There are facts, provable information, data, research results and opinions.  What is the right mix when presenting?  Should we just marshal the detail, lay it out for the audience and let them draw their own conclusions or do we need to direct them?  How expert do we have to be to start handing out advice to others?  Are we seeding the emergence of opposition to what we are talking about, because members of the audience don’t want some speaker lecturing to them?  Are we setting ourselves up for a very hot Q&A session, where some of the assembled masses are about to tear shreds off us?

These types of questions are difficult for those of us in industries where we have points of view and are recommending certain actions on the part of the audience.  The training industry is a hot crucible for advice and recommendations for others. We are suggesting things which we believe will help them do better in their companies.  Or it could be that through your own firm’s experiences, you have observed some things to be careful of and you are going to enlighten the audience, so that they don’t repeat the mistakes you made. 

There is certainly a demand for case studies, warnings, examples and the sharing of experiences, in order to guide audiences about where the dangers are and the traps are set.  Just stating our opinion though won’t cut it.  We have to set that up with some evidence, something relatable for the audience, so that they feel what we are saying is credible.  The best options are personal experiences.  These always have the most credence and authenticity.  The second best is the experience of others and the last is published, public information.  In Japan, any time you are tempted to use data to prove a point, you need to have the Japanese version too.  If it is only information collected in the US or in Europe, then Japanese audience members will just discount it, because as far as they are concerned, Japan is always different and the data won’t travel well. 

Often though, we start out with some data and we even raid previous presentations for slides brimming with graphs and diagrams, to use for the next presentation.  That data is too valuable to just leave for one presentation, so we want to recycle it.  Or we might have some recent survey data, which will be fresh for the audience and we want to impress them.  One of the dangers is we get stuck at the data provision level and we don’t relate this to the realities of the audience members.  Data by itself is good, but “what does it mean for me”, is always in the minds of the audience.

This is where we get into the advice business and we have to tread warily.  We have to remain the expert, without becoming the schoolteacher, bossing the audience members around and telling them how to fly straight. Extrapolating what the data shows is a good idea, but there is an element of prophesy built in and basically that is just our opinion.  Instead of getting sucked into the “listen to me now” business, we can approach it in another way.

Rhetorical questions are brilliant for this.  We can lay out the facts or the argument and instead of moving into the advice component, we can ask the audience what they think, without requiring them to vocalise an answer.  We frame the construct and let the question hang there unanswered, so that the audience has to draw their one conclusions.  When we want to add in our point of view, we can do so in a very small target way.  Rather than spruking the answer, we can cloak it in camouflage.

We can say, “there is a view that…” or “ a common conclusion has been….”, or “a perspective I quite like is….” or “most experts seem to agree that….”.  In this way we proffer an answer, without having to attach ourselves to it.  This reduces the friction with highly opinionated audience members, who may want to argue the point with us.  We come across as reasonable, balanced, open, flexible as well as humble. 

We can say, “I will leave it to everyone to make up their own minds on this one”. That is fine but often we are asked to speak because we supposedly know something about the topic and this may come across as a cop out and audience members may feel cheated.  They don’t want a lecture from us, but they are interested in what we think, and they want to hear about that.

Rhetorical questions and a small target strategy will go a long way toward setting the right frame for the talk.  Audiences will vary of course, but if you don’t know what you are facing then caution is a good policy.  You have assembled valuable information, given some guidance and have respected the audience to be capable of reaching their own interpretation of what it all means, while offering your humble insights.  That is a killer combo.

I was held up at the hospital, which those who live in Tokyo will know, is a typical occurrence, so I was late to the presentation. One of the speakers had just started, as I slid into my seat at the back.  The screen was hard to read, because the scale of the content was small.  The presenter was speaking in a voice range which was probably fine for those seated at the most proximate tables, but was hard to catch at the back of the room.  I missed the very start, but I could tell the speakers hadn’t tested the audio or the screen for visibility when they were doing their set up.  They just turned up and turned things on and away they went.  Not a great idea for presenters.

I always recommend to get there early and check for sight lines, audio quality and screen accessibility.  When we are using a screen or a monitor, we have to be careful where we stand, because we can be cutting people out, if they are seated in a spot where we are blocking their sight access to the screen.  We need to know where these invisible boundaries are before we get going.  That is a simple task.  We just go and sit on those chairs and see where the boundary will be for us, when we are standing and presenting.  The same with the size of the fonts and diagrams.  Go to the extreme corners and rear of the seating area and see how clearly those audience members will be able to see what we are presenting on screen.  In this case, there were a lot of small drawings and diagrams and at the back of the venue, they were hard to see.

The audio is another key point.  Speakers are not sound engineers, but they can have the tech team help them to get the volumes right.  In this case, the volumes were too low for the size of the room.  If they had checked it when they arrived, which I doubt, the room would have been empty.  We need to allow for the host of bodies in the room, which will weaken the spread of the audio, once the audience has filed in.  The volume control needs to allow for that and to be set a little higher than normal.  This is another reason why professional speakers always repeat the questions they receive from the audience, if there are no microphones being employed.  The speaker may be able to hear the question, but other members of the audience will have trouble catching what was being asked.  In this case, there were hand microphones for the questioners, so everyone could easily hear the questions.

The other issue was the size of the presentation.  By this, I mean how big were the speakers going with their voices, energy and gestures.  There were two speakers and in both cases they were very contained.  For those seated at the front, it was probably fine, but quite a different experience for those seated at the back.  We have to remember the importance of having “speaker presence”  and adjust ourselves to go bigger when presenting.  This is why sitting in the extreme distance seats at the start, before the audience arrives, is so insightful.  You realise that you are much smaller on stage, for those at the rear, than you imagined.

Getting the voice strength up is important, but often speakers cannot gauge how much stronger they need to be.  They somehow imagine that a normal chatting voice volume can be applied, when they are the presenter.  As presenters, we want to be conversational, but we shouldn’t misunderstand what that means.   We should be relaxed, but louder than in normal conversation. For those seated down the back, we need more energy from the speaker, in order to be able to connect with them.  We buy energy, passion, confidence, commitment and the voice is a major tool to project all of those things.  We don’t have to be shouting, but we do have to be projecting our energy to the far reaches of the room. 

Gestures need to become bigger.  They don’t have to be too exaggerated and massive, but they do have to become bigger.  One exception though, is that if you are ever presenting in a 5000 seat venue, then your gestures really have to be ramped up.  On stage, you are a peanut in size and it is super hard to connect with the people in cheap seats, right down the back.  Even if the venue isn’t that mighty, we still need to be conscious that we have to up our gesture game, to accommodate the audience members at the back.  We cannot be only presenting to those seated up the front. 

The output level of these speakers was at about the 75% range.  They clearly needed to do more to reach all of the people in the room.  If they had these thoughts in mind, when they arrived at the venue, then they would have made the necessary adjustments.  Like a lot of speakers though, they got there, made sure the slides were working and that was the end of it.  Just a little more attention to the venue considerations and the audience positioning and things would have been a lot better.

“You are too loud”, “You are too high energy”.  These were some survey comments following some training I was delivering for 60 managers for a client.  You can imagine that the venue to hold ten tables of 6 participants each has to be quite large and spacious and that was the case.  To project to an audience that size, in such a large venue, means you have to really lift yourself and pump out a lot of energy. The brief from the client was that many of these managers had lost their mojo over the course of Covid and the organisation needed lifting and these were the people who needed to provide that lift.  They wanted the first session to be a motivational speech to inject some missing mojo back into those in the team who were lacking in that department.

With some of those comments coming back in the survey after the session it was obvious that for some of them I was too strong, too powerful and they found that threatening.  Out of 60 how many do I think felt like that?  I would say two or three and as a trainer I would just ignore that group and go for moving the mass of the people and getting them fired up.  If I was the boss, I would look at replacing them with others to lead who would be more suitable for the task.  I would be asking, “if they can’t take a one hour motivational speech, how can they deliver as leaders to their teams?”.  Other comments were “powerful”, “motivating”, “enthusiastic”, etc., so you can see it hit the mark with the majority and as a trainer that is a good result. Training is one thing and presenting is another, but there are obvious overlaps, especially given that first session was a motivational talk.

Is there the danger that if we are too strong as a presenter, we will lose some of our audience, who don’t like all of that power close up and personal?  Also, how much power is too much?  Where is the line to determine we have gone too hard and too far?  A talk is usually around 40 minutes and there are 15 minutes for questions, so the amount of presenting time is contained.  Is it legitimate to go hard during those 40 minutes? 

There are a number of factors to consider.  Who is the audience and what is the point of this talk. The brief in my example was clear – restore their broken mojo and fire them up.  To do that I have to be fired up, high energy, driving, powerful.  If I want to lift them to 100%, then I have to go to 150%.  In a typical business speech we won’t be asked to perform that role.  The topics are usually more technical, we share experiences, explain how we got results and cover problem solving.  We are there to stimulate the thinking of the audience and get them on the road to success.  Do we need to go to 150%?  Actually we might in very short bursts, if we need to make an important point, but we are talking nano seconds here not minutes.

There is also the question of the brand we want for ourselves personally and professionally.  How do we want to be perceived in the market?  If we are coming across in a very mild, low energy manner, that may work for our brand and for some industry audiences, particularly technical groups.  If it was an audience of salespeople, it would be a total dud.  I am a trainer and a salesperson and if I presented in a highly calm, no energy manner, it would be the death knell for my business.  No one would hire me, because I wasn’t being congruent with what I am doing. 

Generally speaking, our talks should be a mixture of energy outputs.  There are certain words we want to highlight to lift their importance above the parapet and make sure they resonate with the audience.  We inject a lot of energy into those words mimicking the highs of classical music.  Classical music cannot just be crescendos or the audience becomes overwhelmed.  There must be lulls too and that contrast is what make both work so well and so it is with public speaking.  All soft or all hard are both bound to fail. 

Most speakers deliver their content to the audience in a monotone voice, which is a great formula for putting people to sleep.  We need to match our energy to our content. Professor Mehrabian discovered in his research in the 1960s, that if the way you are delivering the content doesn’t match the content, then that lack of congruency confuses the audience and they get distracted.  In his day, that distraction would be evidenced with the audience concentrating on how we look and how our voice sounds, instead of on what we are saying. Today the audience would be lurching for their phones to escape the speaker and get on to the internet to access their social media feeds. 

This means where there are points in the talk which call for more enthusiasm, we should raise our energy and voice and show more passion.  If it requires a calm demeanour, then that is what we need to be presenting to the audience.  We cannot have a Johnny One Note approach of one setting on the energy dial from start to finish.  Our variation in energy and output is the key.

 “I have been presenting since I was 17, but I am not good at engaging the audience”.  This comment from a man in his fifties was telling.  He was in a very technical area which requires a highly acute mind and he is a leader in that field.  He has a big job today for a famous brand name firm.  If he has been getting lots of practice presenting since a young age, why has he not been able to transition across to engaging his audience?  He made the comment to me unprompted, so he was aware of the gap and had not been able to bridge it yet under his own steam.

I told him that in one particular course we have, that stretches over two days, by mid-afternoon on Day One the participants start to stop focusing on themselves and really start working their audience and this just continues for the next day and a half.  If it is that quick, why can’t he get to that point by himself?  The simple answer is the expertise of the instructors and the coaching being handed out.

If you don’t know what you are looking for, it is hard to hit the target and by that, I don’t mean having some vague idea of what you want to achieve in audience engagement terms.  The instructors know what they are looking for and so they push the participants to rise to the occasion and start connecting with the people they are talking to.  The coaching shows the way forward and the repetition with feedback is the key to refining this part of the presenter’s arsenal.

The big breakthrough comes in a couple of forms.  One is the energy flow.  When we are just handing over information, we retain all the energy within ourselves and are just going through the motions with a major data dump.  We are putting the information under the audience’s noses and then just leaving it up to them to digest it.  When we want to engage the audience, we start directing our intrinsic energy known as “ki” in Japanese, into the audience.  Anyone who has studied martial arts will have a good idea of what I am talking about.

This requires that we are pumping out energy to those in front of us.  That sounds simple enough but a lot of people are very mild mannered and softly spoken.  Consequently they become invisible to their audience and nothing they present resonates nor retains.  We need to purposely lift our energy and then direct it to the audience members and we need to do that one person at a time.  Pushing the energy out en masse, means the energy is diluted and the spell is broken. 

For some people pushing out a lot of energy is something they don’t normally do, so they are resistant to increasing the energy flow.  They imagine they can address the audience just as they would their friend over coffee.  That is definitely not the case and presenting and chatting are light years apart in the galaxy of public speaking.

I saw this recently with a very senior person giving a talk.  She is a very mild mannered, softly spoken person.  That is fine, except if you want to have impact with an audience you need to increase the energy and particularly the voice volume.  For her, anything above a chat level of speaking would feel totally crazy, as if she was hysterical and was screaming at people.  Not true.  What happens is we feel your confidence and we feel your energy and we gravitate toward both. 

I know I could get her from totally forgettable to remarkable in thirty minutes of coaching, but mentally she is not interested in that, because she doesn’t value public speaking enough to want to make the change.  So be it, but the downside is, she stays invisible.  I think that is a bad idea.

By talking to the audience one person at a time, we can direct the energy flow straight to each person, one by one, and they immediately feel it.  We combine this energy direction with our eye power.  The usual formula is for the speaker to look at everyone and therefore no one. Our eye power is now diluted.  When we give six seconds of eye power to each person, we are making a powerful direct connection, which for the audience member is tremendously impactful.  They really feel we are talking to them only, in the room, for that moment and the link between us is palpable.

When we add in our gestures to the pot, we are now cooking up a magic broth, which really engages the audience.  There is the issue of knowing what to do, getting coached so that you can refine it and having the desire to make the necessary changes to accomplish this connection with the audience.  If the desire isn’t there, than no amount of professional coaching will work.  The problem for most people is all they have ever seen are presenters talking at their audience rather than speakers deeply engaging their audience.  When we see what is possible, it opens our eyes up and we realise the gap between where we are today and where we could be.  Get the desire and get the coaching.