Value is a difficult thing to pin down.  In any audience, there is bound to be a wide range of interests, needs, and wants.  How do we decipher that array into a presentation which meets all expectations?  Well, we can’t.  There are too many variables at play, so we have to work on hitting the target for the majority of those who have assembled to hear us speak.  There is a designated theme for the talk, hosted by an organisation whose members have aligned around a central set of interests.  That is a good starting point to ascertain which angle of approach will be the best and most effective. Within that broad spectrum, we have our own areas of expertise and interest, and we seek the nexus of those two forces to find the right theme for the talk. 

Having worked out which theme and approach will meet the needs of most of the audience, we need to look for our value bombs.  What do we know which they don’t?  What valuable experiences have we had, which they won’t have had?  What dead ends and failed missions have we experienced, which they won’t have had as yet and will want to avoid?  The process of elimination is at work here as we dissect our own knowledge bank and our host of experiences, as we draw on the resources we have available to us for assembling the talk.

There is a balance between talking about ourselves and making it relevant to the audience.  Some speakers get that line of demarcation confused and spend too much time on their own glorious career.  They forget the audience is not like us and have different drivers of importance to them.  Our examples, from our own hard wrought experiences, are certainly powerful and appealing to an audience.  However, we have to move from the specifics about us to the broader frame of reference to how the audience can apply the lessons we have learnt.

This is where the value transition takes place.  We need to craft that transition carefully.  This is what happened to me – the incident; this is what I learnt as a result – the insight; and here is what you can learn and apply for yourself – the application.  This incident-insight-application formula is a very handy frame of reference to throw over the talk we are designing, to make sure we can draw out the value for the listeners. 

Because it happened to us, it is true.  Now what we deduce from the experience can be debated, but usually when everyone shares the same context, the chances are high that similar conclusions will be reached. This lessens the chances of an audience disagreeing with our findings.  The application has to be broad enough to capture the various situations of those in the audience.  There is usually a range of industry sectors, ages, genders and experience sets we have to appeal to.

A good way to cover off this variety is to think about what would be the top five possible applications of our insight for this audience.  Probably we won’t get everyone perfectly included, but the chances are high we will get the majority catered for.  Even if we use the rule of three and say here are the three best applications of this idea, that will usually be enough if we think that five is stretching things too much. 

When we line up the experience, insight and application, the audience can all see that we are providing value, even if it happens that we are not hitting that particular person’s bullseye.  That effort to make the talk relevant for the listeners will be appreciated and it shows we really know what we are talking about. 

Pontificating is great fun, but audiences usually want the lessons on what not to do and what to do in that order.  The risk averse nature of people requires that we outline where we failed as a warning lesson to others, that they should avoid doing what we did and save themselves a lot of money and trouble in the process.  Everyone loves a good train wreck story, and I am sure we all have plenty of them to share.

The design stage of any talk is critical and so let’s make sure we are thinking value provision from the very start, as an overall guiding light before do anything else.  What value do we have to offer and work from there to align that with the likely members of the audience for our talk.  Include some “don’t do this folks” lessons and everyone will be happy.

We love another acronym, not!  It is a handy memory jogger though, so let’s persevere with yet another one.  Whenever you are in a situation where you need to get collaboration,  support, funding or agreement, then the EAR formula is a very effective tool for presenters.  It is simplicity itself in terms of understanding the formula.  The delivery though is the key and this will make all the difference.

The Formula stands for E – Event, A – Action and R – Result.  It is quite counterintuitive and therein lies a lot of its success.  It is disarming and makes the presenter a small target for opposition to what they are recommending.  Often, we have something we want and our first instinct is to just blurt it out.  We have convinced ourselves that it is the best course of action, the most logical, high value approach and obviously the weight of all of these factors will automatically sway our listeners to adopt our recommendation.

What is the reaction to all of this blurting though?  Immediately the audience hears what we have to say, we are suddenly facing a crowd of card carrying sceptics.  We shouldn’t be surprised but we usually are.  What have we done?  We have offered the flimsiest tissue of an idea to the listeners and expected them to extrapolate what they have heard to encompass the full weight of our argument.  Of course we are intending to now launch into the detail of the idea, the rationale, the evidence etc.  This makes sense.  We are taught at business school to get the executive summary to the top of the report and then go into labyrinthine detail on why this idea makes a lot sense.  When it is in document form, the audience do read the detail and do pay attention to the proof of our idea.

Sadly, when we are live, they lose all senses and depart from the plan.  They hear our raw unaided, unprotected, unabashed idea and they go into deafness.  Their eyes are open but their mind has raced away to a distant place, where they are roiling through why this blurted idea makes little or no sense, or why it flies in the face of their experience or expectations, or a thousand other reasons why this simply won’t work.  We have lost their attention.

Instead we apply the EAR formula and we take them to a place in their mind’s eye.  There must be a reason why we believe what we think and that must have come from a limited number of sources – what we heard, read or experienced.  The Event piece is to reconstruct that moment when we had our epiphany, our realisation our breakthrough on this idea.  We want to transport them to the spot too, so that they can reconstruct the roots of this idea.

We don’t have unlimited time for this and we are telling a story, but it is a brief story.  If we get tangled up in the intricacies of the story and are going on and on, then the listeners will become impatient and dissatisfied.  If they are our bosses they will just tell us “to hurry up and get on with it”.

The secret is to put in the season – a snowy day, a hot summers day, a fall day, a spring day.  We can all imagine what that would look like, because it corresponds to our own experience and we can visualise it. We now locate the moment – a dark wood panelled boardroom, a meeting room at the headquarters, a Zoom call, on the factory or shop floor etc.  Again we paint the picture of the scene.  Not just a factory, but which factory, what type of factory, how did it look.  People they know should be introduced into the story where possible.  These actors may be known to them and this adds credibility to the story and the point. 

The bulk of the speaking time is given over to the telling of the background of how we got to this idea.  An excellent outcome is upon hearing all of this background context, the listener is racing ahead of us and drawing their own conclusions on what needs to be done based on the evidence given.  Given the same context, the chances are strong that they have reached the same conclusion we have, looking at the same evidence.

After we tell the story we lower the boom and hit them with our call to action.  This is A- Action we want them to take component.  The big mistake a lot of people make at this point is to just keep adding a series of actions, rather than singling out one central action we want executed.  We cannot distract them or nudge them away from considering one decision only.  Take action or not.  This part of the puzzle is about 5-10 seconds long.  This forces us to be crystal clear on what is the one thing we want them to do.  For example, “So based on the research, I recommend we begin a prototype and test our assumptions”. 

We cannot let that hang there alone.  We need to back it up with one of the goodies that will come with it and we must settle on the most powerful “Result” we will enjoy if they take our advice.  We do not keep adding benefits and dilute the core message.  We go for the blockbuster benefit and that also only takes 5-10 seconds and then we shut up and wait for their response.  We could say, “if the prototype works, we are looking at an immediate 30% lift in revenues just in the first year”.

The EAR formula is a jujitsu move, because we are navigating around their potential objections.  They just cannot disagree with our context.  Our conclusions yes, but not the background to that conclusion.  They also have to hear the whole story first before they jump in with a rebuttal.  This formula provides us with the means to be heard in a genuine and fair manner.  We can keep doing things the hard way or we can use the EAR formula and make business a lot easier for ourselves.

Where is the line between referencing our experiences and insights and just talking about ourselves?  I attended a talk recently where the speaker had a perspective to share with the audience, to add value to their careers and businesses.  What surprised me was how much of the talk was cantered on the speaker rather than the audience.  I was thinking about this later and wondered what the better balance would be?  When we go on about ourselves, we are getting further away from points of relevance for the listeners.  We have to remember that people are unapologetically 100% focused on themselves and their own interests and don’t care all that much about our story.

As the speaker, the closer we can align what we are saying to the listener’s interests, the greater the acceptance of what we are saying and the bigger the impact we will have as the presenter.  That is fine in theory, but we can’t just make a series of pompous statements about how things should be and not back them up with evidence.  Often that evidence is coming from our own experiences and that can be the most convincing variety.  Unveiling a lot of sexy data during the talk is interesting, but a mud and blood rendition of what happened to us in the trenches, is always more gripping and compelling. This speaker, in my mind, strayed across the line and was wallowing in too much self-indulgence about what they had been doing.

How do we balance our story with the audience's need for alignment with their benefit?  What the speaker could have done was better draw out how to transfer their learnings into concrete examples, where the listeners could apply them to their own circumstances.  Instead of just saying this is what I did, and this is how it worked for me, they could have gone a bit deeper on the application for others who are not them.  When the example is too idiosyncratic, the agency for others becomes diminished or diluted.

We could say, “I did this and got this result.  Now here are three ways you could take this same idea and apply it to your situation”.  We have now crossed over to the audience’s application of the knowledge. By giving more than one opportunity, we are more likely to hit on what the majority of audience members are looking for.   Importantly, by prior analysis of who is showing up the talk, we can anticipate common needs and circumstances. This allows us to get closer to the mark of listener reality when we explain our examples.

A simple rule of thumb should be 20% of what happened to us and 80% of the time on explaining why this will work for our audience.  Our speaker, in this case, reversed those percentages and spent the majority of the time talking about what happened to them. The problem with this is we in the audience are not them and we have to parse out what we can apply from their story.  It is much better of the speaker saves us that drama and they tell us what we can apply. 

We draw out the key points we want to make for the audience, align our war stories with the points and then add a significant section in the talk on explaining why doing this is a great idea and specifically why it is a great idea bolstered with concrete cases and options.  This is an unbeatable combination.  We demonstrate in words that because we did it, they can, too.  We draw out how it will work for the audience and convince them that it has a broader application than just working for us alone.  We have to marshal the benefits of taking our advice, and the more concretely we can do that, the better.

Our speaker convinced us that it worked for them, but failed to make the case that it would work for us.  They hinted at it, but statements are cheap and we sceptical folk want more evidence.  We are all risk averse, so we want chapter and verse and solid provable details.

When constructing the talk, keep that 20%-80% dichotomy in mind.  Certainly use ourselves as proof, but don’t rely on it exclusively.  If we can talk about others doing marvellous things with our advice, that is the icing on the cake.  We love to hear case studies and then draw our own conclusions on how much we can take from the example and apply it in our world. That idea is something we need to be constantly hammering away at too.  Keep telling them to think how they can adapt it, and apply it for themselves.  In this way, we can keep switching the focus back to the audience away from us and we will get the balance right.

Would the people who know you or meet you describe you as persuasive? Do you think you are persuasive enough? Persuasion power is the most important, but the most commonly lacking skill in the business world. Do it yourself trial and error wastes time and resources. It is time to change things up and get that key skill.  There is a perfect solution for you- to LEARN MORE click here (https://bit.ly/3VhvR2B )

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About The Author

Dr. Greg Story, President Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training

Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

Bestselling author of “Japan Sales Mastery” (the Japanese translation is "The Eigyo" (The営業), “Japan Business Mastery” and "Japan Presentations Mastery" and his new books "How To Stop Wasting Money On Training" and the translation "Toreningu De Okane Wo Muda Ni Suru No Wa Yamemashoo" (トレーニングでお金を無駄にするのは止めま

Dr. Greg Story is an international keynote speaker, an executive coach, and a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. He leads the Dale Carnegie Franchise in Tokyo which traces its roots straight back to the very establishment of Dale Carnegie in Japan in 1963 by Mr. Frank Mochizuki.

He publishes daily blogs on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter

Has 6 weekly podcasts:

1.     Mondays -  The Leadership Japan Series,

2.    Tuesdays – The Presentations Japan Series

Every second Tuesday - ビジネス達人の教え

3.    Wednesdays - The Sales Japan Series

4.    Thursdays – The Leadership Japan Series

Also every second Thursday - ビジネスプロポッドキャスト

5.    Fridays - The Japan Business Mastery Show

6.    Saturdays – Japan’s Top Business Interviews

Has 3 weekly TV shows on YouTube:

1.     Mondays - The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show

Also every Second Thursday - ビジネスプロTV

2.    Fridays – Japan Business Mastery

3.    Saturdays – Japan Top Business Interviews

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development.

Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making, become a 39 year veteran of Japan and run his own company in Tokyo.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate (糸東流) and is currently a 6th Dan.

Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

I was recently reminded of the importance of openings and transitions when presenting watching a new speaker in action. They were using the occasion to establish their business here in Japan.  Like this speaker, most of us face an audience who don’t know us when we start speaking.  They may have glanced at the blurb from the organisers listing our accomplishments and background, all proving we are a legitimate expert, someone people should listen to.  Regardless of the massive self-promotion we passed across to the hosts of the event to send out to everyone, we still have to deliver the goods. 

The audience enters the room thinking about a lot of things, but thinking about us isn’t the highest priority.  They have that day at work to process what has happened so far. They also think about things they must do after our talk and what is coming up later that day or the next day.  In other words, mentally they are pretty busy and then we turn up.

Usually, the MC will introduce us and set the stage for us.  The quality of these introductions is scarily various.  Some MCs are arrogant and won’t be guided by the carefully hand crafted, elegantly wordsmithed script we have laboured over. We have been working hard to marshal all of our key selling points, aiming to stack high our massive credibility.  Whenever one of the MCs goes off piste, it is rare that they do a better job than what we have put together.  They often get the facts wrong and miss the key selling points. 

As the speaker, we should “insist” to the meeting hosts that the MC read out what we have prepared and not ad lib, freestyle or indulge themselves with our entry point to our talk.  Be firm with this.  Most people don’t give talks and don’t put their personal and public brands out there. They have no idea how important these small details actually are.

In this speaker’s case, the MC did a great job of selling them to the audience. What comes next is very important.  We have to say something which grabs attention and sets the stage for the main points we are going to make.  Remember, the entire crowd are fully obsessed with themselves and not us, so we have to smash through that mental preoccupation they have with their world and bring them into our world. 

We should have received a list of company names and their positions before the talk.  This is a big help.  It allows us to gauge the temperature in the room.  Are they experts or amateurs or a mix?  Depending on who is in front of us, we construct our opening.  We know they are all self-interested, so if we can open with something which appeals to that obsession all the better. 

In this speaker’s case, the opening was all about them and not about the greatest interests of the audience.  That was an opportunity missed.  We need to connect us with what the audience is most interested in and typically with the thing they fear the most.  We are all risk averse and we gravitate toward our fears before we head for our pleasure points.  That means scaring the hell out of your audience is always a reliable starter to make sure they have forgotten all about the day and are now solidly with us in the room. Think about the hottest topics with the greatest sex appeal at the moment.  Talk about that. 

Always avoid controversial elements like politics and religion, though.  As Michael Jordan famously said, “Republicans buy sneakers too”.  We do not want to create hostiles in the audience, if we bag Trump or Biden in our opening.  There are plenty of other scary topics to choose from and something closer to home is always best. 

For example, in Japan, we have a major decline in population underway.  That is an abstract idea for most of us. We just see the media headlines.  We don’t really notice the decline though, because it is gradual. The trains seem just as crowded as ever, when we are going to work.  However, if we can connect that to our own futures, we can bring that scary topic alive. 

We can say, “It is good that we have a Government run pension scheme in Japan that we all contribute to.  It is a worry though, that probably by the time you are ready to collect, your money may not be there.  That scheme works based on the younger generation paying into the scheme, so you can get our money out when you are older.  If there are not enough young people contributing, there won’t be enough money for you when you retire.  That is what declining population means for most of us.  Are you going to be okay when you stop working?”.

 After hearing that opening, the audience will be all ears to hear what we have to say on the subject.  They are expecting we come with a solution and they are ready for it.  That staff meeting they have after this talk or them picking up the dry cleaning is now completely out of their minds and they are fully concentrated on us.  This then sets us up the transition to the main talk where we outline our key points, backed up with evidence which is unassailable.

Our speaker didn’t manage to pull that off. Basically, they focused on themselves and missed the chance to really snag the audience’s fears and therefore their full attention.  We can hit the listeners right between the eyes with our opening and then inject a short piece about ourselves before we transition to the main body.  That is a much better approach, than jumping straight into talking about ourselves.

When we are planning our talk, we have to decide what is the purpose of this presentation?  In business, typically, we most often deliver the “inform” type.  We will pass over information we have come across in our travels and research for the edification of the audience.  They have turned up to learn something they didn’t already know and expect value for the time and money they have invested.  It might be the “motivate” talk to bolster the fandom numbers for our brand.  We extoll the virtues of our firm and our widget and get the listeners excited about buying our offerings.  If we give an “inspire” talk, then we are appealing to the audience to become the best version of themselves and maximise their potential.  This is often the “rags to riches” type of encouragement, using our own example as a source of inspiration.  If we could do it, then the audience can also do it.  If we are giving the “entertain” talk, this will mainly be a light presentation between the arrival of the next rounds of heavy red wines after a big dinner.

Regardless of the type of talk, we face a problem of too much information for the time we have to present.  I am sure you have made this fatal error like me.  Before doing any serious planning, we plunder other presentations for interesting, relevant and cool slides to add to this talk.  We start from the wrong point and before you know it we have fallen in love with a lot of content.  We have missed the viewpoint of deciding our central thesis and then going around and matching the proof and evidence to drive home our conclusions.

This bottom-up approach usually means we have way too many slides and certainly many more than we need to make our point.  What we think is adding power and strength to our argument is, in fact, weakening it.  The problem is one of dilution.  If we give the audience too many things to consider and take in, then they don’t gain a strong central message from us. 

I notice this tendency when we are teaching the Magic Formula to give talks.  There is a period at the beginning of the talk to set the stage, to draw out the context, explain the background.  Then we recommend an action and we follow this up with the benefit of taking that action.  It is a very simple and tight formula.  What always happens though, when we do the roleplay, and the coaching is people go off the track. 

They need to nominate the one central, most important action they want the audience to take.  That instruction is fairly easy to understand, but most people manage to get it wrong.  They wax lyrical about the many great and wondrous actions the listeners should take.  They also pile on the benefits of the various actions.  For the listener, it is overwhelming. They cannot remember any of it.  If the audience can’t recall what we said, then we will have to count that presentation as a failure.

The idea of three things for your audience to work on is not new.  However, common sense is not common and established, proven ideas have to be re-discovered every generation.  For any talk, there will be three main elements which are the most powerful components of supporting the argument we are making.  Within each of these points, there will be three key aspects which prove our point.  We are already at nine points and we haven’t added in the start and close of the talk yet.  In a forty-minute speech, we will be bumping up against the time limit.  Remember, we also have a ton of sexy slides we want to use, which will blow the time out completely. We need to exercise great discipline in our selection of what to keep and what to discard.

Forcing the Rule Of Three on ourselves is a very good way of making sure we get the key point fully supported and convincing, without confusing our listeners about what it is we want to say.  I would like to say it is more complex and difficult than this, to make myself look more “presentation guru” like.  The reality is that simple is always best when presenting.  Confusing people and therefore distracting people from our key message makes no sense. However, often we do a good job of doing just that by overcomplicating the messaging.  Next time you put a talk together, apply the Rule of Three and see what you can trim to make the key ideas shine more brightly.

Navigation is critical in presenting.  This is how we keep the audience with us and keep reinforcing our key messages.  Years ago, I attended a speech by a serious VIP.  He had jetted in from the US to visit Japan and made time to give the Chamber of Commerce members the benefits of his insights.  It was a seriously meandering and confusing talk.  I was left befuddled and bemused. Later, speaking with others, I found I wasn’t the only one struggling to understand where he was going with his messaging. What was the impression he left with me – negative, unimpressed, insulted.  He did serious damage to his personal and professional brands that day.  Here we are years later I and I am still recalling that catastrophe.

Recently, I was asked to provide a review of a new book and because I am always time poor, I thought listening to the audio version would give me more flexibility to work my way through it.  I have narrated my own book on “Japan Sales Mastery”, so I know how tough that recording process is. Interestingly, apart from being reminded how exhausting doing the narration was, I was noting the importance of navigation in that medium. 

I was trying to scan the subject matter to be able to cobble together a review which captured the breadth of the topic and the point of view being offered.  This meant I had to stabilise a lot of information in my mind and draw on that to pull the threads together. Actually, I found it hard to do and had to listen to the audio a second time to get the overview I needed. So much for saving time!

You only have voice on the audio and that is very similar to our presentations.  Of course, we can add visual stimulation through the slide deck and that mechanism also adds great navigation possibilities to keep the listeners with us.  Nevertheless, I was thinking about those occasions where you don’t or can’t use slides and what were the learnings about navigation, when all you have to work with is voice.

This is where signposts come in.  As trainers, we are taught to set up the phases of the training.  For example, if we are going to go into small groups to discuss a point, we don’t just say, “break into three groups”.  We will say, “In a moment, we are going to break into three groups to discuss XYZ”.  The reason for this is we need navigation for the participants during the class. They need to mentally prepare themselves for the pivot from what they have been doing to what is coming in the next phase.

Our presentations are like that too.  We will have certain topics in the speech providing the points we want to make and the evidence to support our position.  Generally, in a forty-minute speech, we will have a limited number of “chapters” for our speech.  We have our overarching key point we want to make and then we back that up with sub-points arranged as chapters and then surround those sub-points with proof.  There are a series of pivots, from one chapter to the next, throughout the talk. We need to make sure we are guiding our audience to come with us, rather than making a pivot and losing them on the turn.

We might bridge from one topic to the next if the theme is related, or we may need to make a sharp turn to a new topic.  Either way, we need to announce it to the audience.  For example, “we have been talking about the economic ramifications of this change in regulation.  Let me now talk about the HR dimensions of these proposed changes”.  The regulatory changes are the common issue and we are slightly elongating the topic to cover another different but related angle, so the transition is easy for our listeners to follow. 

If we are making a major pivot, then we need to set that up.  For example, “we have been talking about the economic ramifications of this change in regulation.  Let me switch gears and talk about a new topic, which we will all have to deal with in the next six months”.  In this way, the audience understands that regulatory issues as a topic is completed and now we are moving to an entirely new subject.  When we warn them that this switch is coming, they mentally adjust their concentration to deal with the new direction.

If we don’t do this, we are changing topics and listeners are left to their own devices to understand if these two topics are related or different and what is the connection between them, if there is a connection. You can see how easily we can confuse the crowd when we pivot subjects.  So, let’s leave some breadcrumbs so the listeners can stay with us, as we move around the topic and make our main points during the talk.   If we do this, they will be with us at the end, rather than lost and reaching for their mobile phones to find something infinitely more interesting than us.  We can’t have that now, can we!

Does introducing emotion when presenting mean sharing a good weep with the audience?  No, that is way over the top in a business context and would be the death knell of the speaker’s credibility.  We are not turning up to your talk to see you burst into tears, carried away with your lack of emotional control. 

We are there with you for one of four reasons.  1. Most typically, we aspire to be informed about some relevant aspect of our business.  2. We might be there to be motivated to take some action, which we have procrastinated on and have you convince us to swallow the frog and go do it.  3. It could be to gain inspiration about you, your brand, your organisation and we become fans. 4. Entertain us.  This could be an after dinner speech, where over copious great food and grog, we desire your raconteur wit and repartee.

In all four cases, random or spontaneous tears, are not on the menu.  When I talk about emotion, I am referring to stopping the Easter Island statue impersonations you have been pulling off.  If you have ever seen photos of these statues carved out of stone, the faces depicted are hard, unrelenting, and never changing.  This could be you, by the way, when you are presenting.

I was reminded of this phenomenon the other day when teaching a class on presenting.  The difference it made when the speakers smiled rather than being stone faced while presenting was remarkable.  Why were they stone faced, like their ancient kin on Easter Island?

This is our problem as speakers when we are concentrating on the content of what we are going to say. Because of this, we are not conscious about the delivery of how we say it.  Professor Albert Mehrabian cleared this point up in the 1960s during his research.  He is often misquoted. If you ever want to defrock the credentials of someone claiming to be an expert on public speaking and presenting, see if they get his facts confused. 

You will see the following numbers thrown around with shallow abandon and they are wrong.  Dubious presentation teachers will tell you how you dress is 55%, your voice quality 38% and your words 7% of the ratio of how you make an impression on an audience.  So dress well and sound nice. I was watching some “expert” on LinkedIn Learning sprouting these numbers with firm conviction.  Run far and fast when you encounter these fake people.

The good Profs research point was these numbers are only relevant when you lack congruency between what you are saying and how you are saying it.  If you said the words “the gap was huge” but you were holding your hands only a few centimeters apart to show the gap, that action wouldn’t be congruent with your words.  If you were relaying some good news, but your face was projecting a dark, unhappy scowl, that wouldn’t be congruent with the words. 

As per Mehrabian’s research, when we are confused by your lack of congruency, we wander off and start noticing how you are dressed or how you sound and we are distracted 93% of the time from your message. That is a very bad result for a speaker.

Rather than having only one expression on our face when presenting, we should have a constant barrage of expressions unfurling, each perfectly matched to the message we are delivering.  If it is good news we are purveying, then we should smile.  If we proffer bad news, we should look concerned. If something is puzzling us, we should look puzzled.  If it is a bit odd, we should look curious.

As speakers, we want to connect with our audience and there is no better guarantee of failing in that regard than having the wrong face for the message we are conveying.  If we have one constant “serious” face throughout our talk, it will be unlikely we can connect with the listeners.  We need to relax our face to be more approachable and to engage with the audience.

Sounds simple, except if you are nervous or deep in concentration on what you are going to say next, all thoughts of audience connection can sail out the window and we are left with your best Easter Island statue impersonation.  Like any activity, repetition teaches us how to relax when we are doing it. 

When we first learnt to ride a bicycle or to drive a car, we were tense and stressed.  Our face can be as hard as stone and our body contorted with stiffness.  After many repetitions, we are able to relax and ride the bicycle and drive the car while multi-tasking (certainly not recommended folks).  The point is, we learn how to relax and this happens when we do a lot of speaking repetitions.

Our face is the most powerful tool we have, so vastly superior to any monitor and slide deck.  We need to access this power and work on matching the congruency of our words with what is on our face when we present.  The best way to check your face is to video yourself. It can be shocking at first to realise the distance you have to bridge, but now you have awareness, you are a long way closer to being able to engage your audience.

I was reading an interesting LinkedIn post about how at the start of your presentation in Japan you need to have slides on your background and credentials to get the trust of the audience.

Let me quote from the post, so that you can get the flavour: “Most of the presentations I’ve seen by Japanese professionals tend to start with a detailed profile of the presenter’s career and professional accomplishments. Yes, a lot of these slides are information heavy and (no offence but) not aesthetically pleasing, but the average Japanese user is thinking “this person has many qualifications. I trust this person.” It’s not their fault, but Japanese people culturally tend to be wary of foreign brands and companies. The best you can do is try to break that barrier by listing all your accolades and making it clear that you are a trustworthy professional”

This post has attracted a lot of discussion so far and I added my two bobs worth as well.  The point being made was that Japanese doubt what they are being told unless they trust the person making the presentation.  Fair enough. The suggested way to gain that trust is to provide a lot of data on who you are, what you have done, where you have worked etc., at the start of proceedings. The author noted that, “a lot of these slides are information heavy”. I disagree with this approach if you want to engage your audience.

First impressions are critical and the first one minute of our talk is the decider for a large portion of the audience.  My biggest concern isn’t that they won’t trust what I am saying.  Today, we all have to worry that they will vote with their hands and grab their phones to escape from us to the internet.  They stop listening to our message.  It would be extremely rare that a Japanese audience would have people actually get up and walk out while the speaker is presenting.  I have never witnessed that. No one is that bold or rude.  Rather, they will just grab their phone and disappear in plain sight, right in front of you.

My suggestion in the LinkedIn thread was to try to get that biographical detail into the blurb advertising the talk.  We could also have it as a handout, which the audience can reference.  The idea of telling people who you are and why they should listen to you is a good idea.  This is especially so in this Era of Cynicism and fake news and I don’t see this as solely a Japanese issue. My suggestion, though, is to not waste the start of the talk with this type of heavy background detail.

We are vying with so many distractions in the minds of the audience sitting in front of us.  We have to grab their attention right from the start.  That means not tinkering around with the slide deck if we are switching it across from the previous speaker or from the host’s introduction.  We should get someone else to load up our slide deck, so that we are free from the start, to engage our audience. 

There are two favourite strategies I apply.  One is to find some really shocking statistic or piece of information which will scare the pants off the audience.  We all react to fear and loss, more so than gain and greatness. I saw one the other day in the Financial Times.  There was a statistic that from 2010 to 2020, Japanese companies on average were paying over the odds to acquire foreign companies to the tune of a 34% premium. Also, between 1990 and 2014, twenty-five percent of Japanese M&A acquisitions were failures and had to be written off.  This compared with only 5% of US deals ending in failure. 

If I was using this information, I would start, “Japan should immediately halt doing foreign M&As. Demographics are driving Japanese businesses to go offshore and buy businesses, but this strategy is super high risk. Japanese buyers of foreign companies are overpaying an average 34% premium to acquire businesses, but one in four fail and they are losing their investment. Are you ready to lose money too?  Let’s find out what they should do”.

With a start like “Japan should immediately halt doing foreign M&As”, and a finish with “are you ready to lose money too?  Let’s find out what they should do”, no one in a Japanese audience will be focused on my credentials.  They will be worried about losing the investment and attracting potential blame if things go wrong.  My aim was to seize their attention and that opening will do it.

As far as gaining credibility goes, I need to back up my statements with provable facts and data.  Statements are just opinion and the audience needs to know where I am getting this information.  In this case, the Financial Times is owned by the Nikkei and is considered a reputable journalistic source.  Our main body of our talk needs references to proof of the points we make to sustain our argument.  This is where we prove our credentials as a speaker, because we show we are an expert who have assembled the needed information to back up what we are saying.

The other technique I like is to tell a story.  By the way, a personal story is the best.  It needs to take the audience with me back to the point when I discovered this truth I am telling them. By taking them back to the context, they will probably draw the same conclusion I have reached based on the same data.  If I have it, I might relate the gory story of a foreign M&A deal that nearly bankrupted the Japanese company and weave in the FT statistics.

If you still feel you need a biography slide, then please, please, please make it able to be understood in two seconds. Don’t force people to wade through the slide deck swamp you have created on screen.  Just include the strongest points to gain the credibility you feel needed. Absolutely don’t make this your first slide or the start of the talk.  Get the attention grabber opening working first to grab the audience and then you can unveil your most powerful credentials. Pour on the proof in the main body to get acceptance of you and your message and deliver the talk competently. This protects your personal and professional brands.

 It was a big affair.  Many supporting organisations had promoted this expert dual speaker event and the large audience filed into the prestigious venue.  I was sold on the advertising too.  I was intrigued by the pairing of topics and according to the blurb, the speakers’ backgrounds looked the money. The MC kicked things off and handed the baton off to the first speaker.  Things went off the rails immediately.  The initial thought was the microphone wasn’t on, but sadly it was.  The speaker just wasn’t on. 

This was a rookie tech mistake. I didn’t expect to see that from a very senior guy in his sixties.  Here is a side note for the rest of us - always get to the venue early and test the microphone set up.  Often the venue sound system is also a problem and there need to be changes made to the volume controls to get more out of the system.  It was a good reminder to me to not trust the given equipment as it is.

 Also, often in business venues, the people organising the talk are great at moving tables and chairs around, but less expert when it comes to the getting the sound system to work properly.  This was an evening event, so the tech people have long departed and we amateurs are the only ones remaining. That is why we need to get there early and check everything before we are ever handed a microphone in public and expected to perform.

This gentleman’s frail, wispy, low energy voice was speaking to us, but I really struggled with hearing what was being said.  I was sitting in the front row, but even at that distance, the voice volume being generated was insufficient to follow the thesis being presented.  For the next twenty minutes, I had no idea what he was saying.

Actually, it was worse than that, which was already bad enough. Our speaker was an expert from the finance sector and had held many leading positions here in Japan, including Country Head and President of a number of big name brands.  You would think with a resume like that, he would know better, but he  spoke in a monotone. 

This meant that each word was delivered with exactly the same strength as every other word in his sentences.  Now we all know that words are not democratic.  Some have more importance and prestige than others, and so need to be lofted above the hoi polloi.  We need to hit those words harder or alternatively much softer to create variation.  This variation is a simple pattern interrupt, which is what keeps the listeners with us.

 The problem with a monotone delivery is it has no pattern interrupt and so makes the audience sleepy. That is precisely what happened to me.  I couldn’t for the life of me follow what on earth he was saying, so I became drowsy.  The speaker was not an English native speaker and so there was a slight accent. However, he has spent almost the entirety of his career in international finance, so his English was very good and not an issue for him to deliver this talk. This foreign language aspect is definitely not an excuse. I am convinced he would have delivered the same talk in his own language, in exactly the same way.  This is how he speaks in public, period.

He also spoke his monotone sentences in long bursts, sans pauses.  I have this trouble too when I speak in Japanese, because I tend to speed up.  This means that the words become jumbled and are hard to dissect.  There are no “brain breaks” to allow us to digest what we have just heard.  When you combine an accent with a fast clip, it makes it more difficult for the audience to follow you.  When I speak in Japanese to a public audience, I have to keep telling myself to slow down and inject pauses, to help the crowd stick with my message.

Combining all this with a complete lack of energy made his speech a serious pain.  Speaker energy is infectious.  We create an electricity in the room which envelops our audience and transports them to the place we have decided to take them in our talk. When a speaker doesn’t project energy, the audience has to mount their own energy sources to get involved in the speech.  If the talk is gripping, even if the speaker isn’t generating a lot of ‘ki” (気) or intrinsic energy, we can meet them in the middle and stick with the talk.  But a wispy voice, devoid of energy, speaking in a monotone, with an accent, is the coup de grâce for a public speaker’s reputation, no matter how senior they may be or how grand their resume is .

 The other two weapons in the public speaker’s arsenal were also sheathed.  He was using a podium to hold his notes.  This meant that the height of the podium came up to his waist level, hiding his body from the audience.  You often see speakers resting their laptop on the podium when they are using slides.  In both cases, you don’t need to stand behind the obstacle.  With slides you can have a slide clicker and stand anywhere you like.  Just using his notes, he could have stood to the side to use more of his body language to bolster his words.  It makes such a difference and you will notice how much the next time you see a speaker come out from behind the podium.

Eye contact wasn’t being employed either to engage the crowd.  He wasn’t trying to connect one-on-one with the audience, as he could easily have done.  When you stare straight into one eye of an audience member for around six seconds, they really feel the close connection with you.  For them, it seems as if time and space have been suspended and it is just the two of you in the room, having a private conversation.  It is so powerful and as speakers, we definitely want to employ our eye power. 

Gestures were also absent.  Part of the problem was he was holding the microphone in one hand and resting his other elbow on the podium, thus ensuring the free hand wasn’t being used, either. What a wasted opportunity. The vortex of voice, body language, eye contact and gestures all zeroing in on the audience members, one by one, is what makes a speaker have real impact.  That much concentrated energy coming at you is irresistible.

Now here is the rub.  He has been working away for over forty years and he has always been like this.  That means he has been destroying audiences with a toxic regularity stretching over decades. It was obvious he was totally oblivious to how much damage he was doing to his personal and professional brands.  His time past cannot be reclaimed, and that is sad.  What is even sadder is he will keep going like this for the rest of his career.  Don’t squander your working years like he has – get the training and make presenting a powerhouse support for your career and brands.

I hesitated to use this title, because it smacks of click bait, doesn’t it?  To hell with it, live dangerously, I say! What flagged this question for me was an article in the Financial Times by Anjli Raval about Wall Street earnings calls.   She mentioned that researchers from the University of Bergen and Said Business School analysed the question-and-answer sections of earnings calls from 2993 American listed companies between 2010 and 2019. 

They were looking at a term I had never heard of before, called “uptalk”.  This is a common thing with women, who sometimes end their sentences with a rising intonation.  It comes across as open, friendly and not being domineering or pushy.  All good.  However, it also can sound as if they are not convinced of what they are saying. That rising tone sounds like the statement is morphing into an unstated question conveying uncertainty.

The research showed that whenever they used this uptalk element in their speech, male analysts made less buy recommendations when female CEOs were doing the earnings calls. The academics noted, “Analysts respond negatively when female executives use unexpectedly high levels of uptalk”.  The study showed that this did not apply when men used uptalk in the earnings calls.

Raval also captures some dilemmas facing women executives when she writes, “They must be vocal but not deemed ‘shrill’.  They must be confident but not perceived as arrogant; empathetic but not so much that is shows weakness; they should smile and be enthusiastic to not appear ‘threatening’ or ‘hostile’ (words rarely used for male counterparts). And they shouldn’t complain”. Whew.  That is a tricky path to navigate for female executives.

What about Japan?  In my experience, there is definitely an expectation here about how women are supposed to speak.  Television panels, talk shows etc., here usually feature the woman as a charming appendage to the male.  He is the expert and the center of attention.  Her job is to not say much, listen intently to what he is saying and make him look good.

I should point out though, that sounding hesitant using “uptalk” style of speech is a fixture of the culture in Japan, for both men and women.  It is a means of sounding polite, humble and non-aggressive. These are welcome attributes in a country which values social harmony.  Having said that, I feel there is greater pressure on women here to restrain themselves in what they say and particularly in how forcefully they say it.

Infamously, ex-Prime Minister Mori, when he headed the Japan Olympic Organising Committee, complained about women wanting to talk too much at the meetings. That caused a huge furore and very, very reluctantly, he resigned his position after holding on to it until the bitter end.  What I think he was saying was that the women on the committee should sit there and listen to men like him, and say nothing.  They should be guided by the senior males in the room, so their opinions weren’t required.  “If you need an opinion, I will give it to you” type of approach. 

Ex-Prime Minister Aso is also a reliable source for faux pas regarding the place of women in Japanese society.  There is even a dedicated section on Wikipedia titled “Controversial Statements”.  I wonder how many Japanese people listed in Wikipedia have such a dedicated section?  In 2014, he talked about women who didn’t give birth being “problematic”.  In 2018, he said “there is no such thing as a sexual harassment charge”.  January 2024, he called Foreign Minister Yōko Kamikawa, aged 70, an “obasan” or old lady, and commented that she was “not particularly beautiful”. 

By the way, he is 83, light years distant from being handsome and grew up with a massive array of silver spoons stuffed into his mouth. Being male, his looks don’t enter into any calculations. In that same speech, he also said she was a “new star and could inspire new stars to emerge in politics”.  Some serious mixed messaging going on there from Aso.

 So should women in Japan even bother with public speaking, given the male dominance of business here?  There are many excellent foreign female speakers here like Helen Iwata, who is a friend and a graduate of our High Impact Presentations Course. She is really skilled and teaches public speaking for women.  What about skilled Japanese females?  I am sure they must be out there somewhere and maybe I have missed them over the last 39 years living here. In reality, I don’t see many female executives giving public speeches and I am struggling to think of someone who would be a really good role model? 

 I quoted Raval earlier on the difficulties for women to navigate the right tone when speaking. Japan is no different and perhaps even less open to the idea and certainly less tolerant as well.  What we see in our classes, though, is that there is no problem for women to become excellent public speakers.  That, I believe, is the difference.  Regardless of gender, when we get the training, we know how to navigate all the obstacles to getting our message across. 

What often happens, though, is women in business are left to work it out through trial and error.  In companies, men get the training quota, and the women don’t. You need regular speaking spots to make that trial-and-error algorithm work.  Executives in Japan just don’t get to give that many speeches in a year. Also, the number of speaking spots for women here is a lot less than for men.  It will take female executives a long time to work it out by themselves.  I suggest women in business (actually everyone!) get the training, so they can speed things up, improve the process and secure the needed outcomes.

 Pasedena, January 31,1993. Michael Jackson performs at the Super Bowl.  He suddenly pops out of the smoke on to the stage and strikes a dramatic pose facing right.  He holds that pose for one minute and eight seconds, not moving a muscle.  He makes one change and looks left. He holds that same pose for another 20 seconds before he takes off his sunglasses and then starts singing and dancing. Imagine a whole football stadium with nearly one hundred thousand fans there and a viewing audience of 91 million.  You have to possess tremendous guts and self-belief to hold that monster crowd in the palm of your hand and stand there motionless for over a minute.

This is an extreme case and none of us would dream of walking up on to a stage in front of a business audience and just standing there motionless and not speaking for over a minute.  It would be considered weird and we would lose credibility with the crowd.   

What could we do though to build some anticipation for the things we are saying? Often, when we are nervous we speak too fast and too much, so there are no breaks to allow the audience members to digest what we are saying.  It is like the rolling breakers in the surf, each one crashing over the top of the previous one.  We crush our audience with our information, as it hits them in waves and overwhelms them.

I saw a demonstration of great anticipation many years ago at a business presentation.  The speaker was not on the front of the stage when he was announced.  There was a pause of around twenty seconds after that and then when we heard his voice he was nowhere in sight.  The reason for that was he was at the back of the hall behind us and he started speaking out of our vision.  People were craning their necks and looking around for the source of the voice.  Slowly, he made his way to the front and continued his talk.  It was quite effective to build some anticipation and to differentiate him from just about every other talk we had attended up the that point.  It also worked in a business context and wasn’t considered weird or strange.

Usually, when the speaker is announced they head for their laptop on stage and start playing around with it, to get the slides up.  Once the slide deck is visible they start their presentation.  No anticipation going on here, only annoyance on the part of the audience for the delay in getting proceedings underway. 

What if we switched things up a bit and made sure we were not the one doing the mechanics on the slide deck? We can get someone else to organise that for us and make our way straight to the center of the stage.  In this way we are creating our first impression as a professional.  Rather than starting immediately, we could hold the audience in anticipation of what is to come.  Not for over a minute, like Michael Jackson, but 15 seconds is quite a long time to hold them there before we start. 

When we do this, our opening has to be a blockbuster because we have built the expectation by driving up the tension from the beginning.  A very mundane greeting such as thanking the organisers for the chance to talk will not suffice.  We need an opening that is so powerful, that the audience is now fully concentrated on us and are eager to hear more of what we have to say.  It could be a quote, a statistic, and fact or a story.  Whatever it is, we have to make sure it really connects with the audience.  The worst thing to do is build up audience expectations and then let bring everyone down.

Doom and gloom is a great content piece and superior to hope and a bright future.  We are more moved by fear than we are by gain, so appealing to everyone’s risk averse nature is a good place to begin.  For example, we hold the crowd for 15 seconds than unleash, “In the next ten years the very fabric of Japanese society is going to be torn and shredded”.  At about the ten second mark, they are wondering what is going on and why we are not starting straightaway. That pattern interrupt followed by such a brazen headline, will have the whole room hungry for the explanation.

It depends of course on the theme of your talk, but look for something seriously gloomy and scary to kick things off.  That “fabric of Japanese society” start could lead into a talk about the breakdown of cultural harmony here as poorly educated foreigners from third world countries flood in to fill the jobs Japanese can’t or won’t do.  We could talk about consequent rising crime, the spread of drugs, intra-foreigner tribal violence and a whole host of other scary topics.

During our talk, we can slightly elongate our pauses for effect.  Great comedians are known for their comic timing.  They have memorised their script and their talent is in the art of the release of the punchline.  We have to take a page out of their book and look for the pause, before we lower the boom with our release of the various punchlines, we have arranged for the topic.  Some major ramification or danger sign or new development or whatever we are focusing on for the presentation. 

Generally speaking, we need to be hitting some high point every five minutes in the talk to keep the audience with us.  That means being able to use pauses and hitting key words or phrases like a maestro.  The pause creates the vacuum for the key word or phrase to fill.  If there is a pause both before and after, it really lift the power of the word or phrase we have chosen. Those variations in tone and strength is what creates the interest on the part of the audience, to keep listening to us.  A monotone delivery or a single constant voice strength delivery are too boring to keep the crowd with us. 

We can learn from Michael Jackson’s guts and adapt the idea to our business world.  We grab everyone’s attention and we keep the delivery in a business context which only adds to our personal and professional brands.

It is very common to see panel discussions at business events.  There is danger lurking in the shadows, though. The hosts invite a number of experts, usually around three to four, to interact with the MC.  The idea is that a range of views will emerge and a richer resource of information will be provided this way, compared to the single speaker model. Sometimes, there will be a hybrid, where you might be asked to give a short burst on your subject and then join the rest of the panel for the discussion component.

The danger here is your personal and professional reputation is being put up for public evaluation.  This is not just against an absolute standard, but also in a comparison with the other panel members.  Some colleagues up on stage can be quite competitive, but you didn’t get the memo. Your insights may come across as paltry, when ranked against another panellist’s sterling efforts.  Or you might struggle to give a meaningful reply to the MC’s questions and come across as a “fake” expert.  The other end of the problem are those panellists who just talk way too much and lack self-awareness.  Technical people can often be like this. They ramble on and on and the MC has to publicly reign them in. This is not a good look, so be succinct in your answers.

When we are asked to give a talk, hopefully we prepare well for the occasion, and we should rehearse what we are going to present.  With a panel discussion it is a bit illusory, because it doesn’t seem to be a “presentation”, but in fact it is. It is certainly judged that way by the audience.  They don’t say to themselves, “Oh, this is just a panel discussion, so I will suspend my usual cynicism, high expectations and unrealistic standards accordingly”.  No, they are in full beast, critic mode, as per normal.

Thinking of the panel talk answers as your own personal mini-presentation is a good starting point. This will drive you to prepare properly.  What does that mean, though?  We should know what the MC is going to ask us in advance and prepare our answers ahead of time, so that we are not struggling to come up with a response on the spot.  It is always good to check with the MC on the day, because things may have moved since they sent you the email on the questions they were planning to ask.

 We also have to be on the ball with paying close attention to the comments of the other panellists.  The MC may suddenly ask us to match our comment to their remarks.  If we are concentrating only on what we will say next, we may miss the cue and look frazzled. As the discussion moves, we have to be ready to make an unprepared comment and so we should be mentally manufacturing possible answers to any questions which may arise.  We need to be constantly adjusting to the flow of the conversation in real time.

Being able to sprout statistics, references, quotes on the subject really adds weight to our reputation as an expert in this area.  Normally, if we have a slide deck in a presentation, then all of the data is there and we don’t have to remember any of it.  On a panel, though, being able to quote the information from memory is very attractive and impressive to an audience.  Opinions are cheap, but knowledge has to be gained and we need to demonstrate we have this subject firmly in our grasp. 

Now having said that, it is not a bad thing to refer to some notes if the content is complex or challenging to recall.  Don’t worry, the audience won’t rise as one and denounce you as a fraud for checking your notes or quoting from your notes.  However, being able to unload the data unaided, elevates your level of credibility to a very great height.  This is particularly useful if you are the only one of the panel who can pull off this magic trick.

I was chatting to a panellist before the action got underway and he was telling me about the public speaking training he had received at his legal firm, so I was expecting a good performance.  Well, it was pretty average.  Why?  He ummed and ahhed his way through it and had negative vocal mannerisms such as saying “you know” way too often.  That detracted from the believability of his comment content.  What we say and how we say it matters. 

The other big error was he ignored his audience.  I could see he hadn’t been on too many panel discussions.  The MC was seated at the end of the row of experts. Our panellist would receive a question from the MC and, while solely looking at the MC, deliver the response.  Amateur mistake.  He had an entire audience there to speak to, but he chose to ignore them.  He could give a six second blast to the MC and then work his eye contact on individual members of the audience. 

In one minute he could make six seconds of direct connection with ten people each in the crowd. Generally, our answer takes three to four minutes, so there is a possibility of strongly engaging 40 members of the crowd per answer.  That is a totally different result to ignoring the audience and just answering the MC’s questions.

One other thing is posture.  Women have this worked out, so they rarely ever make rookie mistakes. However, some male panellists slump in their chairs and look simply unprofessional.  Guys, never kick your legs out like you were watching the sports on TV at home.  You might think that wouldn’t happen, but you will see it.  I recall an MC himself doing this during the discussion. I couldn’t believe it, but there he was, in full sight destroying his reputation. 

Also, please spare us a ringside view of your hairy shins, because your socks are too short.  When we are up on stage, we are elevated, so the eyeline of the audience is looking up at us and hence the brutal calf exposure no one needs to see.  Sit up straight and tall, keep your knees together and remove all distractions from your message. Don’t forget to use gestures which include the audience in your answers. 

Remove the risk and danger from being a panellist and instead turn the opportunity into a triumph of personal and professional brand building.

The education system in Japan from the early stages, right the way through varsity to most corporate training, is based on the lecture model.  The instructor provides the information, and the participants write it all down.  It is a very one directional, passive approach.  When we are presenting, what do we do when we are using the “inform” model?  Where are we supposed to draw the line between just passing on valuable information to the audience and trying to engage the audience?  Are these two aims mutually exclusive?  Isn’t the reason we are invited to speak is because we have valuable things to impart to the audience?  Isn’t the reason the audience has turned up is to gain insights, perspectives and information they don’t already possess? 

I am sure we all agree that the speaker has to provide value to the listeners otherwise what is the point of them paying the dough and investing their time to attend?  The question becomes how to provide the required value?  Can the speaker have excellent experience, clear insights, rich data and be engaging at the same time?  The answer is yes and let me use a local example to make the point. Jesper Koll is a well-known economist here in Tokyo and he does a lot of public speaking.  I am a fan and have attended maybe twenty of his presentations over the years. To my mind, they always hit the right combination of excellent experience, clear insights, rich data and are kept engaging. 

What is Jesper doing which is working so well?  He is always high energy, humorous, provides high quality statistics and data and most importantly, he has an intent to engage everyone in the crowd.  Speaker intention is a key asset to be successful. He doesn’t see his role is to just dump a lot of data on his audience and imagine his work is done. He is going for much more than that. He wants to get a strong reaction from his audience and he is always successful in that aim.

Storytelling is an asset for Jesper.  Rather than just giving everyone a download of facts, he wraps them up in stories. This makes the information much easier to absorb, digest and recall. Think about what stories you have to thread your data through.  The story sticks and therefore so does the data.  Here is a simple example.  Say the data showed that the number of young people in Japan aged 15-34 has halved in the last twenty years and is going to halve again in the next thirty-five years. 

We could just state the facts or we could wrap it up in a story like this: “It was a snowy day in Tokyo and I was visiting my client in Otemachi. It was really miserable outside, so I was glad to get out of the cold and into the warmth of his office on the 23^rd floor.  We were sitting in their expensive, well-appointed leather and walnut Boardroom with his HR team and we were discussing the problems of recruiting and retaining staff.  I didn’t know these numbers, but on the huge monitor on the wall, his head of HR Ms. Inoue put up the demographic projections for Japan.  In the last twenty years we have halved the number of people age 15-34.  What was highlighted to me was that the projections showed we would lose another half again over the next 35years. I was silently wondering where we would find the staff we need to expand the business in the future”.  By using storytelling we have taken the audience to a place in their mind’s eye, where they can see a snowy Otemachi, a gorgeous Boardroom, and a huge monitor showing the statistics.  Threading the numbers into the story makes it more likely we will retain the data well after the talk and as speakers that is what we want isn’t it, to be remembered as someone providing value.

Jesper also uses rhetorical questions very well.  He will come and stand right in front of someone in the audience, towering over them and lay down the question.  The victim is usually paralysed by fear at this point because (a) they think they have to provide an answer in public and (b) they don’t know the answer.  Just in the nick of time Jesper wades in to the rescue with the answer. At this point, the victim realises that this was a rhetorical question after all and not something they were obliged to answer.  Floods of relief abound at this point.

The upshot is that he keeps his audience on their toes and engaged with the proceedings.  Trust me, you don’t want to be daydreaming when he is speaking, so he keeps everyone paying close attention to what he says.  He is using his eye contact constantly with individuals in the crowd.  This personalises the talk, rather than leaving it as the spray the eye contact everywhere, at the same time, alternative.  That method engages precisely no one.  Watch Japanese politicians. You will see they are masters of fakery, looking like they are making eye contact with the crowd, swivelling their heads to and fro, without managing to make any engagement with anyone.

Why is the lecture style of speech here so popular?  As I mentioned this is the model most people have been exposed to since birth, so this has become the default standard. Anything else looks like heresy in a culture where conforming is the best path to safety.  You get along in Japan by going along and so no rocking the boat.  Does anyone audit the results of these lectures masquerading as speeches?  No, so the crime against humanity continues from one generation to the next.

The reason this style of speech has reached its end use date is because of technology.  The mobile phone instantly connects everyone to the lure of the internet. With advances in AI you can access data so quickly, we don’t need to be told stuff anymore. Just data by itself isn’t enough.  We need insights, fresh perspectives, guides on how to apply the data and access to the experiences of others. We want to learn what we should do in a similar situation.  

In the past, the moment the speaker looked boring, that is to say, started lecturing, the Japanese audience’s traditional remedy was to fall asleep.  I have seen plenty of that in my 39 years here. However today, the listeners are now wide awake and on their phone accessing the internet.  The competition for mind space is relentless and getting harder, as concentration spans shrink, and distractions abound. 

The speaker has to thread the needle between imparting valuable data and information and keeping the audience engaged and with them, so that the listeners can receive the key messages the speaker is trying to convey. As mentioned, we need to be energised and highly proactive to secure their engagement. Fresh data, insights, rhetorical questions, eye contact, voice modulation and storytelling are excellent tools for achieving that outcome.

At the start, I asked the questions, “When we are presenting, what do we do when we are using the “inform” model?  Where are we supposed to draw the line between just passing on valuable information to the audience and trying to engage the audience?  Are these two aims mutually exclusive?”.  The clear answer is they are not in opposition to each other.  Take Jesper’s example to heart and there will be no reason why we can’t all have both. 

There is a famous speech construct which we have all heard; “Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you just told them”.  Basically, this says open the talk by flagging what your central thesis is, expound on that thesis and then, in the summary, revisit the key points.  There is nothing wrong with that approach, except that it is a bit basic and boring.  Apart from that, it is fine!  Given the bombardment we all face every day from the media, social media and advertising, we have to rise above the deluge and stand out or be washed away with the mass effluent.

How do we do that?  Here is a simple formula we can use when constructing our talk.  We can create our talk and involve some central characters.  There will be the villain. It could be a person or a system or an issue or anything which is a danger to our getting done what needs to be accomplished.  Also we need to add a bur under the saddle of the audience.  We need to outline how bad things will become if we don’t take the action we are suggesting and take that action right now.  Make the audience the hero of this talk.  For ourselves, we play the role of the wise sage, the guide suggesting what would be the best approach to overcome this issue. We outline the call to action and we clarify the plan. Finally, we need to make clear the benefits of the outcome we are suggesting.

A good place to start is with the villain.  We need to open the talk in a way which will break through all the competing messages inside the mind of our listeners.  Today, they have a lot going on. They are worried about things they cannot control which happened in the past.  They are anxious about the things they need to be doing right now. Additionally, they are projecting forward to drag in concerns which will appear in the future.  In the midst of this maelstrom, we innocently turn up to give our little talk.

The opening is designed to smash through all the noise and grab the audience by the throat.  We need to force them to put their phone down, stop thinking about something else, and give us their full attention.  Bad news sells.  We know that because look at what we are served up by the media all of the time.  “If it bleeds, it leads” is a classic headline filtering exercise by newspaper editors.  So let’s start strong with a big downside.  For example, “We in business are all doomed, because we won’t be able to recruit the staff we need due to the shortage of workers here in Japan”.  Hopefully, that start will set off a hundred “thuds”, as mobile phones hit tables in the room and all eyes are fixed on you. 

Having grabbed their attention, we now go into detail on how bad it is and will become.  We must make a strong case that if we don’t take action now, then Armageddon is just around the corner.  For most people, doing nothing is thought to be a zero cost option, but we destroy that notion.  The implications of no action have to be laid out in full. At this point, we need data, statistics, evidence, proof to make our point.  Opinions are interesting, but so what?  We want to know the facts to make up our own mind and this is when we give them to the listeners.

We make the audience the hero and we appeal to their better selves to make the right decision.  Don’t leave this to chance. We try to control their reaction to what we are saying by setting it up during the talk. Our explanation will include statements like, “I am sure now that you have heard the numbers you can see that….” and “Based on the data, I am sure we will all agree that….” and “I hate to be a bearer of bad news, but I am sure we would all prefer to be forearmed and forewarned for a difficult future. So you can see why I am giving this talk now and I invite you to take action today.”

We as their wise guide come with the solution, outline what action they need to take in detail and save them all the work needed to fix the issue.  Our plan is outlined comprehensively, and we include some “what if” scenarios.  Do this because we must anticipate what the pushback will be from the audience before we give the talk. Don’t allow any doubts or concerns about what we are saying to fester while we are giving the talk.  We go after them during the talk. Try to completely crush these objections and do that inside your talk before you get to the Q&A.

The success they will have from taking our advice has to be concrete, simple and presented in a way which will make it doable for the audience to adopt.  We try to have them visualise the changes they need to make inside their firm to adapt what we are outlining to make it their reality.  Get them to see the benefits in their mind’s eye through using word pictures. 

When we parade these central characters in the story and arrange the talk using them, we create a presentation which will grip everyone’s attention.  We can do this despite all the temptations of the internet, which, by the way, is within easy grasp and only a few clicks away for everyone.  Old formulas for talks are fading fast as audience attention spans shrink, patience disappears, and time is in shorter supply.  As presenters, we must lift our game and go harder to breakthrough all the barriers to our messages.  If we do this, then we will stand out from the crowd and our personal and professional brands will be not only protected, but enhanced.

“I want to be perfect when I speak”. No, you don’t! Let me tell you a tale of two CEO presenters with different approaches to addressing their audiences.  One CEO used recent movies as his navigation for his speech.  Actually, I had watched none of them, but he added enough context for me to get the point he was making about his own journey as a CEO, in a tough industry, in tough times.  Actually, we all love a talk about hard times and woe, followed by ultimate success against the odds.  This type of speech gives us a mix of empathy for the presenter and hope for ourselves.  By the way, which version of a talk would you be more interested in – “How I made $20 million” or “How I lost $20 million”?  Most of us would probably be more interested in the latter, because our risk averse natures are always looking for clues as to what we should avoid doing.  The other CEO speaker was just perfect.  The speech flowed beautifully, it was carefully crafted and manicured. The navigation was exact and it had no delivery blemishes.  It simply failed.

Part of the difference was in the storytelling aspect of the two talks. The first CEO got us hooked on his struggles, his despair, his tale of redemption.  He opened up the kimono to share his vulnerability, his imposter syndrome, his raw fears.  It was painful and real.  We had a context to gauge his ultimate success, because he took us to the bottom, to the depths. He helped us visualise, through his word pictures, his challenging ascent back into the fiscal black.  The other speaker told a tale of solid progress, a stable journey onward and upward.  It was hard to hear, because it sounded too foreign, too far removed from the reality of the last couple of years of struggle. 

The delivery styles were also diametrically opposed.  The first CEO stumbled over his words at times, had a foreign accent which frankly challenged my ears to comprehend certain terms.  He used the movies selected as navigation and spoke to the point each one represented and stitched his own story into the narrative to make his points come alive.  His hands were empty for gestures. He was relaxed and concentrated on engaging his audience by looking at us throughout the talk.  He used the stage area to cover the room to the left and right, but he wasn’t manic and aimlessly wandering around free range without purpose, like so many crazed speakers you see.

The second CEO sent a chill through my spine when I noticed he was bringing his iPad with him to the podium. Uh oh!  Sure enough, he read that perfectly constructed speech to us all.  He was a much more fluent speaker of English, had no pronunciation flaws and the construction of the talk and the navigation was excellent.  He had clearly labored hard over the text to whip it into shape and make it as perfect as possible.  That was the problem.  It was perfect, but it lacked authenticity. He didn’t feel engaging as a speaker.  It was a canned speech and by choosing to read it to us; he disconnected himself from his audience.  He looked down at the iPad to give that talk and that meant he wasn’t 100% concentrated on his audience, unlike the first CEO.

 We are not perfect when we speak, mispronouncing words and stumbling over cartain phrases.  We have flaws and that is why we are appealing to our listeners.  They know themselves that they are like that too. We forgive the speaker for our common flaws.  There is a limit, though. Anyone who has had the misfortune to hear a speaker um and ah their way throughout the entire talk, says to themselves, “end this torture now please”.  That is at the other extreme of flaws which surpasses the audience's ability to bear the unbearable.  By the way, if that is you, constantly uming and ahing, then please do the rest of us a favour and stop speaking in public, until you can string two words together without destroying our souls. 

 Counterintuitively, when the delivery is too perfect, we struggle to feel any great commonality with the speaker.  They are a different animal to the rest of us. Reading the talk guarantees perfection, but it comes at a severe cost.  It can easily become a lifeless, moribund and boring exercise. 

My guess is that this second CEO speaker spent the entire preparation time working on the crafting of the text.  Effort was spent on shuffling words around and working hard on the flow of the document.  There seemed no idea in play of “how can I deliver this talk and really engage the audience when I read it?”.  Our word emphasis, phrasing, pauses, eye contact and gestures can still be employed when reading the text to bring it alive as much as possible.  We can depart from the text to tell a side story or make a key point.  Let’s engage in eye contact with the crowd, so that it feels like we are talking directly to them.  We have all the tools at our disposal and we need to be drawing on them.

My advice though is to avoid perfection and go for authenticity. Concentrate on your audience.  They will forgive your few flaws and will gravitate to you when you speak.  Think about it. It is exceedingly rare that someone reading a talk can hold the audience in the palm of their hand.  Have you ever witnessed that phenomenon in actuality? Our first CEO achieved that breakthrough, because he made us the centerpiece of his talk, not his carefully crafted text, like the second CEO did.  You don’t need perfection – go for being truly authentic.  If you are going to read it to me, word for word, then send it by email – that would be better.

The Master of Ceremony (MC) goes to the microphone to get the programme underway but the audience are simply oblivious, caught up in their own riveting conversations. The situation is much worse at receptions where alcohol is already flowing and the people down the back are generating a roar, a positive din, that drowns out the speakers. Apart from bona fide members of Imperial Families, everyone is fair game in the “let’s ignore the speaker” stakes. Cabinet Ministers, eminent speakers, famous personalities all struggle to get the attention of the crowd. When it is our turn, what can we humble beings do about this?

Here are some ideas that will shut down the noisy rabble and provide a proper platform for the speaker to be heard.

Make sure to turn off the background music well before you are ready to start. Surprisingly, this is often forgotten by the organisers. Speakers should not try to compete with irritating white noise in the background, so check this will be done before you are due to launch forth.

Preferably always have someone else introduce you. Their job is to quiet the room in preparation for your presentation. This doesn't always go to plan though, because it can be a lucky draw on who introduces you. Usually, they are not skilled speakers themselves and so they may do a lame job at best.

If you are in the MC role yourself, about to introduce the programme speaker, avoid the charisma by-pass problem of no presence in the room. I recently saw a giant of a man, fulsomely mustachioed, boasting a hulking frame, draw up to the microphone and in a tiny faint voice try and call the assembled masses to order. He had absolutely no success, so even an imposing physical presence is no guarantee to cut through the clatter.

On the other hand, if you worry about speaking behind high podiums and appearing to your audience as a stylish coiffure just peaking above the water line, always arrive early and have the event staff provide a small raised dais behind the podium for you.   We always want the audience to easily see our face. Even better, dismiss the podium altogether, because now we can use our body language to maximum effect. If you are using a laptop on the podium, turn it to the side, so that you can see the screen and stand facing the audience, so there are no barriers between you. The technology should be at our command and not commanding us.

As noted, voice projection is key for cutting through crowd noise. Today’s microphone technology is very good, so you don’t need to have a stentorian voice to be heard. However, placing the microphone too close to your mouth creates dissonance, making it harder to hear you. Mysteriously, some speakers have the opposite problem and hold the microphone so low that there is almost no sound being heard. These errors are easily avoided if you just hold the microphone about a hand’s spread in front of your mouth and speak across the top of the microphone mesh.

When you face a challenging noisy crowd, make sure to hit the first few words very hard. To get things going, start with a strong “Ladies and Gentleman” with power invested into the first word and remember to draw that first word out slightly (Ladieeeeees). Elongate it for effect but don’t overdo it . Now include a small pause before a strong finish to the phrase. This will generally shut the room down and gather everyone’s focus on the speaker. If it doesn’t produce that “hear a pin drop” silence, then go again with strong voicing of the next phrase, “May I have your attention please”. Again, add a pause and let peer pressure quiet your audience. If it is still noisy, repeat this phrase once more and do not start until you have total silence.

I have seen speakers using assorted cutlery to bang on a glass, to create a chime that signals it is time to “shut up everyone and listen”. It works, however, one word of warning - don’t speak while pounding. Let the chime effect work for you and when the room pressure builds to a point where you have achieved silence, put the glass down, pause and then start. Why pause? This builds anticipation and curiosity, both of which work in our favour when trying to get attention to what we are saying. Using pauses during your talk is also powerful for focusing everyone on the message you are delivering

Similarly, you can also use powerful music to drown out the crowd’s babble and make them listen to what is coming next. Just a short piece will do, as it signals action is about to commence and people will switch their gaze to you at the front of the room. After the music ends, again use a slight pause and then start.

We can’t be effective communicators if people are not listening, so our first task is to quiet the room. Using these techniques will produce the right break in the chaos for your message to be heard. Some final advice, don’t practice on your audience. Spend time rehearsing your talk, so that you are confident and comfortable that you can command the room from the very start.

 Action steps

1. Turn off the BGM well before you start
2. Have someone else quiet the room for you
3. Don’t allow the podium to dominate you
4. Practice with the microphones, so that you know the correct distance and angle of elevation to use
5. Hit the first word hard and elongate it slightly
6. Uses pauses – they add power to the speaker
7. If you strike a glass to produce a crowd-quieting chime, add a pause and then speak
8. A short burst of music can silence an audience and clear the way for you to start speaking

Best intentions, higher callings, righteousness – all good stuff but without good communication, our efforts fail. Instinctively, we all know storytelling is a great communication tool, but the word itself is a problem. We associate it with bedtime stories and therefore the idea sounds a bit childish. In the modern era, Hollywood talks about the arc of the story or in politics, the media punishes the lack of narrative. Actually, this is storytelling just dressed up in more formal attire.

The other problem with storytelling is that we are not very good at it. It seems too simple, so we gravitate to more complex solutions – frameworks, theories, models, four box quadrants, pyramids, Venn diagrams – anything to appear more convoluted and pseudo-intelligent. If we present something complex, we must be smart. On the other hand, anyone can tell a story. Ah…but can they?

How many really good business stories have you heard lately? Have you been captured by the speaker, as they have taken you into a story that has you emotionally and logically involved? In my observation, businesspeople are usually poor communicators. To ensure they never improve, they are invariably uninterested in “childish solutions” like becoming a great business storyteller. They totally miss the point. We can tell stories that are credible, relevant and absorbing. We do this by adding in colour, action, personalities, locations, situations – all manner of rich fabric to the story. We paint a powerful word picture that the listener can visualise in their mind’s eye.

No matter what industry we are in, we have four main business communication objectives. It might be to increase credibility for our organisation or to inform an audience of some pertinent information. It might be to move people or it might just be for entertainment purposes. The Business Five Step Storytelling process focuses on moving people to action. We might tell this story from the point of view of our own experience in the first person or we may refer to the insights of someone else, told in the third person.

We begin by clarifying the “Why” it matters. The story draws out the immediacy and relevance for the audience of the problem or issue. This is a critical step, because everyone is surfing through hundreds of emails, Facebook and Twitter posts, LinkedIn updates, Instagram messages, etc. They are dealing with family, work, financial and health issues. There is a tremendous competition for the mind space of our audience. If we don’t have a powerful “Why” to grab attention, game over right there. This is where storytelling is so powerful. We move straight into the world of the story, to highlight the gap, the failing, the challenge. Replacing the usual bromide beginnings of talks (Thank you for inviting me; It is a pleasure to speak to you today; etc.), we move straight into emotion and action: “The Marunouchi Board Room mood was dark and grim. As Jim stood up, looking at the faces around the table, he knew this was an all or nothing moment….” If you hear a talk with a start like that, you definitely want to hear what is going to happen next.

We now move straight on to the “What” – the information they need to know. This is knowledge they don’t already have or have not sufficiently focused on as yet. This will bring forth data or perspectives, which are pertinent, immediate and grip our audience. Imparting key points, each linked with firm evidence, is essential today because we are all card carrying skeptics. There is so much false information floating around, we are permanently on guard against feeling cheated or foolish.

We must communicate to the audience what they need to do. This might be our own recommendation or we may relay that of the third person in the story. For example, “Bill told me the whole marketing team, Nakamura, Adam, Tanaka and Ohira had spent weeks working back late, almost missing the last train becoming a regular occurrence. Constantly refining the database, each time with a much sharper angle for the buyer’s perspective, they were getting closer and closer to the key insight. Ohira mentioned to me the reems of paper generated were piling up on every flat surface in the office, they could hardly move but finally the answer became clear. Over a twelve month period, constant split testing and independent validation upon validation registered the same pattern. To produce the follow up communication sequence that will consistently produce the best results we need to….”

Having isolated out the issue, imparted some evidence to provide more compelling reasons to take this issue seriously, we now tell the “How” to move forward. This will explain in some detail what needs to be done, so that the listener can take immediate action: “The vendor’s programmers needed to be involved with the marketing team, as they scope out the action steps. By the way, the flow chart map in our largest meeting room in the Otemachi office spanned across every wall, even the glass door, in some places three layers deep. It was complex but visually easy to follow. Mitsuo walked me through the paper covering the walls, tracking each iteration and step, emphasing the colour paths created by the red, green and blue marker pens. Step One was….”

To deal with any potential doubts or concerns, we head them off by exploring the “What Ifs”. We join the listener in the conversation going on in their mind concerning the fears they might have, about what is being suggested. We address these in the story, so that there are no or few residual barriers to taking action: “There were doubts among the London Board members – plenty of them. What if the data was too old now, given the speed of change we were facing. In fact, we found that the constant split testing allowed us to keep updating our hypothesis, so we were always close to the buyer viewpoint”.

Finally, we repeat the “Action Steps” we recommend, succinctly and clearly, so that these stay fresh in the mind. “After the wrap-up meeting was held over pizzas and beer back at the Toranomon Hill’s office, we isolated out the Five Steps we found which worked best. In this specific order: Step One….” Compressing the steps into numbers like three, five or seven work best, as they tend to be easily recalled. Few people can hold elaborate data points in their head. Keep it short, keep it memorable.

Embed the key messages in a series of stories that we can follow along with you. Unfold the point of the talk with plenty of real people and real situations stitched into the telling. The richer the detail and the more real the story, the easier it will be to take our audience with us. Being dull and boring like everyone else is an option, just not a very good one. With a simple storyline embedded into the explanation, we will be so much more memorable and persuasive.

 Action Steps

1. Explain Why it matters
2. Tell the audience What they need to know
3. Outline How to do it
4. Vanquish the What If objections before they arise
5. Detail the recommended Action Steps

Public speaking throws up many fears and challenges for all of us. As part of High Impact Presentations, one of our public speaking courses, we have been surveying the various participants for the last four years about the types of things they most want to improve. The most common request, from both Japanese and English speakers, is to “be clear when presenting”. What do they mean by clear? The speakers want their message to get across to the audience, to be easy to follow, to have some impact from their efforts to get up in front of others and speak.

This is not easy, mainly because we keep snatching defeat from the jaws of victory! There are some errors we make which kill our ability to communicate with the audience. Here are some critical factors to make sure that situation never occurs.

Firstly, we should decide what is the purpose of our talk? Is it to Entertain people, so they leave feeling warm and fuzzy about us and our organization? Is it to Convince them or to Impress them that our organization is reliable and trustworthy? Is it to Persuade or Inspire them to take some action that we are recommending? Is it to just Inform them of some recent data or information that is relevant to their industry? We need to be crystal clear about what we are trying to do with our talk, before we even worry about the design, production and delivery.

Secondly, we need to thoroughly investigate beforehand just who will we be talking to? What is the generational mix, the age demographic, the male/female split? Are they experts, amateurs, dilettantes, critics, supporters, potential clients, etc.? We need to pitch our talk at the right level for the audience – no dumbing down to the exceedingly well informed, insulting them at every turn. We don’t want to be an acronym heaven dweller or a specialist jargon snob, baffling the punters completely. We need to gauge our listener’s level of comprehension and make sure we are talking to them at their level of expertise.

Thirdly, we should rehearse our talk before we give it. Sounds straight forward doesn’t it, except that hardly anyone does this! In sales we always advise, “Never practice on the client”. Presenters should heed the same sage like advice. If we prepare the talk in writing, we may find the cadence is different when we say the words out loud, compared to when we read it on a page. We also may find we have misjudged the time completely and be too long or too short. We need to start singling out key words we want to hit harder than others for emphasis. Speaking in a boring monotone is one of the most common errors of non-professional, non-competent speakers.

Some Japanese speakers have complained to me that they are at a permanent disadvantage with public speaking, because the Japanese language is a monotone, non-tonal language. True, it lacks the tonal variety of English but there are two simple changes we can make when speaking Japanese to break out of the monotony. Apply pace to speed up or slooow right down. Another variation is to add more power to a word or phrase or to speak in an audible whisper, removing the power altogether. Both of these techniques will help monotone speakers vary their presentation and maintain the interest of their audience.

Fourthly, get the mechanics of delivery right. The message cannot stand by itself; the quality of the content is not enough; the supreme value of the data is insufficient - if people can’t hear you. Yes, physically they can hear you are speaking, but when the content and the delivery are not in harmony, only 7% of the message is actually getting through to the audience. That is a shockingly low number.

The research on this is quite well established and it makes sense. When the message content is not congruent with the way you deliver the message, we get distracted by how you are dressed, by your body language, by the tone of your voice. As an example, if I said , “I am really excited about the prospects for this new technology” in a totally flat, no energy, barely audible monotone voice, with a bored, unhappy expression on my face and delivered it while looking down at the lectern and not at my audience, only 7% of people would get the message. Many speakers make it hard for themselves because they talk to precisely no one. They look at their notes or the screen or the floor or the ceiling; anywhere, but at that sea of expectant faces carefully scrutinising them.

Engage your audience by using eye contact and keep each person’s gaze for around 6 seconds to make the eye contact meaningful, without it becoming intrusive.   Japanese friends tell me “In japan, we are taught not to make eye contact”. That may be the case for normal conversation but once you have an audience, you are now in a different role. We need to step it up if we want to have the audience buy what we are saying or to keep interest in our message.

This is where making eye contact for 6 seconds works so well. The members of the audience feel we are speaking directly to them and they gravitate to us as a result, because we have engaged them. Also, get you face involved! If it is good news, then smile; if you suggest doubt, have a quizzical expression on your face; if the information is surprising, have an expression of wonder; if it is bad news look unhappy or concerned. A wooden face, totally devoid of expression is a tremendous waste, when we have so much potential to add power to our words with our facial expression. Japanese speakers can gain a lot here because often they fail to take advantage of the face as a medium of their message.

A well placed pause is a brilliant way to get the audience focused on what we have just said. Often when we are nervous we speed up and start running the ideas together. This makes it hard for the audience to digest the key points, because the points are rapidly overwhelming and replacing each other. A pause also gives us time to regroup our thoughts and calm down a bit, if we found we were getting a bit too fast in the delivery.

Throw in some gestures to add power to the words, but don’t maintain the same gesture for longer than 15 seconds. Utilise your palms, so that they can be seen by the audience. Don’t hide them behind your back, or lock them up protecting your groin or keep them hidden away in your pockets. This is the classic refuge of my fellow Aussie executives. They don’t know what to do with their hands so one slip into the pocket. The really confused CEOs from “downunder” put both hands in their pockets for a stereo effect. A gesture made too low may not be able to be seen by parts of the audience, so make the gesture zone between chest height and head. The gestures should be natural and not Shakespearian or thespian. Leave acting to the experts, be natural, be your “professional” self.

When we know why and who we are speaking to; when we get voice, face and hands working in unison to add strength to what we are saying, we get 100% of the audience to clearly absorb our message. It is quite clear what we have to do isn’t it!

Action Steps

1. Decide what is the purpose of your presentation at the very start and be clear about it
2. Carefully investigate who you will be talking to
3. Rehearse like crazy before you get up in front of the audience
4. Be a legend on the mechanics of presenting

It is a big crowd, yet the conversation suddenly dies and a hushed silence now sweeps through the room. All eyes are fixed forward, as the MC tears at the envelope and announces this year’s award winner. Polite applause fills the air as the proud selectee stands up, glances around smiling, shakes hands and navigates between the maze of tables and chairs up to the podium. Receiving the prize, obediently posing for the photographer, our winner turns and begins to move gingerly towards the microphone. Facing the assembled crowd of industry peers, personal and organisational brands now begin to disintegrate.

They have that deer-in-the-headlights glazed look in the eye, as they contemplate a packed room full of searching, quizzical faces. Their throat suddenly seems Sahara parched, words struggle to get out, both legs feel weak, and the mind is a total whiteout.

What finally does come out of their mouths are strings of pathetic Ums and Ahs. There are particularly strained and embarrassing silences as they obviously struggle, thinking what they want to say. Their speech is incoherent, nervous, unconvincing and clearly killing them. In one minute they have gone from hero to zero in front of their industry peers. Some cowards even run from the microphone, declaring they will not take the opportunity to make any comment. Their general demeanor screams FEAR and their face looks particularly taut!

We are talking about a one minute acceptance speech here. An opportunity to promote your organization, promote yourself, thank the troops, etc. Why are so many people so poorly prepared to represent their organization in a public setting, where there is no excuse and every likelihood that you will have to get up and speak?

One speaker though, addressed the podium radiating confidence, stood up straight, and spoke with energy and clarity. It was short – maybe two minutes maximum, but it sounded so professional and competent. So it can be done – what is the difference?

The most telling point was the majority of speakers had obviously done zero preparation and this speaker had worked out what needed to be said. The majority had not considered what they might say, until they swung their torso around towards the microphone. That is not a lot of preparation time!

Actually, a short one or two minute speech is probably the most difficult talk we will ever give. It is so brief, we have to really plan it well. We also need to rehearse what we are going to say beforehand. Don’t ramble on and please, let’s not practice on our audience!

There are only a few points we can make when forced to be so brief, so we have to select the most powerful messages and dump the rest - there is no time for dross. As we say it has to be “all killer, no filler”. We need to be projecting massive confidence, even if we are dying from nerves on the inside. By the way, only we know that is the case.   Definitely choose and commit not to show it to the crowd, keep that vital information to yourself.

It is a good practice to hit the first word we speak hard, to eliminate any hesitancy. With that good energy level established , we should maintain our voice power, to project confidence to everyone in the room that we deserve to be up here, getting this award. Remember we all critics and we judge your entire organisation on you. If you rock, we think your whole organisation is great. If you are a dud, we assume everyone down at your shop is a numbskull.

When speaking to the audience, our eyes should be singling out specific individuals at each table to speak to directly, as if we were having a friendly chat over the backyard fence. We are only speaking to them for about six seconds though. More than that becomes intrusive and less doesn’t allow for any meaningful engagement with that person. We then switch our gaze to another table across the room, repeat the process and start engaging someone sitting there. In a one minute speech we can engage ten tables in a room, which with around 8-10 guests at a table is pretty good coverage.

We also won’t waste our chance in the limelight by applying a vice-like grip on the lectern. Instead we are going to free up our hands for gestures. We will accentuate particular thoughts and points, with the use of our hands. We will definitely slip in a pause after a key point, to really let it sink in.   We will add extra voice strength to selected words, to give them added emphasis. We will use animation in our face to drive the key message hard.

If there is even the remotest chance you will have to get up and speak, be prepared, be “A Game” ready, be organised and be great. Rehearse what you will say many times, until it flows smoothly and convincingly. You may not win but if you do, you will be ready. Don’t snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on the awards dais. Make it a personal and professional triumph instead.

We are such a judgmental lot aren’t we! We form opinions about people within seconds of seeing them, often even before we hear them speak. We judge their dress, their body language, their style without knowing anything about them as a person. We are slow to unwind our first impression as well, so those first seconds of any interaction are vital.

We are all critics too, when it comes to presentations. We want the best, we want to be educated, entertained, wowed in our seats and we are usually disappointed. We carry that history of disappointment around with us like heavy baggage, to the next presentation. We shamelessly hold others to a level of accountability, we never wish imposed upon us!

The cold, hard reality is that Presentation Effectiveness can be a make or break skill in the workplace. At some point in your career you will be asked to present information to a group. It doesn't have to be a formal occasion. It might just mean answering a question or being invited to express a view or opinion. It is your job to ensure that you are ready to step up to the call. An individual who can present confidently and effectively immediately differentiates themselves from the rest of the group. Whether you are a pro or a beginner with presenting or public speaking, here are some practical tips for improving your presentation and communications skills.

Getting Rid of the Stress of Public Speaking

Many people are terrified of speaking in front of a group. Everyone is staring at you, your palms are sweating, your pulse is racing, strangely your throat feels suddenly dry and parched, your energy levels have dropped to precipitous levels, your knees might even be knocking as the fight or flight adrenalin kicks in.

Many of us can accomplish pulling off a presentation, but feel a certain amount of fear and stress. Speaking in front of groups does not have to be stressful or nerve racking; instead, the experience can help you stand out and get noticed.

Here are some tips that will help you fight through your anxiety and deliver an effective presentation:

Prepare, Prepare, Prepare

If you have a complete understanding of your material, it will definitely give you an advantage during your presentation. However, do not feel you have to memorize your material; you just need to be familiar with it.

You can read key points as mental prompts to help you keep the flow going in the best order, but don’t read it if you can avoid it. Many people are wedded to their text. They spend the entire time making eye contact with their own words on the sheet in front of them, rather than with their audience and then wonder why nobody was impressed with their presentation. Look at your audience – talk to them as if it was fireside chat, be relaxed and engage with everyone. I recall a brilliant lecture I attended at Harvard Business School, as part of an Executive Education Programme. One of the Professors had written down a list of 10 words on the back wall behind the audience. This was his 3 hour lecture presented entirely without any visible notes. A list of key words you talk to can be your presentation too or you might use the slide deck as the navigation to move your talk along.

Open with Confidence.

 Here is a big secret - only you know you are terrified. Unless you tell us, we will imagine you are competent, after all that is what we are expecting. Japan of course, loves to start a presentation with an apology, often mentioning what a hopeless speaker the individual is. No, no, no! If you are sick don’t tell us. If you are nervous don’t tell us. If you are sad because your cat died, don’t tell us. Don’t say anything about how you feel, because then the focus is on you and not where it should be - on your audience. Work the room instead – focus outward not inward.

Your opening gives your audience a first impression of your presentation. Make sure not to leave anything to chance. Your opening sets the tone for your entire presentation. No ums and ahs please!

Here is how to avoid the usual speaker opening kicking off with hesitation in the form of Ums and Ahs.

Select the first word of each sentence and hit it. Purse your lips once that sentence is completed and then hit the next sentence’s first word. Once you finish the sentence purse your lips again. Keep doing this and hesitancy and timidity will disappear from your image as a speaker.

Also lift your speaking volume up to about 30%-50% higher than in normal conversation. This is not a normal conversation, so it needs a different approach. Stronger volume communicates greater confidence (even if you don’t have any!). You usually have microphones so you don’t have to shout but lift your energy.

If you have a reasonably strong voice and it is a small gathering, dispense with the microphone, so that your hands are free for using gestures.

Focus on a Few Key Points.

Know the major points you want to make. This will help ease your worry and increase your confidence. You should also use electronic visuals, note cards, or memory techniques to outline your key concepts. If you need some prompts then prepare them. If you are using a teleprompter make sure you can carry on without it.

Famous Hollywood Director Michael Bay just got started on his Samsung sponsored public presentation in Las Vegas. When the teleprompter failed, in short order so did he. You can see the disaster unfold on YouTube – it’s sad to watch.

Remember, the slides, the flip chart, the teleprompter are all secondary to you – you are the message. Importantly, only Michael Bay and the host on stage knew what he was going to say that day. By abruptly walking off stage in shamed, burning silence he said to the entire audience that he had forgotten his message, that he failed. He could have carried on with his thoughts and we would never have known it wasn’t the intended content.

Support Ideas with Evidence.

It is always important to provide evidence to support your main points. Supporting evidence will help your audience understand your points and will give you a chance to explain your points more fully. Point-evidence; point-evidence; point-evidence is the way to go. Just because you say it doesn't mean we believe it is true. Prove it!

Close with a Call to Action.

This will be the last impression your audience has of you and your presentation. It is important to ensure the closing reflects the purpose of the presentation. Your closing should summarize your content and give your audience a clear direction.

Don’t forget that you must repeat your close again, after the end of Q&A. Most people lose control of the proceedings when they get to Q&A and many a meltdown has been witnessed at this vital last impression juncture.

Don’t allow someone’s random question content to define your final impression or final message for the audience. I remember I was giving a presentation in Japanese, to an audience of HR professionals about how great Dale Carnegie training was and teaching them how to use some of the key human relations principles.

It was going gangbusters until we got to the Q&A. This very charming, well dressed Japanese lady in her early 70s put her hand up to ask a question and for the next 10 minutes launched into her own speech!

You must stay in command of the messaging and so the show ain’t over until you sing the last line of the wrap up after Q&A. Repeat your close so the last message they get is the one you want them to get. This is the mark of the pro!

Action Points

1. Prepare, Prepare, Prepare
2. Open with Confidence
3. Focus on a Few Key Points
4. Support Ideas with Evidence
5. Close with a Call to Action

There are a number of common structures for giving presentations and one of the most popular is the opening-key points/evidence-closing variety. We consider the length of the presentation, the audience, the purpose of our talk and then we pour the contents into this structure. Generally, in a 30 minute speech we can only consider a few key points we can cover, so we select the most powerful and then look for the evidence which will persuade our audience. This is where a lot of presentations suddenly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

The structure flow is a simple one. The analysis of the occasion is straightforward, but at this next stage we can get confused about what we are trying to achieve. We might become so engrossed in the evidence assembly component that we forget the crucial “WHY” aspect of this effort. We are not here to produce mounds of statistics, battalions of bar charts or proffer reams of text on a screen. Technically oriented presenters love to bludgeon their audience with detail, usually forcing the font or scale to be so small, it is barely visible on screen.

No, the WHY is all about persuading the audience to agree with our conclusion or way of thinking, This is communication skill rather than archeological or archival skill. Line charts, pie charts, comparison tables are trotted out to do battle with the perceptions and biases of the audience. The errors though include a presentation style where the actual detail is impenetrable and so is not fully accepted.   The tendency to imagine that this superb, high quality data will stand by itself and not require the presenter to do much, is another grave error. “I don’t have to be a good speaker, because the quality of my information is so valuable”, is a typical, if somewhat pathetic excuse.

Another common error is to invest the vast majority of the available time for the presentation preparation on the accompanying slides for the talk. Digging up the data, tweeking the detail, creating the charts, arranging the order etc., keeps us quite busy. So busy, in fact, that we forget to practice the delivery of the talk. We find ourselves peering down at our audience, presenting the content for the first time up while at the podium. We are in fact practicing on our audience and this is definitely not a best practice.

How should we fix this approach? Some examples of evidence are really powerful when they are numbers, but instead of drowning our audience with too many numbers, we can select a gripper and use a very big font to isolate out that one number. We then talk to that number and explain what it means. If we want to use line charts or trend analysis, then one chart per slide is a good rule. We don’t split the visual concentration of our audience. We speak to the significance of the trend, knowing that our audience can see the trend line for themselves.

To improve our communication effectiveness, we go one step further and we tell stories about these numbers. Who was involved, where, when and what happened. We recall stories more easily than masses of data, so the evidence and context are more easily transferred. This helps to get us around to the WHY of our talk, the key point we want the audience to absorb. And we practice the delivery over and over until we are comfortable we have the cadence right. We recall Professor Albert Mehrabian’s study about the importance of not just what we say, but how we say it. Emphasising particular words, adding gestures for strengthening key points, engaging our audience by using eye contact, allowing pauses so ideas can sink in and reducing distractions so our actual words are absorbed.

Structure, rehearsal, storytelling and congruent delivery combine to create a powerful success formula for presentations.

Action Steps

1. Don’t be consumed with the detail, keep the main message in mind
2. Don’t be self-indulgent and think your supreme content excuses a poor delivery
3. Allocate sufficient time for rehearsals
4. Tell the stories behind the data
5. Remember what you say is important but how you say it is more important

Our mental approach to our activities determines our success.  We know this in sports and in business, but when it comes to speaking in public, we somehow manage to forget this vital point.

 We know we have to make a presentation, so we get straight into the details and logistics, without spending even a moment on our proper mindset for the activity. Given we are putting our personal and professional brand out there for all to see, you would recognise this was a fairly important opportunity to get it right.

 The mindset game is a critical one, especially if we are nervous about giving presentations.  Confidence is paired with credibility in the presentation game and we have to exude both.  We may be very unsure, nervous, even petrified but we must never show that side to our audience.  Hesitation kills the message delivery and therefore the impact.

 Often we think that our wondrous content will carry the day, that we can be hopeless presenters, but somehow it won't matter.  There are few subjects where we are the font of all knowledge and therefore everyone else has to put up with our ineptitude.  

 Normally, we are competing for the attention of our audience.  Social media has made a hell for presenters because within two seconds our audience can escape to any number of other more interesting worlds.  People are becoming used to multi-tasking, reading their Facebook feed, while they are doing something else like listening to us.

 We need to have a powerful faculty to compete with the wonders of the Internet. A big part of our appeal is our message’s worth and the delivery of that worth. Both are required.  To get the right combination, we need to sell that we are confident in what we're saying and our content is valuable. This means we are able to deliver the talk without having to read the text.  We can talk to key points in front of us or up on the screen.  This is different from burying your head in text notes and not engaging your audience.  To have the confidence to work the room while speaking, means you have to know the content.   You created it or adjusted what someone else put together for you.  

 Start with a powerful opening, including the key message captured in your conclusion. Isolate out 3-5 key points so make your argument and support them with evidence. Design both your first close and your second close for after the Q&A.

You have managed your schedule well, so that there has been ample opportunity to practice the delivery.  People who are spending all their time on the making the slides

forget they have to rehearse the delivery for an audience. They usually prefer to practice on their audiences, then wonder why the whole thing was very flat with no engagement of their audience.

 In the weeks leading up to the talk we are the thinking about what we want to say and how we might say it, we are combing the media and books for juicy quotes and examples to back up what we are saying. We are playing it out in our mind's eye.  During this mental imagining, we see ourselves as very confident and successful - we are predicting our success by seeing it before we even do it.  We are seeing the audience nodding and agreeing with what we say.  We can see ourselves enjoying the moment and feel in full control.

 When we have rehearsed, we know the timing, the cadence of the talk.  We know where to pause, which words to hit harder than other to emphasize our key points.  We are confident on the flow of our talk and with this knowledge we can now relax and enjoy the process rather than dreading it.

 Action Steps

1. Decide you will have the right mindset for your talk
2. Understand your delivery is what makes your content work, not the other way around
3. Don’t read the text – speak to your points or use the screen for your prompts
4. Carefully design your opening, your key points (3 to 5) and your two closes
5. Use mental imaging to see yourself being successful giving the talk
6. Rehearse – don’t practice on your audience

 We may not have the chance to give that many public presentations in a year, but usually we will have some common themes which we can speak on.  As businesspeople, we will have our areas of expertise and experience and based on those attributes, the hosts will invite us to present.  Basically, in the lull between hostilities, we do nothing and just wait for the next chance to speak.  If we want to improve as presenters, that passive approach doesn’t make any sense.  There are a number of things we should be doing between presenting gigs. 

Further researching our expertise areas should be a constant item for us.  We are daily looking for things in the media, in journals and on social media which we can collect and stash away for when we need it.  We can’t put it in the shoe box like our tax receipts, because we need to be able to find it when we need it.  So a simple sorting system is required, so that we can extract what we have found, when the occasion presents itself.

We need an idea collection system as well.  At different times we get some genius inspiration about one of our topics and then that thought is totally overtaken by the next thought and then lost forever.  Instead, we need a place where we can quickly grab that thought and keep it for later when we need it.  Ideas pop up at the most unlikely times, so we need something with us all the time. Usually, our phones have apps suitable for that quick notation we need.  Again, we need a basic filing system, so that we can locate that excellent insight, observation or idea. 

We may have a great amount of knowledge and experience on certain topics, but those searching for speakers may never know we exist.  This is where we need to be constantly making any effort to alert others that we know lots about a few things.  I was reminded of how important this whole “be found” thing is recently.  Ironically, we were doing leadership training for a large consulting firm and had been doing it for quite a while.  One day, out of the blue on LinkedIn, I received a message from a junior person in that firm asking about whether I could speak to a conference they were holding.  In the note to me, it was mentioned that two people who knew me had recommended me for the gig.

I was happy to be considered, but confused as to why the connection had come through this circuitous route?  I have given over 550 public speeches, pump out six podcasts and three TV shows a week, have written the book Japan Presentations Mastery, have 27,000 followers on LinkedIn and have published thousands of articles on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.  Maybe the person doing the research was hopeless. Maybe it was Covid, where public presentations basically vanished, I don't know, but it really highlighted for me how invisible we all are.  Anyway, we have to make a positive effort to be found and we have to calculate in that the designated researchers may be sub-standard, so we need to do even more to be found.

Also, we should always try and video our presentations.  This provides us with material for our “show reel” where we can select the bits and pieces to show a prospective speaking gig host our goods.  As I mentioned, the chances to speak in a year are relatively limited for most of us, so we need to produce some proof that we are the one they need for the next speaking spot.  Videos can be edited and flashed up to make us look even more amazing than we already are and they can be on our websites, on YouTube or sent to the hosts, when they inquire about speaking to their audience.

We shouldn’t be too snooty about taking speaking gigs either.  Imagining you will save it all up for the big stage and be totally awesome is wishful thinking.  We should grab every spot we can get, however humble, so that we build our craft.  We should also keep notes on where we went well and where we need to improve, so that the real time insights are not lost in a busy life. A lot of little events can help hone our skills to really shine at the big events.  As I have mentioned a million times, having incredible data to share doesn't mean your presentation is going to be spectacular.  The brilliant content won’t save you from decimating your audience with ums and ahs, or a monotone, boring, wooden delivery. 

Speaking in front of others, in this Age of Distraction and this Era of Scepticism, means the act of presenting has never been harder.  Audiences are well equipped with their gateway to the internet in their hand. In the first ten seconds, if you sound dull, they bolt and don't wait.  Also, the “fake news” era has driven up the scepticism scale people are gauging us by when speaking.  The bar has never been higher for public speakers. That means we have to become Masters of the Mechanics of speaking at the very least.  Great content is meaningless, if no one is taking any note and you have lost control of their attention 

So, between major speaking gigs, we have work to do.  We should be in a constant state of prep, always anticipating our next chance will emerge and making sure that we will be more than ready to take that opportunity.

 The chances of this happening anywhere is pretty remote, but especially so in Japan.  Audiences here are polite and wouldn’t be so rude as to interrupt the speaker.  Having said that, things can happen for which you are not prepared.  I was delivering my debut speech in Nagoya, as the founding Australian Consul, in Japanese, and the unexpected happened.  A local representative of one of the main Japanese government organisations was sitting in the front row on my left.  I began the speech with a very standard Japanese opening, appreciating everyone coming to hear me when they are all so busy.  I barely got that phrase out of my mouth when he erupted in very loud laughter. 

The unexpected is more likely though, with foreigners in the audience.  Depending on the occasion, it could be one of the big bosses weighing in on what you are saying or one of your ambitious colleagues trying to make you look bad, so that they get the promotion and not you.  Regardless, what can we do in these unexpected situations?

 In that first example, I was nervous enough giving my debut speech as the Consul and giving it in Japanese.  I was dumbfounded by his outburst, because I took it he was laughing at my language skills and I still had another thirty-nine minutes to go speaking in Japanese.  I girded my loins and kept going because I didn’t have a choice.  I wasn’t reading the speech, so it was all coming out of my brain, trying to follow the navigation I had planned for the talk. 

 I noticed that some members of the audience were appreciating the fact I was speaking in Japanese and seemed to follow what I was saying.  I ignored that ignoramus and concentrated on the people who were nodding, smiling or at least looking neutral.  This helped my confidence to return and I could carry on.  I recommend you do the same.  There is very little chance of a cabal of hecklers disrupting your talk, so you will probably only face one person and there are plenty of other people in the audience to interact with.

 If there is just one comment, I would just ignore it and carry on as if nothing happened.  If the talk is internal and heckler is your boss, then you have a different problem and you need to stop and get more detail on what is causing the unhappiness.  If it is a sharp elbowed rival, I would just ignore the interruption.  If the rival or the heckler at a public speech should continue with their outbursts, then you have to stop and deal with it.  How should we deal with it though?

 First of all we need to understand this person is not your friend, so forget trying to win them over to your point of view.  They are interrupting everything to show the rest of the audience how awesome and smart they are, by challenging the speaker on what they are saying.  I would ask them to elaborate on their point. I would look straight at them the whole time and not nod or move my face.  Nodding looks like you are agreeing with what they saying and we may do it out of nervousness or habit.  Don’t.  Just look at them and let them speak.  When they finish, we start our reply and we keep maintaining eye contact and after that we never give them any more eye contact.  We address the rest of our answer to the other members of the audience.

By ignoring them, we are taking all the air out of their balloon and withdrawing the ego driven attention they have been so fervently seeking.  We look at the members of the audience who look friendly, supportive or at least not negative.  We give them each six seconds of eye contact and we just keep repeating this throughout the rest of the talk.

 We will do our best to answer their concern and one thing we should never do is ask if they are happy with our explanation. They are not heckling to get illumination. They are there to provide heat to the speaker and make us look bad. We just give our answer and we say something like, “Now I will get back to our topic for today” and we just keep going, ignoring them the rest of time. If the heckler is taking the talk off topic, we should stop them and say we will be happy to discuss their point after the talk and then get back to what we were saying.  If they still want to continue, again, we tell them we are happy to talk at the end and we pick up where we left off.

 The key to remember is that even though we can be quite nervous without this extra pressure, the majority of the audience are with us.  They think the heckler is a jerk and very rude, so they immediately side with us against them.  They didn’t come here to be part of a bun fight between the speaker and the crowd and they feel their time is being wasted by this very selfish person.  So keep going and look confident and positive, no matter how you are feeling on the inside.  The audience will go with your confidence and support you.

 We often mix up words like metaphor and analogy, using them in the wrong context.  Anecdote is another word we often use, but sometimes are not sure what it means.  Basically, it is storytelling about a real incident or about a person.  I was reminded of the power of the anecdote the other day, when listening to a presentation to a select private group, by an international captain of industry.  He was going through what their firm was doing globally and particularly here in Japan.  As presentations go, it was mostly the “inform” variety with a few sprinklings of the “impress” dimension.  That is to say, it was fairly dry, except for a couple of occasions when he related an anecdote about what they were doing and what they had found.

These brief interventions lifted the whole proceedings up into the “insight” category of communication.  That is a much richer dimension and as listeners, we feel we are getting real value here from this speaker.  The speech basically followed the guidelines of a similar speech he had given recently and he was using slides as his navigation.  The rules of this private study group is that we don’t use slides to show what we are talking about.  We just speak and then take questions in depth on the topic.  He was allowed to use the slide deck as his personal navigation for the talk.  Interestingly the anecdotes were not in the deck.  They came out spontaneously as he searched for illustrations and examples to further flesh out his points.  What a contrast.  We were getting fed corporate pap for the most part and then “bingo”, out pops a valuable morsel.

This tells me that he had not planned his talk to maximise the insights they had learnt from running their business globally and in Japan.  Why would that be?  This is a very common problem with presenters.  They are in the “inform” mode of presentations and think that reeling off data and facts is all that is required.  These accidental sharings were the most valuable part of the whole talk.  We should try to eliminate the accidental nature of these sharings and actually plan to inject them into the talk from the very start. 

I am sure his approach was to take a chronological survey of the company and then just build on that, to highlight the main iterations over time.  What if he had said, “right, I am going to sit down and draw out what we have learnt from doing business here in Japan and gather the widsom together”.  Following that he could arrange the structure of the talk around these learnings and present the context and background, so it would be easy for the audience to follow. We still need the “inform” part, because that context gives the insights their power.  It makes them stand out from the ordinary and trumpets the learnings. Business audiences, in my experience, are always hungry to learn.  In particular, they love to hear about disasters, so that they can make sure they don’t replicate the same issue in their world.

It is hard to be bursting with insights, so we are not talking about a talk with wall to wall insights flowing constantly like a massive waterfall.  However, we do things and we do learn what works and what doesn’t.  The difference is the speaker has a mind to capture these and store that information away for when it is needed.  Most people just forget about the insight and move on, because there is always so much more data and information coming at them.  That endless supply dilutes the key points we the audience need to retain.  So from now on, if you hear a good insight or you discover one in your business, find a place to capture that and have it in your mind to use in a future talk.

One other thing is to be excited about the insight and frame it for the audience.  Our speaker on this occasion never got excited about the insights and spoke throughout with the exact same energy when describing something terribly mundane and when talking about something much more breakthrough.  We need to raise our energy and enthusiasm when we get to the juicy bits, so that the audience knows – here comes something very valuable.  We can frame it too.  We can say, “Let me tell you about something which proved to be such a valuable lesson for us”, or “I came across this understanding which really transformed our business here in Japan” or “let me tell you an insight which saved us from disaster”.  The audience will be guaranteed to be on the edge of their seats to hear what is going to come next and that is exactly where we want them.

So, start with the insights when designing the talk and wrap them up in a clear context.  Make sure the audience can fully appreciate the value they are receiving.  Seize those anecdotes and put them to good use.