout our chapters. If we can do that, then the main body will never be a drag on the attention of the audience. If we do it well, they will be on the edge of their seats, eager to find out what we are going to say next.  If we don’t, the audience will be reaching for their phones, to escape to the siren call of the internet.

The main body does all of the heavy lifting to make our case.  It is also the segment which occupies the majority of the time for the talk, so it must be crafted extremely well.  Break it down into segments or chapters and pile on the evidence. Don’t just read out a bunch of dry data points.  Get the data assembled into stories which will resonate with the audience.  I once had to read the Australian Ambassador Ashton Calvert’s speech in Japanese, when I was Consul General in Osaka, as he couldn’t make the event.  These types of speeches are prepared by Embassy staff for the Ambassador.  It was a classic tale of trade statistics and no stories.  I was giving this speech, thinking to myself, we could have done a lot more with this content to make it more engaging and grab the emotions of the audience.  Departing from the script in that type of case would get you fired, so you have to do it word perfect.  An opportunity gone begging, was my conclusion and a good lesson for me when preparing my own talks.

The main body has the advantage of following your grabber opening, so you have everyone’s attention.  Don’t blow it.  Keep the hooks coming in the chapters of the main body and keep the audience with you right through to the end.

This speaker has it all.  You are sitting down the back of the room, yet you can sense their inner energy, confidence, surety of what they are saying.  You feel they have charisma, that compelling attractiveness as a presenter.  You want to be like that too, but how?  Let’s see how you can increase your presence and appeal as a speaker. 

What the audience won’t see you doing is rehearsing on them.  This sounds infinitely logical, yet so many speakers deliver their talk once. They are practicing on their live audience.  Is this what professionals do?  Of course not.  Professionals walk on stage after they have given their talk many, many times in rehearsal.  They have worked out the correct length, the high points, the cadence, the humour and every small detail needed to make the talk a success.  For feedback, they never ask, “what do you think?”.  Instead, they ask “what was good?” and “how could I make it better?”.  They use video and audio review to improve.  If they are travelling to make the talk, they know that with the lights out, a hotel room’s windows become mirrors, so that they can check their delivery.

Fully Prepared

When you get to the venue, the speaker is already there and in fact has been there an hour earlier checking everything is ready.  They get a sense of the room.  They sit in the cheap seats and see how they will appear up on stage.  They make sure their slide deck is loaded and working correctly.  They know how to work the slide advancer correctly and have worked out the sound levels for the microphone.  You never see them bashing the microphone and asking “can you hear me down the back”.  They have told the venue crew to leave the lights up and not dim them down to suit the screen.  While waiting for people to arrive, they have diplomatically instructed the MC to read their introduction exactly as it has been crafted to project their personal brand.

They are standing near the door as people arrive, introducing themselves and asking what attracted them to today’s topic. They are working the room before the event kicks off. They give each person they engage with 100% of their attention, listening quietly, never interrupting them, finishing their sentences nor jumping in with their own clever comment.  They are building tremendous good will with as many people in the audience as possible before they get anywhere near the stage.  They remember your name and the main details of what you said.  They are genuinely interested to meet you and find out what you are doing.  They have demolished that invisible barrier between speaker and audience.

They are perfectly dressed for the occasion.  They look the part of success.  Every detail has been thought through.  They don’t allow bright ties, puffy pocket chiefs or big scarves to compete with their face.  They know their face is a million watt power source and they make it the main reference point for the audience, rather than being dominated by the slides.

Dominate The Space

The MC calls them on to the stage, after reciting their turbo charged credibility resume, exactly as requested.  They walk to the center of the stage and start immediately, spending no time switching computers and loading their files.  They have arranged for such pedestrian logistics to be handled by their support crew. They have purposely freed themselves up to absolutely nail the first two seconds impression window.  They know that we live in the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism and all we have is two seconds for the audience to decide their first impression of us.  They don’t waste that opportunity.  Their opening is a real grabber that cuts through all the competition for audience mind space. They reference a couple of the people they were speaking with earlier in the audience.  “Mary made a good point about….”, “Bill had a wonderful insight on today’s topic….”.  They are broadcasting to everyone that we are all one unit today and there is no longer any space separating speaker and listener.

They are projecting their ki bouncing it off the rear walls, pumping out high energy to their audience. What they say is clear, concise, well structured, supported by slides which are on point and Zen like in their clarity.  The key message is crystal clear and their evidence is unassailable.  They are engaging each individual audience member in six seconds of eye contact creating the feeling that the speaker is talking directly to them and no one else.  What they say and how they say it is totally congruent.

Control The Final impression

They finish the talk with their first close and smoothly transition to Q&A stating how many minutes for questions. They paraphrase the questions, so that everyone in the audience can hear what was asked.  As they answer, they give the questioner six seconds of eye contact and then work the room with six seconds of eye contact each for the other members of the audience. They don’t try and duck difficult questions.  They mention, “I don’t know, but I will find out and get back to you. Who has the next question?”.

At the end of question time, they seize back the initiative to focus on their key message.  They don’t allow the talk to finish with a question which may be totally off topic.  They use their second close to repeat their key point and have that ringing in the ears of the audience as everyone departs the venue.  They determine their final impression with the audience. They have organised their schedule to be able to invite audience members to swap business cards and chat after the talk. They are gracious and charming with everyone and cement their fan base for the next talk.  They have it all, they are charismatic.

Reading this headline you might be thinking, “Oh yeah, this guy says he is an expert?  Is that really true?”.  In this fake news world, that is an entirely reasonable caution.  Would the following qualify me:  this TEDx talk was my 546th public speech, I am a Master Trainer for Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan and I am a certified High Impact Presentations Instructor having taught thousands of people how to present over the last twenty plus years and I am about to publish my book Japan Presentations Mastery?  I thought it might be interesting to pull back the velvet curtain and reveal how I prepared for this talk, expert or otherwise, but at least someone with substantial public speaking experience.

TEDx has certain restrictions around what you can talk about and how long you can talk for.  The TED mission is to research and discover “ideas worth spreading”.  I needed a topic which was a fit for the format and I had up to thirteen minutes to deliver my talk. There are many things I could have addressed on stage, but I thought “Transform Our Relationships” would have universal appeal, because TED talks are broadcast all around the world.

The first thing to consider was how to end the talk.  I needed to clarify what was the central message I wanted to impart.  The title was the central message, so “transform your relationships for the better” became my choice of the close.  I also linked the close back to some remarks I made right at the start, so I was able to tie a neat bow on the talk. There are no questions in the TED format, so there was only need to design that one close.

I next did some research on what others were saying about transforming relationships.  I found a report entitled “Relationships in the 21st Century”.  When I read the report, I thought the findings were rather unremarkable and that it would be perfect for debunking at the start.  Even a slightly controversial start can be an attention grabber. I left the final design of the opening until the end though.  The start has only one aim and that is to grab audience attention to listen to what it is we have to say.

I had the end clearly in mind and a vague idea about the opening, so now I needed to build chapters for the talk.  Thirteen minutes is quite short, so every word is gold.  I thought Dale Carnegie’s human relations principles were the perfect tool which I could pass on to the audience to apply in their own relationships.  There are thirty human relations principles, so that was too many.  I selected seven. 

Each principle formed a chapter, so that made the construction of the talk quite easy.  I needed some flesh on the bones of this skeleton of the talk though, so I selected some easy to access examples of how to use the principles.  Some of these story vignettes were created to make the point and some were actual examples from real life.

I needed a bridge between the start of the talk and the Dale Carnegie human relations principles, which would set the scene for what was to come.  I drew on some well known influencers – Mahatma Gandhi and Isaac Newton.  I wanted to make the point that the secret of achieving a transformation was to start with yourself, rather than expecting everyone else to change to suit you.  Gandhi’s quote is well known: “become the change you wish to see in the world”.  Perfect. 

Also, every high school student has studied Newtonian Physics and so remember his proclamation that “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”.  Perfect.  I could make the point that if we want to transform our relationships, we can change the angle of approach with others and we will get a different reaction.  This was extremely easy for an audience to grasp as a concept to transform their relationships.  I made this a core message linking each chapter back to the central thesis of “start with changing your angle of approach”.

My final design task was to go back and polish the opening, so that it would grab attention.  I selected the conclusion from the report and then denounced it as too obvious.  By doing so I have now engaged the audience to anticipate what I am going to say, if I am not accepting this report’s conclusion as sufficient enough to understand relationship building in the 21st century.  I wasn’t doing this for dramatic effect. I honestly thought it was all too obvious.  If it had delivered some earth shattering insight, then I would have used that instead as an authority reinforcement. 

Rehearsal is so critical in giving talks. I soon discovered I had too much material for the time allowed, so one of the human relations principles had to be jettisoned overboard.  I had organised the talk into chapters, so each one was complete in itself.  Rather than trying to water down the other chapters to squeeze in chapter seven, it was better to keep the others powerful and reduce one chapter. I then took all of that content and then wrote it up a complete script.  I don’t normally do this step. However, I knew there was no way I would remember every single word of a thirteen minute talk, but this script gave me the core content to draw on.  Obviously, I wasn’t going to read it to the audience – that would be a fake expert! I recorded it and played it over and over to myself about ten times, until I had absorbed flow of the talk in my mind.

I did another three live rehearsals with the cut down materials and kept editing to make sure I could get through it in under thirteen minutes.  At the beginning I had toyed with the idea of no slides so that all of the attention would be on me.  In the end, I decided that slides would help me with the navigation.  This talk goes around the world, so my personal and professional reputations were on the line here, especially when you go around saying you are an expert on public speaking.  I thought it was better to be smooth in my delivery and not to lose my place or have a brain whiteout while on live streaming camera, especially as that means no edit rescue capability.

Once I had selected the slides I wanted, I made sure I owned the use of these slide images.  I could have just taken some images down off the internet, but there is a copyright issue right there.  We all need to respect the IP of the owners of those images.  I also made sure I had pictures with people in them where ever possible. This is always of more interest to an audience.

On the day before the talk, I did five full blood, full power rehearsals and recorded them, so I could check how I sounded.  On the day of the delivery, I recorded ten full power rehearsals at home, one after another, checking the time to make sure I didn’t go over the thirteen minutes limit.  Full rehearsal, full power, with many repetitions is key.

Of course this was very tiring, but I didn’t worry about peaking before the event.  I knew my nervous energy would kick in once I was on stage under the lights, facing the live streaming cameras and the assembled audience.

On the day, there was a technical issue with the screen in front of the stage.  It is located so that the speaker can see what is being displayed on the main screen behind them.  I wasn’t worried.  I had confidence thanks to my rehearsals, that I could do the talk without slides, if I needed to.  For whatever reason it worked perfectly for me, so I reproduced my delivery as I had practiced it over and over and over.

In the Green Room I didn’t chat with the other speakers.  I concentrated on slowing my breathing down to make sure I was calm and quietly read the full script again.  When I was being wired up for the talk, I made sure the head attachment microphone was pulled out away from my cheek and mouth, because I knew I would be pr4ojecting a lot of power to my audience. I didn’t want any audio dissonance from my being loud, to find its way on to the recording. 

As it turned out, four seconds before I was due to go on, they needed to fix a technical issue, so they decided to show a TED video instead.  Naturally I was fully psyched up ready to go and then had to stop everything.  This type of stop-start thing can throw your equilibrium off balance.  I had had this experience before when I was a karate athlete in competition finals, when there was an interruption and a sudden delay before you go on to the mats to fight.

I immediately moved away from the people there in order to keep my concentration at full peak condition.  I happened to notice there was a mirror around the corner of the back stage area.  While they ran the video, I began quietly starting my talk while looking at the mirror, so that I could see my gestures etc., as I got ready to go on.  We cannot allow anything to cause us to lose our concentration or peak energy levels, before we hit the stage.

I walked confidently to the round red carpet, which was my spot from which to talk, paused to enjoy the applause and create some anticipation. I then hit the opening hard with a strong voice and a big double arm gesture.  The rest of the talk went pretty close to my plan.  The key thing to note is, only I knew what the plan was!  At the end I bowed, stayed there to receive the applause and then unhurriedly, I walked off, again showing confidence.  First and last impressions are being formed as soon as we move to and from our positions and we have to have those planned as well.  Someone rushing from the stage leaves a different impression to someone staying there momentarily and then walking off with purpose.f

Today we are going to look at Part Two of Opening our speech.  In the last episode we used an analogy, the startling statement and starting with some good news.  We also covered the dos and don’ts of how to use questions with the audience.  Here are two more openings we can apply to our talks - storytelling and using compliments.

Start with an incident

Storytelling is one of the most powerful tools in the speaker’s toolkit.  Every day we are bombarded with stories.  It could be dramas on television, novels we are reading, movies we are watching and even the news programmes.  When we were children our parents read stories to us at bedtime and so we are incredibly open to stories, in a way we are not open to hearing opinions or statements.

Stories do not have to be long.  Today, with an abundance of impatience, massive distraction everywhere and people’s ever decreasing micro concentration spans, the opportunity to tell a long story in business is gone.  We can tell a short story and still take our audience with us employing their mind’s eye to be with us in the location, in the season, with the people and absorbed with the drama of the situation.  Let’s look at some varieties of stories we can employ for a business context.

1. Personal experience. This is the most powerful story because it is real life. We love to learn from the successes and even better, the failures of others.  Which speech opening would grab your attention more, ”Let me tell you how I made my first ten million dollars” or “Let me tell you how I lost my first ten million dollars”? 

I think we would all want to hear how I lost the ten million, because that sounds more dramatic and we can learn from other’s mistakes.  Relating corporate victory after victory and outlining the perfect coalition of circumstances to explain what a triumph it has been for our organization is reeking of propaganda and our audience cannot identify with what we are saying.

Telling them war stories of failure and redemption tend to work extremely well, because in exposing our failures, we have shown we are like everyone else and the audience can more easily identify with us.

2. Third Party. We have a limited number of personal experiences to draw on, but we have unlimited experiences available, if we include those of others.  Sometimes we prefer to use a third party, if we need some strong evidence or credibility.

We are exposed to third party stories all of the time, but we let them slip away.  It may be something we saw on the news, or in documentaries or we read in magazines or in biographies. We come across a great story, but we just move on without thinking, “well that will be a great story for a talk, let me capture that and store it away for a future speech”.  We should be trawling through whatever we are reading with a part of our brain looking for speech material and having a good system to be able to access it easily at a future point.

3. When we add our personal experiences, the experiences of others and then the entire history of experiences in the world throughout history, we have an unbelievable resource available to us to draw upon.  There is an avalanche of material coming to us down through the ages, where people have faced similar situations to what we are facing today.  We are often accessing this information, but not capturing it.  We should capture it for our talks.

Pay a compliment

1. We can relate our topic to all of the people in the room in the audience.  For example, “Have you heard that most people are scared of public speaking? This is only because they have not received any training.  No one is born a gifted speaker, it is a learnt skill.  If you get the training, then your fear of public speaking will disappear completely”.  Every person has been scared of public speaking at one time or another, so they can immediately bond with us when we bring it up.  They will be all ears to hear what we have to say on the subject

2. We relate our topic to the broader organisation, rather than to individuals. For example, “Your organisation has such a phenomenal reputation for excellence. Let me tell you why”.  When you hear that opening, you are very interested to hear what comes next, because you like compliments and you are also keen to make sure what the speaker says is accurate.

3. We can relate what we are saying to one person.  For example, “I was chatting with Tanaka san before we started and she made a very insightful comment”.  Everyone will want to know what Tanaka san said and Tanaka san will be delighted with the recognition.

The speaker first impression is vital.  We have to plan to make it a success and there are many tools available to us. Try the tools I have included in Parts One and Two of how to open your talk. Remember public speaking has never had this degree of difficulty ever in history. The internet is a click away and people will leave us in a heartbeat, if what we say doesn’t sound interesting or valuable.  The way they determine if it is worth listening to, is from how we start.  We must get the design right or our messages will not transmit to the audience and if that is the case, we have missed a great opportunity to build our personal and professional brands.

First impressions are now down to seven seconds or less.  Our opening begins from the moment we are introduced, even before we get up on stage or move to the center of the stage.  We must walk briskly, confidently and elegantly to our speaking position.  I remember seeing US President Biden on television, walking very swiftly to convey he was still dynamic, despite the years and the grey hair.  He was trying to control a narrative about his suitability to be the US President. He understood the power of first impression.  As speakers we must understand the speech starts well before the speech.  What we write for the event information and what we hand over to the MC to read about us on stage, all are setting up a first impression. The conversations we have with the attendees before we speak are all building a first impression.

What we do on stage is important. If there is a logistical change over of laptops or files, try to get someone else to do that, so that you can straight into your opening.  We are wasting valuable “first impression” seconds with our head down looking at the laptop screen, rather than looking at the audience.  We need to be able to move straight to the center of the stage and get going with our well designed opening.  We have to be able to stay the hands of the restless in the audience to not go for their smart phones and disappear into the world of the internet.

The first words out of our mouth have to grab the attention of the audience, so we must raise the vocal strength of our opening, to break through the mental distraction of our audience members.  We should walk to center stage and then purposely pause slightly before we begin.  This raises the anticipation level of the audience and quietens any chatting that may be going on in the background.  How can we start, what should we say, how do we do it – let’s explore some techniques.

The captivating statement technique uses three methods to get the audience engaged.

1. This is where we can try to make complex subjects more easily understood by comparing two things, which have no natural connection, with each other. For example, “Launching a strategic initiative, is like driving a car. Learning to drive a car looks easy, but in fact is quite complicated. Launching this new strategic initiative looks easy on paper, but we need to expect it will require a lot of good preparation in order for it to be successful”.  We open with the analogy statement and then explain the analogy to make the point clear for the audience.

2. We use this to grab attention by introducing a pattern interrupt with our audience.  We provide some information which is not only new, but potentially shocking.  For example, “The latest statistics are clear - we are running out of young people in Japan.  If we don’t get busy planning to win the war for talent, we will go out of business”.  This will get everyone’s attention.  People are vaguely aware that we are seeing a decline in the population in Japan, but here we are connecting it to the very survival of the organisation.

3. Good news. This relaying of some good news will lift the positive feelings of the audience for the talk to come.  We mention some industry statistics or consumer trends or R&D breakthrough news.  There is always a lot of doom and gloom in business, so going the other direction is also a great way to grab attention. They are now anticipating this will be a valuable talk. 

4. The question technique has three aspects.

1. Gain information. We can ask a real question which requires an answer by having the audience raise their hands.  This gets audience involvement, which is good, but we shouldn’t overdo it. 

2. Get participation. Raising hands, calling out answers, getting people to stand are all good physical actions to have the audience feel part of the talk.  Again, don’t overdo it.

3. Create agreement on a need or interest. We could also ask a rhetorical question which doesn’t require an answer from the audience, because we are going to supply the answer.  This allows us to get everyone engaged with their thoughts on the topic.  We ask it in such a way that it is easy for the audience to agree with.

The opening has to be planned carefully.  We only have one shot to make a good first impression and this is where we do that.  We will continue in the next episode with other techniques we use to open our talk.

Every time we speak, we are representing our professional and personal brands.   People judge us and then they project that same judgment on to our organization.  If we are very professional, then they see everyone in our organisation in a positive light. If we are bumbling and disorganised, then they see our whole organisation the same way.  If we want the audience to believe our message, then they have to believe in us first.  This is why having credibility is so important when speaking.

If we overstate our organisation’s capabilities, it arouses suspicion and damages our credibility.  Remember this is the Era of Cynicism and fake news. Any time we make a statement, then we need to back it up with evidence.  The evidence has to resonate by being vivid, interesting and memorable.  We have to show the benefits of what we are suggesting because facts by themselves cannot be enough.  In particular, we need to show how they can apply these benefits in their own organisations.

We want to present a positive image of our organisation but how do we do this without it being rejected as corporate propaganda?  Being confident when we deliver the key messages makes a tremendous difference.  Uncertain speech, hesitation, struggling for words, using filler words like um and ah, all conspire to defeat our efforts to appear confident in what we are saying.  Fluency in delivery is what we need and that takes practice.  We don’t have to memorise great chunks of content.  We can use the slide deck for navigation purposes to guide us through the flow of the talk.  We just talk to the point of the slide, because we have designed this talk, so obviously we know what we want to say.

We must project tremendous enthusiasm.  I am thinking of two speakers who surprised me with their total lack of enthusiasm for their own amazing companies.  One was a luxury marque car brand and the other a resource captain of industry.  Both had phenomenal sagas of defeat and triumph, of business breakthroughs and of spectacular R&D success.  It would have been much more interesting if they had included these in their talks. They managed to replace these exciting stories with the bland and boring.  If they had spoken as if possessed with total belief in the righteousness of their company’s contribution to the world, they would have had much greater impact with their audiences.  They would have attracted fans for themselves and their companies.

The structure for a talk to impress an audience about our organisation looks like this:

Opening.  The opening has only one purpose. That objective is to create a positive impression so powerful, it breaks through all of the distractions occupying the minds of the listeners.  The first sentence out of the speaker’s mouth has to command our attention and interest. Pithy quotes, grabber statistics, total killer stories, will all do the trick.

Message.  We need to clearly state the key messages.  Within the first five minutes of the talk are the audience clear on where we are going with this speech?  Have we honed our key messages down to the bone, to eliminate psychobabble, pap and make sure we have eliminated our data dump proclivities.  We need to reiterate the most important message in the speech close, before we bridge to the Q&A and again, during the final close at the end, after the Q&A.

Evidence.  We must establish credibility and inspire trust, respect and confidence in what we are saying by using powerful evidence.  So often speakers make sweeping statements and audiences are left to ponder whether that statement about their company is true or are we listening to a re-incarnation of Joseph Goebbels, one of the most evil and notorious propagandists in history?  Carefully inspect every utterance where you are making a broad statement and then check to see if there is sufficient evidence accompanying it.  You will surprise yourself with how often we make statements and offer no proof whatsoever.

Closing.  As mentioned there are two closes.  Close number one, prior to Q&A is designed to capture the essence of your message, in order to reinforce its potency for the audience. The second close for after the Q&A is designed to leave the audience with a favourable, memorable impression of you, your organisation and your message.

The impress talk structure is not complex, but the delivery requires a lot of rehearsal.  Practicing on your audience is self delusion in the making.  So many speakers give their speech once – when they are in front of the assembled mass of sceptics, doubters, critics and cynics.  Anytime you are talking up your own organisation, then you are really asking for trouble.  Get the required fluency in the delivery, so that you are radiating confidence and credibility.  If you do that your message will be bought by the audience.  If you don’t, your personal and professional brands will take a big hit.  The choice is embarrassingly clear.

Are we clear enough about our message? There are some common problems around getting the messaging right. We have no clear message and the audience don’t quite know what to make of the talk. Or we have so many messages, the audience are confused and cannot attach to any of the messages. This is an exaggeration, but we should be able to write our one key message on a grain of rice.  The point is to make the message clear and get it down to the minimum number of words to describe it.  This is really tough.  Rambling and waffling on are easy, whereas being precise is hard work.  This explains why most talks haven’t boiled everything down to one clear message and the presentation fails or misses the mark.

If we are thinking of a topic to speak on or if we are asked to speak on a certain topic, the first major effort will be to find the key message.  This sounds straightforward, but there are so many angles from which to approach a topic, we need to select the best one and then clarify it.  The best one will be determined by our audience analysis.  Who are we going to be speaking to and what message will resonate the most strongly with them?  If we don’t know who our audience is we need to find out. In episode number 260 we went into more detail on just how to do that, so please go back and listen to that episode.

Getting the key message clear is also important when it comes to promoting the talk.  Our title will get sent out to the prospective audience and if we have done our audience analysis well, then there will be a high degree of resonance with our target group.  Getting the title right makes such a difference and we all know that.  We respond to certain titles more than others.  If we can hone in on the key interest, then our audience numbers will fill up and we will set the stage to deliver our message.  I was attending a talk recently and there were only about 30 people online.  Given the speaker and the quality of the content, it should have been 100 people at least.  The title let the talk down and didn’t grab attention, because the message and the audience analysis hadn’t been given enough attention.

Once we have crafted our one key message, we need to look for content which supports that key message.  These are like chapters in a thesis.  When you write your thesis, you have your central proposition, your key finding from the research and the rest of the document is set about backing up what you are pontificating about.  We need evidence – hard evidence rather than broad statements about what we think.  Nobody cares what we think.  In this Era of Cynicism built on a fear of falling for fake news, evidence has become even more vital than in the past.  A speech is a similar situation. We have a number of chapters in the speech which are crammed to the gunwales with evidence proving what we are saying is true.  Inside these chapters there may be some sub-messages, again providing hard evidence, which when added together validate our one big key message.

The usual problem with messaging though is too many messages.  We teach public speaking and we have a tool called the Magic Formula where we provide the context, background, data, proof, evidence, then the call to action and the benefit of that call to action.  I notice that our participants are always adding and adding points to bolster the benefit, rather than grabbing the most powerful benefit.  The effect is the key message about the benefit is being diluted by what follows.  This is the Age of Distraction and when we pile on the detail our audience gets lost and loses interest. We need to make sure the sub-messages are supporting and proving the main message and not competing with it. 

This is where pruning a speech becomes very important.  We need to ask if we can reduce the content by 10% to see if the message becomes clearer.  This is a lot harder than it sounds and I am as guilty as anyone in this regard. What we normally do is keep adding to the speech.  We find a great slide and we add that. Then we find another and add that.  We keep adding more slides or more messages and we create confusion for our audience.  Being forced to chop out 10% is a good discipline to force us to be as clear as possible.  This is painful, but it will improve the whole presentation by adding more clarity to what we want people to absorb.

So have one central message and look for a number of ways to get that one message across. If we can do that, then the audience will absorb what we are saying and we can count the talk as a success.  Go for quality rather than quantity of messages when presenting.

Before we tackle the purpose of our presentation we need to understand who is our audience. We covered this in Episode #260, so please go back and review that episode if you haven’t already heard it. Basically, don’t put pen to paper or start assembling a slide deck, until you are crystal clear on who is going to be in the audience.  Once we know what level to frame the content, we can get started on the next step and that is being very clear on the purpose of the talk.

Perhaps it is an internal presentation.  An All Hands Meeting, a Town Hall, a regular weekly report on your division or section’s numbers, the update on the marketing spend results, etc. It could be for an external audience drawn from your industry, a speech for the Chamber of Commerce, a benkyokai or study group, a public gathering, etc. 

There are four things to consider regarding the type of talk we can give.

1. Inform - This is a very common structure for internal and industry presentations. These are often rich data and deep insight talks. We will have statistics, expert opinion, the latest research findings.  We have our finger on the pulse of the industry trends and what our company’s outcomes have been.  We want to provide value to the audience and so we try to bring something to them which they didn’t know or hadn’t thought about. 

These types of public talks will often have titles such as, “The Top Five Things Regarding X”, “The Latest Research Results on Y”, etc. There will be detailed case studies from the front line that cast light on what is and isn’t working. The question is which data and how much data.  We have to be careful, because we can quickly become data dump junkies. We are always tending to cram too much information into the talk and this can dilute the impact of the messages.  Choosing what to keep and what not to use can be very difficult, but we must be disciplined.  Always go for the gold and leave the silver and bronze to question time as reserve power.

2. Convince or Impress - As speakers we often think the task is selling our message. I am sure you have had this experience.  You toddle off to hear a talk and the speaker is a dud.  They are completely hopeless and can either barely string two words together or they read the text or the screen to us, or even worse they do both! Sub-consciously, we have now extended this buffoonery to the entire organisation and have developed a lack of confidence in this entire group. 

We are musing that if this is who they put forward to the wider public, they must all be stupid and so how can you trust a company like that? Remember every time we stand up to speak, we are also selling ourselves and by extension our section, division or company.

We must believe that what we are sharing is important and we want our audience to think that too.  Sadly, audiences today are living in the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism, so as presenters  we have to work super hard to overcome both.  We need to be excellent presenters, really professional presenters. Plus, we also have to prove what we are saying is true. We have to show the value and we have to emphasise the importance of our message.

3. Persuade or Inspire to Action - This is a particular skill always needed by leaders. We may have a message which we think is very important and we want our audience to benefit from it.  To do so they need to change what they are doing now or start doing something new.  We want to get them to take some specific action.  The only tools we have are our delivery excellence and our content relevancy and quality.  Unless we have really assembled a quality content offer and have delivered it in a highly professional manner we won’t be persuading anyone to do anything, be that internally or externally. 

Prime Minister Winston Churchill was the keynote speaker to Harrow, his old College, in October 1941, as Britain alone faced the Nazis domination of all of Europe.  He said slowly, “Never, ever ever ever ever give up”.  Those seven words were electrifying.  Now that is persuasion, that is inspiration.  We are all facing Covid’s war on our companies, on our businesses, on our livelihoods.  Are we rising to the occasion with our persuasive, take action presentations to our troops?

4. Entertain – do we have to be stand up comedians? Great if you have that facility, but it is not required for speakers.  Humour is a very difficult thing to master for an amateur business presenter, who only speaks a few times a year, at the most.  We can bring passion to our talk and transfer our positive energy to the audience.  If we say something and the audience laughs – write that down baby, because that is humorous, even though that may not have been our intention.

Know who is in our audience, craft the talk to match that audience and decide what is the purpose of our talk.  Once you have that sorted, then get to work on the detailed design of close #1, close #2, the main body with tons of evidence and finally the opening and design it in that order.

Before we do anything, we need to ask just who is going to be in our audience?  If we don’t know that information, then we are thrashing around in the dark, trying to find the light switch. It may be an internal group we are speaking to, so we will have a pretty clear idea who will be in the room.  It might be an industry association talk, so we can expect there will be people similar to us in the audience.  It might be a public talk, sponsored by a chamber of commerce and so there could be people from many different industries gathered to hear us speak.

The key point is to try and find out who will be in the audience, by asking the organisers, if you are not sure who is coming.  If for privacy reasons, you cannot get a list of attendees, then at least ask for as much detail as possible around age, rank and gender.  A benefit of going to the venue early is usually all the name badges of the audience are lined up outside the room, so you can spend a bit of time seeing who is coming.  The name badge will give you the company name but it won’t give you the rank or the status of the individuals.  There is a simple solution for this issue.

Position yourself at the door and then try to greet as many people as possible. Japan is great, because handing over all your key private information is acceptable, because we exchange our meishi or business cards.  You can see the position they hold and looking at their face, you can guess the age bracket.  As you engage them you can ascertain why they have given up their time to attend, so you can gauge their motivations and interests. We can make adjustments on the fly in terms of our angle of delivery with these insights.

I heard a talk on Personal Branding, which completely missed the mark.  The speaker was talking about how she elevated her personal brand in one of the biggest companies on the planet.  Her audience were not in that company size bracket, so there was little to relate to.  If she had spent time talking to people beforehand she would have realised she needed to make made some changes in order to accommodate her audience.  Sadly that didn’t happen and the dry chicken for lunch was the only reward for attending.

Here are some ideas for preparing the talk, taking into consideration the likely composition of your audience:

1. Knowledge – are they novices on the subject or are they veterans? It is hard to know beforehand, so it is always a safe bet to assume there will be some very knowledgeable people in attendance and prepare on that basis.
2. Expertise - if we can understand the level of knowledge of the audience, we can pitch the content at the right level. We don’t want to go too high or too low with the complexity of what we are talking about.  If we get this wrong, we can alienate our listeners and they will tune us out and even worse, escape to the internet to fill in the time remaining.  When we have a mixed audience, it is a lot more complex, so we need to search for the right balance.
3. Experience-are the audience members theoreticians or are they people from the field? Experience in the laboratory is quite different from that of the practitioner on the front line.
4. Bias-strong views can lead some people to have a particular bias regarding the subject we are addressing. If we know what those biases are, it will help us when preparing for the Q&A.  This is where “working the room” as people arrive is important, to flush these out before you start.
5. Needs – As mentioned, when we arrive early and spend some time mixing with the audience members, we can get a sense of what some of the needs around this subject may be. We want to leave them with some valuable take-aways which they will find useful. This needs to be baked into the design before we get there or we need to focus in on some key points based on what we heard when asking people why they came.
6. Wants – Needs and wants are not the same. We again use our pre-talk audience informal survey, when chatting with the early arrivals, about what are some things they would want from the talk.  As a result, we may only need to change our delivery by a few degrees, but it can have a tremendous leverage benefit for resonating with our audience.
7. Goals – when we start planning the talk, we need to think what might be some of the goals for the audience members, which are inspiring them to make the effort to attend the speech. How can they apply some of the insights we are going to impart, the experiences, the data, the detail?

As always, the key is to plan the talk in detail and not just spend all the time on assembling the slide deck.  Rehearse, record, review.  Listening to yourself, is what you are saying valuable or is it pap?  Is it corporate propaganda or is it beneficial, practical, applicable?  Plan with the audience reaction in your mind and things will go much better.

They are usually a bunch of strangers attending out talk.  We may know one or two people in the audience, but generally we have no clue about most of them.  The feeling is likewise.  They may have perfunctorily glanced at our introduction in the blurb advertising the event but who are we as a person?  How smart are we, how useful is this time allocation going to be, can we speak well, are we adding any value to them?  Here are twelve ideas to build rapport with the audience.

1. Consider ourselves honoured to be asked to address an audience and say so. However, don’t do this at the start of the talk.  You hear this all the time, “Thank you for inviting me today, it is a great honour to be able to speak to such a distinguished audience”. Boring!!!  Design a powerful opening to grab everyone’s attention and only then thank the organisers and the audience for the chance to speak.

2. Give our listeners sincere appreciation. Arrive early and meet some members of the audience and thank them for coming to listen to you.  At the end of the talk, we can also express our appreciation for their attendance.  Don’t make this the last comment though.  We reserve that for our final close, where we make sure our key message is reverberating in their ears, as they walk out of the venue.

3. Mention the names of some listeners. Getting there early allows us to meet the guests and then when we get up on stage we can refer to a conversation we had before the start of the speech.  For example, “I was chatting with Suzuki san and she made a very interesting point about….” There is an invisible wall between the speaker and the audience and this connecting with people in the audience breaks that wall down and we feel as one unit.

4. Play ourselves down – not up. Nobody likes someone who is egotistical and acting superior.  We should always be humble and never talk about ourselves, as if we were something special, just because we are the speaker.  Yes, you need some degree of ego to stand up and speak to an audience, but let’s keep the full dimensions of that ego to ourselves.

5. Say “we” not “you”. When we use “we”, it is inclusive language and we want to have our audience to feel as if we are one united team. “You should do…” doesn’t work as well as “we should do”, when we want to appeal to our audience.  Let’s remove all barriers between ourselves and our listeners.

6. Don’t talk with a “scowling face an upbraiding voice”. I never do that you say.  Really? Check the video. When we are concentrating, without knowing it, our face can look like we are scowling at our audience.  Smiling is a great way to make sure we are not doing that, as long as the smile is congruent with what we are saying.  If it is a serious topic, then our face should be serious.  But a scowling face is too much, because it looks like we are angry and admonishing our audience.

7. Talk in terms of your listener’s interests. We might have a great love of a subject and we get a lot of satisfaction from talking about it, but are our audience members interested. We need to design the talk, looking at things from their point of view and their likely interest.  What is in it for them?  What can they take away from this talk which they can apply in theIr world?

8. Have a good time delivering your talk. If we look like giving this talk is killing us, it will make our audience feel uncomfortable and will have a very negative impact on our personal and professional brands.  If we are nervous, we can come across as a wounded animal on stage.  Best to mask that wounded animal look, as much as possible.  Keep all of that type of “I’m nervous” information to yourself.

9. Don’t apologise. This is a very common way to start talks in Japan, but we should start with a well designed opening that breaks through all of the competing distractions for our message and grabs the listener’s attention.  Apologies are all about us, when we should be totally focused on the audience and not ourselves.

10. Appeal to the nobler emotions of your audience. People turn up to hear us speak on the basis they want us to succeed. We should assume that and then be very sincere in our preparations, so that we can match their high expectations of us.

11. Welcome criticism instead of resenting it. If some audience member takes issue with the logic of what we have said or the conclusions we have drawn from the data, we shouldn’t get into an argument. We should just say “thank you” and say we will take that on board and have another look at our assumptions.  If we are receiving some feedback on the delivery of the talk, then we should not allow our emotions to get involved. We should just take it as helpful feedback so that we improve.

12. Be “a good person skilled in speaking”. The most clever criminals around the world all have something in common- they are good talkers. We want to be better than just being a smooth talker.  We want to have our audience’s best interests upper most in our minds at all times. They will feel the difference.

Try these twelve ideas when you are preparing for and delivering your next presentation and you will do a much better job of connecting with your audience.

We all stumble into public speaking in business.  We don’t start our first job with a grand plan for our future public speaking career.  We just work as hard as we can.  If we knew at the start how important this facility was, we would definitely plot out the path forward, corresponding to each stage in our careers.  However, we are left to our own devices and we have no guidelines for presenting.  Let’s fill in that gap in our business education and take a look at some useful guidelines on the basis it is never too late to start becoming a better presenter. 

Here are nine guidelines to adopt.

1. Make brief notes in the order you want to mention them. 

This is your navigation and could be on notes sitting on the podium or you might place a big sheet of paper on the backwall, behind the audience and use code words that only you understand.  There is nothing wrong with quickly consulting your notes if you need to.  Audience members will not jump to their feet and start denouncing us as frauds just because we took a peek at our notes.  No one cares that much.

2. Unless absolutely necessary for legal reasons etc., do not read your speech. I have had the experience of representing my boss and reading his speech word for word.  So painful. Yes, preparing the whole speech as a document is fine to help you practice. Just don’t read it to us.  You can send it by email instead and we won’t need you or your presentation.

3. Never memorise a speech word for word.

This is no fun doing it this way because of the enormous mental strain it places on us.  A thirty minute speech fully recalled from memory is pointless. We should enjoy giving talks so let’s not burden ourselves with that massive memory expectation.  Just have the key points you want to cover and talk to them.

4. Use evidence to substantiate your points

We have to be very careful with general sweeping statements we may make. We will attract skepticism from our audience and we may find ourselves under attack during the Q&A.  Always back up what is being said with evidence, proof, statistics, expert testimony, etc.

5. Know far more about your subject than you can use.

We don’t know what we will be asked in the Q&A, so we have to make sure we can answer any reasonable question, otherwise our personal and professional brands can be damaged.  If we can’t answer a relevant question on our topic, then people will immediately doubt our credibility as a business professional.

6. Rehearse your presentation in front of your professional associates.

However, never, ever ask them “what do you think?”.  All you will hear will be annoying negative comments that will ruin your day and your confidence. Instead, ask them “what was good” and “how can I make it better?”.

7. Use visual aids where appropriate.

We don’t automatically need slides.  If they add value then absolutely use them. Visual aids are helpful because a picture is worth a thousand words, as we say.  Pictures with people in them are the best. Also the visuals provide our navigation through the content of the speech, so we don’t have to remember all of the detail.  We only have to talk to the information or the point on the slide and this is much easier.

8. Control “butterflies” in the tummy by taking in deep, slow, lower diaphragm breaths.  This will help lower our pulse rate, reduce body heat and calm us down. We can also do some strenuous walking around, out of sight, to burn off excess nervous energy. For other people, they may need to lift up their energy levels, by giving themselves a pep talk.

9. Don’t imitate others: be yourself

It is tempting to copy other speakers, but we don’t need to do that.  Life is short, so why try and become a facsimile of someone else? Be you every time and be the best version of you possible. If we work hard on the design, rehearsal and delivery of our talk we will develop our own natural style.

These guidelines are not exhaustive by any means, but they encompass some basics we should apply to our talks. I ran away from public speaking for my first thirty years.  Why?  Because I didn’t know what to do. I had no guidelines, no training and no clue. Even worse, I didn’t understand that I should go and get the training.  I got there eventually, but I wasted so much time and opportunity by being in denial.  Don’t be like me – don’t wait, go and get trained.

We all stumble into public speaking in business.  We don’t start our first job with a grand plan for our future public speaking career.  We just work as hard as we can.  If we knew at the start how important this facility was, we would definitely plot out the path forward, corresponding to each stage in our careers.  However, we are left to our own devices and we have no guidelines for presenting.  Let’s fill in that gap in our business education and take a look at some useful guidelines on the basis it is never too late to start becoming a better presenter. 

Usually for most businesspeople we don’t really know what we are doing when it comes to presentations.  We grow up in business concentrating on our tasks and getting the work done.  As we rise through the ranks, we start to give updates on the results or project progress reports.  As we rise a bit further we may start reporting what our Section or Division has been doing, or introducing the business strategy to senior leaders.  In some cases, we may be presenting to shareholders, the media, chambers of commerce or industry groups. 

Along this continuum we just bumble our way along, copying what our bosses are doing.  They actually had the same presentation education we have been getting – none.  So we have the blind leading the blind, generation after generation.  Nobody inside the company thinks that people moving into leadership positions need to become powerful persuaders and influencers through their communication skillS.  These are attributes that somehow those rising through the ranks have to pick up for themselves.  If the company said, “You need to get presentation training and you will have to pay for it yourself, because we are not going to”, that would be one thing.  Unfortunately, that conversation about need is never breached and there is no guidance whatsoever.

In the absence of any hints from senior leadership, on what we need to be doing around getting better at presenting, here are some starters:

1. Know your material so well, you feel you own it.

We should be an expert in the area we are talking about.  That means we have gained experience, have read the relevant materials and have been active in this field.  Whenever we present we should feel we have reserve power, to be able to add additional information, respond to questions during Q&A and demonstrate that we know our topic in great depth.  We are limited by how much time we have to speak but we should always over prepare. There is nothing more embarrassing than being shown you don’t know much about your talk topic. You will see your credibility fall off the podium and shatter into a thousand shards before your very eyes.

2. Have a positive feeling about the subject you are about to present.

You may have experienced this at School or University, where some Teachers and Professors are just going through the materials in a very perfunctory, detached way. Others however were on fire with real passion for their subject. Naturally we all gravitate toward those with massive passion for their topic. 

The audience won’t remember all of the detail of our talk, but they will remember our passion for the subject and therefore they will remember us.  That is what we want in business isn’t it – to be differentiated, memorable, admired. 

If you have to present on a topic which doesn’t particularly excite you then try and find some elements which are interesting and bring your passion to those parts.  It is not great but better to have flashes of passion than a continual, consistent, humdrum, boring  delivery.

3. Project to your audience the value and significance of your message.

If we don’t sound convinced about our message, then there is zero chance anyone listening will be convinced.  In sales we say, “selling is the transfer of enthusiasm from the seller to the buyer”. Presenting is where we sell our information or our ideas.

We have done the hard work to master our subject area.  We have worked on our delivery skills as a presenter.  We have every right to be talking on the subject.  We should also be excited by the topic and enthusiastic to share all of this wonderful knowledge and information with our audience. 

Our listeners can feel whether we are positive about our content or not.  They can tell if we are just going through the motions or not.  We have all seen speakers like this.  They have been told to give the talk and they have no interest in doing it and are just following orders.  It is painful to be in that type of audience. We are trying to bring value to the audience and we have this uppermost in our mind.

If you become important in business then you will need to become an excellent presenter.  You can become important in business and be a crap speaker, but you will always be eclipsed by those who have invested the time to gain the fundamental skills.

The idea of having enthusiasm would seem to be pretty obvious for someone presenting.  In some cases, though we are just presenting information and getting massively enthusiastic about a bunch of not particularly illuminating numbers would be difficult. Often internal meetings are like this.  We have to give our report on the revenue and client numbers or the trend with visitors to our stores or whatever.  These are factual reports and if we were to suddenly start gushing with breathless enthusiasm, our bosses and colleagues may regard us with deep suspicion that we had lost our marbles.  If we want our listeners to agree with our suggestions or to take action, then we definitely need enthusiasm.  If we are in the persuasion business, then enthusiasm has to be a staple of our presentations.

Last week’s episode was all about the dark failings of Prime Minister Suga as a communicator.  I had the unfortunate bad luck to be watching his media conference announcing the extension of the state of emergency.  It was seriously painful to watch.  I was reminded of how important enthusiasm was, by sitting through his long press conference, where there wasn’t  a trace of enthusiasm in his presentation.  In the end, I couldn’t take any more and turned the television off.

I am not being facetious, when I talk about pain in this case.  Whether it is Suga or anyone else, if their job is to influence us or persuade us and they attempt that without marshalling any enthusiasm, it is physically painful to sit there and be exposed to that.  So let's flip it around and think about when it is our turn to be the influencer, the persuader.  How are we approaching this task?  Are we just buffeting our audience with a data dump, with an extended avalanche of statistics?

Numbers are dead, by the way.  They only have life injected into them by having context applied.  When we do that, the relativities become clearer.  Explaining the background helps explain their relevance.  How often though have we been served up spreadsheets on screen or a bunch of line graphs, crowded together on screen?   This is very common speaker behaviour and a big pain receptor.

We need to find poignant stories about those numbers that make them really come alive.  We need to place them in context with the current business situation and commercial trends.  What do they portend for the organisation?  We need to contrast them with other figures, so we have some sense of perspective.

Instead, what do we get?  “I know you can’t see this but….”, as the speaker drones on throwing up a spreadsheet in tiny fonts, overwhelming us with a blizzard of numbers.  Why do they do that?  Obviously no clue and no training would be the answer.  Rather, they could use animation and show a pop up a balloon, with a single number displayed in very large font, so we can read it easily.  They can then enthusiastically tell us the story of that number and what it represents.  That will be memorable and impactful.

When speakers talk with zero or very low energy like Suga, they mystically suck all of the energy out of the room and suddenly you feel worse than before they started.   In the opposite case, that transfer of speaker energy to the audience has an uplifting effect and the world looks better immediately.  Their enthusiasm becomes contagious and suddenly the world looks a lot better to us. Which variety of speaker would you like to be known as – the uplifter or the energy thief?

Having passion for your subject is required.  Even if the topic itself is rather humdrum and mundane, let’s try and find something in there that will be of interest to an audience.  When we tell the stories we have selected, let’s do so with verve.  We don’t need to be at max power all of the time, but at certain key junctures, we need to rev up the engine and go hard.

Watching Suga, you felt like this guy never gets out of first gear and the engine is barely ticking over.  Until we can find the techniques for bringing energy to our talks, we should refrain from giving them, because the world doesn’t need another energy assassin roaming free. 

We should get coaching, get the training, work hard and put a lot of emphasis on rehearsal.  No one is born as a great presenter.  It is a learnt skill and one we can achieve, if we give it the priority it deserves.  Never forget, once we get up to speak, our personal and professional brands are in jeopardy.  Suga will leave the Prime Ministership a total nobody and will soon be forgotten, except perhaps as an abject lesson in what not to do.  We don’t want to join that crowd do we? 

Let’s bring our enthusiasm to our subject and inject it into our audience, thereby adding to our reputation and making the whole exercise a personal branding triumph.

The news cycle is awash with Prime Minister Suga’s shock announcement that he will not continue as Japan’s leader.  His predecessor Shinzo Abe quit on health concerns and handed over the Covid crisis to Suga.  Here we are twelve months later and Suga is gone.  His inability to communicate as a leader has been seized upon as one of the key reasons for his failure.  In Episode #233, I focused on Suga’s challenges with communication.  Here we are five months later and he has joined that large community of entirely forgetable Japanese leaders.  From his own admission, he has reflected that he wasn’t able to communicate his thoughts in an authentic way.  That would be a case of delusional thinking.

He was entirely authentic.  He was boring, showed no passion, had a single facial expression regardless of the content, had no variation in the speed or strength of his delivery and never smiled.  Apart from that, he was totally forgettable, especially regarding his message.  His supporters, fellow politicians, have lamented that he should have spoken more from his heart.  More delusion.  He read all of his speeches, because he couldn’t string two words together by himself and so had to read it to us.  Those speeches were no doubt prepared by bureaucrats in the relevant Ministries depending on the subject or by his staff.  Every time he tried to speak to reporters without notes, he was obviously struggling and he kept those occasions as short as possible.  If there was any opportunity to use teleprompters, he grabbed at it like a drowning man going down for the third time.  No heart at play in any of these speeches.

He is a abject lesson for everyone about the importance of having a skilled capacity as a public speaker.  This might be one of those urban myths, but apparently some parents wouldn’t let their kids listen to him, in case he created a negative influence on their communication skills.  Even if it isn’t true it is still not a bad idea, because he can only instruct through negative example.

Basically, he has been a so called “retail politician” his whole career.  Someone without privileges or an array of silver spoons like Abe and Previous Prime Minister and current Finance Minister Taro Aso, who through his own dint of hard work and cunning managed to climb to the highest post in the land.  This is a classic tale of patronage, backroom deals and obligations running out of gas. What was also needed was a personal strength in persuasion power through public speaking.  In the end, his colleagues, fully concentrated on saving their own necks, forced him out because they were concerned about an electoral backlash of voter unhappiness.

As we rise through the ranks in our careers we will be called on to become more persuasive.  That will involve public speaking.  Shinzo Abe version Mark 2, when he came back into the Prime Ministership, had obviously had public speaking training.  He was much better than the earlier Mark 1 version.  So what happened with Suga?  If he in fact did receive coaching on speaking, then let’s find out who was his coach and make sure we never use them.  Watching him speak in public from his time as Chief Cabinet Secretary since 2012, until he became Prime Minister in 2020, he hasn’t changed at all.  It is more likely he has never sought any professional coaching on how to become more persuasive.

Why would that be?  My guess would be he didn’t see the need until it was too late.  By too late, I mean having to announce he was quitting.  When he became the leader, he inherited the Covid crisis from Abe. During Suga’s watch it has gone on to the fifth wave, with epic numbers of people becoming infected. Let’s also toss in the Olympics, just to really turn the heat up.  Probably not a lot of spare time for coaching on how to be more persuasive and get his message across to the Japanese voters.

This is the point.  Don’t wait until it is too late like Suga.  Get the training now and keep getting it right throughout your career.  If you want to be persuasive, if you want to get your message across, then it takes work and requires concentrated time.  When you get to the top like Suga, it is too late because you don’t have time.  We all need to be working on this speaking facility before we get to the top.  In fact, this same facility will become an engine to power us to get to the top.  Get trained and keep polishing your communication skills as a lifelong learning commitment.  In a few months time, Suga will have been replaced and forgotten.  It could have been totally different if he had learnt how to be persuasive. He could have delivered his message, authentically and professionally, expressing clearly and succinctly what was in his heart.  Sayonara Suga san.

Have you heard of XiaoIce?  According to the media it is a “cutting edge artificial intelligence system designed to create emotional bonds with its six hundred and sixty million users worldwide”.  It already accounts for sixty percent of all global human-AI interactions, making it the largest. Here is the terrifying punchline, “It was designed to hook users through life-like, empathetic conversations, satisfying emotional needs where real-life communications too often fall short”.  It is claimed that the AI is better than humans at listening attentively. What?

Are our modern communication skills so atrophied, that we have to switch to a chatbot?  Is this a function of growth, off the back of the pandemic?  We are working from home, so many people feel isolated and as if there is no solid foundation in their human relations anymore.  This is ironic really, because today we are in the most “wired” ecosystem in history.  We have online calls, hand held mobile phones and multiple text chat options. How could we be suffering from a lack of connectivity?

The problem then is not the hardware.  Generationally, we can observe that the current younger generation prefers to text than speak. Texting is less complex than trying to phrase what you want to say on the fly.  Text is also less complex when trying to parse what the other party is actually saying.  We don’t have to interpret the voice tone or the cadence of the message.  Text is flat in tone and very fortunately editable before we send it.

The point about listening though is a good one – we have become very poor listeners.  The wonderful technology we have access to today is a double edged sword, because we are now chained to our devices and the days are twenty four hours long, with no respite.  We have our phones by the bedside, so we can connect to the internet immediately and we do.

What can we do to improve our communication skills?  Here are a few timeless Principles of successful communications.

1. Be a good listener.  Encourage others to talk about themselves. 

This sounds pretty easy, but we don’t do it.  We are so focused on ourselves, we stop listening to what the other person is saying.  We are churning the words around in our own mind, prepping for what we will say in the conversation, such that the concentration is on ourselves and not on the person speaking.

We don’t encourage the other person to speak either, because we want to do all the talking.  We think what we have to say is the higher priority and they are there just to hear us out.  We need to suspend our desire to do all the talking and instead just relax and let the other person do most of the talking.  People are so starved of being listened to, they will be so grateful that we allowed them to talk and they will regard us very highly.

2. Become genuinely interested in other people.

Sadly we are very selfish and are primarily interested in ourselves and what is going on in our lives. It is all “me, me, me”. The young people falling in love with the XiaoIce virtual chatbox are fooling themselves into believing that their emotions can be reciprocated by a machine.  They are seeking attention, someone to listen to them, someone to be empathetic with their situation. It is counterintuitive, but the best way to build relationships is to become “genuinely” interested in other people.  The key word there is “genuinely”.  If we do this, we will become part of their world and our world will improve as well.

3. Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.

The key word here is “sincerely”, otherwise it is just manipulation.  Our sense of self-worth is closely linked to how important others make us feel.  People with low self-esteem and low self-worth are now talking to chatbots, in a desperate attempt to feel better about themselves.

All they need is for us to communicate they are important to us.  Often we don’t do this because we presume “they already know that”.  Actually they probably need to hear it a lot more than we imagine.  So look for areas where we can recognise their contribution or their worth and most importantly communicate we appreciate them.

Chatbots are not a substitute for real human relations.  If our society degrades to the point where chatbots are the main source of human relationships then the end of civilisation is nye.  We cannot allow that to happen.  So let's start using these simple Principles and build real relationships with each other, before it is too late.

When I am running half day or full day training sessions there is no rehearsal. There is a lot of participant interaction in our sessions, so you need to have the participants for that bit, if you were going to do a rehearsal.  Instead, I plan the training down to the last second.  I have a roadmap of the training, which nominates precisely what will need to be happening at every minute during the training and I follow that religiously.  If the timing speeds up or slows down I know where I am relative to the plan, so I can make the necessary adjustments. I need to do that because we must not go over the time allotted for the training.  It is the same with speaking and presenting.  The organisers have a programme to get through and they absolutely don’t want the speaker to go beyond their allotted time.  Are you planning your talks down to the last minute?

What do we see?  Speakers who go too long on their subject or who go crazy and try to cram fifteen minutes of content into two minutes.  They start whipping through their slide deck like deranged people. Sitting in the audience, your head starts spinning because you cannot keep up.  Their point of departure is always, “I will need to move through this next section quickly”.  Why is that?  They knew from the start how much time they had and they knew that when they started the talk.

The “I will need to move through this next section quickly” statement is notification that this person is not professional.  Consequently, their personal and organisation brands suffer.  If they cannot figure out how to give a forty minute talk in forty minutes, do you really want them in charge of some work for you?  We also extrapolate their lack of professionalism to the rest of the people who work down there.  Without really thinking about it, we tar them all with the same brush, so this is a major unforced error we have here. 

The quality of your presentation also suffers because often you had some really killer content, but you cannot really utilise it fully, because you are moving so fast.  All of this self-inflicted reputational damage could easily be avoided if you spent time to rehearse the content.  When you allocate the time for the first rehearsal, you quickly realise that you have too much material for the length of time to present it or the other way around.  In my experience though, it is usually too much information and not a lack of information, which is the problem.  We have this great slide we want to use and oh, yeah, there is that other great slide too.  Before you know it, you have a perfect presentation for an hour, the problem is they have only given you forty minutes.

So instead of embarrassing yourself in front of others, you can make the adjustments beforehand.  The subsequent rehearsals can now focus on the delivery component.  There is always plenty to work on in this regard and it requires dedicated time.  What do busy leaders lack? Time.  The tendency is to short change the preparation for the talk and spend that time on something else.  This is a mixing up of priorities.  Most of that other stuff won’t be you in public exposing yourself to the world as a professional.  It will be internal projects, meetings and reporting, which are hidden to judgmental outsiders.

We need to get the content right, the timing within the limit and then we need to really impress the audience with our delivery.  Senior company representatives having to read their talks is unthinkable, but you still see it.  How shameful that you don’t know your business well enough to talk to key points and instead you read the whole thing to us.  Just send us an email with the text, and we can all stay at home and read it for ourselves.  You need to practice before you get in front of any audience.  What they should see is the polished you, the confident you, the persuasive you, not the frantic, disorganised you.

When rehearsing, video review yourself and have others give you “good/better” feedback. Polish the performance, because that is what it is, a performance.  When you understand that then your approach changes.  We remain business like though and don’t attempt to transform ourselves into amateur thespians.  We present as professionals, in our particular field of expertise.  If you can organise it, video yourself presenting live to the audience and then study that later for areas where you can improve.  Professionals rehearse, review, improve and above all else keep to the time allotted. Are you a professional?

Many Japanese companies have expanded their operations outside of Japan to enlarge their business, as the population decline guarantees to keep shrinking the domestic market.  Many multi-national companies have established a strong presence on the ground here, because they like the rule of law and freedom to conduct their business, without having to hand over their IP to domestic partners.  One of the things which keeps popping up as a request from Japanese and multi-national companies here is the challenge of how to ensure their Japanese leaders have more “executive presence” on the international stage.

What do they mean by “executive presence”?  Usually, they are asking their leaders to be better presenters by getting to the key points concisely, clearly and convincingly.  They want persuasion power.  A big barrier for Japan has always been speaking in English, the international business lingua franca.  Yet, this is not the major barrier to having “executive presence” when dealing internationally in business.

Mindset Inhibitors For Japanese Presenters

There are two mindset aspects which make it extremely difficult for Japanese executives to operate at the international professional presentation level.  One is perfectionism.  Japan is a country with no defects allowed, no mistakes tolerated and no errors entertained.  It is a product and service heaven for consumers here and totally aspirational for the rest of the world.  The idea that “we will make more money, if we allow for a defect rate of 5%”, doesn’t exist here and no CFO will ever be able to push this idea through the organisation. This “no error culture” extends to presenting in a foreign language. 

I had the same difficulty when I first started learning Japanese.  I would be forming the perfect Japanese sentence in my mind, all ready to go forth and launch it into the conversation, only to see the topic suddenly switched to something else.  I learnt to launch forth perfect or otherwise, if I ever wanted to be able to speak the language in public.  Japanese executives have trouble making that leap into imperfection and so are often very, very quiet in international meetings.  They often avoid giving presentations if it is possible and if they have to, then they love to read the whole thing, either off a script or off the slides.  Perfect English, but pretty boring and guaranteed to produce zero “executive presence”.

No “Braveheart Speeches” For Japan

The other mindset issue is that presentation skills are not as highly valued.  In the West, we still hearken back to Athens and Rome, to the great orators and their stirring speeches.  Hollywood has had a field day with this trope. In Japan, there were no Mel Gibson Braveheart style speeches being given by the warlords. Battle commanders would sit in a guarded, cordoned off area and receive reports and give orders from there, as the hostilities raged forth.  There were no modern movie style stirring entreaties, while riding up and down in front of the troops, urging them on to fight and win. The samurai leadership class didn’t make mass public speeches.  If the local authorities needed you to know something, they would post it on a notice board. 

Yukichi Fukuzawa, one of Japan’s most famous Westernisers, opened the Enzetsukan or Speech Hall on May 1st, 1875 on the campus of his new Keio University.  It is still there and you can visit it when travel resumes.  We could call this the foundation of Western style speech making in Japan.  That was only 150 years ago, so compared to Athens and Rome, public speaking is quite a recent phenomenon here in Japan. 

Standing in front of people and speaking has an element of assumed superior status, which usually requires the Japanese speaker to apologise at the start for standing above others, while everyone else is seated.  Often, when I was asked to give one of the 200 plus speeches I have given so far in Japanese, a table, chair and a microphone stand were automatically prepared.  The idea of standing and speaking was thought to be tiring for the speaker and it also got us all seated at the same height.  Quite clever because no awkward “status” faux pas were possible. Being confident and outspoken isn’t valued in Japanese culture. Here we should be humble, shy, modest and self-effacing.

Is There A Japanese Way Of Public Speaking?

Reading your speech, word for word, to achieve linguistic purity and carefully displaying no great confidence as a speaker is the accepted formula.  Not a great platform for achieving “executive presence” in an international environment.  Can Japanese become great public speakers?  Yes, but they have to overcome a few mindset issues first.  We teach public speaking here and sometimes will get pushback about the “Japanese way” of public speaking being different to that in the West. This is a false flag.  It is a wily justification for a lack of competence by poor speakers.  We are producing plenty of professional competent speakers in our classes, so we know it can be done and that Japanese executives can become excellent presenters.  There are common basics for effective presentations that will transcend national borders.

One of our arrogant faults in the mono-lingual, Anglo Saxon West is we presume people who are not articulate, especially in English and who cannot present well, are not up to snuff.  Big mistake.  Skill absorption is the key. With proper training, I believe every Japanese leader can achieve “executive presence”.  Some may take longer than others to throw off their mindset issues. Gaining proficiency means we will all improve international mutual trust and enjoy clearer communication.  This is really one of the last global frontiers for Japan. 

Many internationally oriented Japanese executives here, will eventually catch up in English communication skills.   Korean, Chinese and numerous other Asian nation’s executives, for whom the international language of English is not their mother tongue, have managed it. International conferences are where you realise the gap between Japan and the rest of Asia is vast. Japanese executives can certainly manage it as well.   It might be right or it may be wrong, it may be fair or unfair, but it is a reality. Being capable of giving professional presentations in English is how to garner “executive presence”.

I was confirmed into the Anglican Church when I was twelve years of age.  I remember it was the first time I ever wore a tie in my life. Prior to that, every week I had to ride my bicycle to the church after school and do bible studies with other kids with the Minister in order to pass the test to be able to confirmed.  My parents were not religious at all, but I guess because Christianity is such a central component to our belief systems and literature, that they wanted me to get the basics.

Years later I discovered Zig Ziglar, one of the most famous modern day sales trainers.  He was raised in the Deep South of America where bible studies is very big.  I have read his books and watched his videos.  I am fan.  I noticed he was an incredible communicator.  I also noticed that a lot of his sales stories where like the parables he would have read in his “red letter” bible, that is where the words attributed to Jesus are written in red.  Australians are not particularly religious like Americans are, but I did recognise the power of these parables in communication.  I don’t mean the actual quotation of the parables themselves, but the storytelling structure.

The parable structure always has a learning component wrapped up in the story being told.  Often in business, we want to achieve the same thing for our audience.  We might be giving a “persuade” speech rather than simple “inform” speech” or we may be calling for the audience to “take action” rather than just “entertain” them. 

The parables are always from real life, rather than being a confection created for effect.  This makes it easy for us to identify with the story.  When I mentioned going through the confirmation process as a child, I am sure many readers went through a similar experience, including those who are from Muslim or Buddhist religious belief systems.  Our real life stories make it easy to connect with our audience, because they can understand or emphasise with what we are saying.

The parables are also very easy to understand.  The message is crystal clear.  Do this and things will be good.  Do that and things will be bad.  This simplicity is what makes the storytelling so effective.  Zig Ziglar was a master of telling his stories which each had a lesson there for us in sales to absorb.  They were from his experience or the experience of others from the real world, not from the “how it should be world”. 

This is the danger when we become speakers.  We pontificate from on high, from way above the clouds, as if we were superhumans who never made a mistake or had a failure.  The ego has to be strong to tell a story against yourself.  We have grown up supersensitive to being criticised and so it is like kryptonite, we avoid it completely.  Criticising yourself sounds crazy, so we only talk about what a legend we are.

Zig understood that audiences love a good redemption tale. Of course we like to hear how to do things so that they go well, that parable is always in fashion.  Interestingly though, we often feel distant from this model story of bravery, perseverance against the odds, intelligence, strength and wisdom.  We naturally aspire to those things, but they can feel like they are a million miles away from where we are at this moment.  Now failure, disaster, train wrecks all feel much closer to our reality and of course we want to avoid those.  Parable stories on what no to do are much more popular than the ones on what we should be doing.

When things go pear shaped, don’t miss the chance to take a note on that for a future talk.  The events may feel radioactive at the time, but get it down on the record, so that you can retell it when the pain has subsided.  Particularly include the characters involved, the extent of the damage and the depth of the heroics or stupidity involved.  Don’t be limited to your own disasters.  Comb through the media and books for other people’s disasters, which can then be trotted out as a parable for doom and gloom. 

Storytelling master Zig Ziglar copied the parables, probably without even giving it a second thought, because it was so much a part of his cultural upbringings in Yazoo City, Mississippi.  As presenters we can find our own blue ribbon stories of triumph and catastrophe.  We can wrap these up in simple, true renditions of reality that our audience can identify with and easily recall.  The parables are well remembered for a reason – they work as a storytelling structure and we can adopt it for our own talks too.  In ten minutes, I bet you can come up with at least two or three good incidents that have parable like qualities, which can then be fleshed out into mini-stories of business good and evil for an audience.  Give it a try!

Whenever I hear that Jesper Koll, CEO of WisdomTree Investments Japan,

 is going to give a talk here in Tokyo, I want to attend.  I have heard him speak before and he is very good, so my anticipation level of another great presentation is high.  I am not alone in thinking like this and his talks are always packed. This underlines why being able to present at a professional level builds your personal brand.  The basis for a professional presentation is receiving high level training and then getting a lot of practice to hone the craft.  You might be thinking, “well I don’t get that many opportunities to give talks, so the frequency index is a bit low for me”.  Fair enough, but you can get the training and that is the starting point to get the speaking spots.  All professional business speakers did a lot of speaking for free, before they ever got paid.  In business, we will have to give excellent talks from the very start and then at every opportunity, to build our reputation. This is why the training needs to come first and the frequency becomes a consequence of the training results.

For those who are not in the “established reputation” group, which obviously is the majority, there are things we can do very easily to join them.  While we are working in our companies, there will be chances to give updates, reports, represent the section, etc., and this is where we need to start building our reputation. Fortunately, there is rarely a queue formed on the right to give these talks.  Most people hate speaking in public, because they have no clue what they are doing. They just bumble along, shuffling forward like the army of the dead reluctant presenters.  Good, keep bumbling.  That means we can get the opportunity to volunteer our services instead.

When the top bosses see you give your report and your slides are crystal clear, well presented and your delivery is really excellent, you will be noted as someone who can represent the firm.  It may not happen quickly, but don’t worry, those very same abilities as a competent presenter are also the requirements for leading others.  You are likely to be promoted in your firm because you are seen as a skilled communicator, someone with persuasion power.

Rising through the ranks opens up more possibilities for giving presentations.  Often the big bosses themselves hate presenting too and will be very happy to throw you the speaking spot.  Grab it every time.  Once you get into the public arena, other will start to notice you.  More invitations will come. I have never asked Jesper about this, but I will bet he wasn’t an overnight success as a speaker. I am sure he took years to polish his delivery. As you wise up to how the system works, you will start creating your own chances. You will be nominating yourself to give pertinent talks, on some worthy subjects for the local burghers.  Don’t let “imposter syndrome” hold you back.  Remember that 99% of people giving business presentations range in skill from average to rubbish.  You have every right to be out there and because you have received the training, you are automatically in the top 5% straight away.

Picking topics which are hot is a no-brainer.  This is where your copy writing skills are called upon to draft the gripping blurb advertising your talk.  Don’t rely on the hosts to do this for you.  This is your brand we are talking about here and you must have total control over how you are represented to an audience. This is what the people will see and on that basis they will attend, until such time as you are well regarded speaker and people will turn up to hear whatever you have to say regardless, because they are fans. 

This is what happens for me when Jesper’s name is bandied about as a speaker.  I just go straight to the signup page and register, without reading the finer details, because I know it will be good.  The other dimension is that not everyone will be able to attend your talk but many, many more will see the notification. They will start to associate your name with a particular topic.  In Jesper’s case it will be Japan’s economy, because he is an expert economist and that is what he talks about.  Your name in lights as an expert on a topic is part of building an audience and personal brand for the future.

When we get to the delivery stage, we can also build anticipation.  You are introduced by the MC, who is absolutely quoting from the brilliant introduction of yourself, which you prepared in advance.  I say “absolutely” because you need to nobble the MC beforehand and give firm instructions they follow the script and don’t go off piste. It should be brimming to overflow with credibility and this starts to build a positive anticipation in those who don’t know anything about you as yet.

When the MC introduction is finished and you are on stage, don't start immediately.  Just hold the proceedings for a few seconds, which by the way can seem like an eternity and then start. If you want to see an anticipation build of stupendous proportions, then watch the video of Michael Jackson, when he performed at the Super Bowl in 1993.  He didn’t move a muscle for one minute and thirteen seconds.  At that point, all he did was change his head direction to the left. He then held that new pose until the one minute thirty two mark and then he began his performance.  It takes a huge amount of guts to hold an audience for that long.  Well folks we are not Michael Jackson, so we can only hold our audience for a short time, but we should still hold them in order to build that anticipation.

Keep close the idea of creating anticipation in the mind of your audience and develop your presentations accordingly.  If you start this way, you can anticipate a lot of success for your personal and professional brands.

We normally think of omnichannel in relation to the medium being used to contact buyers.  We can also use this idea when thinking about planning our talk.  We automatically revert to the brain when we start this exercise.  Our logical, rational, analytical mode is needed but that is not enough for audiences.  We need heart, value and sex appeal for our messages to resonate.  We tend however to get stuck on the first rung of the planning ladder, the intellectual angle. We all know though that we are emotional creatures, running around justifying our emotional choices with a veneer of logic.  Our talk need to access all of our human instincts.

We need our brain to be working well. Logic is required to make the argument make sense to our audience.  It means we need to be piling on the evidence, proof, data, statistics and testimonials etc.  The navigation of the talk should be logical, so that it flows like a good novel, making it easy for the audience to follow where we are going with this content.  I have mentioned before a talk I attended, where the visiting VIP just rambled through this maze and mist of an esoteric discussion, peppered with his vague musings, which was totally impenetrable.  It lacked structure, logical flow and clear, concise communication.  It was totally self-indulgent. To this day, I still have no idea what he was on about, but his personal reputation and his organisation’s reputation were both shredded that day.

Some members in the audience will be analytical types who love the logic, the detail, the nitty gritty, the evidence and they will be happy to see it.  They will be calibrating everything we say and running it through their mind looking for inconsistencies, gaps, flaws and mistakes of fact. We will win this group over if we are well organised, however they are not the only personality type in the audience. We have to go omnichannel to appeal to other personality types.

Some will be more swayed by their hearts.  We need to get them in touch with their emotions and feelings during our talk.  Novels and movies are emotional engagement masterpieces in many cases.  We are drawn into the characters in the story and what happens to them.  I am a pretty logical guy, but I remember being captured by the heroine in the Japanese television drama Oshin.  Her rise from crushing poverty to running a massive retail empire was a true story, which appealed to my logical brain, but her travails were all pulling at the heartstrings.

We do not have multiple weeks like a television show or three hours like a movie or hundreds of pages in a novel to emotionally engage our audience.  We can have some elements of the human drama of what we are talking about.  Because we are in business there is absolutely no shortage of drama which we can relate.  There are the full spectrum of characters to draw upon as well, from amongst our colleagues, subordinates, superiors, suppliers and clients.  Everyone loves a gory tale of corporate value destruction, factional bloodletting spitting out winners and losers and the dirty deeds done dirt cheap by business nasties.

Another instinct is the gut and this is where we are appealing to value for money.  Is what we are talking about bringing concrete value to the audience.  Have we proffered some information or insight, which was previously unknown to them?  Are we making their business or personal life substantially better?  Are we tuning into the conversation going on in in the minds of the audience and suggesting questions which they want answers to and then magically unveiling the solutions?  The “what is in it for me” question is always the uppermost thought in an audience’s mind, when they sit there listening to us pontificate about a subject.  I attended a talk by a big shot executive from one of the largest companies in the world.   She was talking about personal branding, so she pulled a good crowd.  However, it instantly became apparent that she was talking about how to brand yourself within a mega monster of a company like hers, when the audience was full of punters from small to medium sized enterprises.  There were zero take-aways and zero value on offer that day.

The last omnichannel is sex appeal.  Is your topic sexy, will it fill the seats?  The title is always a key. A lot of thought needs to go into the best shorthand description which will grab attention.  Sometimes we need a provocative title to break through the daily detritus filling the minds of our potential audience members.  “How to” titles also work because we are flagging you will learn something if you attend. The delivery is another aspect of sex appeal.  We have to be excellent in giving the talk, looking for every opportunity to engage with our audience.  We want them thinking, writing down our stuff and often we have to branch into edutainment.  I am not good at snappy repartee, quick wit, zinger one liners or being a skilled raconteur.  I can tell stories though, which are interesting and insightful, which seems to get me by.

When we sit down to design the talk, we need to be asking ourselves, “have I got all of the omnichannel touchpoints covered for this talk?”.  We know people are quite various in how they absorb information and in their interests.  We have to do our best to appeal to as many people as we can in the one sitting.  In the end, it is the planning starting point which matters most.  If we plan to incorporate these four omnichannel     elements of brain, heart, gut and sex appeal, then we will be more successful.

Usually when we have an opportunity to make a presentation, we get busy thinking about what we will talk about.  The organisers may have set some rails by specifying the theme of the event or they may have asked us to speak on a particular topic.  We are busy and often we start with creating new slides and scanning previous presentations for slides we can recycle.  This is a poor strategy.  What do we bang on about to our staff – plan the event or the project before you get started on the nitty gritty details. However, we neglect our own sage advice when it comes to presenting.

Part of the planning process should involve boiling the key message down to a nub that cleverly, succinctly and concisely summarises the whole point of the talk.  Before we go there though we would be wise to consult others for ideas.  It is a bit odd isn’t it, because we are always recommending collaboration and crowd sourcing of ideas for projects.  How we seek those ideas though is a bit tricky.

Bounding up to someone for your presentation and suddenly saying , “do you have any ideas for this talk I am going to give” may not work all that well.  Teamwork featuring excellent levels of collaboration is a concept, a sacred concept in most firms, but rather undefined.  What is the environment for collaboration?  Are people’s ideas welcomed in your workplace?  Are we able to go outside the workplace and source broader networks for ideas?  Do we have trustworthy networks in the first place?

I had to give a keynote speech to a relocation industry conference in Osaka.  I called my contacts working in that industry and asked them about their issues, headaches and challenges.  I have never worked in that industry and neither had anyone in my company, so I needed that broader network to help me.  The irony was that after all the work I had put into crafting that piece de resistance , Covid put the whole event to the sword. I never did give that talk. It would have been brilliant of course!

Jokes aside, the idea of involving others is a good one, because we only know what we know.  “Two brains are better than one” is ancient wisdom, but how often do we avail ourselves of outside input.  I was getting my book “Japan Sales Mastery” translated and was struggling for the best title in Japanese.  My friend Tak Adachi and I were having lunch and I mentioned my problem.  He said why don’t you just call it “Za Eigyo” or “The Sale”.  My son, later said to me why don’t I drop the katakana for “Za” from the title and just use “The” from English, to become “The Eigyo”. 

This was a smart idea because I am an Australian writing in Japanese about selling in Japan, so the title combines both languages, to differentiate the book as a how foreigner would look at the world of sales in Japan.  I would never have come up with those ideas on my own, so it demonstrated the value of collaboration.

The problem is we all recognise this in theory and we should be applying it to our presentation preparations, but we turn the whole thing into a solitary affair.  We emerge from our cave, brandishing our slide deck and away we go.  Getting more input is a better road to take, but there are some caveats.  People we consult on the spot, will give us the very shallowest of ideas. We need to set this up, explain the theme and then fix a date a few days later, to allow them to digest the theme and work on some ideas.  We are looking for diversity of views here and are not going to make any snap judgments.  We should listen quietly – no interrupting, jumping in over the top of them or ending their sentences.  We then thank them and privately reject, modify or incorporate their ideas.

If we ask them to give some feedback on our ideas, always frame the response.  We want them to tell us what they like about it first and then tell us how we could make it even better.  Confidence is a key aspect when presenting and that includes the preparation phase as well.  This whole effort doesn’t have to take a lot of time, so we are not going to be caught in a time crunch and have to rush things, to be in time for the talk.  More ancient wisdom says we don’t plan to fail, but we often fail to plan.  We can incorporate more ideas into the preparation phase, if we simply plan for it.

The end is near.  The end of Covid that is, as we see vaccinations increase and get us all closer to herd immunity.  When will it end?  There probably will never be an exact end, but it will diminish and our lives will get back to something approaching normality.  That means we will be back in the meeting rooms and speaking venues to give our talks to live audiences.  We have gotten used to online talks, which are the supreme example of impersonal presentations.  The audience are a series of tiny boxes on the screen, some without their cameras on and there is no particular sense of interaction.  We are talking to a camera mounted 10 centimeters or more above where the faces are positioned, so we have little read on the audience reaction to our talk.

Using body language on screen is difficult.  In fact, it is so difficult that almost 99% of speakers don’t use any when they speak online.  They sit there talking and talking, but not involving their hands for gestures or using any facial expression.  Fake backgrounds have taught everyone that if you start waving your hands around they will disappear.  The secret here though is to use gestures, but just don’t wave them around like a pirate captain. When you do move your hands, move them slowly and keep the gestures in the upper shoulder to around ear height range, in order to be easy to see.

When we are live in person, we can rediscover all the benefits of using our full body to emphasise our messages.  When I see speakers standing behind a podium, so that they can operate their laptop or read from their notes, I always think what a waste.  A waste of energy, which could have been distributed to the audience through our full body.  We should move away from the podium and face the audience, so that we can draw on the power of our total body speaking techniques.

This includes using the three distances technique with the audience.  When we want to make a macro point, we can move slightly back from the audience, lift our chin up slightly and employ very large gestures.  When we want a neutral power position, we can be mid-stage and hold our chin level, while employing normal gestures.  If we want to make a micro point, we can move as close as possible to the audience, drop our chin down ever so slightly and use rather smaller gestures.

If it is a big venue, we can cover the left and right sides of the stage too.  When we move though, we should try to avoid speaking while moving.  Walking is a distraction, so we want to minimise this as much as possible and have the audience completely concentrated on our words alone.  We should walk naturally to the very stage apron on the left or right side, so that we are as physically close to that part of the audience as possible.  This physical positioning gives a greater sense of speaker and audience connection.  This is because we are showing we want to move to be with them, rather than remaining a distant, remote speaker on stage, clearly separated from the attendees.

Being in the room, we can now really use our eye power.  Online, we have to train ourselves to look at the camera, but it is a weird experience. The way it works with the technology is such that we cannot see the reactions on the faces below, because we are looking up at the camera lens.  Our talk may as well be delivered by phone, because we are not getting any feedback on the content of what we are saying.  In a live venue, we can see the faces of the audience and can make contact with their eyes.  We should be seeking to hold each person’s gaze, one by one, for six seconds.  This is enough time to make a connection, make the talk feel more personal, yet without the eye contact feeling too intrusive. 

Keeping the lights up, if we are using slides is key, because we want to see their reactions and we want them to see us too.  If any “helpful” individual decides to turn the house lights down while you are speaking, then stop speaking. Pause to build some tension in the room and then release the tension, by asking for the lights to be brought back up again.

We don’t have a chat function live, but you can ask your audience to raise their hands if they agree or disagree with some point you want feedback on.  It sounds funny, but when I have taught classes live, I miss that chat function. It gives you instant feedback from a large number of people and you can comment on their contributions and recognise them, as the chat input pops up onscreen.  Constantly asking the live audience to raise their hands or to all speak up is going to be a shambles. Of course, we have the live Q&A to deal with enquiries and further clarifications, so all is not lost.

At some point soon we will back live. I found there is a transition from the computer screen to the big stage and it takes a bit of adjustment to get back in the saddle. We need to dust off our basic techniques for speaking and be ready to boost our personal and professional brands.  Show time folks!

246: How to be a Star in Business Interviews

Being interviewed by the media can be a high risk affair, depending on the publication, the journalist and the business zeitgeist of the moment.  These types of interviews come up relatively rarely in business.  More common are panel discussions at business events hosted by Chambers of Commerce and more recently interviews on podcasts.  I have been on both sides of the microphone, so let me share some observations which may help you prepare for your interview.

Chamber panels and podcasts are usually not “gotcha” interviews, as we will encounter with some journalists doing media interviews.  Generally, we are going to be treated well and it would be rare that the interviewer really went after you.  Having said that though, we have to expect the interviewer to want to dig down deeper into something you have said.  This can be of two basic varieties. 

One is a high level statement you made where the context and detail is obvious to the speaker.  This may not be obvious to the audience though, so the interviewer will seek more detail and clarification.  In this case, that is not a problem, because we have the depth of mastery of the subject.  The other variety is a statement that may be accepted wisdom or it might be something we have said without giving too much thought to it.  This is when we will get into trouble, because as soon as the interviewer starts to dig in, it becomes plainly obvious we don’t know all that much about it and out pours fluff instead of substance.

The answer here is to talk about things you have experienced, read about in detail, have researched deeply or where you have listened to experts.  This sounds obvious, however we don’t know where we will go with the questions and we can be drawn to stray into areas where our intellectual coverage is pretty thin.  There is nothing wrong with honesty.  Just say, “I don’t have much to say on that subject because I am not an expert in that area. However something I do feel passionate about is…”. Don’t just end it with telling the audience you don’t know much, because we are starting to damage our personal brand. Avoid leaving the conversation hanging in the air with us having admitted we are babbling on about stuff we don’t know too much about. Immediately segue into an area where we are knowledgeable and talk about that.

Always seek the questions in advance.  With media people they will do that, but often they have a couple of silent assassins ready which they will hit you with unexpectedly, to throw you off balance, to gain their “scoop”.  Business panels and podcasts are usually not like that.  Generally, for panels, they will let you know, in general terms, what is the broad discussion they are looking for.  In the case of a panel, it is unpredictable where the conversation will move, but at least there are broad rails bounding the subject matter.  Again, it always better to say you don’t know, than trying to snow the organisers or the audience.  Instead make a comment about some aspect you do know well and preserve your expert status.

For podcasts, you should expect they will have a set list of questions and you should get those in advance.  If the interviewer says something like “I let the muse guide me”, then I wouldn’t recommend joining that podcast, unless you are massively confident about the subject matter.  Generally, there will be prior episodes, so you can get a sense of whether you are in the presence of real genius or a total nutter.  Often there will be a pre-meeting, to go through the episode theme and for them to get a sense of what sort of a guest you will be.  You can also get a sense of who they are too.

Prepare for the questions, but understand you won’t be able to read from notes.  The pace will move too fast for that.  You can glance at your notes, so it is better to have them arranged for easy reference, if you indeed need to do that.  Just having mentally calibrated the questions is usually enough.  Remember you are there because you know about the subject, so it will be easy for you to speak about it.

That is often the real problem.  We do know a lot about the subject and we talk for too long and say too much.  Media interviews are an area where the more concise you are the safer it is.  Panel discussion hosts don’t like guests who want to hog the limelight, so they will unceremoniously cut you off, effectively signalling to the audience that you lack self-awareness. Podcast hosts may just edit the hell out of you.  There is a balance, but being concise comes across a lot better than rambling.  If what you say is a bit too circumspect, the interviewer will draw you out further.  If you hear yourself talking too much, then you probably are, so you need to conclude your remarks on that point and stop.

Rehearse your remarks based on the questions.  Remember these are public occasions and just as you would rehearse for a public speech, you need to do the same for the interview.  This will help you to trim the fluff from your answers and polish them into succinct, clever responses which will shine a positive light on you.  This is just as much your personal brand as giving a keynote speech.  Your fellow panelists or rivals on other podcasts, won’t take this step. Think of these occasions in this way and you will definitely come across as a star.