American politics is a must watch for the rest of us.  Whoever becomes the next President will have major ramifications for every country on the planet.  I will not get into a political discussion about who should be the next leader, but I do want to pick up on some relevant aspects of the campaigns.  In particular, the way Joe Biden handled the recent debate and the subsequent massive criticisms of his public speaking ability.

I wonder how many of the people concerned about his poor performance are also having the same issues?  The major conclusions from the debate were that he was low energy.  He may or may not have had a cold, but he was certainly low energy as a presenter.  What do I see, though, in most business presentations by leaders?  If they are Japanese CEOs, then invariably, they are also low energy.  Don’t stand out in the crowd is how you “go along to get along” in Japan, so this low energy approach is baked into the culture.

That is all right then, isn’t it? When in Tokyo, do as the local Tokyoites do when presenting. Actually, no, it is not okay.  Being able to have an audience absorb our message is the goal, otherwise why are we presenting?  Low energy presenters are vying with the allure of the internet for the attention of the audience. If, as the speaker, we are not gripping the listener’s focus, they will switch that focus away from us to their email or social media – while we are still talking.  These days, even the good presenters have people in the crowd multi-tasking on their phones at the same time.

Here is the point: criticize Joe for his low energy, but just make sure you are not doing a version of that yourself.  Are you able to hit keywords and phrases to lift their value in a sentence? Are you able to move words to a higher plane to grab interest from the listeners?  Democracy is great, but there is only the dictatorship of the most important words in a sentence to be applied when speaking.  Not every word has equal rights and equal value, so elevate those which are more important to your message.

Joe is certainly not a fluent speaker of English.  In fact, he has never been a fluent speaker of English because of the stutter he has had his whole life.  What is amazing to me is that someone with such a stutter should choose a line of work which requires a lot of speechmaking.  Somehow, he has adapted his speaking to account for this stutter and that directly impacts his timing and speed of speech.  Well done, Joe, for being able to take such an obvious high profile speech defect and overcome it to be able to speak in public as a politician. I hope it gives encouragement to others who have the same malady. The lesson here is if you work on it, you too can improve your public speaking ability.  Maybe you won’t become an outstanding speaker, but at least you can become effective.

I have never stuttered, but I have done its close cousin – umming and ahing. This can be similarly distracting as someone with a stutter.  I worked with a colleague whose every few words were interspersed with “ums”.  It was seriously, seriously painful to have to listen to him. What can we do about overcoming this annoying habit?

The clue is to focus on the first word of each sentence, hit that word hard, say the sentence and then purse your lips, and rinse and repeat.  Over time, the umming and ahing will lessen.  I don’t think I have 100% eradicated my old habit, but I know it is a lot better today, by following this simple technique.

Another useful habit has been to use pauses more effectively when I am speaking.  The filler words are just our brain buying to time to construct the next sentence and decide how we want to say our thoughts out aloud. The pause delivers the same thinking time payoff, without the annoyance.

Another criticism of Joe was that he was sometimes rambling. This happens in CEO speeches too.  They fail on three levels usually.  One is they don’t take public speaking seriously enough, usually because they are technical people who consider this stuff as fluff.  They were great at maths, chemistry and physics at school, but were duds in English class.

Secondly, they have not spent the time and effort to sufficiently plan the speech and focus on the navigation to make it easy for the audience to follow. I was attending the speech of a global CEO pre-Covid and honestly, I was listening hard, but was still lost.  He went off on a tangent and “esoteric” is a kind word to try to describe what he was on about.  Actually, it was flat out puzzling what was the point.

I asked some of the others sitting at the table, after the speech, if they could follow him and, like me, they were similarly lost. When we speak, we have to make sure that the direction of where we are going with the point is clear to the audience. Each section must link to the next and there has to be a navigable flow to the thoughts and arguments.

The other speech preparation fatality is rehearsal.  I will be bold and assert that 99% of business speeches are only ever given once – to that audience, on that day, at that specific time.  The preparation time is usually sucked up with the slide deck assembly.  No time is left to actually do a full run through of the talk before it is unleashed on a live audience.

Rehearsal allows us to understand the time control required, to check the fluency of how we deliver the talk and whether all the bits stitch together properly or not.  Please, please, please schedule time for the rehearsal.  Also, carefully instruct those giving you feedback, to only give you “good/better” feedback. Otherwise, they will launch a witch hunt of your public speaking misdemeanors and destroy your confidence entirely.

Joe may have been a train wreck during the debate, but let’s not crow too loudly about his faults, when we may still share versions of them ourselves. We should always be looking to learn something from both fabulous and underwhelming speakers. Remember, in the latter case, without training, “but for them there go I”, applies in spades when presenting.

What an interesting panel discussion we had.  Georg Loer, an old friend of mine, after 17 years running NRW Global which stands for North Rhine Westphalia, was handing over the reins to Carolina Kawakubo.  The guest panellist was Jesper Koll, a very well-known economist here in Tokyo.  All three have been guests on my podcast Japan’s Top Business Interviews with Carolina #19, Georg #83 and Jesper #87.  An interesting contrast in presentation styles on display that evening.

Jesper is a very accomplished speaker.  He has developed his own style and is quite distinct.  He brings a lot of energy, wit and solid data to his talks.  Normally, his talks are a walk through his slide deck where he has assembled very interesting data on what is happening in Japan and he always brings some fresh insights to the statistics.  On this occasion, there were no slides supporting what he was saying, so I was interested to see how he would approach it.

This is important, because as a speaker, if we are too reliant on the visuals for the navigation and the IP, then we can get into trouble if there is a tech glitch or we aren’t able to marshal our argument without the deck.  Tech problems are always a possibility, so I suggest you just print them out and bring them with you.  If the slides can’t be seen, you at least can see what you would have shown and can talk to the points.  The audience can’t see them and please do not hold them up, as I have seen one memorably bad speaker do.  You can grasp the main point of the slide and then just talk to that point.

Jesper, always the consummate professional, just listed the numbers off from his prodigious memory. He could paint word pictures for us, without needing to reference any screen.  Now if you are like me and can’t even spell “prodigious” let alone claim such a memory, you can just note down some key numbers on notes.  Don’t read the notes to us, but certainly consult them.  No one in the audience is going to jump to their feet and denounce you as a charlatan and fraud for having to consult your notes.

Jesper has also come up with an aggressive technique with his audiences using rhetorical questions.  He will wander over to some poor unsuspecting member of the audience seated there in front of him, and towering over them, ask them a very detailed specific question.  The trick with a rhetorical question is the person on the receiving end can’t know if this is an actual question they need to answer or whether it is a question, the speaker is about to answer on their own.  The panic which ensues with the audience members ensures everyone stays awake and alert when Jesper is speaking.  He always rescues the audience member and supplies the answer to their massive relief.

Georg was very avuncular that evening.  He has a quiet, calm manner anyway, and he was clearly giving the stage and baton to Carolina as his successor.  He even dressed down, with just trousers, a white, short-sleeved shirt and casual shoes.  No suit, no tie – very informal and a clever visual signal that the stage belongs to Carolina now. He spoke with that quiet confidence of having done every aspect of this investment and trade promotion work for nearly two decades and having nothing to prove and no need to impress.  He knows his stuff and applied a very intimate conversational tone for that assembly of friends and supporters that evening.  This very personal approach brings his audience to him as he is projecting we are all one big team here, you and I.

Carolina was such a contrast with some senior executives I spoke about recently in episode #393.  They were vying with each other for selection and had two minutes to introduce themselves and sell their advocacy to the voting audience.  One of them couldn’t manage that much and had to read his introduction to us.

By contrast, she was so professional.  She was dressed for the occasion in a dark suit to add credibility to her talk.  No notes, of course and speaking with great confidence.  It is no easy thing to follow on from someone who has been in that same position for 17 years and who everyone in the audience knows intimately.  Confidence is such an important element for the speaker.  That sound in our voice that we know what we are doing and who we are is transmitted straight to the audience and they receive our signal. She did a great job, said the right things and said them in the right way.  She was totally congruent with her talk.

So three contrasting styles with the bombastic Jesper, the calm Georg and the aspirant Carolina.  They were different approaches, but they all worked for the speakers. It is a very broad church and there is plenty of scope for all of us to develop our own style as a speaker.

The premise of tonight's theme is how we position ourselves for the client before we even meet them. With the advent of social media, people will know they are going to meet you and will check you out. That wasn't possible before, but it certainly is now. So, how do we put ourselves in the best light, in the best position before we meet the buyer or the client? That's what I'll be looking at tonight.

A bit about Dale Carnegie: we're a very well-established company, 112 years old, originating in New York, and we've been in Japan for 61 years. We have 200 offices around the world and are quite well known. These are our locations, so wherever you're coming from, we’re probably there. We have eight million graduates and 100,000 in Japan. Warren Buffett is a graduate, as is Chuck Norris, one of my favourites, and the current president of Shiseido, Uotani san, is also a graduate.

These books are very well known: How to Win Friends and Influence People, Hito Wo Ugokasu, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Michi Wa Hirakeru, all very well-known books. They sell well. Dale Carnegie's book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, is consistently in the top ten business books in every language every year around the world. In the publishing industry, they say there are two massive long-sellers: one is the Bible, and the second one is Dale Carnegie's book, which is just incredible but true. So it does very well.

My theme here is that in business, know, like, and trust are some fundamentals. People have to know you to do business with you. They have to like you, generally speaking. While we might do business with people we don't like, it's not our preference, and they have to trust us. Now, I'm not going to deal with like and trust tonight. That's too much, but I’ll deal particularly with getting to know you, and we'll look at that.

So, how do I build credibility before I meet the buyer? How do I establish that remotely? That’s what we'll be looking at.

In 2010, I was scared of social media. I wasn’t on any social media at all, and these are the themes I was worried about. It was an unknown thing to me. I didn’t understand it. I thought, oh, my identity will be stolen. They’re going to hack my credit card. Trolls will hammer me if I post something. I was scared. At that time, social media was fairly limited. LinkedIn was the longest-running, but it was really a recruiting site for people posting their resumes. Facebook was mainly in America. Twitter was only four years old by that time, and Instagram was only one year old. It was all very new, and I was scared of it. Then something happened.

I met Jeffrey Gitomer, an American, a very famous author on sales, and an interesting character. He attended our Dale Carnegie International Convention in San Diego, which, by the way, is a beautiful place. I was very impressed by San Diego. He said to the convention delegates, all Dale Carnegie people, "How many people are on Twitter?" Nobody was on Twitter. Trust me, nobody. At that stage, he had 30,000 followers on Twitter, and he basically said to us, "You are all idiots." He didn't say that directly, but that was the message. "You should get onto social media." I thought, well, okay, he’s probably right. I should check this out. So that’s where I started.

I also got into a thing called content marketing. I had never heard this expression before, and there was a very good podcast with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose called This Old Marketing, which was really pioneering and promoting the whole concept of content marketing. I started listening to these guys and learning about content marketing, which was a revolutionary idea at the time: you put your best stuff out there for nothing. At that time, people were protecting their IP, hiding their details, their data. But they said, no, you put it out there. That was not a typical idea at that time. So I was studying that.

Today, I have 27,680 followers on LinkedIn and 3,383 articles and blogs published on LinkedIn. On Facebook, I have 4,200 friends. I’m not really big into Facebook, to be honest. On Instagram, I have 536 followers. I only started Instagram recently. On Twitter, I don’t have many followers. I’ve never quite come to grips with Twitter myself. I post on it but never look at it, basically.

As mentioned by Jeff, we started YouTube in 2013 and called it Tokyo Japan Dale Carnegie TV. Now, we have 1,920 subscribers. It has taken a long time to get over 1,000 and close to 2,000. Very hard work. We have 2,500 videos on YouTube, which is a lot. And of course, we’re a training company, so we have lots of content in the areas we cover. Another big influence on me was Grant Cardone, another American, a very famous hardcore sales guy, very successful. He makes this point: we are all invisible. I was talking about know, like, trust. But if you’re invisible, how do you build a business? People don’t know you, and that’s what he’s on about. People don’t know you. You have to make a big effort to get out there and be known. So I took that on board and said, okay, I have to become more visible. I have to work on that.

Social media is one of the big content marketing delivery mechanisms. We’re trying to get attention. Where is the attention on social media? Are we where the buyer's attention is found on social media? Are we where they’re looking on social media? In Japan, YouTube kills everything with 102 million. Next is Line, of course. X, formerly known as Twitter. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. LinkedIn has very low numbers, just three million. But if you’re in the expat community, it would be an incredibly high proportion of people on LinkedIn. My personal main target is expat leaders because I have all these Japanese working for them who need training. If I can get to the expat leader, maybe I can get the whole company. So that’s one of my targets.

Yes, it’s true. Facebook is basically Japanese. The comment was that Facebook is like LinkedIn for Japanese, and very true. I post all my stuff on Facebook. I post on all these things except for Pinterest. I don’t do Pinterest, and I can’t work out how to use Line. If I could work it out, I’d probably do something there, but I haven’t yet. We are trying to dominate our niches as a training company.

This gets tricky because we have three main curriculum areas: leadership, presentation, and sales. If we were only doing leadership, that would be one level of content we need to produce. But we’re not just doing leadership, so we have to produce a lot of content to compete with others who specialise in leadership. We have to produce a lot of content to compete with people who specialise in presentations and the same for sales. So we are tripling what would be a normal company's requirement, which is why we’re pumping out so much content.

What about AI? You might think, "No problem, AI will produce this presentation for tonight." In thirty seconds, you’ve got it. How easy is this? AI will write some posts for LinkedIn, and bingo, out comes the content. We are redundant as content creators because AI will do it all for us. Well, maybe. Your rivals might be using it. Maybe you’re using it. But how can we differentiate our content? Here are some ideas.

First of all, it doesn’t know your stories. It hasn’t been able to scrape those. Your personal stories are only known to you. You have a hundred percent control of that. When you write LinkedIn posts, AI tends to be a bit generic in the way it creates content. You look at the outputs, and they all have a similar style. But if you write as you speak, in the vernacular, that’s very much you. Very authentic, very individual, and with your own point of view. AI will scrape all of the world’s viewpoints on a topic, but you have your own individual viewpoint. That’s unique.

You must become highly skilled in presenting. You can get the best content from AI, but you still have to stand up here and deliver it. AI might do this online with an avatar, but in the real world, no. It can’t do it. Have your own personal style, which is hard to duplicate.

Some of my differentiation approaches include using my title, Dr. Greg Story. I have a PhD, and I use that distinctly because I’m in the training business. You’d rather be taught by Dr. Story than someone with just a basic degree, right? So I use that as a differentiator through my education as branding. I use a lot of alliteration when I write: "super sushi service." It’s alliteration. I use that style for my writing and use words in unexpected ways, normal words but in slightly unexpected ways. When you’re reading, it feels a bit different because it’s me. Others won’t do it. AI certainly won’t do it. I try to use unusual words to differentiate and have a style that’s recognisable. I hope that when you see my stuff, you’ll say, "Oh, that’s written by Greg Story" as opposed to anyone else. I also try to include personal stories to connect with my audience and make the content relatable and memorable.

So, AI is a tool we can use, but to truly stand out and make our content unique, we have to infuse it with our personal touch, experiences, and style. That’s something AI can’t replicate.

Again, to differentiate, to have a style that's recognizable. I hope that when you see my stuff, you'll say, oh, that's written by Greg's story as opposed to it could bewritten by anybody. And then try to include personal storiesto connect with my Now, I I avoided that.

And I broadcast, as Jeff said, video. I broadcast audio.

And then, what's your message?

And then, you can have a story with a lesson, a parable, something that you've learned. Something happened. You've learned a lesson from that and you share that lesson. So these are some typical storytelling themes we can use when we're putting together our content.

But I finally broke through as a presenter. I started sharing my personal information. I found I could connect with people in a way I wasn't able to connect so well before.

But we have these self limiting beliefs. The point is we've got to get over those. If we're going to project ourselves into the market and be credible with clients before we meet them, they've got to know us. We've got to get out there.So let's work on that.

But we've got some self limiting beliefs.

For example, I had a meeting with the president.

I had a meeting with Suzuki Taro, the president.

I hate being recorded on camera. I'm an introvert.

I knew where to hit certain words and phrases, key ideas,and bring my energy to that point in the sentence. Very hard for AI to know how to do that. So these are things that differentiate.

I think the name Story, someone can correct me here, but it's actually originally a Scandinavian name.

I try to make the client the hero.

I try to use my own cadence, my own rhythm. When I'm highlighting key ideas and phrases, which again, it's going to be very hard for AI to replicate that because it's my definition. For example, I've recorded one of my books,Japan Sales Mastery, whichn just about killed me, I've got to tell you. I can't believe how hard narrating your own damn book is.

I used to be scared of the camera, but I've managed to get over that and I am an introvert, actually. So this is very taxing for me tonight to have all these people in the room with me. I'll have to go home later and lay down for quite along time to recover.

I'm a very private person, Jeff. I don't share much. If you look publicly online, you find very little about me personally.You will find a lot of stuff about presentations, leadership, sales, not a lot about Greg's story.

I'm not beautiful enough or handsome enough to appear on video.

I'm not photogenic at all. I always look terrible in photographs.

I'm not photogenic.

I'm the guide.

I've got a very raspy voice from ten million kiais in the karate dojo, actually.

In this room, we put a green screen set over there. We set up the camera here and I will record myself on green screen video.

Include the names. Even if you have a code name for someone, include the names.

It automatically sent to my YouTube channel with the audio podcast and also, the podcast video goes to YouTube.

It was and I didn't do anymore after that. It's exhausted me. But someone else could narrate it. But I wrote it, so I knew where to put the emphasis.

It wasn't planned.

It's out there about a very small amount.

Much better. There's got to be a context. Something'shappening in the background. Something's going on. What is it? Bring out that background.

My Saturday mornings are writing every week. Saturday morning, I write. I write one on presentations, one on sales, one on leadership.

My voice sounds terrible.

Now I'm not handsome.

So I can multipurpose my one piece of content very, very effectively.

So I start, in my case, always with a blog text.

So include the people in the story.

So my copywriting structure looks like this.

So that text gets turned into podcast audio.

So this is multipurposing of content.

So we have different stories. We have the warning story, we can writeabout that. Bad things are coming.

So we're going tell some stories. Now, someone said to me tonight, oh, your name's Story. That's handy if you're gonna be in the storytelling business.

So, we need, I believe, to master video and audio and text in this modern age.

So, who are we according to what does Google say about you? Who are you when you look up Google?

Story, which got anglicized in the great Viking invasion of England, I believe in the eighth century. So there we go.

That audio will go to the podcast and will go to a place called Libsyn, Liberated Syndication, which hosts podcasts on Apple Podcasts.  It's got a huge list of different podcasts they get my content out to. That's what all those little green arrows mean. But it also turns up on my YouTube channel as audio.

The opportunity cost of no action because in a lot of cases, people think no action means no cost. That's not true.

The plan, let's get rid of the villain. Let's fix thatproblem.

The villain, client's problem.

Then I'll record those for my podcast.

Then, this is important.

Then, we have the narrative arc. There'll be certain characters in the story.

There'll be some conflict, some problem, or a big opportunity. What is that? Set the context with the opportunity. Then there's gonna be a resolution. Could be good, could be bad, but there'll be a resolution one way or another.

There's a teleprompter behind here and I'll be reading theteleprompter of what I've written and I'll take that text and I'll turn it into video.

There's an opportunity cost there. And then finally, the solution, the happy outcome. We talk about that.

We can have the success story, hey, we did well. We can have a humorous story, something amusing. We can have a branding story, talking about your company and how great you're doing and how you're helping save the world, etcetera.

What's the learning? What's the thing you want to get across to people? So that's an arc in the narrative. When you're writing a story, you're putting stuff together to think about.

What do you find? Yahoo, Bing, ChatGPT, YouTube, Amazon. If you search yourself on these items, what does it tell us about you? Who are you? I'm possibly going to be your client. I want to know about you. This is where I'm going to look. This is where I'll go. And what will I find?

Now, a lot of Americans have said to me that they can't use Facebook for business because there are a lot of embarrassing frat house photographs of them in very compromising positions, drinking very exotic-looking drinks with umbrellas in them, in very bad locations with very dodgy people. So they are excluded. But I said I was terrified of social media. I came late to the party. What you'll see on these mediums is me in business all the time. You're not going to see me casual very often. I control it.

So if you look up Greg Story, there are seventy-one entries on Google, forty-four on YouTube, ninety-one on Bing. I stopped at page ten. Chat GPT, one entry. I did a presentation last December for the American Chamber Sales Committee. At that time, I wasn't even existing on Chat GPT. So finally, I made it. I'm there. And it's actually correct. It wasn't hallucinating. I'm actually there. And then YouTube, there are fifty entries. I stopped at fifty. There's a lot more. And then Amazon, one entry. What's going on here? I've got, well, seven books already published, and the eighth one is with Amazon right now. So Amazon's search engine is not very good. So anyway, I don't know how that works.

So what has been useful for me to become known and credible with my potential buyers?

LinkedIn is my main medium for business, and this is what my front page looks like. You see lots of me in action. I'm running a soft skills training company. So what am I doing? I'm teaching or I'm speaking, naturally. And then, here I am. My name is not Dr Greg Story. The name in LinkedIn is Dr Greg Story, franchise owner, master trainer, executive coach, leadership sales, presentations, Tokyo, Japan. That is what's in my name bracket on LinkedIn, not just Dr Greg Story. And then, it talks about global master trainer, executive coach, three-time best-selling author, global business expert, leadership, sales, presentations and communication president. There's a lot of propaganda about me on that one page, and then you have all of my postings would come after that. Massive numbers. In this case, on LinkedIn, three thousand three hundred and fifty of them.

And then, as I said, twenty-seven thousand six hundred and eighty followers. Post impressions, seven thousand thirty-two in the last seven days. In the last ninety days, seven hundred and sixty-four people looked at my profile. Eight hundred and seventeen people searched for me. How many people are searching for you? You go to your LinkedIn, have a look at your number. How many people are searching for you?

When I see that number's high, I'm happy. It says that what I'm doing is working. They're searching for me. I'm trying to find them, of course, but they're looking for me. I may not know who they are, but I'm giving them what I want them to find. I'm packaging it up. I'm saying, this is me. I'm credible. I can do everything on leadership, everything on sales and presentations. I've got it. That's what I'm saying.

So Roberto DeVito was the editor of the American Chamber Journal, and I used to submit articles to the journal. I made a big mistake. When I first submitted them, I thought, you've got Dale Carnegie on the wall over there. I thought, well, Dale Carnegie, he's the icon. I can't compete with the icon. So I never put my name and photograph with the articles, only my name. Until one day, I was at an event. I gave someone my card. “Are you the guy that writes those articles in the American Chamber Journal?”,  I said, yes. I realised, you idiot. You should have put your own face and name, so people could recognise both instead of just the name. Trust me, my face and name is on everything I can find now, to catch up.

But I met, actually, I bumped into Roberto across the road in front of the Ark Hills building one day just by accident. I'm having a quick chat, because he's editing my articles. I'm putting them up there. He said, “Greg, why don't you start a podcast?” Here's my response. “What's a podcast?”.

I'd sort of heard of it. In the 1990s, there were podcasts, and they sort of disappeared, and they came back in the mid-2000s, right? 2013. So and I thought, wow, a podcast. Okay. So I'll take that on board. So this was a re-creation, but this would have been me back in 2013, 2014 actually, with this exact mic recording my podcast. I had zero idea. I was clueless. I didn't even think about the mic, you know. I didn't know the quality. But now, for the techy people here, and I'm sure there's a lot of techy people here. I use a Shure SM58 microphone. I use a Zoom H6 handy recorder, which actually is recording this presentation right now. I use Adobe Audition for the editing, and I use Libsyn to host my Apple podcasts. So that's some of the tech. Now, I'm not going to discuss what we do for the videos because there's a lot of lighting and camera and stuff for that, but we have a lot of gear for all that stuff. So I'm better organised now.

So what did I learn about podcasting?

First of all, don't be an idiot like me. Spend the money and get a good quality microphone. Straight up. Don't muck around. Get the right gear. Find a platform which can upload your content to multiple areas like Libsyn. You need something like that. If you're gonna do interviews, the guest provides the IP. Jeff has been a guest on my podcast, Japan's top Business Interviews, and he provided all the IP.

But if you're doing it yourself, then you need to have content. And I have a lot of content, as I'll talk about in a minute, because I can do that because we're in the business of doing training. So we know about leadership, presentations, sales, communication. And you got to be like clockwork. We say weekly. It's got to be weekly. You can't miss. And if you're going to do it, commit to it. There are so many podcasts that fail within the first ten episodes and they quit. Don't be one of those people. If you're going to commit to it, keep going with it. Don't worry about the numbers. Keep going with it. You'll eventually get the numbers you want.

So, this is my first podcast, August the second, 2014. Every Thursday, Leadership Japan Series. This is where I started. So now, we've got nearly seventy-four thousand five hundred ninety-nine downloads. Five hundred and fifty-nine episodes weekly.

Now, in 2016, I'm following this content marketing. The guru says, niche down. Right. But, get ready to ride the tiger's back. Because what I thought was, okay, niche down, I am going to break them out. The Leadership Japan series had content about sales. It had content about presenting. I know, I'll break them out and separate them. I'll niche down. “How hard could that be”,  I said to myself. Well, once you jump on to the tiger's back, as soon as you jump off, you get eaten. So you have got to be careful what you do here. So I started with one and then I presented this one. This is November third, 2016. Every Tuesday, this has twenty-three thousand nine hundred and fifty-two downloads. We're up to episode three eighty-five on this one. And then I did this one, which was the Sales Japan series. It's every Wednesday, three thirty-one thousand three hundred and sixty-seven downloads, three hundred and eighty-five episodes.

But the work to produce these additional two was much bigger than I expected. But remember, we are a training company. We are doing all of these areas, so we have to have content in each of these areas to compete with companies who only do sales, only do leadership, only do presentations. So we just triple our workload immediately and we're prepared for that.

Now, in 2018, Google said, we are going to now do voice-based search as well as text, and I believed them. And I thought, bingo. Because how many blogs were there in the world in 2018? Major, major, major number of blogs around the world. How can you compete with so many millions of people producing billions of people producing blogs?

And I thought, ah, audio. I have a lot of audio. Maybe I can win in the audio market. It's hard to win in the text market. So I know, I know, I got a great idea “Why don't I create more audio?”, I said to myself and try and dominate that voice-based search.

Well, guess what? You Google Greg Story, you're not going find much in the vocal department from Google. Thank you very much. Where's my voice-based search, Google? Still not there. So anyway, but I didn't know that. I believed them.

So I was inspired by, some people might remember the show, Tokyo on Fire from Tim Langley. It was a very good program on politics. So, yeah, I was inspired by this. I said, “you know what? I'm going do video”. So this is how I got started. The first one, my weekly podcast. So December 28th, 2018, I started doing my weekly podcast, and then I converted it into a video and put it on YouTube. So now we've got nine hundred and ninety-three videos, nine hundred and twenty-four subscribers, not a big number, nine hundred ninety-five episodes weekly.

So if you look at this, I'm doing six podcasts a week, fifty-two weeks a year. I'm doing three videos a week, fifty-two weeks a year. It's a machine. I've got a machine behind me. It wasn't there when I started.

I was terrified of social media. My colleagues, who were twenty years younger than me, had social media. I said, yeah, it's a fad. I was wrong. I was wrong. Now, I don't have twenty years to play catch up, so I have to run hard.

And these are some of the lessons I learnt from all this. So first, don't be afraid of social media. Second, repurpose content. So once I created all this, I realised the power of having all this content. So I turned it into books, as Jeff mentioned. These were the four books that were done. These three were audiobooks and Kindle. This is the latest one, done on audiobooks and Kindle.

Then I wrote this book.

Stop Wasting Money On Training.

I think that's a bit counterintuitive for a training company.Subtitle, “how to get the best results from your training budget in Japan” because I realized you couldn't find any books on on how to pick a training company. We are experts in training. So I wrote a book, a neutral book. It's not a propaganda piece for Dale Carnegie. If you read it, it's not like that at all. It's very, very neutral,very objective, but it talks about the things you need to think about. When I go to see the client, I’ve got two books.This is one of them.

Now, theres presentation and sales and very shortly leadership and I give them both.

Do I care if they read them? No. This says, we are expertson training. That's enough for credibility. Okay?

This is my new book. I say, we're waiting for Amazon to give us the thumbs up. Could be tonight. Could be tomorrow morning. It's that close.

I have never seen any books in English about leading in Japan written by foreigners.

If you can find one, let me know. I couldn't find any.

I believe this is the first book ever written on this topic. And the target audience are expat CEOs who are leading here to help them because these are the people who pay for our training, who have the decision making power or at least get me in front of the HR team to try and convince them to take us on as a training company. So very, very fresh.

Very, very fresh.

And I call it your complete leadership toolkit and it is a very complete book. So now, I have soon to be eight books, right? Coming up will be eight books.

Then, I will rewrite that leadership book for a Japanese audience and we'll translate that. That'll be number nine.

So everyone's heard of Gary Vaynerchuk, I presume. He's a legend. He's an amazing business person, incredible entrepreneur.

He took reality TV, combined it with motivation, and he combined it with education.

And he has another trading name as Gary Vee.

He had a guy following him around, video him all day long, which they cut up and brought out. He's unbelievable volume producer.

But Gary Vee or Gary Vaynerchuk has thirty people working in team Gary, chopping all this stuff up. He's a legend.

He says, I heard this recently, you have got to post twelve times aday.

I'm like, “that's ridiculous”.

How could you do that? Well, guess what?

I'm posting twelve times a day.

I counted them up. The blog goes to LinkedIn. It automatically goes to Facebook and Twitter. Now, purists would say,you're a very bad boy, Greg.

You should be recrafting that for Facebook and you should be recrafting that for Twitter instead of sending in the same stuff. Hey. Do I have that sort of time? No.

I've got three areas, presentation, sales, and leadership to cover. I'm busy. So I just flick a switch and bingo. It's there. Done.

I upload something I'll talk about in a moment called Fare Bella Figura. I'll talk about that shortly. It goes to, to LinkedIn and I share it also to Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram.

I upload video shorts to LinkedIn, then they get switched over to TikTok, threads, and Instagram, which is actually twelve a day.

So I'm actually doing what Gary Vaynerchuk said to do. I thought it was impossible, but I'm actually doing it. Amazed me.

So we need a mindset shift here.

We need to be agnostic about the funnel that brings the client to us.

But we got a brace for trouble.

We're doing something new. We should try it anyway. And if it doesn't work, well, you know, retreat if you have to and don't say no for the buyer in terms of trying something new. And if it works, go all in and ignore the critics and hammer it. So this is something that I was thinking about.

There are some fundamental business truths.

People judge us when they first meet us based on our bodylanguage, how we're standing, how we move. The second thing they judge us on is how we're dressed. They look us up and down. They're checking us out. They're making judgments. We haven't even opened our mouth yet, but they're making judgments, first impressions about us.

So we have to control that first impression and we mustbecome more knowledgeable about image control in business.

So I had some innovation considerations.

I found people often complimented me about the way I'm dressed.

I thought, can I drive that as a differentiator against my competitors in the training industry? Can I take that and drive it harder?

I didn't see any businessmen blogging about what they wear except for people who are in the clothing business.They got their own boutiques or whatever.

I didn't see any business people blogging about men’s clothing.

So I needed to execute though in a very light low touch manner, because I'm pretty busy and I have to have the guts, right, to court trolls, mockery, derision, abuse and hatred by putting myself out there and I was scared to do it.

I thought, you know, if I put out what I'm wearing, man, I'm going get hammered by these people. Well, I'm just going to be abused all day long.

So I took a deep breath.

I said, okay, I'll go for it.

Here's my premise and every one of my blog starts like this. I run my own soft skills training franchise business here in Tokyo. And many years ago, I decided to dress for success.

Each day, I consult my schedule and that day's work content drives my sartorial choices.

Before I head out the door every day, I check myself in the mirror and ask, do I look like one of the most professional people in my industry?

That's the premise, okay?

Then, this comes up. This is the Fare Bella Figura.  In Italian, it means make a good impression.

I use Italian because I think it's pretty cool. Sounds better. Fare Bella Fugira. Sounds pretty good in Italian,bright? So, master your first impressions. Be a sharp dressed man. Now, which is the band we know about being a sharp dressed man? ZZ Top. You know that song, Be a Sharp Dressed Man. I thought, that's pretty cool. I'll use that. So I put in Be A Sharp Dressed Man.

Now, this is what they get. I put in very detailed comment on what I'm wearing. You can see all the stuff on LinkedIn. This is just what I'm showing you. It's like wallpaper. And I have a photograph of me. But guess what's in the background?

Nineteen twelve. Dale Carnegie. I'm taking it right here. So, I'm promoting the company and the longevity of the company at the same time I'm promoting what I'm wearing. Right? So, I'm getting double value there.

So, now, here's the distressing part. Here's the results.

My handcrafted, really carefully written blogs, which I work really hard on every Saturday morning and come up with these eight hundred thousand word pieces, I get two hundred impressions on LinkedIn.

The first Fare Bella Figura,  when I put up, sixteenhundred impressions. I felt like crying.I couldn't believe it. Like, just show me in a suit and I get sixteen hundred. I'm writing all this stuff on leadership and presentation and sales and I get two hundred. And it continues to outrank my other blogs. Still.

So, at the end of my blogs, there's a sales funnel. There are three lead magnets and then the description about my podcasts and my books and about me and all the propaganda is there.

Guess what? On the end of all these posst, that same propaganda is there.It's there. It's a funnel to get people to come to our websitethrough these lead magnets.

So here's some takeaways.

Observe trends. I've noticed, and this audience is not very good representation of that, but suits are coming back for men.

Suits are coming back for men. Ties are going to come back for men. Shoes, serious shoes, not sneakers.

It's coming.

Check me in five years to see if I'm right.

But I feel it'smoving in that direction. I might be an early mover maybe in this trend. I don't know. I don't know. I might be totally wrong.

Let's see.

There's a gap in the market. No men are putting themselves out there talking about what they wear every work day. I only do it five days a week. I only do Monday to Friday when I'm at work. Right? So what's my point of view and experience here? Got to embrace that, some new ways to engage an audience.  

How do I differentiate myself from my rivals?

Try something new and stop if it doesn't work. So these are some ideas for you on how to control your image, your message, your content to hook into the client's mindset before they meet you. So you're crafting their expectations about who you are and what they can do with you before you even meet them.

Now, I don't know everything about digital marketing. This is only what I've done myself and I'm sure there are many things I can improve which I don't even know about. So if you see something tonight and you say, what are you doing, you idiot? You should be using this and you should be doing that and don't you know about this? Tell me, because I'm still educating myself about this stuff.

I'm a boomer, but in here, I'm still nineteen.

So with that, I'd like to invite you, who has the first question? Thank you.

It is not often that we get a front row seat to watch a group of very senior businesspeople compete with each other when presenting.   If you like blood sports, then this is right up your alley.  This is a zero-sum game for seizing the brass ring and even better, it is conducted in the full glare of the assembled masses.  This is an annual event, which, as a Master Trainer of presentations and public speaking, I always look forward to. 

Being the eternal optimist, I always imagine that this year I will be delighted with the high levels of professionalism on display.  This could be a leading indicator that the senior ranks of companies are understanding the importance of presentations, persuasion and storytelling skills. 

We all know the pressures in business and the levels of competition are getting more and more intense.  Throw in the rapid advances of technology and we have a boiling red ocean of difficulty, which we all must deal with.  These executives are always a good gauge of the ability of business to keep up with the demands.  Sadly, another year of no change and no improvement.

These executives have two minutes to convince the voting members that they should be selected over their rivals.  On this occasion, there were no women in the mix, which in itself is a worry, but that is another podcast. Every year I take detailed notes on what I am seeing and not seeing. 

Typically, no one seems to have a clue about what to do with their hands.  More importantly, they have no idea how to make their hands work for them. Gestures add strength to our words and are a powerful amplifier of our message.  Holding our hands around stomach or groin level or even worse, behind our backs, eliminates the opportunity to use this powerful message driving medium.

Gestures need to be held up high, so that they are easy to see.  The maximum holding time is up to fifteen seconds, after which the gestures lose all their power and just become annoying. Pointing fingers or fists at the audience are very aggressive gestures and are best replaced with using the open palm instead.  The desired effect is the same without the aggro.

Eye contact is another major lost opportunity.  In a one-minute period, we can engage directly with ten people and we should be doing that all the time we have available to us.  The alternative is what these executives were doing, which was not looking at the audience and just vaguely scanning the room, not focusing on anyone in particular.  A type of fake eye contact effort. 

It was a large venue with hundreds of people and so optically, when we select one person down the back to focus on, the ten people sitting around them all feel we are looking directly at them too. We can get ripple effect going with our eye contact and in one minute engage with eleven people. 

This wasn’t happening.  The result was the speakers seemed detached and not engaged with their voters.  This makes the message more difficult to drive in because the power of the eye contact is completely diffused and rendered useless.

Voice strength is important too.  One of the aspirants asked me for a few hints about five minutes before he was due to start speaking.  I know him well.  He has a very demure manner and is rather softly spoken.  I told him to simply increase his vocal power.  He may have feared that he would be screaming, but I assured him that would not be the case at all. I knew that this would help him to come across as more credible and confident.  He did that and turned out to be the highest vote getter.  A few of the speakers let their voice trail off at the very end of their talk, when doing the wrap up. This is extremely bad and leaves a weak final impression. Don’t let it fade out.  Instead make it a crescendo at the end and finish with strength.

Another surprising thing was how little the speakers understood about how to use a microphone.  There was a microphone stand for them to use and almost all of them stood too far back away from the microphone.  They were losing vocal power as a result and this diminished their dynamism in the eyes of the audience. 

One of them added to his woes by getting his feet positioning wrong.  If you point your feet at ninety degrees to the audience, you are balanced and will be able to focus on the entire audience.  If, like him, you get the angle wrong and are off fifteen degrees, without knowing it, your body positioning is now turned such that you are ignoring about a third of your audience on one side. Don’t ignore your audience. 

To my horror and astonishment, one company President of a very large and well-known firm, chose to read his entire speech from hand held notes.  This is a two-minute speech and he can’t manage that at his level?  I was thinking that is a pretty sad state of affairs at his age and stage.  There is absolutely no need for that.

If you do, it ensures you look down at the page and do not engage your audience. It screams out you are out of your depth entirely.  Unsurprisingly, he got the lowest number of votes.

I shouldn’t be too harsh though, because up until my early thirties, I was terrified of public speaking and fled every chance to participate.  At least he was up there on stage giving it a go.  I wondered whether I should reach out to him and suggest he can do better than reading his talk out to us.  It is a tricky thing, so I will dwell on that a bit more. It may have the opposite effect and he may take offense at my implied suggestion that he is crap presenter, which he is.

One major and disappointing absence in this melee was storytelling.  It was a very dry boring affair for the most part. These are not boring, wallflower type people who have done nothing with their lives and careers. They are international businessmen with years of adventures and experiences under their belts. No one seized the opportunity to weave a fascinating story into their talk, to really grab hold of their audience and monopolise their attention for those two minutes.

I would give none of these senior executives a passing grade and worry about how effective they are in their role as leader.  They are the guide, explaining the future direction of the business and they have to convince everyone to follow them.  I cannot be confident they are doing a good job of it.

For all of us, we need persuasion power and that means being able to get up and speak in a convincing and professional manner.  If that is beyond you, then get the training, preferably with us, but at least get it from somewhere reputable.  The need is not going to diminish or go away.  It is only going to become more intense.

Our presenter was vivacious, sparky, bright and engaging. She works in a cool area of business and has the opportunity to see what works and doesn’t work in many industries.  This enables her to pull together terrific insights and back these up with hard evidence based on numerous case studies and who doesn’t love a good case study.  A big crowd turned out to hear her talk, so the place was packed.

Chatting before we started, she mentioned in passing that she had not planned the talk and was going to wing it.  I thought that was “brave” but in a bad way.  The talk has been advertised for weeks. She knows when it is on, so why would she want to wing it?  I just dismissed that as either bravado or laying out an early excuse, in case it bombs as a presentation.  Either way, I didn’t believe it and sure enough, when she went through the slide deck it was obviously structured and well planned.  She was speaking to what was on screen, so definitely no “script” required, but it had a plan.

Early in, she said something disturbing.  She mentioned that she intended for this to be an interactive talk.  This sounds pretty sexy, getting the audience involved and it can be, but I got worried immediately.  Her invitation to contribute to participate flags the issue of time control. 

Whenever we invite the audience to chip in with their thoughts and experiences, we lose the ability to keep on time.  Some responses are short, but many are surprisingly long.  I am always amazed by how much pent-up demand there is out there for people to add their two bobs’ worth. Maybe these days, with everyone so engrossed with their individual phone screens, the opportunity for some people to speak up has shrivelled and they are desperate for their thoughts, musings and comments to be heard by others.  When you make that “interactive” invitation, there will be a proportion of people who will take you up on your offer and more.  The “more” bit is where we lose control. That impacts the overall discipline of the talk to conform to the schedule for start and finish.

There is nothing wrong with involving the audience, but it requires discipline on our part to control proceedings such that we finish on time. When we combine this interactivity at scale, we can blow out the time required to get through the prepared material.  This happened to me recently when teaching a class on presentations for a luxury brand.  In typical Dale Carnegie fashion, we plan our classes out to the second.  People in the class, however were much more talkative than I expected and I found a dilemma of more material to cover than the time allocated.  I had to drop some parts out because we had a hard stop.

The secret in this case is to skip those parts, but in a way which is not obvious to the audience.  Only you know what is in the slide deck and so you can make adjustments if you need to.  I just jumped to some later slides in a way which was not public to the participants.  As far as they were concerned, this was all part of the plan.

Our speaker ran out of time and made the amateur error of showing us al what we had missed out because she wasn’t able to control the proceedings.  This is really bad.  Now the audience feels unhappy because they were enjoying the first part of the presentation and they want to receive all the value they are trading their time for.  Seeing sexy slides whiz by with no commentary or explanation is really a tease, but not one we can enjoy.

My calculation was she needed about another thirty minutes to cover what she had prepared. If she had been more disciplined, she could have allowed some degree of interaction bit capped it so that it didn’t blow up the presentation time schedule.  She got caught by the organisers, giving her the bum’s rush to get off stage because the time was more than up.

Reflecting on the structure, she had spent a fair amount of time at the start establishing her credentials through trip down memory lane with her career.  It was relevant to what she was presenting about and it was incredibly charming, but I think it went a bit too long. Consequently, at the end she had to sacrifice the juicy bits about the case studies.  She could have let her evidence do the hard lifting to establish her credibility on this subject, because she certainly had the goods.  This is another discipline point – don’t get too caught up in talking about yourself, as fascinating as that is to you.

Her takeaway points were a letdown at the very end, as she wrapped up. She had the right idea, but the content was a bit ho hum.  She could have come up with some harder hitting recommendations at the end to really provide benefit to the audience.  No one was photographing the take aways, and that is always a bad sign with any sort of summary.

Her final impression was her rushing through the content, teasing us with the sexy bits we didn’t cover and then leaving us high and dry with humdrum guides to our next steps. The lack of discipline meant the presentation started well and just slowly imploded and collapsed at the end. She was still vivacious and charming, so that always helps.  Better though to be more professional and bring value to the audience. That is what we want them to remember us for.