I am just back from a highly pointless presentation. The bureaucrats who run the Tokyo Metro subway system and the Tokyo Government Planning Division were presenting on their plan for a new subway line to be constructed in my neighbourhood. This is my second occasion to attend one of these types of presentations. The previous one was about changing the direction of aircraft landing at Haneda and for planes to fly low over our neighbourhoods, which unfortunately are in the new direct flight path. These “explanation sessions” are pointless for many reasons, including the way they are conducted.
There is no real appetite to entertain the viewpoint of the assembled residents and so the design is to obscure, divert and suck up as much time as possible with administrative aspects of the meeting, in order to limit the question time.
Interestingly they had a slide show, which had an announcer read the whole content to us. Why was that required, when everyone can read what is on screen? To use up the question time of course. Question time itself was interesting in the way they handled it. Somewhat surprisingly, they do what we teach regarding hostile questions. They had a navigator take the hot question, then paraphrase it, removing all the venom and spiky bits, before handing it over to the supposed experts.
You might be thinking, “well these are government bureaucrats, so there is no relation to the world of commerce”. Often we can see the flaws in others, but ignore those same flaws in ourselves. Japanese business presentations are very formal. There will be a navigator to tell us things, like where the exits are located and to turn off our phones. The President giving the talk will often not be highly familiar with the slides prepared by the underlings and will read the whole thing to us.
Sometimes, if there is a screen located behind the podium, they will unhelpfully turn their back to us and their head toward the screen and then read the whole content to us. Often, there will be a slick corporate video shown, the main purpose of which is to reduce the President’s speaking time burden and which adds very little value to the presentation.
Taking the sting out of questions is a legitimate technique, but you still have to handle the questions. Today there was a lot of dissembling of answers and that is never satisfactory. The same things happen in business. You can see the speaker is flustered by the question and doesn’t know how to handle it. The first problem is they go directly to answer mode, instead of creating a little brain space to think about the answer. Invariably, we have all had the experience of coming up with the killer answer about two hours too late, for when we needed it. What came out of our mouth though was the first thing which popped into our mind and obviously that will never be as good as a more considered answer. Our mouth was too close to our ear and our brain wasn’t engaged fast enough, before we blurted out our response. We can wind up sprouting nonsense in reply to the question.
Just adding a little cushion makes a world of difference. The cushion is that space between the question ending and the answer proper beginning. You might ask them to repeat the question or you can paraphrase what they said or you can make a neutral comment such as, “that is a very important consideration” or all three, to gain thinking time. Five seconds does a wonder of good when it comes to contemplating how to handle tough questions. Naturally, our answers won’t always be satisfying for certain members of the audience, but we need to explain the logic of our approach, decisions or our actions.
If we don’t know the answer, then trying to snow the audience, instead of admitting the truth is a guaranteed way to destroy our reputation. Audiences will accept it if you say to the questioner, “I don’t have an answer for that point at the moment, but let’s exchange business cards after my talk and I will find the answer for you. Who has the next question?”.
Now this only works when the question is very specific and the answer is not something that you would be expected to necessarily have at your fingertips. If it is within the scope of your subject and you don’t know the answer, then that is a black mark on your professionalism. You see this sometimes from jet setting VIPs who swoop in to give their talk, before they head off to their next engagement. It is a PR exercise which can go wrong very quickly. Their presentation was prepared for them and they think their job is to just read it out to us. Again, it is better to be honest and admit you should know that answer, apologise that you don’t and promise to get the answer to the questioner. None of us are perfect, so we will accept your odd flaw and imperfection.
We should always keep in mind that every time we get up to speak, we are punting our personal and professional brands out there for all to see. Prepare thoroughly and rehearse, rehearse, rehearse is the right formula. If we do that, people will come away impressed with us and feel the time spent was worthwhile and they will be looking forward to hearing from us again in the future.
The request has been made to give a talk on a certain subject. The date and time are fixed and now the work begins on the preparation. Here is how not to do it! Start with plundering previous slide decks for re-usable content and create new original content for this particular presentation. Fuss mightily over which slides go in and which go out. Discover even after that Herculean effort to pare down the beast, that it still needs bits to be lopped off. Does this sound tremendously familiar to you when getting ready to give a presentation? Well if this is what not to do, then exactly what are we supposed to be doing?
The warm embrace of an existing tried and true slide deck and the excitement of grabbing new materials and wrangling it into a slide, can be intoxicating I know, however we have to consider what is the point here. A collage of slides is not a central message and there lies the problem. Before we even think of any cool visuals, we need to plumb the depths of our brain for what it is we want our audience to know and believe. We need to boil all the possibilities down to a single, crystal clear and pungent message.
This is harder than it seems, because there are a number of attractive messages we could be focusing on. So which is the right one? This is where we discover we have to take one step back and understand better, who is going to be in our audience. The topic will give us a hint of prospective acolytes, we can urge to join our cause. The organisers will have a good idea of who normally turns out for this topic. As they get the registrations, we can know precisely who will be our listeners, presuming the hosts will share that information. Even if they don’t pony up the info, they will usually tell us which companies are going to be attending. Once we get some indication of who will be our audience, we can start to think about which message is most likely to hit the bullseye the best.
Having done this part of the preparation, the temptation is to now plunge into the slides and start arranging them accordingly, simultaneously working out which new slides are needed. We have to switch the mindset from slide equals important to story equals important. The dilemma with data and information is that it is raw and inert. When we can wrap that information up in a story, we are really starting to motor along. The reason is simple. Data by itself lacks context and colour. Also a lot of data is hard to visualise or comprehend. Rattling off some statistics may have our audience’s eyes glazing over. If we convert those numbers into something they can understand, then it has potency. A classic example is numbers of football fields to represent the area’s size. If we can tie that data to a person and what it meant for them, then we bring the whole point alive.
It is almost impossible to relate to measurements, but we can easily relate to someone else’s experiences. Hopefully, it is no longer the case, but beer has been an arbiter of distance in Australia. I remember meeting a fellow student at University and when he told me his home town, I asked him how far away it was from Brisbane. His answer was a classic. In true laconic fashion, he casually replied, “about six stubbies”, meaning the time it would take you to drink six small bottles of beer, while driving the distance. Jail time today, but this was back in the day.
The beauty of telling stories is it forces the focus to be on us, the speaker, rather than the screen. Today’s video meetings make this even more pressing. I was coaching a senior executive regarding a talk she had to make to senior management. In the process, it became obvious to me that she should either scrap the slides altogether or just use a very small number. Her objective was to have impact, to propel her personal brand forward and position herself for a major global position. If she used a lot of slides in the limited time she had for their attention, on video, she would be captured in a tiny little box on the top right of the screen monitor, while the slides monopolised most of the screen real estate. By dispensing with or paring back the screen “share” function, she would have the chance to look straight into the green dot, where the camera is, on the top of her laptop and be seen by the viewers in full and seen looking straight at them.
Without visuals she now has to paint a picture for the audience. She can tell a story about when this incident took place. For example, she can create the temporal indications by referring to the season, “it was three years ago and heavy snow fell in New York that day”. Now we know when it was, where it was and have a mental image of snowy New York streets. Next, we need some people in this story, preferably people the audience will know.
“I bumped into Warren Buffett who was wearing a thick coat and a long scarf, as he was leaving the Rockefeller Center and I asked him….”
Most people know of the Rockefeller Center and Warren Buffett, so they can imagine the snowy scene in their minds. Do we need a slide with a photograph of a snowy New York street or one with Warren Buffett in it? Probably not, if we are telling the story well and it keeps all the attention on us and not letting it leach out to our tough competitor - the slide deck.
Slides have their place. I do Iike photographs with no words on the slide and then I tell the story, explaining the symbolism of the image. Unlike text, detailed spreadsheets, graphs or tables of numbers up on screen, the slide with a photo takes about one second to process and then the listeners are open to my story. We don’t have to make or recycle slides, if we change our mindset to storytelling and then plan the talk from there rather than the other way around. When it is your personal and professional brand out there on display, these choices make a big difference.
Self-awareness, self-belief, self-direction, self-discipline – there are a host of these “self” aspects to who we are and often related to who we are not. If you grew up with a silver spoon firmly in your mouth, went to expensive, exclusive private schools, extensively travelled abroad with your parents at a young age and enjoyed the summers at your Swiss Boarding school in your youth, that is terrific. The chances are strong that your self-belief is strong and your expectations even higher. A lot of things have coalesced to help you be successful in life and along the way, you have been in an environment where being able to speak in front of others has been as natural as learning how to swim well.
Probably for most of us, me included, this sounds like exceptional skill in parent selection. If the path in life has been rocky or even just “ordinary”, none of these advantages have been a factor in your life and career progression. Maybe you were able to pull yourself up by your own efforts and have achieved some success, to the degree that you are now someone who is asked to speak in front of others. Or maybe, you are an ordinary mortal, but through some strange fate, the firm wants you to speak to your team or the broader organisation or even in public, to industry groups.
I now own my own company outright, have a Ph.D. in political science and international relations, am a 6th Dan in traditional karate and so you might be tempted to think, “naw, he wouldn’t be someone who suffers from imposter syndrome”. I wish that was true. You may know this saying, “You can take the boy out of Brisbane, but you can’t take the Brisbane out of the boy”. I have spent over half my life living in Japan now, but I am still that boy from Brisbane, with the poor parent selection abilities.
In my case, I do a lot of public speaking. I also release six podcasts a week, of which five are what I write, based on my own experience and the curriculum from Dale Carnegie. I am constantly putting myself out there into the world, publicly exposing myself to judgement and critique. How do you go from where you came from, to now positioning yourself as an expert? This is where the imposter syndrome raises its ugly head. “Who do you think you are, to be putting all this stuff out into the ether?”, says the voice of doubt deep inside your head.
Perfectionism is a big blocker for all of us. We feel because we are still incomplete, not perfect, we don’t have the right to stand up in front of others and speak about our topic. We worry about being judged and found short. This is the highest hurdle to clear. Rather than perfectionism, we need to be thinking in terms of relativities. There is an old saying that “the one-eyed man is king, in the kingdom of the blind”. That is us. We have some small extra degree of concrete knowledge or experience, which may be more than what most people have accumulated, but it is certainly not absolute. We don’t claim to have absolute knowledge on any subject. We note that we are perpetual students of the subject and are treading the path still, on the learning journey.
This is very freeing. If we are speaking in front of others and we discover we have a bona fide expert on our subject in the audience, we shouldn’t feel scared, diminished or that we need to become competitive with them. We should celebrate the fact they are attending and ask their views on some pertinent aspect of the subject, in particular an area where they may have substantially more knowledge or experience that we have. Here is the surprise. Your audience will appreciate their attendance and your ability to have them share. They will not stand up and start denouncing you as a charlatan, a fraud and someone who should be run out of town on a rail.
We all understand that none of us have perfect knowledge on any subject, that we are all in the process of progressing and when you freely admit this, there is no target to attack. In karate we call it taisabaki – a movement to the side, which robs the attacker of a hard target. All they wind up doing is striking thin air, because you are no longer there directly in front of their blow. When presenting we do the same. We slip off to the side and admit we don’t have perfect knowledge, we acknowledge the expertise or experience of members of the audience and we keep out brand intact.
The golden rule is never argue with the members of the audience. Accept they may have a different view, allow them to express it and let the audience make up their own mind about the point at issue. If you become obstinate, then you are getting into the perfectionism zone and you will always be found wanting.
The hardest attack is when the person cherry picks something you said, takes it out of context or misrepresents it, trying to make you look stupid. This happened to me during a Clubhouse discussion on selling in Japan. I should have handled it better, but the sudden public opposition to my opinion released a fog in my brain, so it wasn’t as sharp as it should have been. I did have the perfect rejoinder about an hour later, but it was way too late by then. I did beat myself up about that, but then I realised, “hey, I did have the rejoinder for the next time and I will be ready to go in the future”.
If we have integrity and admit we don’t have perfect knowledge or complete experience, we are in a good position to stand up in front of others and offer what we do know. If we have the humility to allow diverse views and opinions, we don’t present any target for someone the hit.m If we honestly face out own limitations, then we will interact with others in a manner which invites trust and acceptance. If we are supremely nervous about giving this presentation, then we are never, ever going to betray any sign of that. “Keep it to yourself” is the best policy. No one will notice, because they want us to succeed and we will.
How good is your Mongolian? Well, I don’t know even one word in Mongolian, but I learnt a powerful lesson about presenting and communicating, when grappling with this language recently. I am a Master Trainer for Dale Carnegie and most of my time is spent working here for Japanese clients. Occasionally, I am asked to work with Dale Carnegie colleagues from other parts of the world, usually in APAC, to help certify their new trainers. This is how I came to be working with ten budding trainers from Ulan Bator.
My instruction was given in English, but their own role plays and practice pieces, were done in Mongolian. I wondered at the start, how on earth can I coach these people, if I can’t understand their language? I was surprised though by a number of things. We communicate with words, but we also communicate with structure, energy, passion, voice pacing and body language.
Listening to their role plays, I could tell if they were not following the structure they were supposed to be using, even though I couldn’t understand one word of what they were saying. This just reinforced for me the importance of designing our presentations using a clear structure, such that one each section flows seamlessly into the next section. We will have a number of points and sub-points in our talks and we will have chapters in the talk as well, as we move from one subject to the next. We need to make sure the sub-points flow and are obviously relevant, regarding the main thesis we are making in our presentation.
We also need to make sure we have bridges to link the chapters together. If we just leap from one topic to the next, our audience may get lost and not make the connection. We know our subject intensively and extensively, so we have no problem juxtaposing the chapters together. However, someone hearing about content like this for the first time may struggle to follow the arc of the narrative we are explaining. The bridge doesn’t have to be extensive or complicated, but it needs to be designed from the start.
I enjoyed the Chinese classic, The History of The Three Kingdoms. At the end of each chapter, the author would say something like, “if you want to know what happened to Li Xue, then read the next chapter”. Such a primitive tool to link the story together, but it worked, because you were really wondering what was going to happen to Li Xue. We can do much better than that I am sure and we should. Let’s work on our bridging technique to link the talk together using all the component parts.
The energy levels of the different trainers were also a good indicator for me of the attractiveness of the content. I had no idea what the exact content was in Mongolian, but the degree of energy each speaker employed, transposed to me the amount of interest I should have in what they were saying. I noticed that if they were not injecting enough energy, I didn’t feel much resonance with them. Those who could operate at the higher energy levels kept my concentration, regardless of the 100% linguistic barrier separating us.
Training people and giving public talks, basically requires the same skill set in communication terms. Both need to be pumping out vast levels of energy throughout. Remember, the level of energy we employ for a chat over coffee is not what we need to be tapping into when we are on stage. Our role is now totally different and we have to move up some gears and adopt a much more powerful persona when we are on stage.
Vocal variety is so important. If we are too soft or too strong all the way through, as if the volume control was stuck on the one setting, then we will lose the attention of our audience. If the speaker is too low key in their delivery from start to finish, the audience quickly gets bored and they start daydreaming about something else or even more likely today, they are lunging for their phones to escape from us, to the lure of the internet.
If we are all relentless fire and brimstone, they get tired under the relentless bombardment from us. What I noticed from the class participants was the variation in their vocal delivery kept my attention, even though I was oblivious to the meaning of what they were saying. I thought, “Wow, if you can get this much impact in a foreign language, how much more potential is there when you are using your own native language when presenting”. The issue is often we forget about this and we get stuck in the one groove throughout our talk.
None of the things I have mentioned here are new, complicated or difficult, but like a lot of things we know but don’t do. Teaching the candidates from Mongolia was a good reminder for me of things I should be paying more attention to in my presentations. We all get into habits and lose some of the self-awareness we need to keep improving in our craft. Let’s not do that!