How To Get Self-Belief As A Presenter When You Don’t Have Any

We don’t get the chance to do so many public presentations in business, so it becomes a hard skill set to build or maintain.  The internal presentations we give at work tend to be very mundane. Often we are just reporting on the numbers and why they aren’t where they are supposed to be or where we to date are with the project.   These are normally rather informal affairs and we are not in highly persuade mode when we give them.  We should be clear and concise, but we probably don’t really get out of first gear as a presenter.

Obviously, giving public talks is a lot more pressure than the internal weekly team meeting report. We need to be operating at a much higher level and the complexity index is much, much higher.  This translates into pressure and often comes with a big dose of self-doubt.  This is called the imposter syndrome. Should I be the one talking on this subject? What if they have questions I can’t answer?  What if they don’t like it or me?  What if I underperform as a presenter?   What if I white out and forget what I want to say?  The scenes of potential disasters are played out in our minds, as we talk ourselves into a panic.

How do we stop that negative self-talk and get a more positive view on our potential to do a really first class, impressive, professional job?  It is not a level playing field. We need to realize that the world of business presenters is full of people who are quite hopeless and boring, so the audience has been trained to expect very, very little.  We don’t have to be a super star, we just need to be competent and we will automatically stand out from the crowd of losers murdering their presentations out there everyday.

What does competent look like?  It means we are well prepared.  This doesn’t mean we have 50 slides in the slide deck ready to rumble.  It means we have thought about our talk in the context of who will be in the audience and what level of expert knowledge they have of the subject, so that we know at what level to pitch our talk. 

It means we have designed it by starting from the key punch line we will deliver in the initial close and then we have worked backwards to select the “chapters” that will bring home that point we have selected.  We have seized upon an opening that will grab the attention of our increasingly attention deficit audience They are all armed with their mobile phones, ready to escape from the speaker at any hint of unprofessionalism or potential boredom.

It means we will have rehearsed the talk at least three times, to make sure it flows well and fits the time slot we have been allocated.  We will make sure the slides are supporting us, not hogging all the attention and upstaging us.  They will be so clear that our audience can deduce the key point of each slide in two seconds, because of how we are presenting the information.  The slides provide us with the navigation of the speech, so we don’t have to worry about what comes next. We also have our talking points in front of us, if we need to refer to them as a backup, reducing our stress levels.

It means we are not head down the whole time, reading from the printout or the laptop screen.  We are eyes up and looking at some of the members of our audience.  We are looking precisely at those who are either nodding approvingly or at least have a neutral expression on their face.  This builds our confidence on the way through the speech. We are avoiding anyone who looks obstreperous, negative, hostile or angry.  We do this to keep our mental equilibrium under control and positive throughout the talk.  We keep all of our doubts, fears, insecurities and worries to ourselves as a secret.  We definitely don’t show any of these to our audience.  We are fully committed to the idea that the “show must go on”, no matter what unexpected things may occur during our speaking time.

Those whom we have chosen to look at, are getting about six seconds of total eye contact concentration each time, as we make our points.  We then move on to the next person and keep repeating this as we build a one-to-one feeling with members of our audience.  They feel we are speaking directly to them and this is powerful. We are backing up our eye contact with our gestures, voice modulation and pauses. This helps to drive home the key points we want to make.  We are purposely asking rhetorical questions to keep everyone engaged.  In terms of pure volume, we are speaking about 40% louder than normal.  This projects our voice for clarity and at the same time our confidence.  Audiences buy speaker confidence and we are keeping ourselves busy selling it to them.

We are using our first close we developed as we go into Q & A and we are confidently prepared for their questions.  We are confident because we have built up reserve power through our study of the subject. We have kicked off Q & A, by publically stating how many minutes we have for questions.  We do this to give ourselves a dignified retreat, a smooth way of departing the talk if we need to, in case things get out of control and a bit too hot.

We know how to cushion any salvos, thinly disguised as questions, that might come our way. A cushion is a general statement that doesn’t agree with or disagree with, what has been mentioned in the question.  This cushion buys us crucial thinking time before we have to respond. We end the talk with our final close, to make sure our key message is resonating with the audience.  This is purposely designed to be the last thing they hear, as they walk out the door.

“We don’t plan to fail, we fail to plan” is an old saw and still true.  The key to success in building self-belief as a speaker is to be really well prepared and thoroughly rehearsed.  When you make the time to fully prepare before the talk, to become ready, you head off all potential disasters and meltdowns that might otherwise occur. This is how to build self-belief – hard work, detailed preparation and lots of practice before you give the talk.

How To Rehearse Your Presentation

We have planned our talk, all we need do now is deliver it.  We have designed it, starting with the key punch line we will deliver in the first close of the speech, before we get to the Q & A.  This is the essence of our message and it is from this key idea that we have derived the key talking points we want to make, that will be the “chapters” of our speech.  In a thirty minute speech we will probably get to three to four of these, depending on the amount of depth we need to get into.  Finally, we develop the opening and then do the final close design for after the Q & A.  With this outline, we start to see if this will work in reality.

We have fleshed out the construct, have inserted stories into the talk to back up key points and have a first draft.  Now designing something on paper and then giving it out aloud are quite different beasts. We often find that when we run through the talk aloud, the logic of the order isn’t strong enough or the points seem a bit unclear.  Unless there is some special reason to do so, we are not reading out the draft like a complete script. 

We have sketched out speaking points, to which we will talk.  These are the bare bones of the talk and this is what we use for the initial run through.  When we do the speaking run through of the draft, we may find that additional or better points occur to us and this is when we do our editing.  Some parts may be weak in promoting our argument, so we need to spend a bit more time bolstering those. 

As we are not reading it, we will find that we will vary the content in the delivery every time we give it in rehearsal and probably in reality.  Nothing at all wrong with that.  Only we know what we are going to say, so there are no content police to catch us out on any variations from the original.  It actually doesn’t matter too much, because invariably we are refining and further polishing the speech. 

So naturally this means we are running though the actual talk a number of times.  How many times?  No one answer here, but I would reckon we are talking probably between three to five times. If we have a thirty minute talk we have clocked up two and a half hours in rehearsal time quite easily.  Most busy businesspeople lack two and half hours for practice , so it is more likely to fall into the three times maximum category. Obviously the more often we give it before we bring it to an audience, the better but we have to be realistic about our time availability.  The three times realty is vastly better than the usual occurrence, which is zero rehearsal.

As we are practicing and further polishing the construct, content and quality of the stories we are going to be using, we will get a better sense of how long all of this will take. The usual no practice version of public speaking leaves most people with absolutely no clue as to how long they will need for the talk.  Most are more likely to overshoot than undershoot.  When we go too long, we run into trouble with the constraints of the occasion.  The organisers start subtly telling us to “get off”. 

This practice run through is when we realize we have to prune our work of art and this is extremely difficult.  Some parts may need to be dropped altogether – oh no!  This can be painful because we love all of or children and can’t bear to lose any of them.  Nevertheless, we have to be showing some tough love to our draft presentation, otherwise we can’t get it finished in the time allotted . 

We don’t want to find ourselves in the position of having to shunt the end together in a whirlwind of download that baffles the audience and leaves everyone with the impression that we are so disorganized, we can't manage to put together a thirty minute talk.

If we have the time and resources, having others listen to our speech is good but this is often difficult. By the way, limit them to good/better feedback, because otherwise they will straight to negative critique and you won’t like that at all.  If we can’t do that, then videoing the talk so we can see ourselves is very good. All you need is your phone or ipad and a holder thingy attached to a tripod and you are in business and no film crew required.  If that can’t be done then use the voice memo on your phone to play back how it sounds. 

When I am traveling to give talks, I find the Hotel room with the lights out allows the windows in the room to become a mirror and I can see myself pontificating, gesturing, pausing and delivering with aplomb.  

Time is the killer when it comes to rehearsing.  Remember the trade off though – 90 minutes of your time, versus eternal damnation as a hapless and hopeless presenter, who has just publically incinerated their personal and company brands.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to dalecarnegie.comand check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Author of Japan Sales Mastery, the Amazon #1 Bestseller on selling in Japan and the first book on the subject in the last thirty years.

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 and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate 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.

Rhetorical Questions When Presenting

Are we talking at people, to people or with people when we are presenting?  The “talking at” part is easy to pick.  There is no attempt at rapport building with the audience.  No stories and lot and lots of data dump going on. Technical experts love this type of presentation, because they can spend all the time sharing the data.  Because they are an “expert” then they feel self justified to tell people stuff.  They don’t put much value on this presenting lark, because it is hardly a serious activity and people are here for the information – right?  “All style, no substance” being the ultimate putdown of skilled presenters by this techie crowd.  Detail is layered upon detail and density is never thought to be an issue. Especially when it comes to their slides, which are so dense, as to be impenetrable. Jargon is preferred too because that cuts down the need for explaining what you are talking about and overall, less words are needed.  The point is not to persuade anyone but to hammer them with detail.

The “speak to people” presenters are more capable of building rapport.  They are keen to get their message across and are careful about how they do that.  They do try to engage with their audience.  They think about the slide design to make sure it is it sharp looking yet easy to understand. They avoid jargon because they know it breaks the audience into an “us” and “them” divide.  They are also aware that it also can come across as pretentious and somewhat condescending.   They are conscious they are up on stage and they want to impart valuable knowledge to the audience.

The “speak with” presenters take things further.  They get there early and try to meet the participants as they come in.  They engage with them and find out their interests and motivations for joining this talk.  They take some of these conversations into their talks and reference the people they have been chatting with earlier.  “Suzuki san made an excellent point to me earlier about ….” They know by doing this they can dispense with that mental barrier between those doing the speaking and those doing the listening. The audience and speaker have become one.  They try to get the audience physically involved by asking them to raise their hands in response to their questions. 

The “speak with” presenter does all of these things of the “speak to” presenter and more.  They know that if they speak in a conversational tone this makes it easier to draw the audience in.  They use their eye contact to connect with members of their audience, so that they feel they are almost having a private conversation.  They wrap their key points up in stories to make them easier to remember and to understand on the first telling.  Where possible, they try to make those stories their own personal experience.  They are adding a degree of authenticity and vulnerability, without it becoming too much. They know where to draw the line to make the point, without the delivery becoming too clingy.

They use a mix of rhetorical questions and real questions.  A rhetorical question is posed not for the purpose of extracting an answer, but to grab the attention of the audience.  We know that audience concentration spans are becoming shorter and shorter.  Sometimes we are being ignored and we need to corral everyone mentally back into the room. The beauty of a rhetorical question is that the audience are not quite sure if they are required to come up with a response, so it creates a bit of tension in the room.  This tension is enough to grab their attention.  Real questions can’t be used too often, as the act becomes tedious and creates a feeling of “ I am being manipulated” in the audience. Rhetorical questions however can be used quite a bit more, because there is no response required.  It helps us to guide the audience’s thinking along a glide path of our choosing, because we control both the context and the direction of the discussion.  Framing the questions frames the debate.

So if you see your audience flagging, getting distracted or surreptitiously whipping out their phones under the desks, then hit them right between the eyes with a rhetorical question to get their full attention again.  In the battle for audience attention, it is a zero sum game.  Either they are listening to what we have to say or they are escaping from us.  We need powerful weapons to keep them focused on us and not the myriad distractions on offer.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to dalecarnegie.comand check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Author of Japan Sales Mastery, the Amazon #1 Bestseller on selling in Japan and the first book on the subject in the last thirty years.

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 and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate 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.

Giving Presentations: It Is Harder Than It Looks Folks

When you are an instructor and coach for presenters or a regular presenter, you tend to be immersed in that world and your sense of the degree of difficulty involved becomes numbed. I was reminded of this when we were doing a video shoot in Japanese the other day.  We have employed an actor to appear in our videos advertising our core courses.  I shoot a video almost everyday, but I am doing this in English.  I have been debating with myself about whether I should be doing them in Japanese as well or whether we should have a native speaker do it.  I can speak Japanese but naturally I have an accent.  Also while I constantly struggle with English grammar, Japanese grammar perfection lifts the degree of ask so much higher.

In the end, we went for the Japanese native speaker and hired an actor to do the shoot.  This was fascinating for me.  As soon as we started, I realised that the skill sets to be an actor and to be a presenter are quite different in Japan.  Reading lines on a teleprompter is a skill and is quite difficult and tiring because of the concentration involved.  That is why the newscasters always takes breaks by alternating between two people or cutting to the visuals on screen and using just voice.  With practice you can get better at this and he did too.

What was missing though was the ability to smile, use congruent facial expressions and gestures while all this teleprompter flow of words was whizzing by.  As presentation trainers we know how to juggle many balls in the air at the same time.  We are using our eyes to engage with the audience.  We are also checking to see if we are getting agreement or resistance to our message.  We are adding in our facial expressions to back up the eye power.  Our gestures are chiming in to strengthen a point we are making.

If it is a point we are making, about which the evidence is not yet clear, a quizzical expression on our face combined with a hint of doubt in our voice tone really drives home the message that we are not sure what is going to happen next.  If it is something we are definitely certain will happen next, then slowly, confidently nodding our head as if in agreement works very well. We add to it by strengthening the tone of our voice, our confidence level, when delivering the words and powerfully looking at members of the audience using our eye strength.  This combined effect creates high levels of credibility for what we are saying.

Our actor needed some serious coaching on these points.  This surprised me, but then I remembered “we are in Japan”.  The base level of understanding of what is required to give a professional presentation is very low here.  In fact, the actor was making the excuse that Japanese don’t know how to give proper presentations, which was why he was struggling with all of this stuff. The concept that just because Japanese are poor at presenting means we can all ignore professionalism wasn’t an idea I was buying that day.  But it does throw up the fundamental concept here that being poor or mediocre when presenting is somehow acceptable.  It isn’t.

A study published in 1967 by UCLA Professor of Psychology Albert Mehrabian pointed out an audience focus ratio of 7% from verbal, 38% vocal and 55% body language.  The key caveat, which is often missed when quoting these research numbers, are the words “when incongruent”.  What Professor Mehrabian meant was that “when what you are saying is not congruent with the way you are saying it, only 7% of what you are actually saying is getting through to your audience”.  The rest of the time they are distracted from your key message by your voice and your clothing.  This was the problem we had with our actor.  He needed my coaching on how to get the words to be supported by the expression on his face, his gestures and his body language, so that we can make sure the viewer receives 100% of the message in the words he is delivering.

So if even actors can’t automatically do this stuff, how much more difficult is it for everyone else here in Japan?  I attended a business talk given by the President of one of the most well known brands in the world, on a very sexy topic.  It turned out to be a nothing sort of presentation.  Not bad, but not powerful either.  I doubt anyone of us can recall one word of what was said. Our speaker had no impact and left no key messages with us.  Personally, I would call that a rank failure as a presenter, big name brand or otherwise. 

The answer isn’t DNA, pedigree, big brand or luck.  It is training.  Get trained in how to present and join the top 1% in business who can stand up and capture their audience.  I said capture their audience not just speak at them.  There is a world of difference between the two.  Remember in Japan, the 99% are really, really hopeless, so entry into the top 1% has a very low bar here.

I’ve Got My Eye On You

Eye line in Japan is a tricky subject.  This is a non-confrontational, high harmony, consensus culture.  Looking people straight in the eye is just too aggressive for polite society here.  Children are taught to look at the forehead, the chin, the throat rather than the eyes of the person they are speaking with.  This idea carries on into established and accepted societal norms of interpersonal interaction.  Foreigners burning the retinas of their Japanese counterparts by maintaining continuous strong eye contact makes Japanese people feel very uncomfortable. As a foreigner living here, after a while you find yourself shying away from making eye contact. This creates another set of problems for when you are dealing with other foreigners here, or when you are going overseas.  In the West we are trained to “look a man straight in the eye”.

So, what happens when we are doing presentations and public speeches in Japan?  Where should we be looking?  Most Japanese speakers have no training and less of a clue about what they should be doing, when speaking in public.  They are not much of a role model for us.  No point modeling yourself on the hopeless.  But won’t the audience react negatively to us if we are making eye contact with them?

We need to distinguish between a social conversation and a presentation.  The former is by nature informal and the latter is a more businesslike affair.  We are not a member of the audience chatting with our neighbour.  We have been given the opportunity to speak to an audience, we are on stage or at the podium, we have the microphone, we have everyone’s attention.  We are in the limelight.  Our job is to inform, engage, persuade, impress, differentiate. 

I was at a presentation about matching your wine glass with the variety of wine you are drinking. Our presenter had obviously given this type of presentation many times.  One thing he did very well was engage with his audience, who were all senior businesspeople.  He kept moving his eye line around the attendees, but not in a linear fashion. He was breaking it up, looking left, front, right, left, back etc.  By keeping it unpredictable, the audience members couldn’t drift off and lose touch with what he was saying.  Our brains are quite smart.  If we understand that the eye line is going around in a set order we get distracted and our thoughts are also subsumed by something other than what the speaker is talking about.  Even worse today, they will be whipping out their phones and playing around with email or social media.

By engaging our eyes, to keep continuous contact with our audience, we can really control the proceedings.  Be it Japan or anywhere else for that matter, we have to regulate the length of our eye contact.  Making eye contact is good.  Holding it for too long is not so good.  Boring a hole into the head of our audience member becomes oppressive.  Staring at someone continuously is hard to take for the recipient.  Too short and it becomes fake eye contact, which has no benefit.  Too long and it creates an uncomfortable feeling in our audience member, which pretty much defeats our purpose.  There is no hard and fast rule but around six seconds allows sufficient eye contact to drive home the point we are making without it becoming too oppressive. 

Combining voice, gestures and eye contact together professionally is the Power Three of public speaking. If you want to make a macro point, a big picture point, then make eye contact with someone at the very back of the room.  You should also open up your arms in bigger gestures sizes to make the point feel more inclusive in a big room.  By the way, as an additional bonus, depending on the size of the audience, the twenty people sitting around that person you have selected, will all imagine you are looking directly at them as well.  So despite the distance you can engage with more people, more powerfully, in the time allotted to you.

If you want to make a micro point, a strong assertion, a powerful statement, then pick someone in the front row and address them directly.  Stand on the very apron of the stage when you do this, if you can. Your physical proximity is also a big trigger for credibility, because you are turning the body language up to max power. Even those seated at the back will pick up on the power of your assertion, despite the fact you are not speaking to them directly.  They will recognize this is an important statement, by the way you have presented it.

Outstanding Japanese Presenters

I spend a lot of time complaining about how poor is the professional quality of presenters in Japan. It is true, so when you come across people who can present properly, it so refreshing and gives you hope that the rest of them can do it too.  I attended an American Chamber event here in Tokyo recently and the speaker was the President of Nestle Japan.  In fact, Mr. Kozo Takaoka had become the first ever Japanese to succeed to the role of President for Nestle in Japan despite their 104 years in operation here.  Watching his presentation it was easy to see why he was the leader of this well established operation in Japan.

He spoke in English, which was totally impressive, because so few Japanese company Presidents can give a half decent talk in English, unless they were reading it.  He definitely didn’t need to read his speech. He was too busy engaging with his audience.  He did this with his eye contact, as he spoke to us.  He kept his focus on his audience, who were mostly representatives of small-medium sized enterprises.  He was using a slide deck, but it was subservient to him and what he wanted to say, rather than the usual Japanese penchant of being the second fiddle to the screen.

The slides were well designed and well presented.  Easy to understand and grasp within two seconds of viewing them.  That two second rule is a good one.  If your slides are too complex or too busy to be understood in around two seconds, then you need to simplify them.  That is often best achieved be eliminating the slide entirely.  Often they add little actual additional benefit to what you can convey in words.  We tend to use them because, well that is what everyone else is doing. We do this on autopilot, without really analyzing what strength that slide deck medium can bring to the message you want to convey.

One thing I liked was Takaoka san’s use of video.  They were very short and relevant to what he wanted to explain.  What I really find irritating about Japanese company President presentations is how they will bung in a 10 minute video to pad out their talk. It is usually something cooked up by the PR or Marketing department and is aiming to be a propaganda triumph for the firm.  Sadly, because it is all propaganda, we quickly switch off and take very little notice of it.  It is also rarely related to the point the speaker is making.  The real point is that it saves the speaker from having to speak, which sort of defeats the purpose doesn't it.

The flow of Takaoka san’s talk was also well designed.  It followed a logical order and was well supported by his delivery, his slide deck and his short videos.  You would think this was a relatively straightforward thing but it surpasses the ability of most Japanese presenters.  He was able to draw out highlights and then could show something in visual form, which backed what he had just said.  Seeing is believing and if the point we want to make can be reinforced visually then we should be trying to achieve that outcome.

His use of humour was also spot on.  When we think about humour in speaking we are often drawn to compare ourselves to stand up comedy speakers, which is a very unwise move.  They are there 100% to entertain, rather than to inform, persuade or convince.  The latter areas are where we are placing ourselves when we are in the role of speaker to a business audience.  Takaoka san’s humour was unforced and very natural.  He was prepared to laugh at himself, which always goes down well. When we try to be funny as a speaker it usually flops. Professional comedians are refining their work on the content, timing and delivery side continuously, whereas we probably only get to speak publically a few times a year, if we are lucky.

Takaoka san also spoke from his own experience so he had total authenticity.  Telling us about someone else’s marketing successes and failures has a certain distant, academic feel to it.  He was there, he was doing it and he was relating those coal face incidents, so it became real and credible for his audience.  Where ever we can, we should always trying to draw on things which have happened to us in business, to make the points we want to get across.  They don’t need to be read to an audience, because we lived through them and so have no problem remembering them in detail.

Takaoka san was the full package and it was the best Japanese presentation I have seen to date. This type of role model forces all the excuses to disappear, because being Japanese is not a legitimate excuse to be unable to do a professional presentation.  But that is often trotted out as the excuse.  “We Japanese are no good at presenting, whereas you foreigners are all good”.  Two totally fallacious points if ever there were any.

Powerpoint Free Presentations

Visuals on a screen are very powerful communication tools when presenting.  Being able to show graphs can really drive home the point. If numbers are not so easy to follow or accessible, then proportion differences, trend lines, bars, pies, colours can be persuasive.   Explaining complex sequences with diagrams is good too.  This makes the potentially confusing more accessible.  Photos are really great for presentations.  “One picture is worth a thousand words” was used in an advertisement way back in 1918 in San Antonio Texas, although the base idea has been around for centuries.  Images are powerful communicators.  Just the image by itself or with one word, or a line of text are also spicing up the speakers communication effort.

The problem is everyone is doing it.  We all have our power point deck ready to go when we present.  We are not differentiating ourselves from other presenters.  Often the slides on screen don’t actually add much to the presentation either.  There is a herd mentality going on here.  They say in banking, that it is acceptable to fail conventionally, but not by doing exotic stuff.  The same in presenting.  It is fine to be boring and dull, as long as you follow the railway track of what ever other presenter is doing.  If that boring shtick suits you, then keep doing that.  By the way, let me know how it is working out for you.

If you want to stand out amongst the average, the Lilliputians of Presenting, the nondescript and forgettable don’t always go for the slide deck.  Mix it up a bit.  I saw Howard Schulz of Starbucks fame, give a presentation in Tokyo.  He had one slide.  That was the Starbucks logo.  He was able to talk with just that image in the background and he kept the interest of the crowd.  He spoke about something he knows a lot about – his company.  We actually know a lot about our subject matter too and we can do it with out any slides.

One downside of slides is that it seeps the audience attention away from the speaker.  We are shifting our eyes away from the speaker to what is on the screen.  This is often compounded as an error, by some helpful “know nothing” who switches the lights off at the same time.  Now the screen has won all the attention because the speaker has disappeared into the darkness, the void, and only their voice is apparent like some pre-recorded content for the light show.  The entire repertoire of the facial expressions and body language available to the speaker have been neutralised.

The screen based presentations have the advantage of being milestones and markers along which the presentation can flow.  You don’t have to remember what comes next, because all you have to do is push a button. This is a quite handy.  You can put something up on screen and talk to the point and this flow will progress logically and smoothly.  When you are free-forming, you are up on the high wire and have no net.  We have to remember though that only we know the order.  If we mess it up and put one bit in the wrong place only we will know. The audience will be oblivious for the most part and we can just blatantly carry on, as if nothing happened. So the downside is not that great.

You can still keep your order by writing out your speech, as a full speech or as points.  This is your navigation to keep the speech on track. The key is not to read it out to the audience.  Talk to the points instead.  We want our eyes fixed on the audience members throughout. That means eliminating any and all distractions.  Ideally, we don’t want our eyes dropping to glance at a page and then having to look up again.  It is not the end of the world if that happens, as long as you keep the glancing bit quick.  Better to think in silence with your chin up and looking at your audience, than with your head down scanning a piece of paper on the rostrum.

So save yourself a lot of time worrying about the finer points of slide deck creation and instead concentrate on the key messages you want to get across.  Also when delivering with no bright screen in play, the audience has nowhere to go, but to look at you.  Make sure you return the compliment by looking at them throughout the talk.  Eye contact, eye contact, eye contact is the rule. Giving an audience a change from the usual makes you memorable.  By contrast, you seem quite at ease up there on the high wire.  The audience members know they can’t do that, so the respect factor for you goes right up.  Your talent and skill as a speaker stands out more powerfully and the contrast with the punters out there, chained to their slide deck, becomes more pungent.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to dalecarnegie.comand check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Author of Japan Sales Mastery, the Amazon #1 Bestseller on selling in Japan and the first book on the subject in the last thirty years.

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 and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate 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.

How To Select Data For Presentations In Business In Japan

How much is enough data in a presentation?  How much is too much?  Generally speaking, most presenters have a problem with too much, rather than too little information.  Your slide deck is brimming over with goodness.  And you just can’t bring yourself to trim it down. After all the effort you went to assembling that tour de force, you want to get it all out there in the public arena.  You have spent hours on the gathering of the detail and making the slides, so you are very heavily invested in the process.  You want to show the power of your thought leadership, your intellect, your insights, your experience.

Here is the danger though. We kill our audience with kindness. The kindness of throwing the entire assembly at them.  They are now being buffeted by the strong winds of new data, new information, new insights, one after another.  The last one is killed by the succeeding one, and it in turn is killed by the next one. We go into massive overload of the visual senses and the memory banks are being broken through, like a raging river spilling its banks.  Are we self aware about what we are doing?  No, we are caught up in data mania, where more is better.  We can’t thow that graph out because it took a lot to create it. We need to have that extra bullet point, even though it is not adding any extra dimension to the presentation. 

We have forgotten our purpose of doing the presentation and are now firmly fixated on the mechanics, the logistics, the content and not the outcomes we want.  There are different key purposes with a presentation: to entertain, to inform, to persuade.  The majority of business presentations should be to persuade but are often underperforming and are only hitting the inform button.  This is because the presenter hasn’t realised that with the same effort and drawing on the same data resource, they can move up the scale and be highly persuasive.  Data, data, data just doesn’t work though

At the end of the session the audience is shredded.  They cannot remember any of the information because there was way too much.  They cannot remember the key message, because there were too many key messages.  They walk out of there shaking their heads saying “what hit me?”.  Was this a success?  Did we convert anyone to our way of thinking?  Did they leave with any valuable takeaways so that they feel some value from attending? Or did they leave dazed and diminished?

So as presenters, we have to be like Mari Kondo with her housekeeping advice - keep only the bits we love and throw the rest out.  We have to make some hard choices about what goes up on that screen and what remains relegated to the depths of the slide deck reserve bench.  We have to winnow out the key messages and whittle them down to one central message.  We need to take that key message and assemble a flotilla of support with evidence, proof, data, comment, etc., to support it. 

We need a good structure to carry the presentation.  A blockbuster opening to grab attention.  A limited number of key points we can make in the time allotted.  Strong supporting data and evidence to back up the key points. We need to design powerful close number one as we finish the presentation and also a powerful close number two, for after the Q&A.

We have to keep the presentation itself short and snappy, rather than long and laborious.  We want to leave them tonguing for more rather than leaving them feeling sated or saturated.

We want them to get our key message and have it firmly planted in their brain, so they get it, remember it and believe it.  That is different to stuffing the fire hose down their throats and hitting the faucet to turn it on full bore.  But this is often what we do, when we lead with data.  Always remember when it comes to presenting, less is more baby!  You can always flesh out the points more in the Q&A and after the talk, for those most interested in the topic.  We want to impress the audience not bury them under detail.  Getting the balance is the presenters skill and art and that is why there are so few presenters who are any good.  Plenty of room at the top folks, so come and join!

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to dalecarnegie.comand check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Author of Japan Sales Mastery, the Amazon #1 Bestseller on selling in Japan and the first book on the subject in the last thirty years.

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 and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate 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.

Presenting In Business in Japan

Japan has some particular ways of doing things.  We say "when in Rome, do as the Romans do".  That would be extremely bad advice when it comes to presenting your solution to buyers here.  Japan is the country of Zen, which holds simplicity at it's centre.  You would never know that though, when you look at typical business presentations.  The slide deck is a mess.  There are slides with five different colours on offer.  You will see four to five different fonts on the same screen.  The text will be dense, small font sizes and impenetrable.  If there are four graphs, then they are all shown on the same slide. 

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, when one of my team showed me the slide deck from a recent presentation he attended.  This event hosted by the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce,  had about 150 hopefuls in the audience, keen and eager to learn how to do presentations properly.  The instructor was a Japanese business consultant and his slides were terrible. There were too many details on each slide, too much text, too many diagrams cobbled together on screen.  He was using four different fonts on each slide. It was ugly and hard to follow. He was someone, supposedly an expert on presentations, showing the faithful how to do it.  Sadly the lack of knowledge here on how to present is legendary.

I had been asked to give a series of presentations for the Tokyo Metropolitan Government on how to start a business in Japan.  They showed me what the previous speaker, a Japanese business women had been using. I just laughed to myself when I saw it. It was florid, drenched in too many colours, too small sized fonts, too much text, a total disaster as far as a professional business presentation goes. The officials at the Tokyo Metropolitan Government obviously thought that this mess passed muster.  How could that be?

I don't know why because this is the country of high aesthetics of zen simplicity?  If you ever take a careful look at a Japanese kimono, however you will find an amazing array of colours juxtaposed together. Often these colours don't seem to go together, as far as Western concepts of colour spectrum matching goes. Maybe there is more of a kimono mind at play here, than any zen sensibilities?

Even smart people do the craziest things.  One of my ex-staff now works for a Robotics company founded by a mad professor type. The founder is very, very smart. I attended his presentation and boy oh boy where did the smarts go?  The slide show was the same thing.  Too many colours, too much information crammed onto one slide, totally dense and hard to follow.  It was just overloaded with diagrams, detail and graphs.  So don't follow the Japanese model, instead do professional presentations, be concise, precise, clear, sparse.

Also in Japan, it is quite common for people to sit down when they present.  You will find they have prepared a desk, chair and low microphone stand for you.  Don't follow this pattern.  Stand up so that you can position yourself on the audience left of the screen.  We want them looking at our face first, then reading left to right across the screen.  We know that our face is the most powerful tool there is, when it comes to presentations and we want to be in the best position to use it.   Also when we stand up ,we get to use the full capacity of our body language to drive home the key points we want to make.

In Japan however, if you stand above the audience, it is implying your eminent superiority over all of those sitting.  Well you simply can't imply that with buyers, because they are God and there is nothing higher than them.  So you need to make an apology that you are going to stand up, but explain that this will make it easier for you to give the presentation.  Now this applies to foreigners and to Japanese alike. 

The key is stand up, but apologise first, so you can get permission to not sit when presenting. For foreigners, we are freed up from a lot of restrictive conventions to do with the culture, because they just think we are ignorant and don't know any better.  This apology idea though, travels very well across audiences and across nationalities.  Even if you have Japanese team members doing the presentation in Japanese, get them to apologise and stand up and present.

If you are presenting to a buying group do not just imagine you can engage with the main person and do the deal.  The way decisions are taken here, there will be all of the stakeholders in the room. Few people will want to say “yes” to anything new because that is risky, so they are there to make sure this is safe or to make sure it doesn't happen.  You need to engage everyone. 

Don't make the beginners mistake of talking to the person with the best English. They are rarely the decision maker.  They are just a minion who is there, because they have good English.  Engage with everyone, just as you should be doing in any presentation.

If you are using consecutive interpreting you need to learn how to speak in brackets.  Speak part of your thought, stop, wait until the interpreting has finished, pick up the thought and continue.  This may sound easy, but trust me it is not easy at all. Your thought process can get hijacked during the consecutive interpreting break and you lose your train of thought or you go off on some unintended tangent. 

One of the best people I ever saw using consecutive interpreting was Murray Rose.  He was a swimming icon in Australia, multiple Olympic medalist and a boyhood hero of mine.  I had the pleasure to meet him when I was Consul General for Australia in Osaka. He was here to promote the Sydney Olympics. 

He gave the most impressive and moving speech on the meaning of the Olympics.  I can tell you it brought a tear to my eye it was so sincere and Aussie boys don’t cry. I wish we had been smart enough to record it.  The other thing that struck me was how skilled he was to start a thought, hold it and continue perfectly.  That takes work. You also have to remember not to talk for too long.  You need to give the interpreter a chance to remember what you said so they can repeat it. You often see people who are not used to interpreters waxing long and lyrically, completely forgetting the talk now has to be switched into Japanese. The interpreter just cannot retain that much detail, so whatever you said will only be partially transferred to the listeners. Go for short brackets so that nothing is lost.

How To Read Faces When Presenting In Business In Japan

People staring at you intently when you are presenting can be unnerving. This is especially the case when we are already feeling nervous to begin with. If some of those faces in the audience look particularly hostile, then the level of inner tension can be reaching danger point. We are stressing ourselves in reaction to how we perceive the audience and what we imagine they are thinking about us and what we are saying.

“Don't judge a book by it's cover” is ancient wisdom and the same is the case when presenting. I was in Osaka a number of years ago, giving a presentation in Japanese to 100 salespeople in the travel industry on why Australia was such a great education destination for Japanese students. The idea was that I would inspire these salespeople to recommend education destinations in Australia, in preference to other competing countries, after I had fired them up with my passion for the idea.

I can still remember the scene. It was a long hall and everyone wearing dark suits, mainly men and a big venue.  On my left side, about half way down, was sitting one guy who had a really angry face. Even from that distance I could tell he looked angry.  He didn't seem to buying anything that I was saying at all. 

At the end of the presentation, he leapt out of his seat and came straight down to the front where I was standing. I had just come down off the podium to exchange business cards with members of the audience. I honestly thought he was going to punch me! Instead he started thanking me profusely in Japanese for my presentation, said it was really great, he really learn a lot, etc., etc. 

I felt like saying, "if you liked it so much why didn't you tell your face!" I also realised that what I took for an angry face, was in fact a face deeply concentrating on what I had been saying. Now Japan throws up a few challenges in this regard, because Japan is quite a serious place, with a lot of serious people, whose faces we may misread. 

Whenever I write or speak about presenting, I am always making the point to keep eye contact with each person for around six seconds and to look at people in all six pockets of a room. Those in the front, left, middle, right and those at the back again left, middle, right. We do this in a random, unpredictable way to keep audience interest in our presentation. Having said that though, not everyone is equal. If you are nervous about speaking to groups, inside those pockets pick out the people who are nodding in agreement with what you are saying or who at least have a neutral face. To maintain your confidence do not look at anyone who looks angry, doubtful, quizzical or hostile. 

Ignore them completely to concentrate on those who are with you. This will help build your confidence when speaking and over time you won’t need to do this but in the early stages it works quite well.  Actually thinking about it, I am totally confident presenting, but I still continue to ignore people who look hostile, because I have no particular interest in engaging with them.

The part of the talk where the hostiles get to be a problem is usually during question time.  If you have been trained in how to handle Q&A, you never worry about hostiles in your audience, because you know you can handle anything they throw at you. If the whole audience looks hostile, well tough it out and keep going, bracing yourself for the Q&A where you can expect a lot of pushback. By the way we teach how to deal with hostile Q&A, so let us know if you would like to learn the secret.

One key point – always specify how much time there is for questions, so that you can make a graceful departure and leave the venue with your head held up high.  If you don’t, it looks like you are a scoundrel and a coward trying to flee the premises, because you can’t take the heat.  We don’t want that as our final impression do we.  They can disagree with you as much as they like, but you have to end the proceedings looking like the cool, calm professional you are.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to dalecarnegie.comand check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Author of Japan Sales Mastery, the Amazon #1 Bestseller on selling in Japan and the first book on the subject in the last thirty years.

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 and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate 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.

Being Persuasive In Business In Japan

Business schools are teaching put up your conclusion first in the Executive Summary and then the evidence and argument follows in the main body.  If we are writing something for others to read, then this is absolutely terrific.  If it is a report on a market’s potential or how the product launch fared, this makes a lot of logical sense.  Busy people want the punch line delivered quickly, so they can allow themselves the opportunity to move on to more pressing needs. If we are talking to people, trying to win them over to our way of thinking, then this is rubbish.  Don’t ever do this, because you are setting yourself up for trouble.

We do it though, don’t we. We offer up our conclusion at the start and wonder why that didn’t go according to plan.  We don’t get immediate acceptance, as we had expected. Here is the problem in the real world.  When we tell people our conclusion, we are now up against a wall of critics, one-uppers, debaters and dilettantes. We have exposed our argument to the world, but we have left it to hang out there with nothing to defend it. You might be thinking, “no, the defence comes straight after, as we get into the evidence”.  You are so optimistic!

In fact, as soon as the opening conclusion is stated, the audience has stopped listening to you completely.   They are thinking they are smarter than you and don’t need to hear anymore.  They are fully concentrated on the clever thing they are going to say, to demolish your recommendations.  Their minds are buzzing with their counter arguments, their views, how to make themselves look good  and alternative proposals.  They can hear white noise in the background, which is actually you speaking, but they are not focused on your content, because they believe what they have to say is much more important.

To avoid this scenario dump the business school model and reverse gears.  When you want to persuade someone of some recommendation you are making, start with the evidence first.  Do it in the form of a short story.  It shouldn’t be too long and you are forbidden to start rambling.  Keep it tight, taut and on point.

The story needs to be rich in word pictures.  We need to be able to see the scene you are describing in our mind’s eye.  We need to bring in people they will know, describe locations they are familiar with and create a time sequence through reference to seasons or business milestones during the year.  They cannot intervene or tune you out, because they have no idea where this story is taking us and they are forced listen to you.

We need to promote the context behind the recommendation we are making.  By creating the scene, the audience will be coming to their own conclusions about what needs to happen.  The context is telling them that logically XYZ should happen.  This is the same conclusion you came to, based on the same evidence you are giving them and you tell them XYZ should occur. Immediately we have done that, we go into the outcome or benefit that your proposal will generate.  So the order runs this way: context, recommendation then benefit.

Because it is short, we won’t lose the audience and that is why we have to practice this delivery. In any short presentation each word becomes very important, so we have to trim the talk of all fluff and surplus words.  If you try to make it too involved and go down a number of rabbit holes, you will lose the audience, who will become impatient and tune you out.  So we have to give enough powerful evidence, without getting bogged down in the gritty details.  Those gritty details can come later, but the key driver initially, is to get people to agree with your general direction.

The context first approach is great because while people can disagree with your conclusions they can’t disagree with your context.  Usually they won’t have as much command of the context as you have, so it is hard to debate with you over the background details.  They also have to wait until they get all the relevant information before they know what you are proposing.  They can’t cut you off because they don’t know if this is going to positive, negative, or about the past, present or future.  They have to hear you out before they can say anything. Genius!  Actually it is magical and this is why this construct of context-recommendation-benefit is called The Magic Formula.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to dalecarnegie.comand check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Author of Japan Sales Mastery, the Amazon #1 Bestseller on selling in Japan and the first book on the subject in the last thirty years.

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 and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate 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.

Presenter Survival Tips For A Tech Meltdown

When the tech crashes, you shouldn't crash and burn with it when presenting. Absolutely ALWAYS get to the venue early and check the equipment. Remember, you are in an alien environment, being served by people you have never met before. Who knows how old the technology they have is or of what quality level is the equipment.  The people setting up the talk never give presentations.  They don’t understand that if the tech goes horribly wrong, the audience will blame the speaker, not the hosts.  They also don’t understand that public presentations are the arena in which reputations are built or destroyed.  They are just there to open the room up and move the chairs around. We should never rely on anyone else when we are the presenter.

 I find that bringing my own laptop and a backup USB tends to eliminate a few of the technical problems which can occur. I also bring hardcopies of the slide deck, which I can refer to before the talk, if the projector, monitor, USB or computer isn't working. I can reduce my stress, because I know what I want to cover. I have rehearsed the presentation, so I know the cadence I want to achieve and the order of the unveiling of the talk.

Now, importantly, in that room, I am the only one who has a clue what I am going to say and the order in which I am going to say it. If it happens that my point 6 actually followed point three rather than point five, then only I know the order was incorrect. I certainly won't be sharing that little morsel with the audience. I will brazenly charge on, as if it were all part of the bigger plan.  And that is what every presenter must remember – don’t flag problems the audience doesn’t need to know.

I am highly perturbed that top level CEOs of big corporations can't give a speech to a business audience without reading the whole thing. The content is usually put together by people in the Marketing or PR departments and maybe the CEO worked on it before delivering the talk. Great, but why do they have to read it? Don't they know their industry, their sector, their own business? It is pathetic in my view, to see a top business leader reading line by line from the speech script. Some can at least glance at the audience as they read it, so that is less pathetic, but still not good enough. 

Now if it super technical and no brain could retain the content, then reading it makes sense, but how many of those business presentations have you ever attended. In my case - none. If you are in the scientific community or some field so complex, that there is no possibility of remembering it all in your speech, then you are forced to read it. But we are in business and there are few super highly technical presentations that we will ever need to attend. They are usually more standard affairs where they talk about what is happening in their industry, the marketplace and what their firm is doing about it.

I saw a terrific example of no notes, but keeping the presentation going for three hours. Think about that - three hours and no notes. He had no visible notes, as far as we in the audience were concerned. This was a professor at Harvard Business School when I was attending a week long Executive Education course. Now this was an impressive feat and the first time I had seen such a thing. 

At the end of it, as we were filing out of the lecture theatre, I happened to notice that on the back wall behind us was a large sheet of paper with ten words written on it. I realised that this was the speech right there. The professor had his order on the sheet and he just talked to each of the ten prompt code words that were on that sheet. 

If we get to the venue and the tech is not working, we can do the same thing.  Just jot down some prompt words, in the order you need and elaborate on those for your talk. We don't need the tech to give a presentation. Now we can't describe what a graph shows or a diagram demonstrates as well as the original slide deck, but we can paint word pictures and describe trends to illuminate the point we are making.  We can also be telling stories that draw out the key differences, the reasons for the changes or the new insights from the data, rather than having to actually show the data.

So in your planning phase, always be prepared for a meltdown of the tech and be flexible about crafting your talk from the ashes. Always get there early without exception. Remember, only you know what is going to be covered in your talk and in what order you will roll it out.  Keep that secret information to yourself. No matter what happens, carry on and the audience will probably never know there was a problem.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to dalecarnegie.comand check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Author of Japan Sales Mastery, the Amazon #1 Bestseller on selling in Japan and the first book on the subject in the last thirty years.

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 and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate 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.

How To Murder Your Personal Brand In Business In Japan

When you get up and speak in front of an audience, you are putting your professional and personal brand on the line. The event is advertised, people are alerted to the fact you are speaking and a proportion will bother to turn up to hear what you have to say.  They may be drawn in by the fact you work for a famous or powerful company, so their expectations are high.  What we often forget is that unconsciously, they are also turning up to hear how you say it.  Everyone is an armchair critic on oration and usually the level of intensity is diametrically opposite to their own level of speaking ability. 

When you get up to speak, it doesn't matter which prestigious University you graduated from or which mega corporate you work for. When you are on stage, your degree doesn't help you nor does your job title - you are on your own and you sink or swim accordingly. Our speaker on this occasion sank.

The sad part is there was no reason for that to happen. Our speaker made three key errors. Firstly, they did zero research on who was in the audience. The point of the talk may have resonated with someone working in another similar mega corporate, but there were few of those characters in the room that day. I know, because I was exchanging business cards and didn't run across too many brand name employer companies represented at the speaking venue. The degree of difficulty on checking on who is going to be in your audience is this hard: call the organisers and ask who is in the room, who do they represent, what is the gender balance, age balance, and what are the position levels they hold within their companies.

I think anyone could manage to do that and the results would impact how you prepared your talk. Our speaker didn't bother to do that, so the talk failed to persuade.

Another error was the speaker had obviously done no practice on the presentation before delivering it to the audience. Here is a simple rule - "never practice on your audience."  Sounds fairly straightforward, but few speakers run through any attempt at rehearsing their talk before they give it.  They just turn up on the appointed day and hour and away they go.  Fairly hard to work that thinking out, given the high level of attention which is about to be placed on your personal and professional brands.  We should all be running through our full length presentation at least three times before giving it.  We need to do that to work out the cadence of the speech and to check that we are on message. We know we have to be doing something to energise the audience every five minutes and we have to plan for that.

The speaker’s delivery was distracting us from the key messages.  The Ums...were coming thick and fast, the talk was low energy and the voice too soft, even with the microphone. They had obviously not checked the room or equipment before the talk started.  They were not speaking in a monotone but it was a pretty close thing. This was a very unimpressive, totally forgettable effort and it didn't have to end like that.

The third error was this person had not been coached on public speaking. The irony was that their company policy was to do all of their staff development work in-house. I know the speaker wasn't a product of any internal coaching because there hadn't been any practice done in the first place. As a professional trainer for presentation skills, I doubt the managers in that company would be adding much value anyway, even if they had done some coaching. A case of the half-baked leading the half-baked. 

Ironically, the speaker included the fatal words “Presentation Skills” in their LinkedIn profile, as one of the many skills they possess.  That proved to be a very bold assertion.  They were hopeless.  Watching their performance and reading the profile now makes you doubt their level of expertise in the other areas they listed.  Get the training and brush up your skills. It will just make such a tremendous difference.

Take every opportunity to speak in front of others because this is a brilliant way to promote your personal brand.  But plan properly, practice privately and be ready to add to and build your personal brand in the business community.  Getting training is a great idea because now you are lifted out of the limitations of your own organization.   We all need to have the best practice, professional ruler run over our abilities and get the right level of coaching to improve.

Avoid these three errors and you will do a much better job than our speaker did.  None of these ideas are rocket science, just common sense, yet supposedly "smart" people working for the megacorps get them wrong.   Take some of these some ideas and apply them toward how to accentuate, rather than murder your personal brand.

What Is The One Key Thing When Presenting?

I was talking with a friend, while we were having lunch at this very nice Italian restaurant he frequents, near his office.  Between dishes, we were talking about how he has to go to his US headquarters and join all the other representative Country Heads from around the world and give his report on how the business is going in Japan.  I was thinking that that must be a very high profile and pressure presentation. So I mentioned how great our High Impact Presentations Course was. In my own case, I wish I had done it 20 years earlier, because it would have changed my career trajectory.  Anyway, my friend was patiently listening to all of this and then asked me a very profound question,  “What is the one key thing when presenting?”.

What he was getting at was that if we had to boil it all down, what is the one most critical skill we need to be effective as a presenter.  This is a major question in business. After all, this is our personal and professional brand we are putting out there on show for all the world to see.  This is not something we want to get wrong.  I had no hesitation in telling him “focus on your audience”.

Great. What does that mean, because aren’t we all focusing on our audience when we present? Definitely, yes, we should be focusing on our audience, but often we are deluding ourselves.  If we break down the presentation and analyse it, we can see that focusing on your audience has major ramifications for your degree of success when talking in front of others. 

We may have what we want to say in our mind when preparing the talk.  We may be an expert in our field and have a whole bunch of stuff we want to share because we are excited by the content.  However, we may have not taken the trouble to think about what the audience would be most interested in?  Why would they turn up?  What will they be expecting to hear?  We may have not bothered to research who would be in the room.  What would be the age range, the gender mix, the degrees of expertise on the subject.  Did we do our research so we could focus the topic down to the slant most likely to impress our audience?  Or did we just talk about what we were interested in?

Who were we thinking about when we got up to speak?  We may have started our talk focused not on the audience but on ourselves. We were thinking how nervous we were feeling.  We feel captured by our high pulse rate, our sweaty palms, our dry throat, our weakness in the knees.  The focus is 100% inward not outward.

We may have been very deeply engrossed in the notes we were reading, such that we didn’t even look up at the audience.  Or if we did, we used one of those fake eye contact approaches, where our eyes look in the direction of the audience but we are not really looking at anyone. We may have decided to ignore half the crowd and only talk to one half of the room or maybe only the front row or maybe no one, because we are staring over all the seated heads at some spot on the back wall.  Or we may be skimming across the room looking at everyone for one second and therefore looking at no one.  We cannot engage anyone in the audience with a fleeting one second glimpse but we can try to give the impression of an attempt to engage with our audience. This is not a talk focused on the audience.  Do the audience members sitting there feel that we are talking directly to them individually and not to an amorphous mass.

We may have decided that the audience was pretty dumb, so we need to read the text on the slides to them. We might even do that by turning our back on the audience and staring up at the text on the screen.  We are so focused on the text and the content and not on those listening to us.

Just to drive home the lack of focus on the audience, we cram so much information on each slide, that they becomes impenetrable.  Analytical types love jamming ten graphs on the one slide or throwing up the entire text document on screen.   We may hit up the slide with five different colours in a florid mess.  Or we may have gone crazy, like an example I saw recently, where the presenter used four or more different fonts in the text.  This made it super hard to read for the audience members.   Where was the focus?  It was on the presenters “cleverness” to showcase so many fonts on each slide, even though it was a disaster. Not to really rub it in, but the Japanese presenter was delivering a two hour lecture to a local Chamber of Commerce on presenting skills.

We may be rambling, because we have a poor structure for the talk, so we are hard to follow.  We may not have applied a logical flow to the talk to make it easy for the audience.  “Don’t make your talk hard to follow” is a fundamental rule.     Or we may speak in a monotone to see how many people we can put to sleep.  By hitting key words we can emphasise key messages we want the audience to take away with them.  We may be umming ahhing like a legend, to really distract the audience from the message.  We have not done any work on polishing our presenting skills, because we are not focused on the audience but selfishly on the most friction free, time efficient approach.  That means no extra effort being made.

We may have spent a total time of zero minutes practicing the talk before we gave it.  We may have spent our time instead working on the slide deck.  It takes time to cram ten graphs on the one slide, with five different colours and four different fonts for the text.   This major effort will just suck up any potential rehearsal time before the presentation.  So where were we focused after all?

Even though we may imagine we are focused on the audience, we may in fact be missing the opportunity or actively working against that aim.  Take another look at whether you are actually focused on your audience or whether you are just imagining it.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to dalecarnegie.comand check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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 and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate 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.

Don’t Be Boring When Presenting

Every week I get to listen to speeches from some of the top people in their field.  I belong to an elite Rotary Club here in Tokyo.  That description in itself is a bit of a problem, given the philosophy of Rotary as a service organisation helping society and connecting business people together.  When my fellow Rotarians from different parts of the world hear this term “elite”, they will be puzzled, but hey, this is Japan and we do things differently here.  My particular Rotary is brimming with the captains of industry, the commercial crème de la crème, the top shelf of corporate leadership.  One of these titans was giving a presentation recently. 

He runs a huge print media company with an eye popping daily circulation in the millions that is the envy of his Western compatriots.  This is a man whose whole career has been devoted to communication, capturing stories and gaining influence.  So my expectations were raised on a couple of fronts.  I thought here is a speaker who will have a lot of interesting anecdotes, given his organization has a global footprint and the fact that they have been doing this the 1870s.  I thought given all the changes going on in the media business, he will be able to provide insights into where the industry is going.  What a disappointment.

The first red flag that the quality of this presentation was going to be less than expected, was when he started reading his speech.  For someone in his position, with the many decades of experience he has, why on earth would he need to read his speech.  Everyone in that audience reads his media product on a daily basis without fail.  He is a fellow Rotarian so he is amongst friends.  There is no question time in this format so there can be no concerns about being ambushed by a tough question.  This would have to be one of the safest speaking environments on the planet. He could talk to his notes without having to read the whole thing word by word.

We all have some area of expertise otherwise we wouldn’t be given the chance to speak.  When we have experience with our area of knowledge we don’t need to read the script.  We can talk to the points and this allows us to engage with the audience in a more natural way.  Unlike our speaker, we won’t have our gaze transfixed on the sheet of paper sitting on the rostrum in front of us.  This forces our eye line to be looking down on the page and not up at our audience. This creates a barrier with our audience and precludes the opportunity to engage with them.  Our eyes are such powerful communication tools and we should be using them to look at individuals in the audience as we speak.  We should be switching our gaze around the room, holding that person’s attention for around 6 seconds before moving on to the next person.

The next red flag on the quality was his speaking speed.  When we are reading we can tend to speed up.  This gets worse when we get nervous.  I don’t know if he was nervous or not, but I do know he was whipping through his speech at a  rate of knots. Another reason for the speed can be trying to squash as much content into the delivery as possible in the accorded time. 

Slow down for clarity. I am a rapid speaker in both English and Japanese.  I have to really work on myself to slow down so that the audience can follow what I am saying.  This is especially the case when speaking in a foreign language.  Slightly different accents and cadence can be hard for the listener to catch and when you speed things up the degree of difficulty rapidly accelerates.  When we are flying along at speed we tend to lose the pauses. 

Instead it becomes a machine gun delivery that just runs one set of thoughts right over the top of the preceding ideas, making it very hard for the audience to keep up.  We need to give our listeners some little time to catch their breath mentally and digest what we have just said.  As he was speaking in Japanese, I would have appreciated a few pauses so I could process what he was saying more easily.

Were there interesting stories and anecdotes from his star studded career covering the major events of the last 40 years?  Nope. Were there interesting trends being revealed about the future of media in Japan. No.  It was boring and uninteresting and it didn’t need to be like that.  Tell stories from your own experiences – we  have a strong interest in that type of content. Lots of things happen in business and in life and we all have terrific episodes and examples we can weave into our talk to support the point we are making.

Think about your audience and what would be of interest to them about trends in your industry that will impact their business, the market or create future societal trends. Something that the broadest base of listeners can relate to.

We didn’t have any of that on this particular day but we should have.  It was boring.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to dalecarnegie.comand check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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 and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate 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.

How To Facilitate When Presenting

Many presentations are one dimensional. The speaker speaks and we just listen, maybe getting a chance to lob in the odd question at the end. In many cases, with internal presentations, there will be a role for the presenter as a facilitator as well, to get the discussion going or to drive the decision making process. Very few speakers are trained to facilitate and so we more or less bumble our way through.

One of the first things we have to learn in our facilitator role, is to shut up and listen. When we gave our presentation, we had the limelight. As a facilitator, though, we want as many others as possible to share that limelight, which means we have to get out of talk mode and go into listen mode. Sounds easy, but it isn’t.

When we are revved up in presentation mode, it is hard to change direction and just stop making our points. When someone says something, our brain lights up with something clever we would like to say. In fact, we get the inspiration pretty quickly, so we tend to switch off the person who is speaking and what they have to say. We just concentrate on what we want to say. Effectively, that means we have now stopped listening. We might be better than that, but we may instead be doing selective listening. Only honing in on the points we like and ignoring the rest of what the speaker had to say. We need to really work on our listening skills as a speaker and allow others our full attention when they are contributing. If you find yourself cutting others off before they finish, then you know you need to ease off and just listen more.

Silence for a speaker can be a struggle. Japan has no problem with silence so there is no social pressure here to fill the airwaves with continuous talk. We should take a leaf out of their book and use silence more when facilitating. Ask a question and then become quiet, even when we get into that uncomfortable silence period. Some are shy to speak up, others are deep processors going down many layers of thought on what they want to say. We need to give them time to contribute, we may even need to ask the more boisterous types to hold their comment and allow others to talk for a change.

We need nerves of steel when we do this, because in Western culture, silence is seen as uncomfortable, an indication of the breakdown of communication, that something has gone wrong because people are not participating. No one in Japan particularly feels any of that, by the way, so it is all in our heads.

Also avoid rephrasing a question or comment, unless it is really necessary. People have their own styles of speech and we need to make them feel welcome to contribute. If we become “correctors” of other people’s comments, they get the message that they are not skilled enough in communication to be able to lodge their own original effort. From this point on they will simply stop contributing. We should also be careful about changing the subject, until everyone has had a chance to comment. As mentioned, some are shy, some are deep thinkers and just at that vital moment when they are about to launch forth with their carefully crafted contribution, we switch subjects and they are banished to silence.

We also need to have a poker face. If we hear something with which we very much disagree, our facial expression and our body language, can go into overdrive and convey our displeasure with other people’s views. Again, this acts as an inhibitor of participation. Bosses do this all the time and then wonder why the number and quality of ideas are so poor.

We need to be aware of when to use closed questions to drive clarity and agreement and when to use open questions, to stimulate discussion. It can be a good practice to disassociate ourselves from the question and ask it as if a third party was involved. For example, “some commentators have the view that the new financial year is the best time for launching new projects. How has been your experiences with this type of thing?”. By not attaching our name to the view, it makes it easier for others to put forward a contrary view.

When we are asking questions, there will be three common varieties. The fact-based questions are there to get out information and data and generally will have a specific, correct response. This type of question is better addressed to the whole group than an individual, to avoid the possibility of calling out someone who cannot answer and will be embarrassed.

Opinion-based questions help to get a sense of how people feel emotionally about a topic. It is important to assess the emotional climate in the room on some topics before we go any further with the discussions. When people are reluctant to offer their opinion, especially here in Japan, you need to use a different technique. Ask everyone to write down their thoughts, but don’t ask, “What do you think?”. In Japan, that is too confronting. Instead ask “What did you write down?” and people will speak up.

When we are speaking that is one role. When we move to facilitator mode we need to switch gears and make some adjustments to how we do things. Understanding the different requirements is key. As a facilitator, we want audience participation and their contributions. We need to set that up and make it happen.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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 and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate 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.

Great Voice As a Speaker?

Probably only a microscopic number of speakers have had any voice training. The vast majority of us are in business and get called on to speak. As we rise through the ranks we need to deliver reports internally, to speak to our project teams, to address the sales rally. We also get dragged outside the organisation to give speeches to industry groups or chambers of commerce etc. When we get up and speak we are just using an extension of our daily conversational speaking voice. This is where we get into trouble.

Speaking to a group can be done in a conversational way, but the voice needs to change. It needs a number if things to be happening at the same time. It needs to be a bit louder than normal, even when you are using a microphone. This relates to the power levels we need to be projecting to the audience and the way to regulate that is through the volume we apply.

We need to be using well placed pauses. Often we are nervous when we are to get up in front of others, so unknowingly we start to speed up and start running the sentences together. I was coaching an Indian businessmen once and he gave a two minute talk which was one single sentence without a pause anywhere. I was amazed. When we do this we are killing the message because the audience cannot easily follow what we are saying and also because our ideas crash over the top of each other like winter storm surf. We need the pauses so the ideas can be heard and can sink in and be processed by the audience.

Mumbling the words makes it hard to follow. Mumbling is usually a factor when we are speaking too quickly and not using enough pauses. Slow down for better effect. Now I am a fast speaker so slowing down just kills me and kills my flow. I have to do it though if I want to be heard. It becomes a particular problem when I speak in Japanese. Having an accent when I speak and doing it at speed makes it hard for the audience to follow. I need to slow down!

When you are a fast speaker you worry that the audience will think there is something unnatural with the way you are speaking, as if you are being disrespectful to them. I was using a teleprompter and the speed setting was rather slower than what I would normally use. I thought this is going to sound condescending to the audience. However, when I heard the speech later, it didn’t sound like I was speaking down to my audience at all. In fact, it sounded clear and measured.

We need to start with a good strong voice and make sure we don’t allow the ends of our sentences to trail off and just end in a whimper. We need to finish each sentence with some strength. We don’t want the intonation rising at the end either because that implies lack of conviction about what we are saying. In the middle part we want voice modulation. That comes in three varieties: tonal range, that is to say the up and down of speech tone; the degree of strength we are using – soft and strong; and the speed – sometimes we slow it right down and other times we speed it up again.

Filler words like Um and Ah have to be reduced or preferably removed altogether. They are a distraction when they have high frequency. It annoys the listener and competes for the attention of our message. The audience starts concentrating on the speech hesitations rather than the key points we are trying to convey. I was at a speech recently and the frequency of “ums” was every sentence. There weren’t even any “ahs” to break up the monotony! It was a negative for the speaker and it diminished an impressive resume.

We don’t need to have a deep DJ voice but if you have one, great for you. For the rest of us, we can only go with what we have and we can use our voice range to go a bit deeper on certain key words we want to emphasise. The words in a sentence are not all equal. This is not a lexicon democracy. It is a dictatorship of the important and we should be stressing the words which are key to the message. Don’t hit too many words in the one sentence, because we detract from the impact of our careful selection. Going soft on words works just as well as going hard by the way. A conspirator flavor is introduced when we do that. It is as if we are inviting the audience into our closed circle and we are sharing a secret with them and them alone.

When we hear our own voice played back it sounds strange because it is not how we hear it inside our own head. I remember that John Lennon was very self conscious about how his voice sounded on his records. Despite that he managed to sell millions of records anyway. This difference of how we sound is a physical thing to do with the bones in the ear, making sure we hear it one way and our audience is hearing it another.

Forget about the way you sound. Speak with control, with clarity, with pauses, with key word emphasis, with tonal variety. When we do that, the audience will be attracted to our message and that is all that we need. Think about all of the actors you see in movies and on television – they don’t all have just one voice style. They are successful because they are great communicators with the voice they have. We need to be the same.

The Power Of Belief When Presenting

Watching a grey haired, grizzled veteran of the media making his award acceptance speech talking about the importance of the pursuit of the truth in the media and a High School Senior speaking out about gun control, I was struck by how powerful both speeches were.  Many award speeches we see are either hopeless or perfunctory.  This one was different.  No notes, coherent, well delivered, confident and with a strong message.  The High School boy also spoke without notes, in front of a big audience, yet with so much confidence and clarity.  The common factor for both was the amount of belief they were communicating in their message.

Now in business, we might be thinking that is all very well for a media representative trying to fight back against a President who lambasts journalists about fake news and disparages their profession. We might think that this young man has survived a life and death experience and so he has that special degree of super commitment.   We in business are quite different aren’t we?

Getting fired up over spreadsheets, or quarterly results, or the PR department’s corporate messaging isn’t all that life changing, powerful or exciting.

This is a cop out.   If we are delivering a presentation in business, we have a message we wish to convey and the delivery of that message can make or break the success of what we are doing.  If we are just reporting numbers, we can see that as a routine function, isolated and puny in impact.  

What if we saw our activity against the WHY of what we are doing and connected the numbers back to that. What if we connected it to the lofty goals we have set for ourselves and how these numbers fit into that effort.  What if we connected it to the competition out there and how we were doing against them in the market place.  We can all take something that seems mundane and find a greater sense of purpose.  

If we are presenting on behalf of our firm, we are usually trying to convey a positive message about the company and what we are doing.  If we analyze our audience well, we can know how to connect what we want to say with issues that they are interested in and will value.  There is no shortage of ways to make a presentation relevant to our audience. The secret is in the planning.

The delivery is the hard part though.  Seeing yourself as a soldier on the media front lines, fighting back against the evil afoot is a much more uplifting topic than talking about the firm’s annual marketing plan. The delivery can have the transfer of belief though.  Yes, the scope and scale of the drama is different.  However, we can seize on the central point we want to get across to our audience and talk about that in a way that resonates we totally believe what we are saying is the best advice for them.

Counter intuitively, start the planning with the talk’s final punch line.  What is it you really, earnestly want to communicate, what is your key point?  Once you have divined that essence, build the talk around it by offering evidence, examples, vignettes, stories, proof, case studies that back it up.

If you believe what you are saying, then be supremely confident when communicating these points.  Send out waves of desire to help your audience do better through what you are conveying. The feeling is totally different to doing a download of data to an audience. This is the mental provision of the buffet and then the audience are on their own to take what they like and have an interest in, with no central compelling narrative, idea, point or message. We don’t want that.

Even if the object of the talk is to inform, the desire should be to provide the most up to date, highest value information and insight about what it means to our audience. If the object is to impress the audience about our company, then the desire is to convert as many of the people in the crowd to become fans, so that we can help them with our solutions. We don’t just want them to like our firm, we want them to buy our wares, speak highly of us and recommends us to all and sundry.

Belief is the most powerful engine with which to power a presentation. Find where you can inject belief into your talk. It must be relevant to the audience, genuine, authentic and heart felt. When you speak with belief you speak with a different voice. Something magical happens to you as a communicator and you and your message will be remembered. And that is what we want isn’t it.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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 and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate 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.

Experts Not Very Expert At Presenting

Five star luxury is always appreciated and the hotel setting for this presentation was clearly appropriate given this elite event. The speaker’s contribution to business acumen was being highly anticipated, judged by the number of people in the room. Numerous round tables with white tablecloths, mainly men in dark suits, reserved tables for the more important, Western breakfast buffet at the back – the usual setting. We are all gathered for the information we are about to receive because there may be some insights presented which may help our businesses. We are also all armed with our mental review sheet of the presenter’s competence and by extension his organization. We want to know how much we can trust what we are being told.

Experts are a problem when they come to presenting their knowledge because they don’t value the process. The data, the graphs, the trend lines, the insights, the market intelligence all have value, so a first rate treasure trove can be delivered in a second or third rate manner. This is their excuse at any rate, “I don’t have to be a good presenter, because everyone is assembled to hear my genius content”, they plead.

Usually economic and market related expert presenters are carrying around big brains which are highly analytical. They rely on the inherent quality of their information to carry the day. Worryingly, they are in the persuasion business without realising it. Despite what they imagine, the data doesn’t sell itself. There is a line of reasoning, some thesis, a discourse that is near and dear to the heart of the presenter. They are here because they want people to buy their analysis, to think highly of them and their company and purchase their firm’s widget or whatever

The buying process though hinges on trust and credibility. Experts need to show two things – that they know what they are talking about and that what they are saying is true. The “true” bit can be gauged by the quality of their sources of the data, plus the veracity of their analysis and argument made on that basis. The trust part though is a lot more personal exercise. Is the expert able to articulate the thesis in a way that the audience can agree? Is the presentation easy to follow? Is the data being presented easily digestible, so that we buy what they are selling?

This is where the problems start. The speaker is a poor speaker. We are now getting sidetracked by their inability to strings two sentences together. We have lost focus on the content and are now diverted by their delivery. Their monotone delivery is making us sleepy. The lack of tonal variety means that each word is assigned exactly the same value, so the gems, the pearls, the brilliant diamonds are not standing out as they should.

They are wooden in their body language, so the face is the same mask throughout, like one of those Japanese Noh masks. They are not lifting our belief in what is being said by getting their facial expression behind the words to drive home the point. They are not using much in the way of gestures, because when their hands are not holding the podium down with a vice like grip, they are flourishing the clicker around to advance the slide deck. Gestures can be very powerful to draw attention to key points and to engage the audience, but none of that is on display today.

The visual aids are not really helping all that much. There is too much information on each slide, so our attention is being dispersed across too many data points. Analytical types think that if one graph per slide is good them three must be a lot better. It isn’t!

Adding lots of text must be a good idea they think because it adds greater value. The concept that the presenter could speak to a key word hasn’t filtered in yet. They see the screen as an extension of their writing pad and so let’s pile on the words, to get everyone understanding the point. Whole sentences are more attractive than single words from their point of view.

Looking fixedly at the screen information is a favourite. It is as if they are totally mesmerized, captured by the data and can’t help looking at it, so they ignore their audience. This a big thing to give up, if your are in the persuasion business and trust me we are all in that business.

Being able to drive home your key points, while eyeballing the audience is a powerful weapon. We can engage our audience and draw them into us and what we are saying. We have had thousands of years of refining this in the Western world and we know the power of persuasion through the spoken word. The experts though, ignore history to their peril. By watching our audience, we can also keep a hawk like view of how our audience is reacting to what we are saying and showing them. The reactions are very helpful to where we need to place the emphasis of the talk and give us a heads up, on what questions we are likely to get in Q&A.

It was obvious that no thought had been put into how to open the presentation and how to close it. We went through the slides, went straight into the questions and then moved on to the coffee break before the next speaker. When we are presenting, the first words out of our mouth had better be pretty good. We need to tempt the audience to want to stay riveted to the presentation, because the content is valuable, the presenter is valuable and the presenter’s organisation is valuable. We need to hammer our prime message twice at the end, once before we go to Q&A and then again as we wrap it all up and head for coffee.

I heard from one of the organisers that this was this expert’s first foray into presenting the latest global research findings of this venerable organisation. It became obvious they hadn’t bothered to provide any training before his first outing and also that he wouldn’t be getting any after the tour either. It is a “work it out yourself” approach to harming one’s personal and professional brands.

Crazy stuff you might ponder, but this scenario is all too common. Don’t put people representing your organisation out there on public display, until they have had some training. We don’t want them to underwhelm or even worse screw it up. These are all own goals easily avoided, yet we see the same mistakes time after time, often from the same company! Don’t be one of them.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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 and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate 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.

Watch Others To Learn Presenting

When we are the thick of things we have trouble observing ourselves. Public speaking is really pushing many people right out of their comfort zone, so the stress levels are massive. They feel they are heating up, their breath is getting shorter, their tummy feels rather bad and their throat is parched. It is very hard to be an objective observer of your own performance when you are mainly preoccupied with survival. This is where being an observer of others is very handy.

Our High Impact Presentations Course uses this technique in depth. While we are up there presenting our classmates are watching us like a hawk for two things. One is to discover what we are doing that is good. The second is looking for areas where we could do better. You will notice I didn’t introduce any ideas about things they could critique about our performance. This is looking into the past, it degrades everyone’s confidence and creates a negative relationship between the participants.

When we are not in class though there are many chances for us to observe how others present. Obviously when we attend events with a speaker we can take the opportunity to hone our observation skills. The vast majority of attendees are there just to hear the speaker and learn something from the content. They are not mentally pulling the whole operation apart and analysing it. Well that is precisely what we should be doing.

Did the speaker attempt to connect with the audience before the event? Did they reference something said by one of the attendees to build a bond with the audience and break down the barriers? How was the introduction? Usually this is done by the hosting organization’s person. Was it obviously something that person put together and therefore was a pretty half baked affair or was it an all dancing, all singing warm up for the main act?

When you are presenting always prepare your own introduction. Don’t make it an essay, keep it brief and focused on the high points. Don’t allow anyone else to represent you during the talk. Send it before you speak or hand it to them on the day. Either way, try to get them to stick to the script. What you have written will always be a lot better than anything they come up with.

How was the speaker’s opening of the talk? Were they fiddling around with the tech and discussing it with the audience before they got going? Did they say stupid things like “can you hear me?” as they are tapping the microphone, because they hadn’t bothered to check earlier when they arrived.

Was the first sentence something which grabbed our attention and made sure we kept our hands off our mobile devices? Could they break through all the clutter in our minds as we worry about yesterday, what happened today and what we need to do tomorrow? How did they open? Was it straight into an interesting story? Did they say something surprising or informative? Did they open with a question which got us engaged in the theme of the talk? Look for these techniques and then consider what you need to do to grab audience mind share when you are a speaker. Today, there is so much more distraction and competition for limited time, miniscule concentration spans that we have to really be on our game, in that environment.

Once they got going was it easy to follow where they were going with this presentation? Did it hang together? Was it logically well constructed so we were brought along with their argument and we were persuaded? Did they shift gears every five minutes or so to maintain our interest? Were they using their eyes to engage us one by one, their voice to have modulation to maintain our interest? Were they using their body language to add strength to their argument?

How did they wrap it up? Did they loop back to something they said at the start? Did they use a quotation from an authority figure? Did they summarise the key points?

Did they handle the Q&A like a pro? Were they paraphrasing what had been said so everyone could hear it. Were they using cushions to buy themselves thinking time. Did they have a second close ready to go so that they could make sure their key message was the last thing the audience heard and remembered, regardless of what came up during the Q&A?

So as you see, we are going to be kept pretty busy when we attend someone else’s talk. By checking for these things we are programming into our minds the importance of being properly prepared before we get up and talk. Don’t let the chance slip by to work over someone else’s efforts to insulate ourselves from the typical errors and to make our talk a triumph, based on learning from the foibles of others.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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 and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate 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.

How To Be Confident When Presenting

The Mochizuki Room of the High Performance Center Akasaka opens up and today’s class members gradually file in, finding a seat, hanging up their winter coats. They mostly don’t know each other, so there is a little bit of nervousness in the room, as they start meeting their classmates and their instructors. At the outset, we ask them to set a vision for the training. It is written in the present tense, but the timing is set 6 months in the future. This requires a bit of mental gymnastics. That means it is not written as, “I will do something or other” but “I am”, as a form of expression. It assumes they have achieved some outcome and that is was a big success.

They have to project forward to a point where they will be giving a future presentation and they have to describe how successful it was, as if it really happened already, even though it is in the future. Next we ask them to imagine after that successful presentation, that they are the last to leave the room. As they are walking out of the building following the crowd, they can hear some of the attendees of their talk discussing their presentation. We ask them to nominate what are the three attributes they want to hear used to describe their presentation, from those who have just heard them speak.

When we ask our class participants for High Impact Presentations Course what are some of the attributes they want to have referenced as presenters, the word “confidence” comes up in almost 99% of cases. Other attributes include: clear, interesting, professional, fun, motivating, impactful, logical, valuable, passionate, interesting etc. Why is confidence the most widely sought after attribute?

We know that confidence sells the message. Someone who doesn’t look confident about what they are suggesting is rejected right then and there. If you can’t believe it yourself, then why should we believe what you are saying. This reaction makes sense doesn’t it.

Confidence also presumes a positive mental state. Speaking in front of others can be contemplated as a negative. Perhaps at school they gave a report and classmates laughed at them, crushing their confidence forever. Maybe they presented their tutorial paper at University and they were diced up by their classmates. Somewhere in their past there may be a recollection of the intense shame, humiliation and despair they felt when they have to present in front of others.

Usually a lack of confidence is associated with nervousness. Being nervous is one thing and putting yourself in that state is another. We are all trained to avoid pain and unpleasantness. Knowing you will become very nervous if you have to present in front of others, automatically has us looking for the escape route to avoid that situation. We know what is coming and we don’t like the look of it. Having the adrenalin coursing through our veins, our breathing feeling constrained, the blood draining away from our major organs releasing a queasy feeling in the pit of our stomach is not a state we want to enter into if we can avoid it.

That was me too. I avoided public speaking for decades, because of my lack of confidence. Was I half smart enough to go and get some training to overcome these fears? No. I did nothing but sweat and tremble in trepidation that I would have to speak in front of others. I passed up on opportunities to build my personal and professional brand and to promote my organisation.

This is the point – we are not confident because we don’t know what we are doing. Any task we have never done before or which is technical and requires some degree of training is going to make us nervous about doing it. Public speaking is no different.

Like these attendees of the High Impact Presentations Course in the Mochizuki Room, we can all overcome these fears of insufficiency to the task, by getting the training. They learn how to deal with fear, with the fight or flight syndrome all speakers have to face. They learn speaking structures that will enable them to prepare any presentation format. When you can just pour the content into the right format, life gets a lot easier. Understanding the point of the talk is another simple but key element. Am I here to get action, to entertain, to inform or to impress? Learning how to design the start and finish of the talk, how to properly design the slides for the talk, how to analyse the audience to know how to present the talk are all the basics we need to know.

When you add in the personal coaching from the instructors it all starts to improve. You only get positive feedback, so your delicate nervous state is not totally upended. You get specific things to work on and lots and lots of practice. You hit the magic marker. This is when you learn how to switch the focus from yourself and move to focusing on your audience. It doesn't happen immediately but it does happen. Once you do that, all the fears about speaking in front of others, which is all about you by the way, disappear.

This is when you can start to notice the impact of what you are saying is having on your audience. You can see the impact because you are watching them like a hawk, never taking your eyes off the audience and you are using your eye power to engage them one by one, throughout the presentation. People nodding approvingly really boosts your confidence and you start to enjoy the process.

With training, you never fear the Q&A. This is when the event potentially becomes a street fight with no rules. When we are speaking we have control of the time, the agenda and the content. Q&A can see questions which have nothing to do with the topic, severe critiques of what you have just said and someone’s own diatribe on a subject they hold near and dear. You cannot control this but you can control your response. When you have been trained you can weather any storm and can become bulletproof against any attack. Trust me, this knowledge makes you very confident when presenting.

So get trained and increase your confidence when presenting. It is that simple. Once you have done it, you will kick yourself as to why you didn’t get the training earlier. It makes you happy to get the skills but sad to think of how much time and opportunity you have lost for no good reason. Better late than never though, so let’s get going!

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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 and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate 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.

Having More Presence As A Speaker

Two different presenters and a big occasion. The five star hotel ballroom was packed and a lot of attention was being given to these two leaders, both new to their roles. Presenting is a cruel world. It has no respect for position or pedigree. Like the first presenter, you can be a big shot at your mega company, but unless you have the goods, no one will be impressed and in fact you will damage both your personal and company brand. In the case of the second presenter, you might be a VIP and in Japan this is a big deal and pretty good, because of the way everyone fawns over you. The gloves come off though when you get up on stage to do your presentation. If you are a dud, average, mediocre or uninspiring, then the sheen on that old VIP status starts to look a bit dull and tattered.

If the big shots are having trouble, how about the rest of us? How do we have a presence on stage when we speak? I teach our High Impact Presentations Course and do a lot of one-on-one Executive Coaching for presentations. Often, I hear the request from the participants and from the executives around how to have more presence when on stage.

It is true isn’t it. The vast majority of people we meet in life have very little presence. Why would they suddenly be transformed into a presenting god at the podium? It is the same inside companies. The Japanese executives are often requesting help with having more “executive presence” when they are attending large, high level, internal meetings. Part of it is language skills in English. Part of it is cultural – be humble, play yourself down, don’t stand out, be respectful of those older or more senior than you in the room. Part of it is a complete lack of training.

When we present there are three levers we need to pulling on hard and they are the words, our voice and our body language. The words obviously relate to the content and it has to be excellent. If what we are saying is boring, obvious, unremarkable or insignificant, then don’t expect to be carried from the hall on the shoulders of your supporters, as they parade your triumph along the cobbled streets to the town square.

Japanese presenters need to lose their obsession with linguistic perfection. The audience just doesn’t care. So what if a grammatical mistake is made or a word mispronounced? In this multi-cultural, global, matrixed world, native English speakers are used to hearing non-native speakers mangle the English language. Actually they don’t have a problem with it, because they are used to it. We correct what is being said, inside our minds and connect the dots, so we can follow where the speaker is going. We are doing this without conscious thought because it has become so standard and natural.

The voice is a powerful instrument. This is where we need to rise to the occasion. A presentation should be delivered as if we are having a fireside chat but at a volume and strength, that is made for the public occasion. We keep the intimacy, but we elongate the vocal range. We are creating variety and are staying as far away from a monotone delivery as we can get. Japanese language is a monotone, so it is handmade for putting the audience to sleep. Even in Japanese though, we can use variety in speed and power in our delivery to give us sufficient vocal range to keep the punters awake.

Body language includes gestures, posture, eye contact etc. The hidden key to having more presence really requires skills in this area though. I have been training in traditional karate since 1971. I also did ten years of taichiquan before I had to stop when I came back to Japan. In both cases, called chi in Chinese and the ki in Japanese, there is magical energy in the body. All martial arts are devoted to harnessing that power.

Does this mean you have to take up martial arts to be a speaker and tap into the energy source. I don’t believe so, based on our ability to coach people to have more ki when they present. The amateur presenter is consuming all the energy within themselves. They haven’t worked out that you have to project that energy into the audience. They miss this because they are focused on themselves and what they are doing, rather than being focused entirely on their audience.

Here are a couple of simple things to adopt from now on whenever you have to present. I will condense 47 years of training down to key points. When you speak, look straight into the eyes of the individual in your audience, for about six seconds, before moving your gaze on to the next person. Keep this up throughout, with no wavering. Also, do it in a random fashion so that it cannot be predicted. Cover all areas of the room, front, back, left, right, middle as you look at individuals.

At the same time as using your eye power, project your energy to that person.   Imagine it was like an energy laser beam you were projecting to the people sitting in front of you. Use your voice to shoot the words out to these people you are looking at. Gestures add power to the words. Combine your body language together to direct more presence to the person you are speaking to.

All of this is taking place at the same time. What it means is that you are directly 100% of your attention to one person at a time when you are speaking. Many speakers are looking everywhere and nowhere when they are talking. Instead use this total power direct into the audience.

By the way, in a big hall, the 20 people sitting around your target person, will all feel your attention is being directed toward them. What the audience feels is your full energy and power when you present.

This is what they mean by having “presence”.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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 and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate 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.

How To Come Up With Speech Content

Their request arrives. “Would you please give a presentation to our group?”. You check on what they would like you to talk about. Usually, the answer is a bit vague. The content will not be so finely or specifically designated. It may cover a broad subject area or they may mention what people usually speak about or they might just throw it back to you completely. Okay…. So how do we come up with a speech title and description?

We need both to be decided rather early because they want to promote the event and get the message out about the coming talk. That is a pain for a procrastinator like myself. I now have to think! The problem is that you need a snappy title that will attract an audience. People in marketing and advertising get paid a lot of money to come up with these brilliant little gems but we are doing it ourselves. It can’t be too long, has to reflect the content of what we will speak about and it has to have a hook that will grab attention. Copywriting is a finite skill and we are usually rank amateurs. We need a title and supporting text that is going to get people motivated to turn up.

We need a theme though first and so how do we choose that? While we were discussing the request to speak, we should take the opportunity to enquire about their target audience. Are they hard-core professionals in this area, dilettantes, aspirants, fans or rent-a-crowd? What is the age and gender demographic? Once we know who we are going to be talking to, we can start to consider the subject we will choose.

Now we may have many and varied interests, but our subject guide should be what will be of the greatest interest to the largest number of punters in the audience. Obviously it has to cover an area which we can actually speak on, but our personal devotion shouldn’t be choice. That talk content will be fascinating for us and perhaps lost on the audience members. Having honed the choices down to one, we now consider what is the punch line of the talk.

This punch line is also known as the close of the talk. Ironically we don’t start with the title, flag the key things to be covered and then start to build the slide deck. We start with the finish and work our way backwards toward the title. As we roughly form up the content we start to get ideas about a possible title. The title can be straightforward and descriptive, like this piece or it can use other hooks. If we think about how the content will be found by search engine algorithms, it is best not to use something too illusive and arty. Speaking gigs are advertised somewhere and they do get added to your personal search results, so we should maximize that chance we are given.

The title can also be fascinating, such that people will want to hear all about it. Sounds good but this is not that easy to do and as mentioned, copywriters are trained to get the words right. We are amateurs in that regard. We can spend some time tossing around various title possibilities until we find one we like. The point is to toss around a number of them rather going for the first one to pop into our brain. Think of the title from a potential audience member’s point of view. What would grab their attention and hold their interest.

The supporting description is usually only a few paragraphs long so we have to again be working hard wordsmithing the content. This is not where we spell out the content we will cover, like an agenda in a book. This part needs to be crammed to gunwales with value from the audience viewpoint. We need to be telling them what they will get out of this talk, how it will help them. We don’t have so many words to do this in, so we have to hit the high notes hard.

There will also be a short bio about us to explain why we have the authority, capacity and expertise to talk on this subject. It is not a job CV. It again should be a powerful couple of sentences that reeks of “expert”.

Once we have done all of this we can start working on the detail of the talk and getting the slides together. If we take our time to plan this way, we will give a much better talk, have a far greater impact with the audience and be regarded as a quality expert in our field.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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 and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate 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.

Presenting: Good Is The Enemy Of Great

I was recently reminded of this point about a good presentation being the enemy of a great presentation. Two speakers with a tonne of business experience gave their talks, one after the other. Both were very confident, quite competent and rather boring. By most people’s measure they probably did a “good job”, but they could have been great instead. What was missing? The neglected elements are what makes the difference between being great rather than just being good.

One of the speakers used notes and did a pretty fair attempt of looking at the audience rather than concentrating on the text. This is not easy. You have to read the content, then reproduce it from memory, as you are eye balling the audience. If you think this is a snap, just try it.

Did he need to have a written text? Actually no. He could have talked to his key points, given he was highly articulate and experienced enough to do so. Being able to spend more time engaging with the assembled masses, rather than engaging with your script takes work. The content contained all of the expected things. That is an issue as well. Once your audience realizes you are doing the usual routine expected of someone in your exalted position, they tend to mentally switch off.   It was delivered with supreme confidence and you could tell this wasn’t the speaker’s first rodeo. It was good, but it wasn’t great.

The second speaker upped the ante and spoke with no notes. This is a much better version. It means you can spend your entire speaking time engaging your audience with eye contact. It would have been better if the speaker had actually done that, picking out individuals in the crowd and engaging them one by one. Rather, it was one of those one size fits all jobs, where the speaker is talking to everyone and no one at the same time.

It was a big crowd. In these cases, when you select one person and you look and speak directly to them, the distance involved provides the illusion that you are talking directly to a number of people standing or sitting around the person you are actually concentrating on. It means you are engaging many individuals with the sensation that you are directly addressing them and no one else in the room at that moment. This is so powerful you would think all speakers would do it.

So both speakers were using eye contact, but it was fake eye contact. It looks like they are speaking to the people in front of them, but actually it is an undifferentiated mass affair, rather than creating a feeling of one on one intimacy.

All you have to do to change that, is look directly into the eyes of one person for around six seconds and they will feel a profound sense of personal connection with you. Why six seconds? The time spent under six seconds can come across as fleeting and perfunctory, rather than a genuine attempt to really engage. Over six seconds of you staring intently at someone, brings out the fear you are a psycho axe murderer, to the audience member involved.

The other element that was missing was engagement with the message. I am struggling with finding the correct descriptor here. Uninspiring platitudes is too harsh a judgment, because I am sure they were genuine in what they were telling the audience. The problem was it sounded just like the type of thing they should be saying, so our expectations were met, rather than exceeded. Good, but not great.

On both occasions, there were no attempts to connect with the audience at the emotional level through storytelling. This is rather the problem with most business speakers. They are talking to us, but not engaging or moving us. Storytelling really brings the human element to the fore. We easily follow the plot, we can identify with the characters and we will feel an emotional connection with the point being made by the speaker. This is how you go beyond good to achieve greatness, as a communicator in business. The fatally sad part is that both of these speakers’ professional lives are absolutely brimming with human stories which we can naturally grasp and appreciate. There is such a richness in using stories to drive home the point, but the treasure was unspent on this occasion. Why?

Because they couldn't go beyond being good to challenge themselves to be great. This is the issue when we gain confidence to address an audience. We feel we were professional, that we did a good job, that we completed the task competently compared to most others. This is true, but we fall short of our full potential when we are self-satisfied with these lower rungs on the ladder to speaking success.

It sounds harsh but realistically most business presenters we experience are rubbish, so our scope of comparison creates a false sense of achievement. We need to become the best we can possibly be. To do that we need to engage the audience with our eyes, speak directly to them and regale them with human stories that really stir their emotions. This should be the standard against which we measure ourselves.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com

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About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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 and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts “THE Leadership Japan Series”, "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate 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.