What Is The Best Way To Introduce Yourself  When Presenting?

Usually when we are speaking we are introduced twice.  Once at the very start by the MC and then during our segment of the talk.  The MC’s role is quite simple.  It is to set the stage for the speaker, to bring something of their history, their achievements and various details that make them a credible presenter for this audience.  This can often be a problem though, depending on a  few key factors.

Are you relying on the MC to do the research on you, encapsulate your achievements and highlight why you should have the right to stand up here in front of everyone and pontificate on your subject?  Most people are too busy to do better than a perfunctory job of this and often they won’t appreciate what particular points need more highlighting than others. 

It is always best to prepare your own introduction.  Keep control of what is being said about you and the areas you wish to showcase. You can decide for each occasion which elements of your history or current focus are going to be most impactful for this particular audience and topic.  Don’t make it too long. 

I was recently organising a speaker for an event and his self-introduction was very long, a potpourri of his entire life.  He obviously couldn’t discriminate between very, very high points very high points and high points, so he cobbled the whole thing together as a unit.  I wasn’t the MC that evening but the actual MC ignored the whole thing and just said, “you have seen his biography in the meeting event notice, so I won’t go through it now”.  Yes, we may have glanced at it, but we were not remembering it in detail and the chance to reconnect with it was no longer there.

The MC role can be difficult to manage for the speaker.  They can choose to ignore everything your wrote and give their own version.  Usually this is laced full of errors, exaggerations and miscommunication.  Some MCs have pretty big egos and think they are the star of the show and that they can do a better job than any offerings from the speaker.  What comes out of their mouth is usually an amazement, because you know what they were supposed to say. 

For this reason, my advice is to only feed the MC the key points and deny them the option to seize hold of your reputation and background and pervert it into something totally unrecognisable.  You only need them to set the stage and give you a chance to connect with your audience.  When it is your turn to speak you can go freely into the details you want  highlight.

I would not do this immediately following on from the MC.  We need a break and the biography is not the best way to start your speech anyway.  The start of the talk has only one purpose and that is to stay the hand of every single person in that audience, from secretly reaching for their phone to escape from you, to the charms of the internet.

Design a blockbuster opening that will grab the attention of the audience and then introduce yourself, rather than the other way around.  When you get to your self-introduction, look for opportunities to tell a story that brings some highlight to the attention of the listeners.  This is a more subtle way of telling everyone how fantastic you are.  This also limits the amount of content you can share with the audience, ensuring it doesn’t get too long and too detailed.  We will remember your story more than any other part of your introduction, so choose something that is highly memorable about you.  Make it positive rather than negative.  You can tell plenty of stories in your talk about how you learnt through failure, but for the introduction, choose those incidents which portray you in a good light.  This is what you want people to associate with you – success, ability, innovation, bravery, learning. 

Don’t allow your introduction to happen, with you as an interested bystander. Grab hold of the content and feed certain parts the MC to allow them to do their job.  Keep other juicy parts for yourself, to set the scene for your speech to be a great success.

How To Control Your Reactions During Q&A

Creating and delivering the presentation sees you in 100% total control.  You have designed it, you have been given the floor to talk about it, all is good.  However, the moment the time comes for questions, we are now in a street fight.  Why a street fight?  Because in a street fight there are no rules and the Q&A following a presentation is the same – no rules.  Oh that’s not right you might be thinking.  What about social norms, propriety, manners, decorum – surely all of these things are a filter on bareknuckle duking it out in public?   That is correct but it is not a guarantee. 

There are different personality types assembled in the room.  In Japan, often the English language presentation occasions are like mini-UNS, in terms of national representation.  Different social norms apply in countries apart from your own. The French educational system promotes critique of statements and ideas and that is seen as an illustration of superior intellect. My fellow Australians are often sceptical and doubting and don’t hesitate to mention it, in a direct assault on what has just been said.  There are also different personality types in the room.  Some people are naturally aggressive and want to argue the point, if the speaker has the temerity to say something they disagree with.

What is considered rude, aggressive or inappropriate behaviour is a relative judgment depending on where you grew up, how you were educated and how you individually see the world.  Even in Japanese society, there are occasions where there is heated argument and a lot of the typical Japanese restraint is out the window.

As the speaker we are pumped full of chemicalS when we get up to present.  If we are nervous, then the flight or fight adrenaline chemicals are released by the Amygdala inside our brain.  We cannot stop this but we can control it.  It is interesting that if this state is held for a long period of time, we lose the feeling of strength and have a sense of weakness.  A forty minute speech is a long time to be in a heightened state and by the time we get to the Q&A, we may be feeling denuded of strength.  Just at the moment when we come under full force attack.

The face of the speaker is a critical indicator during the Q&A.  I caught myself shaking my head to indicate disagreement with what was coming my way in the form of a question during the Q&A.  Without initially realising it, I was sending out a physical sign that I wasn’t accepting the  questioner’s bead of disagreement to what I had been pontificating.  From an audience point of view, this looks like you are inflexible, closed to other opinions and just dismissive of  anyone with an opinion that differs from your own.

Even if you are not a rabid head shaker like I was, the expression on your face may be speaking volumes to your audience.  You might be displaying a sceptical visage of doubt and rejection of what is being said before you have heard the whole argument out.  You might even be pumping blood into your face so that it goes red in colour.  There is a female businesswoman I know here, whose skin goes bright red when she is in the public eye and begins to look like one of those warning beacons.  There is probably nothing she can do about that, but it is definitely not a good look.  Or your general demeanour is one of disdain for the questioner and you look arrogant and disrespectful of alternative opinions.

Given the chemical surge leading to denuding of strength I mentioned earlier, we may look like we are defeated by the questioner and this impacts our credibility to show we are true believers in what we said and are fully committed to that line of argument.  We don’t want to appear like we have collapsed in the face of pushback during the Q&A.  Maintain a brave front, even if it is all front.  The audience won’t know the difference.

Nodding during the questioning is also a big mistake.  We do this in normal conversation, to show the speaker we are paying attention to them and this bleeds over into public speaking events as well. I learnt this when I did media training.  The television media love it when you are nodding, because they can take that bit in the editing and transpose it to sync with the voice of the person disagreeing with you and it appears you are accepting their argument.  Very sneaky isn’t it, but when you pop up on TV agreeing with your questioner attacking all that you have said, it is too late.  Even if there is no TV there, don’t look like you are agreeing with the questioner and control that nodding right from the start.

So during Q&A maintain a totally neutral expression on your face and don’t allow you head to nod.  If you feel anxiety from the question, take some slow deep breaths to slow down your heart rate and breathing.  Keep supremely calm and remember that really aggressive questioners look like dills or grandstanders to the rest of the audience who usually place their sympathy with the person under attack.  We do have that Colosseum thing in us however, where we like watching blood sports and Q&A can come under that category. 

So we have to appear above the fray, in control, calm, reasonable and assured of what we are saying.  Control your temper, don’t cut them off mid-question, leave a pregnant pause after they have finished, to allow some of the tension to dissipate, then lob in a cushion or neutral statement to give you thinking time and then answer their question. 

Here is a killer technique for obstreperous questioners.  When you start to answer their question, give them 100% eye contact for six seconds to show you won’t be intimidated. Next switch your six second eye contact to various other members of the audience and never look at the questioner again.  By publically and completely ignoring them, you take all the air out of their puffed up ego and you decimate them through denial of attention.

How Many People Should Present?

Often, we are presenting as a team and more than one speaker may be involved.  Is that ideal or are we better off to have only one speaker?  Usually we are talking for around 40 minutes, so the time isn’t all that long to split over multiple speakers.  Are we better to limit it to one or two, or does it actually matter?  Personally, I prefer one speaker if possible and if necessary then two as a maximum.  There is the rhythm requirement for both speaker and listener.  Chopping and changing all the time makes it hard for the audience to identify with the speaker and absorb the message.  For the speaker too the chance to get one’s cadence rolling gets truncated when you have to hand off to the next speaker. 

Having multiple speakers is common at events, but usually they have the full time allotted to them and they don’t share it around.  There are some reasons for this and one is that the speaker is the star of the show.  We want to be careful about having two suns in the sky.  If one of the speakers is very polished, professional and very competent as a presenter and their comrade is a shambles, then the audience attributes your firm’s level of professionalism to the shambles, rather than the excellent presenter.  The reputational damage from this is huge because the audience finds the lowest level of skill and plots you there.  You have also just clearly demonstrated that your firm is incapable of professional consistency.

Even if both speakers are competent, there is the issue of  maintaining the same level of energy in the room. Remember, the audience is stone cold when they get into the venue and we have to warm them up.  We are in the Age of Distraction and today audiences are shameless about pulling out their mobile phones and scrolling through their email or social media as they multitask.  We speakers want them single focused on us and not escaping to the tantalising delights of the internet. The first speaker has to break through that wall of disinterest and mild to throbbing cynicism and grab everyone’s attention.  They have to win the audience over and they use all the weapons at their disposal, ranging from the quality of the material involved to the delivery techniques employed.

They do their job and now there is handover to the other speaker.  The audience cynicism meter springs back into action as they now have to sum up the new speaker to see if they will keep listening or get out their mobile and escape the room.  What are some best practices for the handover. I don’t think I ever see this done well.  Usually it is some poor bromide like , “Taro will now talk about X” and up steps Taro to the microphone or the podium. 

Instead, why not say, “we have found some fascinating applications of this material for your business.  This will be of interest to every business in the room today, because we are all facing the same issues of staying relevant in business.  We have an expert here to guide us through the traps and obstacles, someone who has been working on these issues for decades, please welcome my good friend and colleague Taro to the podium take us through how we can prosper and differentiate ourselves over the next decade”.  When our colleague begins moving to the stage, we are already clapping vigorously to inspire the audience to also clap.   On stage, we ceremoniously welcome him or her with a warm handshake and a big smile and then depart to our chair, leaving the limelight to them.

They have to be presenting at the same level of energy we were so that the transition seems as seamless as possible.  There should be no time lost switching laptops or dickering around with the technology.  If that needs to be done, they should launch straight into their remarks, while someone else does that for them.  Their immediate job is to focus 100% on the audience and connect with them straight away.  We talk about having a strong opening to grab the audience when we start. The second speaker also needs to have that too.  We can’t just leave it with the first speaker, because the audience will have forgotten that by now and here they are face to face with an unknown quantity.  The second speaker has to design their opening to grab their listeners attention too.

When we get to the Q&A this needs to be worked out ahead of time.  What you don’t want is vaudeville, where a question is raised from the audience and both speakers look at each other quizzically, wondering who will answer that one.  One of the speakers will act as the navigator, either taking the question themselves or passing it over to their colleague.  In this way there are no doubts about who will answer it and also a few seconds available for the colleague to gather their thoughts and think how they will answer the actual question. 

It will be predetermined who will offer the final close after the Q&A. A good practice is to make it the first speaker, so that they can reconnect themselves and the speech from the second half back to the first half.  It ties a nice, neat bow on the whole proceedings.  The point is all this must be planned out in advance, so that all contingencies are catered for.

Okay, So How Should I End My Speech, Make It My Triumph?

This is a tricky part of designing and delivering our presentations.  Think back to the last few presentations you have attended and can you remember anything from the close of their speech?  Can you remember much about the speaker? This close should be the highlight of their talk, the piece that brings it all together, their rallying cry for the main message.  If you can’t recall it, or them, then what was the point of their giving the talk in the first place?  People give talks to make an impression, to promulgate their views, to win fans and converts, to impact the audience, etc.  All weighty and worthy endeavours, but all seemingly to no effect, in most cases.  What can we do to stand above this crowd of nobodies, who are running around giving unmemorable and unimpressive talks?

The keys to any successful talk revolve around very basic principles.  Vince Lombardi, famed American Green Bay Packers football coach would always emphasise that the road to success in his game was blocking and tackling – the basics and so it is with public speaking.  Design must not start with the assembly of the slide deck.  Yet this is how 99% of people do it. 

Instead start with designing the final closing message.  In other words start with how you will finish.  This forces clarity on you, drives you to sum up the key takeaways in one sentence and gets to the heart of what it is you want to say.  It is also excruciatingly difficult, which is why we all head for the slide deck formation instead.

Once we have sieved the gold nugget from the dross, grasped the key point of the talk, then we are ready to work on the rest of the speech.  The main body of the talk will flow naturally from the close, as we assemble data, facts, examples, stories, testimonials and statistics to support our main point.  We then array this vast army of persuasion ready for deploy at our summation.  It must flow in a logical progression, easy to follow for the audience and all pointing back to support our main contention.

The opening and close can have some connection or not.  The role of the opening is very clear – grab the attention of the assembled masses to hear what it is we want to say.  We can state our conclusion directly at the start and then spend the rest of the time justifying that position.  Or we can provide some general navigation about what we are going to talk about today.  Or we can hit the audience with some nitro statement or information, to wake them up to get them to listen to us.

At the end there will be two closes, one before the Q&A and one after.  The majority of speakers allow the final question to control the proceedings rather than themselves.  If that last question is a hummer, a real beauty, right on the topic and allowing you to add extra value to your talk, then brilliant.  How many times have you seen that though?  Usually the last questions are a mess.  All the better, intelligent questions have been taken, the best insights have been plumbed and now we have some dubious punter who wants a bit of your limelight.  Their questions can often be off topic, rambling, unclear or just plain stupid.  Is this how you want your talk remembered? 

The final two closes can reflect each other and be an extension of what you have already said or you can split them up and give each its specific task to make your point.  The close before the Q&A can be a summation to remind your audience of what you spoke about and prime them for questions.  Obviously recency, the last thing people will hear, will have the most powerful impact, so the second close must be very carefully designed. 

Be careful of the event hosts wanting to take over immediately after the last question and not allowing you the chance to make your final close.  You might have gone overtime or they need to vacate the venue or face a bigger bill or whatever.  They can be thanking the audience for coming and wrapping things up with their news of their next event, before you can blink an eye.  You need to word them up at the start that you want to make a final close after the Q&A and then you will give them the floor.

The other component of the close is the delivery.  So many speakers allow their voices to trail off and allow their speaking volume to descend at the peroration.  You want to be remembered as someone passionate about your subject, excited to be there to share it with this audience and a true believer of your message.  That means you need to drive the volume up, hit the last words with a lot of passion and belief.  Make it a rousing call to action, to storm the barricades and to change the world.  That is how you want people to remember your message AND you as a speaker as they shuffle out of the venue and go back to work or home.

When Should You Take Questions During Your Talk?

Having an audience interested enough in your topic to ask questions is a heartening occurrence.  Japan can be a bit tricky though because people are shy to ask questions.  Culturally the thinking is different to the West.  In most western countries we ask questions because we want to know more.  We don’t think that we are being disrespectful by implying that the speaker wasn’t clear enough, so that is why we need to ask our question.  We also never imagine we must be dumb and have to ask a question because we weren’t smart enough to get the speaker’s meaning the first time around.  We also rarely worry about being judged on the quality of our question.  We don’t fret that if we ask a stupid question, we have now publically announced to everyone we are an idiot.

Some speakers encourage questions on the way through their talks.  They are comfortable to be taken down deeper on an aspect of their topic.  They don’t mind being moved along to an off topic point by the questioner.  The advantage of this method is that the audience don’t have to wait until the end of the talk to ask their question.  They can get clarification immediately on what is being explained.  There might be some further information which they want to know about so they can go a bit broader on the topic.

This also presents an image of the speaker as very confident in their topic and flexible to deal with whatever comes up.  They also must be good time managers when speaking, to get through their information, take the questions on the way through and still finish on time.  In today’s Age Of Distraction, being open to questions at any time serves those in the audience with short concentration spans or little patience.  Not everyone in the audience can keep a thought aflame right through to the end, so having forgotten what it was they were going to ask, they just sit there in silence when it gets to Q&A.  Their lost question may have provoked an interesting discussion by the speaker on an important point.  Having one person brave enough to ask a question certainly encourages everyone else to ask their question.  The social pressure of being first has been lifted and group permission now allows for asking the speaker about some points in their talk.

The advantage of waiting until the end is that you remain in control of the order of the talk.  You may deal with all of the potential questions by the end of the talk and the Q&A allows for additional things that have come up in the minds of the audience.  It also makes it easier to work through the slide deck in order.  The slide deck is alike an autopilot for guiding us through the talk, as we don’t have to remember the order, we just follow the slides.  Of course if we allow questions throughout, we can always ask our questioner to wait, because we will be covering that point a little later in the talk.  Nevertheless the questions at the end formula gives the speaker more control over the flow of their talk with no distractions or departures from the theme.

Time control becomes much easier.  We can rehearse our talk and get it down to the exact time, before we open up for questions during the time allotted for Q&A.  If we have to face hostile questions, this is when they will emerge.  Prior to that, we have at least gotten through what we wanted to say.  We had full control of the proceedings. If we get into a torrid time with a questioner, early in the piece, it may throw our equilibrium off balance or cause some consternation or embarrassment to the audience, detracting from what we want to say.  The atmosphere can turn unpleasant very quickly which pollutes everyone’s recollection of you as the speaker.  Also, if we don’t know how to handle hostile questions, our credibility can crumble.  A crumbling credibility in a public forum is not a good look.

So my recommendation is for the seasoned pro speakers to take questions whenever you feel like it.  For those who don’t present so frequently, err on the side of caution and take the questions at the end.

Unleash The Power Of Your Theories And Data When Presenting

It has been a while since I attended a business school presentation.  From time to time the prominent foreign business schools fly in one of their big gun professors to rustle up some business in Japan by delivering a lecture on a topical subject.  They are always good because the professors are either proving insights from their own research or are curating the best of what other specialists have to say on the subject.  I was at one the other day on the subject of leadership.  We all need help in the leadership arena so I was all ears for some pearls of insight and wisdom.

Being a business school, we had theoretical constructs, lots of groovy diagrams and a mountain of data.  The presenter was very well spoken and well presented.  He looked and sounded the part.  I was sitting there thinking that something was missing.  I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but the sense of incompleteness was strong.  I moved on and went back to work and got back into it.  Later it dawned on me what was the missing piece on the business school presentation puzzle.  It was devoid of life.

The talk took place in a mental “clean room” like you see on television when they show how high tech memory chips are made, hermetically sealed off from any polluting elements.  The expectation of a presentation from a business school should be that there will theory aspects aplenty and there were.  There was no “dirt” though.  By that I mean no stories from the coal face about how things got very messy or failed. No tales of woe, despair or desperation. No leadership meltdowns that destroyed the business.  No lessons to the wise about what not to do.

This is the danger of giving “lectures” when we are presenting.  We might have tremendous expert knowledge and experience. We are easily led into pontificating about how things should be done.  We can provide sufficient data to sink a small island, we can back it all up with well researched theories explaining the rationale.  The content though sort of hangs in the air.  It starts to resemble hydroponic plant cultivation.  Lot of nutrients and water going into the development stage, but no solid connection to the ground.  The tomatoes are juicy and red, but the taste is a bit shallow and disappointing.

We should go high and have theories and constructs but we also need to provide context and this is where the blood and the mud of the stories comes into it. There is no doubt that the good professors presenting this content didn’t just dream it up together over a couple of beers down at the academic’s dining hall.  They visited companies, talked with real people, collected the data, captured stories of what actually happened and then weaved their theory out of the detail.

Giving the audience a glimpse into that chaotic world in those companies researched, where things didn’t go so well and where the mistakes were coming fast and furious, would be an exciting whirlwind ride for the audience.  Significantly, I will guarantee that we won’t remember the inner construct of the theory, but we will remember the meltdown at the headquarters of that company before they crashed and burned.

The lesson for the rest of us is to always make sure we are populating our presentations with stories from the front line, telling the tales of the survivors and adding plenty of graphic colour, when describing the corporate gore.  When you are doing your planning and get to a point of importance in your talk make a note “inject story here” in the text or in the slide deck.  This will be a good reminder to ground your potential frothy excesses in fact and reality from the front line.  These stories will linger long on the memory banks of the audience, much longer than their recall of your data, theory or you. 

The secret is to keep asking yourself, “how do I know this to be true”.  Invariably we know this to be true because of something which has happened and that is the story we need to tell, in a short form version, during our talk.  Go back to the source of data or theory.  Also, tell stories involving yourself.  If you screwed it up, then tell us about it.  We will love you for it and feel a stronger bond with you as a person, rather than as a distant and remote “presenter”.  I am a very private person, so it took me a long time to get over sharing my experiences with others, particularly the failures.  What I found was a strong positive reaction to me and an increase in my credibility with my audience.  So inject your stories into your talks and you will find the audience will go for it and do so every time.

How To Persuade When You Are the One Presenting

Being persuasive is not down to luck or accident, it is the result of good planning and execution. This is the problem.  The vast majority of speakers do not prepare properly. The slide deck gets all the attention, the data gets lots of love, the logistics are thoroughly checked.  The planning component?  Not enough going into that effort unfortunately.  How can we become more persuasive?  There is a formula for this, in fact a magic formula

This formula is simple but pure genius.  It has four steps : Step 1. We open with the incident: who, what, where, when.  We believe something to be true.  Why is that? We have come to that conclusion through something that has become known to us. There is a back story there somewhere driving our conclusion.  We tell part of that backstory.  In Step 2, we get into the evidenceto provide context to support our recommendation.  This is woven into the incident we are relating.   In Step 3, we suggest the action needed and  make our recommendation

In the final step, Step 4, we focus on the benefits, telling our audience why our recommendation will help them

Before we present anything,we need to analyse our audience so that we hit the right note with them – not too complex and not too simple. We need to consider a few angles for the talk. This is a vital precaution very few speakers ever take and then get themselves into trouble and wonder why.  How much does my audience know about my topic. What will be the benefit to this audience. What would be some skeptical or negative attitudes toward what I am going to say?  How much resistance can I anticipate. How can I overcome that resistance?

Where possible we should be trying to tailor the talk to the needs of the audience.

We need to look atthe audience point of view regarding how their current situation is relevant to the topic. What are the challenges they are facing. What do they consider to beimportant or unimportant concerning my topic?  How could they benefit by taking the action I’m recommending?

After understanding where your audience is, you can use the magic formula to

capture attention, build credibility, eliminate nervousness, call others to action and get results.

We must apply good discipline such that we don’t start rambling on about some long winded story of how we came to our epiphany.  We need to be sharp about getting to the point or we risk losing our audience. Ninety percent of the time should be devoted to telling the incident but we do it concisely.

We relive a vivid, personal experience relevant to the topic.  When did it happen, who was there, where was it, what happened (establish who, what, when, where, why)?

Include animation and vocal variety.  We next draw out the evidence.  As part of the storytelling, we include the context behind the incident, as a way of backing up what we are saying.  Audiences can disagree with our analysis of the ramifications of the incident but they cannot disagree with the incident itself.

At this point we make our recommendation. We specify what action we want our listeners to take. This component of the process represents only five percent of the time allocation.

The next five percent is when we provide the benefit of taking our recommended action. The whole piece is tight and compelling.  Hearing the background forces the audience to come to their own conclusions about what they think should be done.  Probably they will have come to the same conclusion we came to.  This is an ideal outcome.

Here are some key pointsto remember in the magic formula

1. The story telling doesn’t allow the listener to resist us, because they don’t know what we are recommending as yet
2. The story weaves in context and evidence as to why what we are suggesting is the best idea.The client often projects ahead, after hearing the context and arrives at the same decision we did, about what is the best action to take
3. We make a clear call to action
4. We immediately follow up with the benefit, so that the last thing the listener hears is the positive thing for them, if they take our recommendation

So think about an opportunity coming up where you can apply the magic formula to persuade others?  Think about why you are making this recommendation to the audience.  There is bound to be some context or a background reason why.  Can you create a story which captures that context, so that the client can easily agree?

The ability to persuade people is one of the most critical business abilities but it is possessed by very few. Use these ideas and become one of the top 0.1% in business in Nippon.

Your War Stories In Your Presentation Are Boring

Gaining credibility as a speaker is obviously important.  We often do this by telling our own experiences. However, having too much focus on us and away from the interests of the audience is a fine line we must tread carefully.  When we get this wrong, a lot of valuable speaking time gets taken up and we face the danger of losing our audience. They are like lightening when it comes to escaping to the internet, to go find things they feel are more relevant.

We must always keep in the front of our mind that whenever we face an audience, we are facing a room packed with critics and skeptics.  We definitely have to establish our credibility or they will simply disregard what we are saying.  The usual way to gain credibility is to draw on our experiences.   A great way to do this is telling our war stories.  The focus is usually on things that are important to us, so we certainly enjoy reliving the past.  In fact, we can enjoy it a bit too much. We begin telling our life story because we are such an interesting person. We are certain everyone will want to hear it, won’t they.

Actually, their own life story is much more fascinating for them. So, we should be trying to relate what we are talking about to their own experiences and their realities.  When we want to tell our stories, we have to be committed to keeping them short and to the point.  As soon as an audience gets the sense the speaker is rambling down memory lane, they get distracted, bored and mentally depart from the proceedings.  I was listening to a senior company leader giving a talk and he went on and on about how he started in sales and all his adventures. He was obviously enjoying it, but what did something that happened forty years ago in America have to do with the rest of us here in Tokyo?

A good way to keep the audience engaged and focused on themselves is by asking rhetorical questions.  These are questions for which we don’t require an actual answer, but the audience don’t know that.  This creates a bit of tension and they have to focus on the issue we have raised. The focus is now on the same points the speaker wants to emphasise.  Because of the question, they have to mentally go there themselves. It is much more effective than having the speaker try and drag them there.

Rather than just telling war stories, we can ask them to compare the story we are going to tell with their own experiences.  In this case, the speaker’s example is just a prompt for them to identify with the situation being unveiled.  This is better because they are relating the issue to their own reality.  They can take the speaker’s example and either agree with it or disagree with it.  Even if they disagree with it, their different stance will be based on their own facts rather than opinion.  We might say, “I am going to relate an incident which happened to me in a client meeting.  Have any of you had this experience and if so what did you do?  Listen to what I did and see if you think I made the best choice or not”.  We have now set up the comparison with their own world. This gets their attention in a natural way, rather than me banging on about what a legend I was in the meeting with the client.

Talking about ourselves is fun but it is dangerous.  How should we incorporate it? As we plan our talk, we have to work out the cadence of the delivery to includE our war stories.  If we are talking too much about ourselves the audience may lose interest and mentally escape from us.  If we have designed in content which will involve them, we can keep them with us all the way to the end. This doesn’t happen by itself.  We have to carefully implant it when designing the talk.  It is also very important to test this design during the rehearsal.  Better to discover any issues in rehearsal rather than testing the content on a live audience.  Sounds simple enough, but remarkably, 99% of speakers do no rehearsal at all. Doubt that statistic?  How many speakers have you heard where you got the sense they had carefully rehearsed their talk?  Case closed!

In developing our attention grabbing cadence during the talk, rather than waiting to Q&A to deal with any pushback on our opinions, we can go early.  We can anticipate what those objections might be and handle them during the main body of our speech.  We pose them as rhetorical questions. Some people in the audience when they hear these objections will be thinking “yeah, that’s right”. We then use our evidence drawn from our experiences, our war stories, to demolish that potential objection and ensure we maintain control of the issue.  This technique also engages the audience more deeply in our presentation, as they start to add perspectives they may not have thought of before.  There is also a strong feeling of comprehensiveness about our talk too.  It shows we are aware of different views, are not afraid of them and have an answer to remove them as a consideration.

Successful Presentations Need Good Structure

It is a bad sign when a presentation makes me sleepy, especially if it is at lunch time.  It is very common to have speakers address a topic over a lunch to a group of attendees.  After lunch, you might explain away a bit of the drowsiness, but during the lunch is a warning sign.  The speaker had good voice strength, so nobody was struggling to hear him.  He was knowledgeable on his subject having worked in this area for a number of years.  He was speaking about what his firm does everyday, so he is living the topic. So what went wrong?

Thinking back to the talk, I wondered whether his structure was the issue?  When a speech doesn’t flow well, the audience has to work hard.  Actually, they choose not to work hard and instead just drop out and escape from you.  This was one of those cases.

If we think about giving a speech, we have to plan it well.  In his case, he had prepared slides, but the style of the lunch and the venue meant it was a no slide deck presentation.  He had some side notes written down on his laptop screen to follow.  That is fine for the speaker, because it aids navigation through the topics.  The problem was that the points were not ordered or structured well.  This made it hard to follow, as it tended to jump around, rather than flow.

We design our talks from the idea spark.  In one sentence, we need to isolate out what is the key point we want to make to our audience.  This is not easy, but the act of refining the topic gives us clarity. We create the opening last, because its role is to break into the brains of the audience and capture their full attention for what is coming.

The middle bits between opening and closing is where the design part comes in.  Think of the sections like chapters in a book.  The chapters need to be in a logical order that is easy to follow. They need to link to each other so that the whole thing flows.  To create the chapters we take our central conclusion and ask why is that true?  The answers will come from the points of evidence or our experiences.  We need to get these down and then get them in order. 

It might be a simple structure like “ this is what happened in the past, this is where we are today and this is where we are going in the future”.  We could use a macro-micro split.  This is the big picture and here are the details of the components.  It could be advantage-disadvantage.  We investigate the plusses and minuses of what we are proposing.  It could be taking the key points of evidence and breaking them down to make each a chapter in its own right.

The key is in the sequencing.  What is the logical flow here to move from one chapter to the next?  We need a bridge between chapters to set up what is coming next and to tell our audience we are changing the focus. We need to constantly loop each chapter back to what is the central point.  We can’t just put out evidence and leave it there, expecting the listener to work it out themselves.  We have to tell them why this is important, what it means for them and how they can use it.

Visuals on screen do assist in this process.  It does make it easier to follow because we are hitting more points of stimulus with our audience.  When we don’t have slides, we need to use word pictures to draw the audience into our topic. I am struggling to recall any stories he told about the topic, which is the best place to create those word pictures.

So break the talk up before you go anywhere near the slide construction.  What is the point you want to make?  What are the reasons for that  and turn them into chapter headings.  Check that the flow of the chapters is logical and easy to follow.  Then create a blockbuster opening to grab attention.  If our speaker had spent more time on the design then the talk would have been more accessible to the audience.  Get that wrong in this Age Of Distraction and you have lost them immediately.

Tech Presenters Please Stop Making Stupid Errors

I am sitting there with a crowd of people attending a presentation on blockchain technology.  Some are very technical people active in the crypto currency area, some run their own tech businesses.  Our presenter has amazing experience in this area, having worked for some very big names in the industry.  He also has his own company to promote as well as himself as a leader in this field. He has some recommendations for us based on where he sees the industry moving over the next couple of years.

The coverage of his subject was logical and easy to follow.  It was clear he really knew what he was talking about. The slides by the way, overall, were excellent.  Very professionally done by a designer and they reinforced the credibility of his company.  Very clear, for the most part, with not too much information on each slide and plenty of white space.  Some fonts were a bit smallish and if you were seated at a distance, probably rather impenetrable.  Apart from that quibble though, they were well done. 

I was astounded though, by the way he presented his material.  I calculated that during the entire presentation, including both the Q&A as well as the main body of the talk, he had eye contact with his audience for about 1% of the time.  Where was he looking?  He interspersed his eye contact between looking at the floor and the monitor he was using to show the slides.  In fact, it was almost like some extremely primitive tribe living in the remote mountains of Papua New Guinea, encountering a high spec, large form monitor, showing amazing scenes for the first time.  They would be amazed by what they were seeing and their eyes would be glued to the screen. This describes our modern, urban, high tech presenter to a tee.  He seemed hypnotised by the screen and just kept looking at what was on it the whole time.

Mercifully, he wasn’t reading the content to us, line by line, like some other dim presenters I have had the misfortune to encounter.  He was transfixed though on the screen and just totally ignored his audience.  Occasionally he would break free from the siren call of the monitor and amble around the front of the room, wandering to and fro, staring down at the carpet tiles.

He did have good energy, was obviously expert in this area and had some passion for his subject.  He did prefer to speak in a monotone, where every single word gets the exact some strength treatment and there was no vocal variety.  I liked his gestures, although they tended to be held a bit low. It would have been better to get his hands up higher, so they would be more visible.

He didn’t seem to be lacking in confidence.  I spoke with him briefly before we started when I exchanged business cards. He didn’t come across as some nerdy, painfully shy techie, who wants to avoid contact with human kind as much as possible.

I put this dismal display down to a lack of knowledge.  He knows a lot about the tech but knows close to zero about how to explain it to an audience.  He didn’t seem to understand that to convince an audience of your point of view you need to work on them.  Like a lot of technical people, he must have believed that by just putting the data and information up on the screen, the goodness and sanctity of the content would carry the day.  He must have imagined that his part in the process was not relevant.  Even during the Q&A, he completely ignored the source of the questions – the rows of people seated in front of him.  He just continued to stare at the screen. The words up on the screen at that point were “Thank You”, so not a lot to look at.

The basic rule of presenting is to use all the tools at your disposal.  Eye contact with your audience is so powerful as a persuader.  We wrap that up with our vocal variety, pauses, gestures and body language. 

Hold the gaze of one individual in your audience for six seconds.  Longer than that it becomes too intrusive.  Speak to one person, on a point while holding their gaze, then switch your gaze to another person.  Don’t do it in order, because people will predict what you are doing and switch off , because they know their turn is not coming yet. 

Rather divide the room up into six sections.  Front to the left, middle and right and the same for the rear half of the room.  Then at random move your gaze around picking up people, making eye contact with them and converting them to your point of view on the subject.

Our presenter missed a big opportunity to persuade his audience to use his firm.  He failed to sway us with his point of view, because he under powered the persuasion bit.  The quality of your content may be the best on the planet but that does not remove your role in explaining it.  Back up what you are saying with knowledge of presenting as well and unlike our speaker, become the total package.

How To Be An Inspiring Presenter 

At the start of our class on High Impact Presentations, we ask the participants to think about what type of impression they would like to have linger with their audience, after their presentation has been completed.  How about you? When people are filing out of the hall, what things would you like to hear about your presentation, if your were able to eavesdrop on their conversation?  Being clear is always a favourite and please listen to Episode 144 “How To Be More Concise, Clear and Persuasive When Presenting”, where I go into more detail on how to do that.  Another high ranking popular desire is to be more inspiring.

Now “inspiring” can be defined in many ways, but for the purposes of giving presentations, we can think of it as lifting people up, getting them to take action, to challenge new things, to push themselves harder than before. Actually that is a pretty tall order in a forty minute talk.  Unless we are a professional motivational speaker, the majority of our talks will probably be focused on dispensing information and offering advice on how to solve business problems.

What would a business audience find inspiring?  It could be a tale of daring do, where great adversity had been overcome through the human will.  Conquering dangerous elements of nature, one’s circumstances or fellow man, often come up in this regard.  The problem is business people’s activities usually are far removed from conquering the poles, vertiginous mountain ascents or vast ocean  crossing exploits.  These are very specialist pursuits, which are out of our purview. 

The arc of the story of rags to riches is a popular trope.  This works in business, because we are looking for hope in the face of tough odds.  When we hear that others made it despite all the trials and tribulations, we take it that maybe we can do it too.  It can be a personal story or it can the saga of a firm or a division and its imminent elimination, coming from back from the cusp of destruction to rise again and prosper. We are magnets to lessons on survival. We prefer to learn through the near death experience and ultimate triumph of others, than try it on ourselves.

You might be thinking your life is rather dull, your industry absolutely dull and your firm perpetually dull.  How could you liven up a talk with stories than were inspiring to others?  Maybe you can’t.  Perhaps you have to draw lessons from other industries or personalities and weave these into the point you are making in your talk. 

I like to read biographies and autobiographies for this reason.  I enjoy interviews with outstanding people, telling how they climbed the greasy pole and got to the top.  Strangely, obituaries are also a good source for this type of information.  They are usually brief summaries of a person’s life. They often contain snippets of great hardship or success and frequently both.  Don’t just skim over these heroes tales, instead collect these rich stories.  These can be your go to files for greatness, when you want to introduce an idea that needs some evidence. 

There may be legendary figures in your industry or your firm.  These are stories you can retell for effect, to drive home the insights you want illuminate.  Okay it wasn’t you, but the audience doesn’t care that much.  They like to learn and they love hearing about disasters, so the mess doesn’t have to be your personal catastrophe. 

Usually the founders of your firm went through tough times. There are bound to be tales in there you can use.   Or you can draw on recent recessions, the Lehman Shock, the 2011 triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant meltdown to find episodes where all looked grim, but a legendary team battled on and survived, while many businesses around them disappeared.

You may have some personal experiences that are also relevant.  This can be quite hard, because you are sharing something quite personal with the world.  As an introvert, it took me a long time before I was comfortable to talk about my own experiences.  When I did though, the impact on the audience was immediate.  I could sense the feeling of closeness with strangers, as they listened to my tales of error, overreach, miscalculation etc.   I still have trouble with this, so I do prefer the woes of others to my own, but definitely my own stories are always so much more powerful.  I just need the temerity to tell more of them.

So pepper your talk with uplifting examples from others or from your own experiences, that justify the action you want them to take or boost the feeling of confidence you want to instil in your audience. The raw material is all around you.  Just start looking for it and begin compiling it. When you hear something you can use, capture it immediately for later employ.  Dig into the vaults of your own experiences and draw out examples that will make you magnetic for your audience.  Telling these types of stories is how speakers have inspired audiences down through the ages.  The reason we still do it today is because it works a charm.

Aya McCrindle recently graduated from our High Impact Presentations Course and did her first TED talk. She was well and truly ready for it, because of the training preparation she received. Aya has her own company, Aya Jean Style Coach, where she helps people with mastering first impressions. In her area of expertise, she is the brand. She runs her classes as the leader and that means being credible with her students. All leaders need excellent persuasion skills and this is where the High Impact Presentations Course comes in. If you need to be able to communicate at a high level, if you need to be persuasive, if you need to be able to motivate people, then don't waste your time trying to work it out by yourself. Do the course. It has a proven track record of over 100 years. It is taught in over 100 countries in thirty five languages. It is the Rolls Royce of presentation training. Don't you deserve the Roller?

I Hate Sitting Through Underperforming Presentations

This global company is a household name in Japan.  They have spent a fortune getting the brand name known here.  They had some tough times early on too and got a hammering from the media about aspects of their business model.  A lot of negative publicity was generated, so the name is well known, but not in a helpful way.  The President is giving his talk about the company and the industry to a mixed audience here in Tokyo.  It was sadly underwhelming.  Sitting there was a form of torture for me, who teaches this stuff.  Well what made this an under performing presentation and what can we learn from it?

The meltdown in the media from a few years ago is a common memory.  But what a great “return from the dead story” lies therein. There must have been amazing characters involved.  Even the foreign head office President had to get involved and apologise.  There was drama aplenty and lessons numerous falling out from the catastrophe. We all love to learn by hearing about the errors of others.  We gobble that stuff right up, because we have that Schadenfreude thing going in the background.

Instead, we got a very one dimensional, flat talk about the business model and not much on the lessons learnt.  It was delivered with a very passionless effort, that failed to ignite anyone in the audience.  The speaker looked tired and sounded only slightly interested to be there talking to us. His facial expression was single throughout.  There were no highs and lows of the journey reflected in his expression.  He seemed to make sure to match his voice to his wooden face and spoke throughout in a deathly, dull monotone.  This means he gave up the chance to punch out specific words for emphasis, to bring phrases to life by turbo injecting them with power or alternatively, dropping the strength out for contrast.  It was bland.

In fact, this was a major brand damaging exercise from go to woe.  By that, I count both his personal, professional brand and also the corporate brand.  He mentioned that he had given a couple of these talks to various audiences already and I was thinking that is pretty sad.  Why sad?

I was reminded of that story about Campbell’s tomato soup.  I can’t remember who was the ad guy in charge of the advertising account for Campbells, but the owner complained that the advertising agency was promoting all of the other soups, except tomato.  The ad guy’s reply is very informative for speakers.  He said the reason was that their tomato soup was orange in colour and not all that good.  If he promoted it vigorously, more people would try it, become unimpressed and Campbells would suffer severe brand damage.

This is what happens to speakers like this one.  They nefariously roam around destroying their personal and company brands, by exposing more and more people to their zombie presentation performance. He needed to be a lot more energised in his talk.  This was potential high drama, full of powerful stories that would stick with us, long after the talk was over.  Here we had a great redemption story of how they came back from the brink of expiration in Japan, to recover, regroup and re-conquer the market.

The delivery had one gear and that unfortunately was stuck in low gear.  We never had spurts of speed or energy.  We just dawdled along at three kilometres an hour until it ended.  We all need to become passionate about our story, telling it with a lot of voice strength and using our body language to good effect. 

We take the audience with us on a trip to Space Mountain at Disneyland.  We are strapped in, and then we whiz into the blackness of their downfall, curving at high speed around the media assault, dropping precipitously into a deep dive of lost business from which it looked there was no return.  Next, we soar skyward as we get over the disaster and rebound the company, people and the brand.

We needed that passionate retelling of the journey, the highs and lows, the lessons, the characters involved.  All we got was a slide deck with lots of data on it.  What a lost opportunity.  We all have many stories, good, bad and educational.  We need to use these to engage our audience, so that they feel like they have been with us through that hair raising ride and have touched back down with us, exhausted but elated at having survived the ride.

Remember, people won’t recall the detail of your talk.  They will forget all the statistics. Even if they wrote them down, they won’t consult them ever again.  They will not remember all those groovy slides you crafted and assembled so meticulously.  They will remember the stories though.  They will remember you and how you came across.  They won’t forget how much you excited them or didn’t excite them. Treat every chance to talk as a great brand building or exploding opportunity.  As the speaker definitely be passionate, tell energising stories and be memorable in a good way.  This is how you build both your personal and company brands to good effect.  The negative alternative is not a very pleasant contemplation.

How To More Concise, Clear and Persuasive When Presenting

We run training on presentations and public speaking continuously. These three requests to be more concise, clear and persuasive, often come up from the participants, regarding the nominated areas where they want to improve.  In this Age of Distraction, if you miss the first two, you can kiss goodbye to number three.  As soon as an audience hears you rambling, they are scrambling for the mobile phones to exit your talk.  When you are mystifying your audience, they bolt for digital device safety.

I am the only English native speaker in my team here in Tokyo.  My staff all have very fluent English and are skilled communicators.  One of them however, as much as I love her to death, drives me nuts.  When her brain has fixed on a topic she launches straight into the main body of what she wants to tell me.  It has become a bit of a running joke in the office, because I will stop her and ask “what is the subject of this wonderful exposition?”. 

We can do the same things when we are speaking.  We are so deep into our subject, we forget that the people listening are unable to follow our thread, because we haven’t set up the topic properly. We have phases of our talk.  The opening is the dynamite, the nitro.  We light the fuse and blow everyone out of their complacency, sloth and slumber in order to get them to pay attention to us.

In the main body of our talk we need to be thinking in terms of five minute blocks.  At around this frequency, we need to be switching it up, to keep our audience attached to what we are saying.  We might do this through a powerful story, an impactful slide, an insightful quotation, or a killer question.  When we make a statement in the main body, we need to make sure we are bolting on some evidence to prove what we are saying.  Data, statistics, survey results, testimonials are all excellent sources of credibility for our provocative claims.

The arrangement of the blocks needs to have a logical flow.  It might be by theme, chronological, micro to  macro, problem-solution-result or any number of easy to follow formulas.  The point is to choose one and use it, rather than allowing the muse to take you on a journey without direction.

Bridges between the sections are useful guideposts too.  For example, “We have covered XYZ, now let me explore ABC”, or “In a moment let’s investigate the influence the economy may have on our projections”, or “There are three key things we must be vigilant for, the first is….”. These are threads to stitch the whole presentation together into a format the listener can follow without having to work hard at all.  If we make our audience work hard, we often find they are all lazy escape artists and we have lost them. 

Time is the weapon of choice for the speaker when it comes to learning to shave words, hone sentences and trim excess.  Rehearsal is absolutely key to getting the timing correct.  On how many occasions have we all had to sit there and listen to an unprofessional speaker tell us they are “running out of time” and they will have to “whip” through the last slides?  How do we feel?  Cheated, big time!  We came to get some key information from the talk and skipping over key slides to satisfy some arbitrary time constraints has us worried we are not getting full value from the time we are allocating. 

When the stop watch is running, you learn to sharpen up the prose, glean the essentials and focus on the most important things only.  Rambling away soon trips you up and you realise you need to cut the excess and stick to the most powerful points only. 

When we get to the end, we wrap it up with two closes, one for the pre-Q&A and one for the very end.  These are our opportunities to underscore our punch lines, hammer our main conclusion, reinforce the ideas we are promulgating and leave the audience with a thought pounding so loudly in their ears that it won’t get easily displaced by something else.  The close puts a nice bow on the whole enterprise, wrapping things up sweetly.

Action Steps

1. Plot the talk in five minute brackets
2. Create bridges to lead the audience into the next section
3. Get out the stopwatch to tighten up the delivery
4. Spend time designing the opening and closes to properly marshal the talk

Man, Your Monotone Is Killing Me

Normally we expect Japanese speakers to be boring, because their language is a monotone and so they apply the same formula when speaking in either Japanese or English. That is okay in a way, because it is a cultural thing.  However, for foreigners there is no excuse.  If you are giving your talk in a monotone, expect to lose your audience. Forty minutes of listening to some speaker’s monotone delivery is enough to make most people suicidal.  Regardless of how gripping the topic, the grip of slumber proves more powerful and relentless.

This was me recently.  I turned up at the appointed time for the talk, all full of vim and vigour, eagerly awaiting the unveiling of this troubling topic.  The speaker came with a grand resume, a prince among princes on this topic.  It wasn’t princely.  He wasn’t even the jester.  It was more like a lecture from the hooded hangman or the grim executioner.

My eye lids grew heavy as he droned on and on.  Seated unwisely toward the front, I struggled to observe the common courtesies, as my eyes willed to close.  It was excruciating.  I was sitting there thinking, why is such a vital topic being garrotted here in full view of everyone, by the way he delivering this talk?  What is it about this delivery that is driving me to sleep?

I think there were three factors at play in particular.  The monotone itself is a noise we often refer to as white noise. Your refrigerator often gives off this low hum. It is there all the time.  Well not your Japanese refrigerator, because the living spaces are are too small here to put up with that, so Japanese technology ensures they are a silent as the tomb.  I mean your big western model, in your big kitchen, in your big house.  The speaker’s monotone mimics this white noise that has no highs and lows to keep us interested.  I don’t recommend you telling any speakers soon that their talk was as exciting as the white noise of your refrigerator, but you are certainly allowed to think that.

The refrigerator monotone also has the feature of being continuous.  This was our speaker too.   He just warbled away for the entire time with almost no pauses. Pattern interrupters like pauses are good for the brain, to keep audience attention on what you are talking about.  They are like little warning buzzes that something has changed and we should pay attention to the speaker.  Pauses are translators for us.  We can take a moment to translate what was said into our own understanding. Continuous talking ensures each idea is drowned by the succeeding wave of the next idea.

There are no key words in a monotone.  Every sentence has equal value and every word in a sentence is tremendously democratic and the same as every other word.  I like democracy in political systems but not so keen on this in speeches.  I want key words highlighted by voice modulation.  I have just finished narrating the audio version of my next book Japan Business Mastery.  I don’t have a great DJ style baritone voice.  In fact, after 48 years of doing all that yelling, the kiai, in karate training, people tell me I have a rather husky voice.  Sadly no one says “sexy husky voice”, they just nominate it is husky.  Nevertheless, I don’t ask better qualified professionals to do it, because they won’t know which are the key words I want to hit harder than others.  This isolating out particular words for attention, is what makes the talk more interesting.  We are guiding the listener along a path we have predetermined about how they should think about what we are saying. 

It was painful.  Talks shouldn’t be painful should they.  We go to be informed or persuaded or motivated or entertained and possibly all four if the speaker is really good.  Check yourself by taping your delivery.  Are you using voice modulation, pauses and punching out key words for emphasis?  If you are not, then bring some pillows for the audience members, because that will wind up being your most valuable contribution to the proceedings.

Action Steps

1. Add voice modulation to your delivery.If you are Japanese, then add in strength or take it out or add speed or slow it down, for variety in your delivery.
2. Use pauses to help your audience process what you have said.
3. Hit key words you want to emphasise for your listeners, to draw them into your way of thinking

Visual Elements In Presentations

There is no question visuals are super powerful in presentations.  This can range from your eye contact, body language, gestures all the way up to actual live fireworks.  Think about sporting presentations where they make heavy use of visuals to stir emotions.  The half time show is full of music, fireworks, action.  The team scores a goal and the big screens are zeroing in on the action that just occurred.  The boxers are introduced as they enter the arena and fireworks are exploding behind them, like they are modern messiahs here to save the masses.  You might not think of it this way, but this is what you are competing with today, as the lines get blurred between how events are presented.

There you stand, with just your slide deck advancer in your hand.  You are facing an audience fully tooled up on the most realistic computer games, viral videos, light show events and quick cut video action. You are thinking your information quality will carry the day, because you speak in a monotone, are deadly boring most of the time and embolden us with the passion of road kill.  Sad to say, but none of this ever worked well and it certainly doesn’t work today. 

The quality of your information has zero significance if no one is paying attention to what you are saying.  In this Age of Distraction, audiences are leaping on to their phones at the first sign of tedium.  Even when binge watching their favourite television series, they have the implement of destruction - their phone - at the ready to take up and multi task.

The question today is how to integrate all of this cool stuff into our presentations without it overwhelming us, the presenter.  Slide shows are an ever present danger, as the audience loses their connection with us and are absorbed by what is up on the screen.  The worst thing you can do is hand out the slide deck beforehand, because you are on slide two and they are on page eighteen.  The disconnect with what you are saying becomes close to total at this point. 

Videos can be very good for presenting things in an attractive manner.  I was watching a video at a presentation recently and the supporting video was very slick.  It managed to capture the action, the drama, the excitement in a way that formed a positive impression.  This is the key word though – impression.  It doesn’t last.  We have our attention monopolised for a short period of time and then we are back to distraction HQ.

What I notice with most presenters who are using video is they let the video run wild and they don’t attempt to control it.  By this I mean, they just play the video.  We should have an intro for the video and an outro for after.  We shouldn’t just let our audience watch the video as if every aspect has the same value.  We want to be hitting key messages in that video, in the same way that we hit key words in our sentences to create greater emphasis for our messages.

The video will have one scene or a couple of scenes which help us with our messaging and rather than just running the video, we want to focus our audience’s attention right there.  We need to set that up.  For example, “In this video please look for the scene with the interview with our Chief Scientist.  What she has to say is fascinating and may change your perspective entirely”.  When we hear a set up like that, we are now in a heightened state of anticipation.  We are wondering what is she going to say that will change my perspective?

Once the video is over, we need to wrap a bow around the key messages and refer back to the evidence we presented in the video to back up our point of view on the subject.  For example, “What I like about the message in that video is that we can control our future, if we choose to take that route”.   This sentence would be referring back to your key message from your talk, so that the whole thing is congruent.  This is how we control the video, rather than what has become the norm – the video controls the speaker or it is just fluff, that has no lasting impact and everyone has forgotten it within the next thirty seconds.

As presenters, we have to ensure the focus is fully on us and that the audience is completely riveted to what we are saying.  The Age of Distraction is also the Age of Destruction for Presenters. We need to control the visual elements, so that they are always our servant and never our master.

The Power Of Conversational Style When Presenting

We often see presenters elevated up on stage or positioned at the front of the room, flanked by or under a screen, and protected from the audience by a rostrum. In Japan standing above your seated audience requires an apology for doing so at the start of the speech. This is a very hierarchy conscious society, so implying your superiority to your audience, through your physical positioning has to be wound back immediately. We add to this feeling by driving the slide deck, playing around with the lighting, using a microphone and speaking in a knowledgeable, commanding voice. All of these devices place a barrier between the speaker and the attendees of the talk. 

Is that what we want though – a barrier to our audience?  If we want the audience to buy what we are selling we want to have total access to the participants.  Believe my statistics, follow my suggestions, take action on my ideas are typical outcomes we want to achieve.  Getting people to come with us necessitates persuasion and having appeal.  The less barriers between us and them, the better.

A useful approach is to speak conversationally with our audience, as if we were all intimates of long standing, where the trust had been built up over the years and where the simpatico is flowing.  It also lends itself to sharing information like confidences, that only the specially initiated and conspiratorial are made privy to. We are letting you into special data and insights, that only those in the room can know.

This requires a switch from speaking at an audience to speaking with an audience. We call out the names of audience members we know or have just met, to build that feeling of connection between speaker and participants. “Suzuki san and I were chatting a moment ago and she made an interesting observation on the subject”, “I am glad my old friend Tanaka san is with us today, because I consider him a great model for what I am proposing”, “Obayashi san and I were speaking during the networking before lunch and she mentioned that there was some new data on this topic”.  As soon as we do this, the people we are referring to feel three meters tall, because their name was mentioned in a positive, supporting way.  We also break through the mental barrier between speaker and audience by including the audience members into our speech.

The tone we apply moves from oratory to more of a chatting over the backyard fence style.  It is much more inclusive, convivial, endearing and conversational.  We still pick out key words for emphasis by either putting the power in or pulling it out, we use pattern interrupters like speeding up or slowing down our speaking speed.  A conversational monotone is still a sleep inducer.   We need to avoid that.  We still use gestures and we will increase the frequency of inclusive gestures. What would be an inclusive gesture? The stylised wrapping your arms around your collective audience is a good one, as if you were drawing them in toward you.  Pointing to the audience with your arm outstretched and the palm up is a non-threating way of engaging your audience.  Our eye contact at six seconds for each person, has enough balance to make it inclusive without it becoming invasive.

Talking about ourselves, sometimes in a self disparaging manner, reduces the hierarchy feeling between us and them.  Boris Johnson is master of this.  He has a very elite background, but makes fun of himself in his public speeches.  Depending on the audience, he sometimes makes a show of being flustered and disorganised for effect.  This positions him better as an “everyman” with his audience, rather than a distant upper class elitist.  Not taking yourself too seriously is always good advice, if you want to connect with your audience no matter how brainy, powerful, superior you may see yourself relative to the assembled punters.  Just don’t overdo it, because then it becomes sensed as manipulative and fake.  A little humour at your own expense goes a long way.

Action Steps

1. Mentally switch the scene to a chat over the backyard fence, rather than in a big five star hotel’s ballroom

2. Where possible integrate some of the audience members into your speech to strike that personal connection

3. Make the speaking tone, gestures and eye contact conspiratorial

4. Don’t be afraid to make fun of yourself

Remember, if you would like any questions you have, answered live by me, then just put in the email header “I am based in…and am interested in joining your live Presentations Q&A” and send that email to me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com. I am planning to do a  Zoom meeting with everyone and we will record it for those who can’t make it.  Tell me your location because I may do a couple of versions, to best suit your time zone.

Avoiding Flat Presentations

“The good is the enemy of the great” is a clever saying and very true.  In presenting terms we can have people who are competent but not even close to maximising their potential.  They are sitting there in the lukewarm bath, never experiencing or understanding the joys of an extra ten degrees of heat.  In presenting terms, turning your inner thermometer up ten degrees when facing an audience has a tremendous impact.

Our presenter was intelligent, well read, well researched and had good content. The presentation was workman like. It got done.  The content was covered.  The points were made, the slides were run through, the questions got handled.  And then…. 

This is the point. There was nothing.  It wasn’t retained in the audience’s mind.  There wasn’t that feeling of WOW.  It just dribbled out and ended, disappearing into the void with all of mankind’s other mediocre speeches.  What was missing? Where was that ten degrees of heat which was never applied?

The opening was flat.  It just started.  The level of voice strength of the speaker, chatting with the attendees before the talk and the start of their actual talk, was at the same strength.  The body language was at the same calibration for before and after the start.  It was if the speech was just a continuation of the dialogue that had been going on prior to the kick off.

Everyone has a full brain when they walk in to hear us talk.  We have to get out the crow bar and jemmy our way in there to be heard.  That means the first words out of our mouth have to signal the talk has now begun, pay attention, listen up, cease and desist what you have been doing prior. We have to clearly draw a line for the audience to get them to concentrate on what we are saying.  We only have a few seconds to capture their attention so they will grant us their permission allow us to hold their attention.

We cannot leave such a vital intervention to chance.  We must design it carefully.  The words have to be laden with hooks to keep them interested and with us. We might lure the audience into our story, using word pictures to capture their imagination.  We want them to mentally see the scene we are painting. We could hit them with a stunning statistic that baffles the brain and make it sit up and take note.  It might be a quotation from a famous person to add credibility to the point we are making.  We need to plan for cut through.

Part of that planning needs to involve how we are going to marshal our physical resources particularly our eyes, voice, gestures, posture and positioning.  Voice is where we start, because that is a powerful tool to break into the consciousness of the audience.  By lifting the volume up, we force people to stop whatever it is they are doing and listen to us.  When we add in a gesture to back up the voice the overall impact is strong.  We cannot use eye power with the whole audience at the same time and have any impact so we select one person around the middle, then we give them both barrels of eye contact, for around six seconds.  We just keep repeating this as we work our way through the whole audience.  If it is a huge crowd we keep doing the same thing and at a certain distance, everyone sitting around the intended recipient of our eye power thinks we are looking at them anyway.  We can physically move closer to our audience.  When we do that, we use our standing height above a seated audience, to tower over them and add more power to our physical presence.

If we can get the start going well, then all we have to do is maintain that throughout the talk.  We will add in vocal range when we are talking, to keep our audience in Japan from going to sleep.  We can uses pauses for emphasis and to build anticipation.  The key is to get a good start and then maintain the energy.  Our speaker started small, stayed small and finished small.  The whole thing was muted, flat, unremarkable and infinitely forgettable.  Don’t be one of those speakers.

Action Steps

1. Understand that the audience is almost comatose when you get up to speak
2. Remember we are competing with miniscule attention spans and lots of distraction today
3. Look for a WOW opening to grab the attention of the audience
4. Marshall all our weapons – eyes, voice, body language, gestures, posture, positioning
5. A good start is easier to continue than trying to build up the power gradually

Is How I am Dressed Important When Presenting?

There is an old saying about lies, damn lies and statistics.  An often misquoted statistic in the presenting world is that 55% of your impression on an audience is based on how you are dressed.  Some coaches are advising on this basis and it is only partially true.  Professor Mehrabian’s research at UCLA did nominate that particular percentage, but he did so with an important caveat.  When what we are saying is not congruent or matching with the way we are saying it, then the audience gets distracted and starts focusing on how you are dressed 55% of the time.  When he published that research there were no uber powerful  thermonuclear distractors like we have today, in the form of smart phones.  These instruments of presenter attention destruction are rapidly connecting us with the internet and whisking us away from the speaker.

If we are doing our job properly as speakers we will not be losing our audience. One of my team attended a presentation I gave recently and she reported to me that the audience members were listening to me all the way through.  That is what I thought too, because the entire speech had me focused like a hawk on my audience, to make sure I was holding their attention.  I don’t mention this to say what a smarty pants I am, but just to highlight how difficult it has become for all of us to hold an audience today.

My style of presenting is extremely high energy.  My karate training background has taught me how to harness my “ki” or “chi” and channel it to the audience.  I still have pretty good tonal variety so I can really work on keeping the audience with me.  The downside of all of this is that I generate a lot of heat.  Often when we are presenting on stage there will be spotlights trained on us and these can make us feel very hot as well.  When I am getting dressed that day,

I always make sure of a couple of things for my presentation.  A white shirt is an absolute must.  I love my blue business shirts, but what I found was the heat generates sweat around the neck area, especially when wearing a tie.  That lovely light blue shirt can become two tone. The collar becomes wet and changes to a darker blue.  This is distracting for the audience who are sitting there saying to themselves, “Oh look at that, he has a two tone shirt now!”.

The other thing I pay careful attention to is never doing any presenting unless I am wearing a jacket.  There are probably few things as unattractive as a speaker wearing only a shirt, lifting up their arm to reveal a very sweaty armpit area, that runs right down the side of their body.  Most unappealing and again very distracting to an audience.  I keep my jacket on, buttoned up, the whole time like a suit of armour.  I know that my shirt is soaked during the speech, because of all the heat I am generating. It goes without saying, that an ill fitting suit creates a poor impression.  The way the collar of the jacket sits on the neck tells you everything. If there is a wide gap between the two, this creates a sense of pattern interrupt and your audience gets distracted by it.  Also save your bright coloured jackets for a party. A bright red jacket works well for a magician, but not so great for a speaker.  Always look for ways to make your words conspicuous, rather than what you are wearing.

Sometimes we are asked to be a speaker on a panel.  This can be tricky.  We are usually seated up on stage in front of the audience, so there is nothing separating us from the viewers.  When men cross their legs, if they don’t know what they are doing, we get a very unfortunate close up of their hairy ankles, shins and calf muscles.   Short socks work when you are standing, but are a danger when you sit.  I always wear long socks right up to the knee, to spare my audience the brutality of my hairy legs.

I am quite daring when it comes to wearing bright ties.  I leave them at home though when I am presenting and select something a bit more muted.  Such a bright colour sitting right next to your face is bound to be an unwanted competitor for the attention of your audience.  I do like pocket squares, but I make sure they are also very discreet. A puffed up large pocket square may be a dandy’s delight, but like a bright tie, it sets up competition for the attention of the audience.  Be careful with cufflinks too.  I have some very bright colours in my line up, but I go for the less flagrant when I am presenting.

One of my pet peeves in Japan are the number of guys here who wear their tie, such that there is a gap between the top of the knot and the top button of the shirt collar.  They allow it to loosen off and the gap appears without their knowledge and again this is distracting for the viewers.  You also come across looking like a kid, who can’t dress himself properly.

I also purposely shorten the length of my ties when I am presenting.  Men’s dress rules say the tie should only extend to a point midway down your pant’s belt.  What I find though is that the closed button of a single breasted suit always has an opening between that button and the bottom of the front of the jacket.  The consequence is a tie worn at the correct length, will actually be peaking out from under the jacket, again distracting my audience.  By making it a bit too short the protrusion problem is lessened. Again, I never take off my jacket, so my major tie length faux pas is hidden away.

The shine on my shoes should be mirror like.  Standing up on stage everyone can see your scuffed, down at heel, miserable excuse for shoes.  This says “slob”, “poor quality control” or “poor self awareness” pretty clearly.  It is not helpful for supporting a professional image.  The belt should match the shoes so brown for brown and black for black.  Pretty simple right, so how could you mess that up? Yet, I see guys with a brown belt and black shoes.  This says you are “clueless” to your audience, so if you even can’t get this right, why should we believe anything else you have to say.

I always place the nametag holder I am given by the organisers on the table where I am sitting or on the lectern.  I don’t wear them because they are usually plastic and as I move, they catch the lights focused on stage.  Without knowing it, you are sending out Morse Code signals every time you move, as the plastic flashes the audience.

I have only referred to men in this piece on dressing for presenting, but many of the same things, for the most apart, apply for ladies too. I don’t have the guts to do a specific commentary on how ladies should dress when presenting.  My only hint would be don’t confuse fashion outcomes with presenting outcomes.  Make the focus your face, rather than the clothes.  Don’t dress in any way which draws the audience away from looking at your face.  Our face is the most powerful tool we have.  It is much stronger than whatever is on the screen and our voice.  Don’t allow anything to compete with it.

Senior Executives In A Public Speaking Competition Was So Revealing

Speech contests and debating contests are usually for younger people at school or university.  It is not often you see the most senior people from major corporations going head to head in a public setting.  I was at an event where there was a vote to take place for some prestigious seats on the board of a non-profit.  If the number of applicants equals the number of seats, then it is a perfunctory competition where the winner’s names are just announced.  In the case of more hopefuls than places, then things hot up. 

Each person had two minutes to make their pitch.  Now remember, these are very experienced and senior people, in some cases heading vast organisations.  I was fascinated to see how they would fare. With one exception, English was not their native language.  However, they have been in international business their whole lives and many have lived in numerous foreign countries running the local business for the multinational parent company.  Language skill wasn’t even a factor.

As you might expect, some were better presenters than others.  However, overall they were pretty underwhelming, given the types of big jobs they were holding.  They knew they would have to speak and compete for places with each other and that they only had two minutes.  They had the opportunity to prepare, to rehearse what they would say.  This was not a spontaneous idea on the part of the organisers. The first thing I noticed was how poorly they had all prepared. Talking about your resume and how big your big corporate is, is fine but there was no thought given to what the audience wanted to hear.  Everything was presented from their own point of view.

A few minutes spent planning and preparing would have come up with a fine list of audience expectations of this board. They would have found which hot buttons they needed to push.  This is not hard stuff.  They will represent our interests on the Board and so what would our member interests be?  Having divined that, we should then craft our message to present around how our experience, organisational muscle and personal attributes will deliver for the members.  We only have two minutes so we have to prune hard to fix upon the most high impact points that will resonate with the audience.  We then need to rehearse to make sure we can get this inside the strict two minute limit.  We don’t want to be rushing it or confusing our audience with too many varied points. If we do that they have no hope of keeping track of what we are on about.

Now when we deliver our talk we have to engage with our audience.  We will be going one after another, so we have to break through and override the message of whoever preceded us and implant our message, such that the successor speaker cannot root it out.  Sadly, none of this was happening and they were not engaging their audience at all.  What are they like when addressing the troops back at the office I was wondering? Going by this effort not much chop!

The common thing I noticed that was missing from all the speakers was eye contact. They were not using their two minutes to physically engage with enough people.  Using six seconds of one on one eye contact, we can directly engage with at least twenty people in the audience.  Toward the rear, because of the distance, the people sitting around the target person also believe the speaker is talking directly to them as well, so we can increase that twenty number quite substantially. 

Delivering your resume in a monotone means you are missing the opportunity to hit key words for greater effect.  Now when I say hit, I mean that in the sense that you can choose whether to add voice strength or withdraw voice strength to gain variety in your delivery.  Our gestures are another way to bring power to what we are saying.  Some of the speakers chose to speak while holding their hands behind their backs, denying themselves the opportunity to use gestures. When we don’t show our hands, we are triggering a deep mistrust in the audience. This is because since we lived in caves, we have learnt not to trust people whose hands we cannot see.

It was all pretty bad.  Corporate leaders need to be excellent communicators and that includes giving professional presentations.  This is not something we are born with.  We learn it and we further develop it, over the course of our careers.  There was a lot of personal, professional and company brand damage done the other day, at the face off for the Board seats.  When It is your turn to speak, be ready and blow your competitors out of the water.

Facial Animation Needed For Presenting Success

We have all seen it.  The presenters face is expressionless, wooden, devoid of emotion or life.  It is usually well paired with a horrific monotone delivery, to really kill off the audience.  Presenting is a serious business, so these presenters present a very serious physiognomy.  Scowling is thought to be good too, to show the gravitas they bring to the occasion. These are powerful people, who by definition, must look powerful.  Technical people in particular love this no frills approach and smiling is definitely off their list of possibilities.

To be fair, there are presentations where levity, smiling, frivolity are inappropriate. A remembrance ceremony for the fallen heroes and heroines in battle, would be an occasion for an austere face. Losing all the shareholder’s value through some idiocy would be another.  A serious face however, doesn’t have to be an expressionless face. Recalling lost loved ones in a heartbroken community, can see the presenter’s face stricken and tortured with pent up emotions.  When I read the eulogy for my mother at her funeral, my face was ashen and pained.

In business though, for most cases we can use our faces as an additional communication tool with our audience.  We are using tonal variety in our voices, our hands for gestures, our eyes for audience engagement.  We should also be using our faces too.  A raised eyebrow can speak volumes.  It can indicate curiosity, incredulousness or doubt.  Turning our face to the side and tilting our head to go with it, can show scepticism or cynicism.  Pursing our lips together then pushing them forward in a pout shows disagreement or disapproval.  Pulling our head back from the neck shows shock or surprise.

When you think about it we are incredibly active using our face in normal conversation. If we filmed you speaking and played it back you would be amazed at how much facial expression you are employing. Stand you behind a podium or put you on stage in front of an audience though and maybe all that natural communication ability sails out the window and is replaced by wooden you instead.

When we look at theatre performances, television, movies, comedic acts we can see facial tools being well employed to drive home messages.  I enjoy the popular drama from Italy, Inspector Montalbano and the Italian culture really makes great use of the face to communicate emotions. They are just talking, but it looks like they are arguing and of course the gesturing is on fire.  We should stop watching these shows just for the entertainment value and start re-watching them for what we can learn about how to employ our face when presenting.

In the same way when we are speaking we hit key words with a louder or softer volume for effect, we should start employing our face to do the very same thing.  When you want to raise doubt about some proposition someone else is putting forward, look for a suitable facial expression to back up that message.  When you want to appear sceptical of some idea, then bring your best sceptic face to the fore.

This is very hard to coordinate when you are starting out.  These days I have so much going on with my voice, eyes, gestures, body language I am not even aware of it.  Watching myself on video with the sound turned off, I can see how much natural variety I am bringing to the talk.  It wasn’t like that at the start.  My very first public presentation in my life was in Japanese to the Sundai Yobiko cram school students, where I managed to finish a 25 minute speech in 8 minutes.  I am sure my face was not only wooden but also bright red from all the stress I was feeling.

Like anything to do with public speaking this facial involvement takes practice. Presenting in front of a mirror is a good chance to see how animated you are.  Video is better though and these days everyone has a smart phone with a very good quality camera lens included.  Try doing the same piece with repetition to see if you are bringing your face into the communication.  Also check you are doing it congruently with the content you are addressing.  Over time, you will start creating appropriate facial expressions for that piece of the content without even noticing it.  To be a more effective public speaker, get your face more involved!

Why Japanese Presenters Fear Q&A

Obviously we all have some trepidation when it comes to Q&A, but Japan is quite far behind the rest of the advanced countries when it comes to public speaking. The level of presentations here is abysmally low and excuses abound.  People here talk about a “Japanese style” of doing public talks. What they actually mean is they speak in a monotone, with a wooden face, use no gestures, make no eye contact, employ no pauses, Um and Ah with gay abandon and are supremely boring. They kill everyone with 8 point sized font, four different font types and five garish colours, turning their slides into a psychological weapon of war aimed at decimating their audience.  Because everyone is so bad, this is thought to be a “style”, obviously different from “Western” presentations.  It isn’t a style.  It is just bad.

Not being properly educated in how to give professional presentations, the trickier bits like Q&A are even scarier territory.  For any speaker, once the bell sounds for Q&A, the struggle is on. As the great American philosopher Mike Tyson once said, “everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face”. Relatively speaking, Japan is a kindergarten for Q&A compared to Western audiences.  The ferocity of questions here is kids stuff.  So you would think that everyone would be very chipper about handling the Q&A, but that is not the case.  Here are some areas of the concern we found, when we polled our Japanese students of presenting.

1. If the audience is not familiar to us we get nervous

The chances of having a lifetime of speaking to familiar audiences would be statistically impossible, I would say.  The inference here is that it is less daunting to speak to a “tame” audience who, because they know us, won’t unleash fury upon our heads during the questions component of the talk.

Unfamiliar audiences should be the considered the norm. The way to deal with that is to be well prepared and to have rehearsed beforehand.  I would guess 0.001% of Japanese presenters have rehearsed their talk. 

2. Not sure if I understand the question properly and also not sure if it is okay to ask them to repeat the question

Japanese society is very polite, so that is why until recently, you would be lucky to get any questions at your talk at all.  The thinking has been that it is impolite.  The nuance is you are saying the speaker wasn’t clear enough in their oration.  Also I don’t think any Western audiences would even consider the possibility that it isn’t allowable to ask the questioner to repeat their question.  In Japan, that request implies the questioner wasn’t clear enough and is a veiled criticism, repeated in public, so there is a possibility that the questioner will lose face.

Definitely and politely ask the questioner for clarification on their impenetrable question.  Japan is a polite place, so ask politely and put yourself at fault and not the speaker. You might say, “Thank you for your question.  I really want to answer it correctly, so would you mind repeating it once more for me?”.

3. Not clear on how to answer the question

This will happen to all of us.  I do a lot of public speaking here in Japanese and I always find the Q&A the most difficult.  This is not for the ferocity of the questions, but because of the fog of the language.  Japanese is a highly circuitous language and vagary is a prized achievement. Sometimes, I have no clue what they are asking me.

If we can’t answer the question then we are human.  We cannot always be the font of all knowledge and there will always be occasions where we just don’t have an answer for that question.  We should apologise and fess up straight away. “Thank you for your question.  I am afraid I don’t know the answer to it at this point.  After the talk let’s exchange business cards and I will do my best to come back to you with an answer after I do more research on that topic”.

4. No questions emerge because the audience weren’t paying any attention to the speaker

Most talks in Japan are supremely dull, so naturally the audience escapes to a more interesting place like their smart phone. Suddenly the Q&A springs up and as they haven’t being paying attention, they have no idea what to ask about. The call for questions goes unanswered, so there springs forth this painful, embarrassing silence, as everyone carefully scrutinises their shoes, ensuring zero eye contact with anyone. The speaker is left high and dry and the talk finishes on a low note of disinterest.  It feels like all of the oxygen has been sucked out of the room and the speaker deflates and then in short order, departs.

If no questions are forthcoming, ask your own question: “A question I am often asked is….”.  This will often break the ice for someone else to muscle up the courage to ask their own question.  If nothing is still forthcoming, then repeat this once more, call for more questions. If none emerge then give your final close and finish the proceedings.

Here are two basic rules for answering any question.  Always repeat the question if it is neutral, to make sure everyone in the audience heard it and to give yourself valuable thinking time before attempting to answer it. If it is a hostile question, then paraphrase it by stripping out all the emotion and invective and make it sound neutral.  For example, “Is it true you are losing money and that ten percent of the staff are going to be fired before Christmas?”.  “Thank you, the question was about current business performance” and then you answer it.

We will face Q&A when giving our talks.  Changing our mindset about welcoming the opportunity is a good place to start.  We can add more information, we couldn’t squeeze into the talk. We can elaborate on a theme.  We get a chance to engage more deeply with our audience.  When we shoot down a vicious, brutish, hostile question and destroy it, this makes us a legend of pubic speaking and adds serious lustre to our personal brand.  Bring on the questions!

Why Do You Need To Bother With Presenting

As usual I got the venue early.  I was doing what I teach others in sales to do, get to the venue early, check the nametags of who are attending.  This way you can put faces to names of people you know and you can see if there is a potential client in the room who you would like to meet.  The speaker was also there nice and early setting up.  This is a very good practice and allows you to fix any technical issues which arise.  Sure enough the stand microphone was not working properly and she could not be heard at the back of the room. So a pin microphone was called for.  While waiting, I was chatting about whether she did much public speaking.  I was a little bit astonished by her answer.

She said she did not and that this would be the last one she would do.  She mentioned she got a lot of invitations but declined them. Now as a strong advocate and preacher of doing public speaking to grow your company and professional brands, I was aghast to hear this sacrilegious viewpoint.  She dug the knife in deeper and twisted it when she asked me how many of her competitor CEOs in her industry I had heard talk.  Actually, she was right.  I could only think of one and that was a long, long time ago. 

Now I would have thought that this was a tremendous advantage and would be praying that my competitors stayed as silent as the tomb, so I could go around shooting my mouth off at every opportunity.  Interestingly, in her industry the herd instinct seems to prevail over differentiation. If they don’t do it then I shouldn’t do it either.

That seems totally crazy to me.  She could use these speaking spots to build up a positive image of her company.  She could make sure her firm was top of mind in that competitive high end of the market.  Even if we didn’t all become consumers of the brand, we would become fans of the brand and would recommend it to everyone over her rival’s alternatives.  She has risen to a position of consequence in her job.  She is the first female CEO in Tokyo in that industry.  What a fantastic chance to grow her personal brand as well. I can’t imagine her current employer or any future employer would look askance at her efforts to promote herself as the face of the brand.

I asked her why she was reluctant to speak and again her answer floored me.  She said she didn’t think there was any point running around telling people how great XYZ company was.  She believed they needed to experience the quality of the service to appreciate it and her telling people about it wasn’t effective. I must be too deep in the public speaking world to have these types of thoughts.

I said to her, “Nobody is here to hear about XYZ company.  They don’t care one iota about XYZ company.  They are here to learn what you are doing, your successes and failures, so that they can apply those in their own businesses”.  This would have seemed obvious to me, because I do a lot of speaking, but I could see this struck her as an entirely new idea. I explained that in providing value to her audience, her worth and her company’s worth become further enhanced.

So it would seem she didn’t understand her audience and what they wanted.  I had read all the name badges, so I knew exactly who was in the room and what companies they came from.  This was a gathering of people hungry to learn something new.  She could just as easily have asked the organisers who was attending, so that she could tailor her remarks accordingly.  She was accompanied by her head of PR, who should have done that for her, but sadly the PR person though charming, appeared clueless about using pubic talks to grow the brand. 

One thing I will praise our speaker for was flexibility.  After listening to me giving her my mini Master Class in speaking, she did switch gears during her delivery and try and give more audience perspective to what they are doing.  It could have been so much better though, if she had planned the talk with that at the forefront of her mind, when she and her team started work on the talk.

The realisation of things I take for granted, not being the common perception, was a good wake up call for me.  They say a fish is the last thing to discover water.  I will make a bigger effort to promote the idea of public speaking as an absolutely indispensible arrow in the quiver of business and we must learn to become master archers in our field of endeavour.

Dealing With Questions When Presenting

Japan is quite interesting in the sense that you often don’t get any questions after your presentation.  Screaming silence at the end. Before the presentation, we often spend our time thinking what would happen if I can’t answer the question or what will I do if I get a tough question?  Japan has the opposite issue where the talk falls flat on its face, because there are zero questions for the speaker.  The whole construct collapses into anti climax.  Having no questions has the inference that the topic wasn’t interesting or that the speaker was a boor, rather than it was a brilliant presentation, which answered everything perfectly and comprehensively. After calling for questions and then being left stranded high and dry, it feels quite embarrassing.  On the other hand, getting questions you can’t deal with is also tricky. This is either because you have no idea how to answer them and look a fool or because the question feels more like someone is trying to inflict grievous bodily harm upon you.

The no questions outcome is in fact, a result of lack of planning from the outset.  The speaker has prepared a talk where they are focused on transmitting information to the audience.  The crowd received it and that was that, game over.  We need a different approach.  In the planning stage, break your talk up into brackets of around five minutes.  At each five minute point, we need to liven things up a bit.  We should anticipate our audience might start flagging.  We know their attention spans are increasingly microscopic and audiences are so easily distracted today.

Asking a rhetorical question is a good way of dragging everyone back into the room with you.  This works because they are not sure if they have to actually answer it or not.  Normally we allow the tension to build a little, before we spring the trap and answer it.  Sometimes we can just leave it there, hanging and not answer it at all. If you are worried about facing a sea of blank, silent faces at the end of your talk, this is a good seed to plant, to inspire the audience to ask you later about the answer.  You have tempted them with your question. However you didn’t sate them with the answer. They are vaguely dissatisfied as a result and may raise it in the question time, because you have sufficiently piqued their curiosity.

We can also pose a straight question to the audience and ask them to consider their thoughts on the subject.  We don’t answer it ourselves and we don’t extract any answers from them at that moment either.  This is another seed planting expedition to inspire them to ask their questions or make a comment.  Or we can invite them to go deeper on a topic or specify we can have more clarification during question time, if there is an interest.

Being the first to do anything in Japan or to volunteer, pushing yourself forward is frowned upon.  That is why deathly silence sweeps the room when we get to the Q&A.  Therefore as the speaker, we have to create some momentum ourselves. After seeing there are no hands going up, we pose our own question and then we answer it. We can say, “A question I am often asked is....” Having answered our own question, we may find the coast is clear enough for one of the members of the audience to ask their own question.  We can also use a sakura or a plant in the audience, to ask the first question, if we worry the atmosphere will collapse when no one puts their hand up.  I am sometimes asked by event organisers to ask the first question, if they think the crowd is a bit shy.  My job is to get the ball rolling and in all instances it has worked.

In some cases, the question will be outside your scope of understanding or knowledge. Don’t try and bluff your way through it or give some half baked answer to make it seem as if you know the answer. Just say you don’t know and if the questioner will exchange business cards with you later, you will do your best to get the answer.  Move on quickly and smoothly, by saying, “who has the next question?”. 

Now nasty, hostile, angry, smarty pants questions are a different matter.  Either the audience member thinks you are full of crap or grossly mistaken. They think you need correcting and they are just the person to do it.  They want to draw your attention to all the other possibilities you have neglected.  Sometimes in internal meetings, they may be an ambitious,  competitive colleague who wants to take you down.  Their aim is to make you look like a numbskull in front of everyone. Or they may be trying to take the whole conversation off piste, on to a mad tangent. They try to highjack the proceedings.

What do we do about that?

We need to understand that the distance between our ear and our mouth is too close. We need a circuit breaker, an injection of rational thought to ward off the default emotional reaction.  This is almost impossible to do once the chemicals in the body kick into gear. So we have to get in early to regain control of our brain and mouth.  We will usually have some words already formed in our mouths, poised for release. We need to stop that process and switch to another tack.  We want to make an initial quite bland, vanilla, neutral statement, which neither extinguishes nor encourages the incendiary question.  In the few seconds time it takes for us to make that short filler statement, we can mentally regroup.  This allows us to move on to our second or third possible reply.  These will always be better thought through than the first one that just bolted out of our mouth.

One little bonus tip. 

When you do get around to answering the hostile questioner, maintain direct eye contact with the instigator for six seconds and smile.  Then continue with your answer while make eye contact with everyone else in the audience, one person at a time for six seconds each. Never ever give the nasty question originator any more eye contact after that point.  Ignore them completely from then on.  They were smug, arrogant, narcistic.  They were secretly saying to everyone, “look at me, look at me.  I asked a zinger question because I am so tough and smart”.  They want everyone’s attention, to be the star of the show, to eclipse the speaker, to trample over your presentation.  We can’t have that.  After that first six seconds of direct eye contact with them to face them down and show you are not scared of them or their zinger question, you simply blank them. Take all the air out of their sails by not giving them any more attention whatsoever, throughout the remainder of the Q&A session.

Action Steps

1. Plan the speech content for the possibility of no questions
2. Organise your sakura in the audience to ask the first question
3. Say, “A question I am often asked is….”
4. When facing a hostile question, use a buffer sentence to allow the brain to select a better answer
5. Eyeball your torturer for the first six seconds of your answer then ignore them completely

How Do You Follow On From Really Bad or Really Great Presenters

One of the most painful experiences as a presenter is watching the speaker before you put the entire crowd to sleep with their dull, monotonous monotone delivery. I don’t know which is worse, but the opposite problem is when the speaker was legendary and you hear your name being called because you are up next.  Either way, what is your plan?  Oh, I see, no plan! Maybe that is not a very good approach.

Often when you are invited to speak at certain events, there are a bevy of presenters and you are one of them.  You might be in the Green Room watching on monitors or hidden back stage, waiting to come on.  If the current speaker is just droning on, you can literally see the audience wilting. In Japan the wilt factor is high and the wilt speed is quick.  There is no social remonstration here about sleeping while the speaker is on stage. 

In 1979, when I first arrived in Japan, I was amazed, well actually shocked,  to see how Japanese university students felt no compunction about sleeping right in front of the Professor.  The good Prof would be warbling away and those in the back rows just checked out.  They would fold their arms on the desk, rest their head on their arms and then off to sleepy byes.  In Australia, that would have been unthinkable, considered the height of rudeness and you would have been called out for it during the class.

Having attended a huge number of speeches and given hundreds here myself to Japanese audiences, in Japanese, I have seen this time after time.  The fatal error is to dim the lights for the slide show and bingo, a good chunk of the audience has just fallen asleep.  There are no digs in the ribs with a sharp elbow by neighbours to prod some semblance of respect for the presenter.  Everyone just carries on regardless.

I have also been in the nasty position of having to follow on from a speaker who has murdered the audience. By the time I turn up for my talk they are all certifiably brain dead.  What can you do to retrieve the situation?  Well the concept of this being a distinct possibility in Japan needs to be established in the planning phase.  Most people neglect to consider this untoward turn of events if they are one of a number of speakers. 

The easiest thing is to pause and not start immediately.  The hum of the previous speaker is like a sleeping draft for many in the audience, a bit like white noise in the background.  Their brain has adjusted to that low hum and off they go, dropping into blissful slumber.  By injecting silence into the room, you break the pattern and pattern interrupt is a key to grabbing attention.  The silence also builds anticipation on the part of those still compos mentis. Thirty seconds of silence seems like an eternity and those imagining it is all over now, will emerge from their little nap, to discover you are there on stage ready to go.

This is when you hit it hard with that first sentence.  Crank up the volume and be loud without being a screamer.  Again, add a slight pause after the first outbreak of hostilities to create more pattern interrupt.  Now you have restored everyone’s attention to the speaker, give a truly professional talk, engaging your audience with tonal variety, eye contact, gestures, pauses and great content.  Trying to get an audience in Japan to engage with the speaker through raising their hand in response to a question, often generates zero reaction because nobody wants to stand out in the crowd. “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down” in Japan, so forget any physical refreshment for your audience through speaker nominated actions.  Stick to engaging the audience through photographs, especially featuring people.  Use storytelling to draw them into your message.

What about the opposite issue when the current speaker is really rocking it? The audience are laughing, clearly enjoying themselves and hanging on their every word.  They depart the stage to a rousing ovation with a clearly satisfied reaction.  Now they are calling you up. Fortunately you have a plan for such an occasion.  You start by turning to face the direction the previous speaker took when they departed the field of battle and you compliment them to your audience.  “Wasn’t that a fabulous talk.  Thank you very much Suzuki san, that was really great”.

You have now joined the team compact between that star speaker and the audience. You have identified with the audience and they like you, because they agree with you.  There is no shame or loss in credibility to praise the other speaker.  In fact, it shows just the opposite. You display what a broad mind you have and that you are totally comfortable in your own skin.  Not intimidated in the least and simply oozing confidence.

Do not open with an apology ever.  Don’t talk about you won’t be as good or tell them you feel really insecure after listening to that speaker.  That screams out “loser”.  After a slight pause between bonding with the audience as part of previous presenter fan club, you launch right into your talk with a really good question.  You know it is a really good question, because you have designed it to be that way.  Or you might hit them with a famous quote they all know, from some worthy they all respect.

What you are doing is another version of pattern interrupt.  They were tuned into the previous topic and now you need to redirect their minds away from what they have just heard, to listen to what you are going to say. Be professional in your delivery, be valuable in your content and be the best you can be.  You may not overpower the impression of the star speaker, you may not vanquish their memory, but you will have shown you are a serious, competent person too.

The key is to have two plans.  One for the audience decimator and one for the superstar.  No matter what happens you are ready.  That will show in your presentation and so your personal and company brand will be enhanced.