What Is The Right Length For Your Speech

This was a gala affair for a very worthy cause.  A grand setting. Beautiful ladies in evening gowns, men resplendent in their tuxedos. The host of the charity event was duly introduced, to give an opening speech.  The speech actually started quite well.  He told a powerful story about a young person struggling in their life. The trials, tribulations and barriers described in the lead up to the point of the story were gripping.  The punch line was delivered and it was a direct hit to the heart.  The person he was describing to us was a very close relative.  This had real impact with the audience, it made it personal. Taking an abstract idea and then driving it home with reference to your own reality, brings an audience to you. They are sympathetic, some will be empathetic, but all will be moved.

This was a high point of emotional engagement and then he continued.  And continued and continued.  You could feel the power of the speech, the grip on the audience, was slowly being eroded.  The attention of this luminous gathering was being lost, reduced, dissipated.  Sitting there, I wondered, at what point should he have stopped while he had everyone in the palm of his hand?  When it is us up there, how do we know when is enough is enough? 

Perhaps his attachment to the loved one was driving him to keep going, elaborating and expanding on his message.  Maybe he felt there were many things which needed to be said to this audience.  No doubt there were many worthy points to be conveyed that evening.

The problem is, this is what we want.  But what does our audience want?  If we want to reach them, we have to give the audience what they want, so we can keep them with us.  Once we indulge ourselves and prioritse our own interests, no matter how admirable, we are in danger of disconnecting our audience from our key message.  This is what happened on this occasion.  He should have finished on a high, while he had everyone’s emotional support.

For most speeches we are asked to do, we will have a strict time limit set by the organisers.  We don’t have a chance to waffle on and keep babbling beyond that time dispensation.  When you are the organiser however, there are no limits on you and this is dangerous.  We need to be sensitive to how long we can expect to absorb our audience in where we are taking them with our talk. 

The issue goes back to design of the talk.  Even if you don’t have someone foisting a time limit on you, you need to foist one on yourself.  Once you get to the arc in the story, the countdown to disinterest starts immediately. We have hit them with a powerful point or a powerful story.  We have got them emotionally or logically. This is when we must strike and deliver the key call to action.  The linking of the emotional or logical grip on them and the action requirement we have for them, has to be made as proximate as possible.  Once we start padding out the story or start adding additional things, we lose their focus. 

So in revisiting this particular case, the plan would be to lead the audience along a path of our own design. They don’t know where we are going with the story, when suddenly we reveal the surprise which leaps out and grabs their emotions. Now we have their full attention.  This is the time to deliver the key call to action.  Then we wrap it up, so that the last thing they have ringing in their ear is the action item we want them to take. We do this while their hearts are still feeling warm, benevolent and predisposed to do what we are saying.

If the point of the talk is to hear our own voice and get no traction with the good cause we are promoting, then that is a different scenario.  If however, we want people to get with our programme and part with their cash or whatever, then we need to bring the speech to a clear end.  This speech I have used as a case study could have been a third of the length and had one thousand times more impact.

When working out how long to talk on a point, we have to be parsimonious with our scope.  Better to leave an audience tonguing for more, than feeling sated or even worse, feeling overfed.  The message we want to get across is our one point of focus.  In our planning, we carefully arrange everything prior to that point so we can set it up during our delivery.  We want no more and no less to get the buy in.

Take your speech in the design phase and keep chopping bits out, until you have laser beam clarity around what you want to achieve with your listeners.  Is this hard to do?  Absolutely, because we fall in love with our own prose or the sound of our voice or our opinion or all three.  We have to be disciplined and need consistency of view – the audience view, rather than our own.  Less is more is true when speaking, especially if you are in the philanthropy business.

How To Get Speaking Gigs To Promote Your Personal Brand

A businessman reached out to me after attending my recent speech on “The Seven Deadly Fails Of Selling In Japan”, which I gave to the American Chamber of Commerce here in Tokyo. He wasn’t interested in hearing about how to sell in Japan, but he was frustrated that he was too low profile in his industry.  The consequence of being invisible in your industry sector is that people don’t look for you or find you very easily.  Having people call you up to help them in their business is the preferred way to get new business. It is vastly superior to spending time and money running around trying to find buyers yourself.  Great! How do you do that?

This gentleman’s business was in a very defined niche and there were rivals who were dominating that niche. They were getting the lion’s share of the business as a result.  He was sick of getting the crumbs and wanted to raise his profile so that his phone would start to ring.  His enquiry to me was about doing our High Impact Presentations Course, so that he would be a more skilled presenter.  However, he mentioned he also needed to engineer the speaking spots as an expert authority, to use these speaking skills we are going to impart to him.

This “get found by buyers” aspiration is all part of our personal branding efforts.  One mental shift we have to make though, in this world of content marketing, is to understand that we are all publishing companies now, as well as being in our mainstream businesses.  By this I mean, we have the ability today, to project our ideas around the world and very inexpensively, to an extent never imagined before.  We can start by writing or talking if we can’t write.  Writing blogs or recording blogs and then transcribing them into text is a good starting point.  Great Greg, but what do I write or talk about?

In your area of speciality, there will be problems facing your buyers.  You already know what they are, because when you meet your clients, this is what they talk about.  Just give yourself fifteen uninterrupted minutes sitting there with a pen and some paper. You will soon be able to come up with the most important issues in your industry.  These points can be fleshed out further into blogs.  As I mentioned, you may prefer to talk about the issues and then transcribe them.  It doesn’t matter.  Get the IP (Intellectual Property) out of your head and on to paper.  You could weld all of these issues together into a longer article. This would be suitable for publication in an industry magazine. The various Chambers of Commerce also usually have their own magazines and are always looking for good content. 

Submit your article for publication and expect that they will edit it for you.  This activity gets you in front of the readers, both those who actually read what you have written and those who only noted the headline and your name.  The latter outcome is also fine because you are building an association of a topic and your personal brand.  Often these organizations have an on-line version of their magazine and you will appear in that too.  This is handy for getting picked up by search engines.

Take that same article now and go back and break it up into single issue blocks.  Each of these is a blog post in itself and so add an intro and a conclusion. Load them up to your website, blast them out in your email newsletter, post them on all of your social media. 

Contact event organisers who run conferences in your industry and suggest yourself as a speaker. Send them a copy of your long article, preferably once it has been published in a magazine, for extra credibility. They will be very happy to hear from you, because they are always looking for presenters.  In some cases, they might want you to pay to appear. This might be doable or prohibitive, depending on the event. 

When potential clients or event organisers want to check you out, they will do a search on your name. These blogs and articles you have written, which are pieces of evidence of expertise on this subject, will pop up. It looks better to have a number of relevant posts, than just one long article, so try and populate your feed with multiple examples of good content.  You don’t have to go crazy and post hundreds but more is better than less.

If you find there are podcasts on your subject, contact the podcast hosts and suggest you do a guest spot. If you have a lot of material or can consistently source great guests, then start your own podcast.  You may not broadcast it every day or every week, but you will need some degree of frequency and regularity to get any traction. You can use social media to publicise your podcast episodes.  Again, this activity can be referred to buyers or conference organisers, as proof of your expertise.  The search engines start to attach all of this activity to your name and when people search for you, up comes all of this expert authority.

These days shooting video is super easy.  Facebook live videos take away all editing and you can send them out later through social media.  Or you can shoot video on your iPhone or Ipad.  The camera quality today is excellent.  Just buy a frame to hold your device, screw the holder into a tripod, attach a separate microphone, stand about a meter away and you are off to the races. In iMovie you can edit the content and then upload it to your YouTube channel.  You can take the transcript of the video and use it for articles and blogs.  You can imbed the video itself into social media posts and add the text back in as well. The audio can be stripped out and used in your podcasts or posted in social media with a link.

All of this is multi-purposing. It creates more chances for you to be found.  When you are found, people can gauge the level of expertise you have on a subject and then make a judgment about whether they want you to speak at their event or not.  Even if you don’t make it to the stage at the event, your chances of getting found by potential clients goes right up.  What does it require?  Not much money but it does take time and effort.  The best time to start all of this was yesterday and the second best time is now!

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

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.enjapan.dalecarnegie.com

and check out our - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

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

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

Creating Your Personal Style When Presenting

When we are writing, we can create a style of our own.  The way we use certain vocabulary, the phrasing we apply in our sentences, the types of subjects we tackle.  What about when we are speaking?  What would we like to be known for?  When people hear we are speaking, are they saying to themselves, “I need to attend that talk”?  The answer to can we create our own style is definitely “yes” and you don’t have to look far for role models.

Simon Sinek launched a new career off the back of his now famous TED talk, emphasising the WHY behind what we are all doing.  Anthony Robbins is famous for his massive amounts of energy and self confidence when presenting.  Rowan Atkinson for his sly and dry wit. Brian Tracy for his very science based approach to his subjects.  Zig Ziglar for his storytelling. Locally here in Tokyo, Jesper Koll has a distinct use of casual dress, powerful rhetorical questions, data (and colour!) saturated slides and references to when Germany will win the next World Cup. 

One aspect of building a following is getting numerous, sustained gigs over long periods of time, so that you become well known, like Jesper.  There are many economists in Japan, but few performers like Jesper. He can mix it up, combining dry economics with pizzazz, to make the whole event enlightening and entertaining at the same time.  I am a fan and I always attend.

What about the rest of us, who for many reasons, don’t get that many chances to speak publically in a year?  How can we build a brand?  The first thing is to decide what you would like to become well known for?  Is it your sparling wit, your cutting analysis of complex problems, your supreme confidence on what you are saying, your expert authority, the quality of your data?

Generally speaking, we will have a relatively small number of content areas we will cover.  For example, I never hear Jesper speak about Japanese politics because that is outside his specialized knowledge.  In my case, I cover three topics – sales, leadership and presenting.  That is a bit unusual, but as we are a training company, it makes sense because these are our core areas of expert authority.  I write blogs, shoot video and speak on these subjects.  Here is a hint, you can do the same thing.  Your blogs can be thought leadership pieces or data heavy contributions or considered commentary on a subject.  

Some friends say, unkindly, that I have a good head for podcasts, but I shoot my videos anyway. Audiences search out content in different places, so it makes sense to try and meet them where they are looking. Good head or nay, I choose to get my content out there.  It is often through our blogs and videos that we become known for expertise or interest in different subjects.  When people are looking for a speaker, they can see the quality of what we can do and this may inspire them to invite us to speak.  The impetus is on us though, to make it easy to be found.

If you are a witty type, then certainly be witty when speaking.  This is a natural extension of you and it is congruous with your presentation style.  If you are not witty, then spare the rest of us from failed attempts at stand up comedy, when speaking on business topics.  Cautionary note to Aussies and Brits – avoid all of those culture centric sardonic witticisms. They rarely translate to broader audiences.

If you have access to excellent research and quality data then make this something that you are known for.  Jesper is a well established economist in Japan, so he can easily access his own original research data and other worthy published sources.  When you go to his talk, you know you are going to get some new information. This draws a fan base of repeaters like me.  We can do the same, because in our different lines of business we come across golden nuggets of information, which are not so easily available to all the punters out there in audience land.  We can become known for the quality of our content.

The delivery is the key though.  Boring people are not attractive and won’t build a following, no matter how good their information is.  So don’t be boring!  Engage your audience when you speak, speak clearly and confidently.  I remember reading one of Anthony Robbins’s books about how he sought out speaking spots, as many as possible, when he first started. He did this to short circuit the learning curve for himself.  I am sure many of those early speeches were horrible, but by getting the repetition done, he could find ways to become the speaker he is today.  We should do the same and grab every opportunity to speak however humble it may be.  We can improve and become better at our speaking craft and we should be committed to doing so.  The last thing the business world needs is another boring presenter!

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

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.enjapan.dalecarnegie.com

and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

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

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

Presenting By Video Conferencing

Technology is getting pretty good these days so joining meetings remotely is becoming more and more common.  Years ago the platforms were not that stable and the actions and voice synchronization had a problem with delays.  I had a job interview with a panel by video conference which was horrible.  The panel looked very small on the screen because the system could only handle a wide angle shot for that many people. I on the other hand, was a close up for them.  They would move their mouths and about three seconds later out would come the words and the same for my end.  It was all very disconcerting I must say but I got the job anyway. 

Today the tech is much, much better but the presenting part is no easier.  Here are a few ideas for when you are doing a presentation remotely. Make sure you get there early and check the sound and video connections are working perfectly.  In some cases, you may need to be wearing headphones and speaking into a separate microphone connected to the computer.  I am doing a guest spot on Jeffrey Gitomer and Jennifer Gluckow’s “Sell Or Die” podcast shortly and these are the requirements for me to participate.  Fortunately, because I do three weekly podcasts, I have the necessary high quality microphone and headset.  Make sure to check what you will need equipment-wise your end, well before the set date.  If you can organize it, definitely have an iPad, extra screen or a phone hooked into the same system, so that you can see what the audience can see. 

This is useful during the set up, to see how you look to the viewers and also for during the actual broadcast, to see how you are coming across.  You only need to glance at yourself during the real meeting, because otherwise it looks weird if you are talking to someone off camera. 

Most of these systems allow for recording, so when you rehearse, use the exact same system and record yourself speaking and then take a look at the results.  Most people don’t think to do this, but we have to see the presentation through the eyes of our viewers.  You may notice that you have little habits that become magnified, when it is just your face on screen.  You may find there are slides in the deck that on the small screen are hard to read and need simplifying.

When you use slides, this is very similar to a webinar format.  If you have done webinars before, you know how disconcerting it is to be talking to others and not being able to easily gauge their reactions.  Even with the better tech today, the team members will either be in a wide shot of the whole room, in which case you can’t really see their faces or the tech will only feature the face of whoever is talking, so again you can’t see the other participants.  You just have to accept that your read of how what you are saying is going down, will be limited and carry on anyway. 

The camera in your computer is always set above the main screen, so you are always looking at a point below the looking line of the audience.  If you can manage it buy a separate camera, that you can arrange to be more face level, so you can talk to the camera, rather than talk to a point 20 centimeters below the screen camera.  This also allows you to have better posture and sit up straighter in the chair.  Try it and you will see it makes a big difference to how you relate to the viewing audience.

When you see a screen, it is an illusion really, because the visual aspect is really superseded by the voice.  Also slides will reduce your “face time” on screen as well.  The voice is a powerful tool for communication and in these instances it becomes even more important than usual.  Don’t speak too quickly.  The tech is good but we still need to slow the pace down a bit for the audience to hear what we are saying.  You don’t know the quality of the speakers at their end.  They could be those small, cheap, portable speakers and so the acoustics may not be great.

Many of the things I am going to mention also apply when we are speaking to a live audience.  Voice modulation is key to avoiding a slumber inducing monotone.  Hitting key words brings greater emphasis to important parts of the message.  I recently did over seven hours of narration for my bestseller Japan Sales Mastery for the audio version. 

Sadly, I don’t have the classic, deep bass DJ voice.  What I could do though, which a sexier voiced narrator would find impossible to do, is to know which words to emphasise in every sentence.  By isolating out key words with either additional volume or by dropping the volume to a covert whisper, we can really grab the listener’s attention.

Pauses become very important when speaking in these situations, because we need people to constantly adjust their hearing and digest the content of what we have just said. Rushing ideas, one after another, over the top of each other is ineffective.  Plan to have slightly longer breaks than you would do with a face to face presentation.  Also don’t be thrown if there are long periods of silence on their end.  If you ask a question and no one answers, it can often be that they are not able to organize who will answer amongst themselves, if they are all tuning in remotely.  In that case, just repeat the question and be patient. Wait for the answer.  The ball is their court now, so there is no pressure on you.

Eye contact should be made with the camera at all times, where possible.  This is similar to if you were doing a video shoot.  You need to be making love to the camera lens.  My weekly YouTube TV show “The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show” is me talking straight to the camera.  It was difficult at first, to keep staring into the camera lens, but with practice I found you can get used to it.  Don’t look away or to the side if possible.  It looks like you lack conviction or self confidence in what you are saying. 

You are probably going to be seated, so your gestures will be smaller than normal, but still use them. At this close up range, your arms won’t be making the gestures, as much as your hands.  The sweep of the gestures will be more compact and you will probably want to hold them for slightly longer than usual.  As I said before sit up straight, don’t slouch and adjust the chair height to allow you to do that.  If you can arrange the tech so that you can do the presentation standing that would be ideal.  It gives you more access to your body language and gestures.  It also feels more comfortable than being constrained while sitting.

If it is phone only and no video connection, then the earlier ideas about voice come directly into play.  This is harder in one way, but there is also less pressure, because no one is looking at you.  Also, you are not trying to discern the expressions on their faces through the medium of a small screen.  Rehearsal is still very important and you should record how you sound across the phone lines.  Pay special attention to pauses, because the only mental stimulation they are receiving is auditory.  They need time to filter what they are hearing, so don’t be in a rush. You may have had to send the deck ahead of time, which means they will be on page eight, while you are still on page two. There is nothing you can do about that, so keep going regardless.

The basics of presenting apply whether you are in the hall, on the phone or on live video.  The rehearsal element is even more important.  Getting online early, to check the tech becomes critical.  Remember the tech, the screens, etc., are all there to play second fiddle to you, the presenter.  You must dominate the medium, no matter what it is.  Plan to be successful and you will be successful.

Can A Presentation Be Conversationalist And Still Be Business Professional?

Sometimes we read that when we are presenting it should be just like a conversation with your friend. The idea is we should be relaxed, inclusive, totally focused on the people we are speaking to.  Now will that work in the boardroom when presenting to the senior executives, none of whom are particularly friendly?  Will this work with an audience of legitimate experts in your field?  Will this work with clients when pitching for their business. 

We need to determine from the very start what it is we are trying to achieve.  Are we going to pass on a lot of recent and relevant information that our audience will appreciate, because they can then use that in their work or use it to add to their own presentations?  If it is a technical topic and the attendees are experts, then an inform style speech will work very well.  Should it be chatty?  Probably not. The audience may feel we are not taking them seriously enough.

This doesn’t give us a blank cheque now to be dull and boring.  We need to tailor our talk to our audience and to how much they know about the subject.  Too high level and full of insider jargon and we, the great unwashed, will feel stupid, isolated and diminished by the speaker.  Then we will get angry at our unfair treatment. 

We need to be using power in or power out to highlight certain words we want to stress.  We should be using gestures which are congruent with what we are saying.  Our eyes should be on the audience the whole time picking up visual clues as to how well they are receiving our message.  We should be telling stories to make the points easier to recall.  Where possible we should include aspects of our own experience both good and bad, to be added to the mix to make it real for the listeners.

If the object is to impress your audience and convince them of your suggestions. then we need lots of evidence in the talk.  This is not a backyard over the fence chat.  This is well structured to layer on so much evidence that the audience can only agree with our ideas.  We need oodles of logic, facts, data, statistics, testimonials, evidence etc. We may need a little showmanship to bring these dead numbers to life.  A distance expressed as a numeral is an abstract idea for most people.  But if we expressed it as so many football pitch lengths, then people would have a much better idea of how far we are talking. The same with volumes.  If we compared it to a Sports Stadium or an Olympic pool, then the concept of sizes is easier to grasp.

If our aim is to persuade or get people to commit to action, then we need to be highly energised.  If we don’t look enthusiastic about the idea the audience may well be asking themselves why they should bother to get behind this suggestion from us.  We will need plenty of word pictures to draw out the end result such that the audience can see it in their mind’s eye.  Getting from the abstract to the concrete as fast as possible is critical.  We need to be describing what the future looks like after they take up our ideas and suggestions.  If it was a course in financial accounting, for example, we need to be talking about the types of complex analysis the graduates will be able to perform.  Now comes the important bit, relate that new found facility to the business and how it will either save or increase money.  We cannot leave the outcomes at the general directional level, we need to nut out the concrete gains.

If our job is to entertain the audience, then the conversational manner is a good one. This is disarming, because we are inviting people to relax through our own informality.  The storytelling will be on fire.  We will be relating incidents and filling them out with people, places, seasons and all manner of detail to make the scene come alive.  This is the verbal equivalent of the novelist setting the scene for the action.  The writer doesn’t just say an exchange of spies took place.  The author constructs the drive to the bridge, outlines the surrounds, paints in the atmosphere, injects interesting personalities into the mix. As the speaker we need to be doing the same thing. 

Chatty, witty talks are fine for when we should be chatty.  At other times, we need to be more circumspect and formal. Not dull but formal and the difference is mightily important.  In some cases we may need to come armed with a battalion of bar charts and tie our audience up with our line graphs and then  hit them with our pie charts.  We belt them with detail and data until they surrender.  We might also need to be at our pulpit, preaching our doctrine, making our calls for obedience to our ideas and words.  Fully indoctrinated, we attempt to infect others. Definitely not a chat.  Or we might need to be topical, on point, deep in the zeitgeist as they say, informing others of what is the state of play.  The key is to decide which approach you will take from the very start, before you even get anywhere near a slide deck.  Do that and you will be well on the way to exceeding your audiences expectations.

Tag Team Pitching For Fun And Profit

In business, we are asked to present as a team.  We may be pitching for new business and the presentation requires different specialist areas of expertise.  This is quite different to doing something on your own, where you are the star and have full control over what is going on.  One of the big mistakes with amateur presenters is they don’t rehearse.  They just turn up and fluff it.  They blow up their personal and organisational brands. When in a team environment, you absolutely cannot neglect the rehearsal component.  There will be many sessions needed before you are ready to face an audience, so you have to plan for this.  Do not leave this until the last moment after you have all been diligently assembling your slide decks.

The batting order is important.   Don’t put the brainy nerd up front. They may be the legitimate expert, but unless they are the best presenter keep them in reserve.  We want the best person to lead off, because this is how we create that all important first impression.  They may come back for the close out or have another equally skillful person secure the positive final impression.  The technical geeky people can be safely placed in the middle of proceedings.

As mentioned, don’t allow all the available team time to be sucked up by creating slides for the presentation.  This is the mechanical part and we need the soft skills part to be really firing. That takes time and repetition.  Set deadlines for deck completion, well in advance of the event, so that the chances to get everyone together are created.

Having worked out the order, do dry runs to see how the whole things flows.  Practice little things like each presenter shaking the hand of the next presenter as a type of baton pass between the team.  It shows you are a tight, united unit and connects the whole enterprise together. 

Also, make sure each presentation can be given by everyone in the team.  People get sick, planes get cancelled or delayed, all manner of circumstances can arise.  At the appointed time, you are down some key members of the team.  In this case the audience expects the show to go on and for you to cover the missing person’s part. 

This cannot be the first time this idea has occurred to you,.  You need to plan for this at the very start.  As you all rehearse together you hear their section over and over, so jumping in and working through their part of the deck shouldn’t be an impossibility. The questioning part might be different, but the presenting part should not create too many difficulties, if you are organised.

Have a navigator for the questions determined at the start.  When questions land you want that process to be handled seamlessly.  I remember being on a panel for a dummy press conference, during media training. One ex-journo in the audience asked us a very curly question and we all just looked at each other, having no clue as to who would take that infrared missile.  Our work colleagues in the audience just burst out laughing, because we looked such a shambles. 

Anticipate what likely questions will rise, nominate who will take care of which sections and if anything indeterminate hits the team, understand that the navigator will take care of it.  The navigator, will also control the questions.  If it is straightforward, then after thanking the questioner, they will just say, “Suzuki san will take care of this topic” and hand it over. 

If it is a bit tricky, tough or complicated and is going to be hard to answer, the navigator must control things.  They need to build in a bit of thinking time for the person who is going to have to take this one.  They need to “cushion” the answer.  By this I mean they will say something rather harmless, but which buys valuable thinking time for the person. This allows them to brace themselves for their reply. 

It would sound like this, “Thank you for your question.  Yes, it is important that the budget allocated helps to drive the business forward. I am going to ask Tanaka san to give us some insight into how to address this budget issue -  Tanaka san”.  That sentence takes around 12-15 seconds to say.  Tanaka san knows she will get this one, because it is within in her designated area of expertise to answer during the pitch.  The navigator provides her with some extra time to compose her strategy for her answer. 

Another technique, which you can only use sparingly, is to simply ask them to repeat the question. You got it the first time, but you may want to build in some extra thinking time to come up with the best answer. Do this too often and the games up!

Inject Yourself Into The Presentation Content

When we are presenting, we can be mentally separating out personal selves from the content of the talk. There will be facts, data, statistics, details, examples, evidence, etc., which is all rather far removed from the individual presenting.  It is almost like we are doing third person presentation rather than first person. Technical people in particular like to remove themselves from the proceedings and only talk about the facts.  This is a big opportunity wasted.

I am an introvert, so I understand about the reluctance to inject oneself into the story.  People who know me will be doubting that statement entirely.  They will say I am outgoing, confident, vocal, not shy and retiring at all.  The Myers Briggs personality analysis results define an introvert as someone who when they get tired, likes to retire from the fray, rest up and then return.  The extrovert grabs energy from others and so wants to occupy the center of the fray. 

As an introvert, talking about myself or my family was something that I was highly hesitant to do. In fact I managed to give hundreds of public speeches, while safely keeping myself out of the narrative. This was a big mistake. 

Now we don’t have to hang all the family’s dirty laundry out for all to see, but we can inject something of ourselves into the talk.  We can refer to our experiences with a particular subject.  We can tell stories of what happened to us when we did something we are recommending people to do or not to do.  When we do that we make a very strong connection with the audience and with a sense of reality.  Now the talk has moved from the theoretical to the practical.

We all want to know what the reality is.  That is why we appreciate the opportunity to read consumer comments on products or services they have bought.  We are looking to cut through all the company propaganda and get some sense of what is really going on. You Tube is full of videos of people reviewing products and commenting on their experiences with them.  We love the chance to get more objective information before we make our purchase.

Well, audiences are the same.  They want to know what really happened.  This means if we can inject our experiences and insights into the presentation, the audience speaker credibility gauge starts to really move the needle in a very positive direction for us.  To do this we have to be willing to share stories and episodes of what happened.  Sometimes these are hard to relate because maybe we are not being shown in a perfect light. 

The funny thing about audiences is that they don’t like people who are perfect.  Too smooth, too polished, too slick comes across like a rat with a gold tooth.  Your internal danger beacons starts flashing and the loudspeaker broadcast is telling you “danger, danger”. Our audience likes to hear about the struggles, foibles, mistakes and failings of others.  They don’t regard these people as weaklings to be discarded on the mountainside like in Sparta.  Instead they identify with our human frailties.

Humour is tricky with presentations, but self-depreciating humour never goes down badly.  I was watching one of the masters of sales presentations –_Zig Ziglar.  He was relating his tough, early days in sales, going to host’s kitchens and cooking up a storm for the invited guests who were his prospects.   In passing he casually mentioned that even though he was struggling early in his career he did sell quite a bit - his car, his furniture….  It was quite funny the way he told it and the joke was against himself, rather than against another person.

If we want to connect with our audience, we shouldn’t be afraid to poke fun at ourselves, tell of our failings, mistakes, disasters, train wrecks, etc.  The audience will appreciate the honesty and also the peek inside about what not to do.  It took me a long time to be able to do this, being an incredibly private person, raised in the isolation of the Australian bush.  But when I did manage to start injecting more of myself into my talks, I found a stronger resonance with the audience and more acceptance of what I was saying. I realised I should have been doing this a lot earlier.

Shooshing Your Noisy Audience Is Ridiculous When Presenting

When a presentation event unintentionally turns into comedic relief, you know you have a major credibility problem.  Imagine it is after work, a cavernous hall filled with hundreds of people, the booze and small talk all free flowing.  The MC attempts to introduce the main host of the event, to make some worthy remarks. The hum continues as people are more riveted by their own conversation than anything the crew on stage has to say. In a stroke of pathos, the MC starts shooshing the audience to attempt to quieten them down. 

The audience aren’t buying any of this Mother stuff from the MC and keep chatting regardless.  This leads to even more ridiculous shooshing, only louder and more strident this time.  The MC doesn’t appear to have had any presentation training.  So they have reverted to parental authority over the naughty boys and girls in the audience, to restore some semblance of order.  We have now descended into comedy, but more a comedy of errors.

Almost giving up, the main speaker is now trotted out by the MC for more of the same.  This speaker thankfully didn’t try any shooshing of their own, but the MC was on a roll and unhelpfully weighed in from the sidelines, with more shooshing, during the speech.  The main speaker was not skilled, interesting or commanding, so their words were subsumed into the general low drone echoing across the hall from all the crowd hubbub.  There were other subsequent speakers and they also were buffeted by the strong winds of disinterest.

Should we blame the speakers for being unskilled and boring or the audience for being ignorant and rude or both?  Well I don’t think we can blame the audience and even if we did, what difference would it make?  Should we have burly security guards on hand, to frog march noisy offenders out of the hall. We could try this to spread the general idea that we the organisers can’t be brooked and require better manners from the assembled rabble.

In reality, I think we have to accept that if you release free flowing booze into the audience then their conversations are going to be more attractive to them, than anything else happening on stage.  In many cases in Japan, they hold the booze back for that very reason.  If you are well behaved and don’t talk over the speeches, we will reward you with a drink when we get to the toast. 

This Pavlovian style training tends to inject more discipline into the proceedings.  It is not completely foolproof and some hardened conversationalists, maybe the non-drinkers in the audience, will still continue their tete-a-tete during the main speeches.  It is a much smaller group though and generally everyone is listening to the speeches.  The negative thing about the Japanese methodology though is the speeches are usually too many in number and too long in length.  If you are all that remains between you and drinkees, then remember to make it short and memorable, then get off.

Well what can we do when it is us up there on stage, at the podium, surveying the great unwashed, unreformed and unruly rabble.  They are shamelessly standing there staring back up at us, while willfully chit chatting, with no sign of embarrassment or remorse. 

The first thing is to design your talk to be powerful, impactful and short.  Waffling on about nothing of great import or of any consequence to the audience is a guaranteed formula for being ignored.  Our main speaker did a great job of doing just that.  Naturally people were not moved and the MC, in vain, had to bring out the shooshing nuclear harpoon to corral the audience. 

If you are in this position, think very carefully about what you can say at the start to get the audience engaged.  Talking at them won’t cut it.  We need to be speaking with them and this is where getting crowd involvement works like a charm.  Ask them a rousing question.  Get them physically and mentally involved.

This occasion actually really lent itself perfectly to this task.  It had a sporting theme and the audience was chock full of opposing supporters covering a large number of competing teams. 

If our MC or the speaker had asked the audience to nominate which team was going to win the competition, then audience involvement would have been tremendous.  Additionally the pro technique is to say, “I didn’t catch that, who is going to win?”  By doing this you get the audience to really ramp up their energy and volume.  They want to talk, so give them their chance to really rock it, but only for a moment.  There is a particular mass rally, large crowd effect we want to tap into, as there is tremendous energy therein, which we want to direct.

Following that raucous reaction, thank them, then pause.  You will now have a still quiet in the room. This is when you had better say something really gripping.  You have the complete attention of the masses and they are now open to you.  They are having a good time at last. 

As you proceed into the talk, the low hum at the back will return.  Expect that, so again ask them another leading question in a few minutes time. This will allow them to burn off all that excess chat energy they have, so that they will be calm and listen to you again.  You can’t keep doing this ad nauseam, otherwise it feels manipulative. People won’t respond anymore, they won’t like you and will leave with a bad taste in their mouth.

The answer to keeping audience interest, is to be interesting.  Use word pictures, tell relevant stories, lift your speaker energy right up to the top of the scale to command the room.  Rock stars can do this, because they have massive amplifiers, electric guitars and a full drum kit to work with.  You don't have any of that, but you have to become as powerful as a rock star on stage, to grab easily distracted people’s attention.  Your projection of your “ki” or body energy, big gestures and powerful voice strength are the equivalent of the amplifiers, electric guitars and full drum kit.

In our presentation training, the participants are at about 15% energy levels when they first enter the training room.  We the instructors have to project our own energy levels up to 130% or 150%, to lift the audience up to 100% of their potential energy.  Speaking in front of a noisy crowd requires the same strategy. In this case, you have to go above their energy levels and seize control of the room. They are already at close to 80% to 90%, so we have to go to 150% to stay in command of the proceedings.

Our speaker did none of that and was totally forgettable. The MC was just annoying and the whole episode was a shambles.  Those on stage were all speaker road kill. 

If you are ever in the nominated speaker position to address a noisy assembly, take the ideas outlined here and you will be heard and well regarded.  You will emerge with your reputation really enhanced, because skilled crowd lion tamers are few and far between. 

Bland Is Bad When Presenting

Smart, capable people amaze me when I see them presenting.  This recent speaker was someone I had met in business a few times previously and this was my first time to see him present.  In our earlier conversations, he was knowledgeable, intelligent and professional.  He was an experienced person in his industry and had substantial international work exposure.  He was tall, broad shouldered, square jawed, handsome and personally well presented. His presentation itself was a dud. He had great information, probably some of the best available.  He had good perspective to put that data in context.  The delivery though was lifeless and it was killing the quality of the content.

This is a big mistake we can easily make.  We add too many slides because we think the audience will really benefit from this additional information.  Now we are rushing to get through it all in the allotted time and this detracts from our professionalism as presenters.  Or we want to put too much comparative information on the one slide.  The two or three graphs we are showing are complex and because at a reduced scale to fit on the slide, they are hard to read, so we lose our audience.  We might really go crazy and start putting up whole spreadsheets of figures on the slide and just wipe our audience out completely.

Another problem with delivery can be too much jargon, which forces large swaths of the audience to drop out and go searching for their internet connection on their phone.  They want to spend their time doing something more useful, like checking Facebook or Instagram, rather than listening to us. We may be speaking at a rapid rate of knots, because our nerves and corresponding adrenalin release are driving up the speaking speed. We are like the surf, with each successive wave wiping out the one before it.  In this metaphor, the content of the previous wave is usurped by the next wave, such that the audience cannot retain the previous point we made.  They soon lose touch with the direction of the talk.

In our speaker’s case, his voice loudness was such that with the microphone, we could clearly hear him in the room.  His speaking speed was actually, if anything, a little on the slow side.  The real killer though was his speaking intensity. What do I mean by intensity?  It was very, very low key.  This can often be the deep pit that technical speakers fall into.  They are numbers, rather than words, people and so they deliver their talk with a detached, “I am not really here” presence.  If this was a paper they had written  and they weren’t there then this is fine.  The problem is as if it were an academic or technical paper and the difference between us reading it for ourselves and them giving the presentation is abysmally tiny.

Intensity comes from within and from our mental attitude to the talk.  Are we there to be supremely grey and just inform the audience of the content?  If this is the idea then this presenter was totally successful.  Is this enough though.  In this modern, fast paced, highly competitive world how can we choose to come in last?  If we get a chance to showcase our organisation and ourselves we have to make every post a winner.  We need to better understand the full potential of the situation.  If we can present information in a way that really makes the audience sit up and take notice, then they will think highly of our firm and of us. 

He was grey, bland, forgettable, uninteresting, uninspiring, nice but boring – a speaker wall flower type, disappearing into the background, while standing in the foreground of the venue stage.

There was no tonal variation in his delivery.  He didn’t punch out key words to drive home their importance.  His face was wooden and rather neutral, deadpan looking throughout, rather than excited and passionate about his subject.  He had no crescendos and just settled for lulls all the way throughout the 40 minutes of audience torture.  His body language and gestures had been put away for storage, waiting for a rainy day perhaps, because he didn’t bring them to the hall. Now when you are a big guy like him, being dynamic is relatively easy, because you have mass and when put in motion, it can have a strong impact on your audience. 

He also chose to follow the arrangements by the event staff, none of whom have ever given a public presentation in their entire life and who are completely ignorant of professional presentation requirements.  Following their direction, he stood behind the podium obscuring his body language potential, had the lights dimmed to accommodate the screen and what was being displayed.  He was already grey in delivery terms but his stage positioning and lighting had him almost disappear from plain sight.

He is a great teacher of presentations.  In the Japanese language there is an expression called “hanmen kyoshi” or teacher by negative example.  This is the role he played superbly on this occasion.  We can learn a lot by doing the opposite of what he was doing.  It also makes us realize that being tall, broad and handsome doesn’t mean much, if you don’t know what you are doing as a presenter.  Having great data and information will not retain the attention of our increasingly attention deficit modern audiences, because we cannot keep them riveted to us and off their mobile phones.  The minimum requirement is a clear understanding of the importance of solid delivery skills, on top of which we pour on our unsurpassed content. Not only do we have to understand these points, we have to deliver the delivery!

Don’t Get A Grip When Presenting

Good posture never goes out of fashion.  Standing up straight shows confidence, allows good breath control and projects energy. Given this is pretty simple, then why is it we get this so wrong when presenting?  The problem is temptations aplenty in the presenting environment.  The various acting awards or music performance awards are broadcast all around the world, to celebrate people making their living as professional presenters.  Acting is presenting and so is singing, although we do not often think of the performances in that way, but fundamentally that is what these artists are doing. 

Now this is one group you would expect to do this well.  Yet, we see award recipients murdering their acceptance speeches.  They stand there shoulders curved, hunched over the stand microphone, bending low from the waist to accommodate the tech, rather than the other way around.  These are people who spend an inordinate amount of their time around microphone technology as users.  Yet they seem incapable of mastering this sound dispersal device.  We get a terrific view of the top of their heads, which when we have a bald or balding pate on display, makes the whole experience even more memorable.

If you are ever in a position like that, where the height of the microphone stand makes the distance from the top of the mounted microphone to your mouth seem too far, then change the scenario.  Actually, hopefully you will have arrived early and will have checked the equipment beforehand so will know if the microphone thus mounted will do the trick or not.  You should have already alerted the organisers to your preferred tech arrangements and because it is going to be an extended presentation, you have requested a hand microphone or a lavalier microphone.

Let’s presume you have not had that chance, because it is an award ceremony and your remarks will be brief.  Don’t worry because the solution is devastatingly simple.  Remove the microphone from the stand holder completely and bring it closer to your mouth when you want to speak.  If the microphone is wedged in there and is not relenting or responding to your efforts to remove it, then go for more radical measures.  Pick the whole damn thing up holus-bolus and speak into the microphone, so that you can be heard by everyone.  Don’t be bossed around by the tech – show it who is boss around here.

The other great good posture denier is the podium.  I always recommend dispensing with the podium entirely, if you can do that.  These days we can have our slides there to help us navigate our way through the speech.  The ubiquitous slide advance clickers free us from being trapped behind the podium and having to hit the arrow keys to move through the slide deck. We can advance the slide show from anywhere on the stage and thus be able to access our full body language, to add to our communication piece. 

What we often see though, is the speaker, usually male, applying a vice like grip on the outer edges of the podium, in an effort to stop it escaping from the stage at any moment. Male speakers also love it because they don’t know what to do with their hands, so choking the life out of the podium takes care of that problem completely. This double grip arrangement eliminates the possibility of using gestures, to back up the words, because the podium has now become a function of the speaker’s balance.  This is because the speaker is standing back from the podium and leaning forward, head down, shoulders hunched over the microphone attached to the low flying microphone stand.  When your weight is back like that, you tend to get stuck in that position and wind up delivering the whole speech with that poor posture.

If for some sad reason you are using a podium as a notes bench or are even worse, using your laptop screen as your notes bench, then stand up straight and slightly back and away from the podium.  From here, you can’ t easily grip the furniture and this frees you up to use your gestures.

Good posture shows the mark of the professional, who is in control of their environment, the furniture and the tech.  Now all they have to do is concentrate on their audience and that is why we are there in the first place, isn’t it.

Go Broad, But Also Go Deep When Presenting

When you hear an excellent presentation, it is easy to be well satisfied.  When you are giving such a presentation and the audience are wolfing down your information, it is also easy to be self satisfied.  The good is the enemy of the great we say, don’t we.  The difficulty is when things are going so well, to know exactly how to take them to a higher level.

I was attending such a presentation recently and the speaker was very, very good.  The content was right on topic, for an area which has real attention grabbing power for audiences.  The room was a sell out. That is always a good thing isn’t it. The information itself was new, well designed and cleverly arranged in terms of the cadence of the argument. The actual delivery was probably one of the best that that particular business audience will see in a long, long time.  All good, so how to make something already working extremely well even better?

This is not easy, but I did notice one thing which I thought could have been added and it may be something that we can all consider when we are constructing our own presentations. When we are delivering an “inform style” of presentation, of course we need to be clear, concise and on topic. We also need to have fresh information that is new to the audience, so that they feel they were in the box seats for a very value deep presentation.  This presentation knocked it out of the park in that regard.

When we are doing that inform type of presentation, we can be spending quite a big chunk of our time on the broad brush strokes of industry direction, the shape of the trend, the predictions for the future. This is great because as audience members, we are getting treated to a business equivalent of a massive star show of the outer galaxies, like we will see in a Planetarium .

Future direction is good, but to really take our talk to the highest possible level, we need to do one more thing.  We need to connect this broad and scale based projection analysis to the day to day reality of our punters in the audience.  The talk I attended could have gone one more step and have reached out to the audience, with some steps they could take to connect the information with their daily challenges.  It didn’t have to morph into a complete “how to” presentation, but the inclusion of a few takeaways would have been the super icing on the cake.

The problem is that usually we are so wrapped up in the macro scale of what we are talking about, particularly when we are involved in discussing broad directional changes in an industry, that it is easy to get stuck at that general direction level. We are fully focused on the big picture.

We need to pick up around five things the audience can walk out with, which they can put into immediate action, to link the macro with the micro.  There are bound to be things that our audience can do, as a result of hearing this speech, which will better prepare them and their companies for the coming changes. Everyone wants to know what is coming down the pike and what they need to do be ready for it.

The addition of these concrete steps brings the talk even more alive and makes it more relevant for our audience.  Why five? Of course, we could probably list ten or twenty items, but the smaller number is easier for the audience to apply, without feeling overwhelmed.  Trying to make too many changes too quickly, usually results in nothing getting done. Five is also good as a quantity because it has volume, which gives the talk a greater feeling of worth and credibility.  These five points are sufficiently significant, without being off putting.

So the next time you are giving a presentation of the “inform” variety, look carefully at your macro points and try and pull out some practical steps, some juicy takeaways, that the audience can feast on and integrate into their own businesses straight away. If you do this, they will leave the room with a sense of they have seen the future and they are better prepared with some practical steps to deal with it.

Vacuum Up Cool Stuff for Your Presentations

Do you have one of those diaries that includes a daily quotation on the page?  Or maybe you subscribe to a service that sends you uplifting quotes?  I have noticed that social media is also a great hunting ground for cool quotations too, as people share them around.  We probably note these and then move on with our lives.  For the presenter though, these are gold.  We need to be collecting these sound bites to lob into our presentations.

We might kick off the talk with a pithy quote or perhaps end with one.  This is a great way to start proceedings by setting the intellectual frame of reference for the audience.  Get them thinking and pondering about what we are saying. Ending with a great quote is like an excellent desert after a great meal, we leave feeling better.

Conveniently there are books of quotations in general and then there are collections of quotes from leading individuals.  If Winston Churchill had received a buck for every time he has been quoted, the sum would dwarf the wealth of the robber barons from Silicon Valley.  The point is, there is no shortage of material, only a shortage of imagination and awareness about using it.

The daily news is usually a tedious and depressing rendition of distant disasters, deadly deeds and dirty tricks being orchestrated somewhere on the planet.  It is also a good source of interesting tidbits we can inject into our talks to assist us in making a key point in our argument. Instead of just using it for the wrapping up of the vegetable peelings and fish bones, scan the pages for more gold. I find using a pen to mark an article helps me to locate it later and then cut out the piece that attracted my interest.  Then it is peelings bound, as it heads off to the trash.

We need to be looking for evergreen tidbits, because news rapidly becomes irrelevant.  We may not have a convenient speaking spot looming on the horizon to coordinate with our little explosive.  Capture them for later use.  You might be thinking, I don’t fancy trying to store all these random bits of newsprint, getting dusty and tatty somewhere in the house.  These days we can take a photo with our phone, upload that to a cloud corral like Evernote and store it there.  Usually we are after short bits of fierce and fiery additions to our text, to illustrate a point we are making, so we don’t need the whole article.

Other speakers are also occasionally a good source of quotes and stories.  Let me give an example of one I heard recently.  Mr Nagato, the head of Japan Post was relating a tale about former Prime Minister Mori.  Prime Minister Mori probably spent more time playing rugby than studying English when he was a lad, so his linguistic challenges were many. 

Japan was hosting a G7 meeting and he had to greet all the heavy hitters as they arrived.  His minders had been working him over, to be able to get out a couple of simple phrases without the aid of interpreters. You can sense impending disaster already can’t you!  So the phrases were “How are you” to which most people would say “I am well thank you” or something similar and Mori would then reply  “me too”.  This is the normal give and take and nothing too exotic or overly ambitious.

So Bill Clinton rolls into town and rather than following the script Mori says “Who are you” by mistake, to which Bill says “Hilary’s Husband” and without missing a beat, Mori says “Me too”.  Bill carries on with “Good luck” and moves on inside.

Now that was a great story and Nagato san had very cleverly worked that into his topic, which had nothing to do with that G7 episode.  We all laughed and felt good about Nagato san and his talk.  This was no accident.  He had calculated this as a way to relax his audience and win them over to his side. It worked like a charm.

My point is, we are all swimming through a daily storm tide of quotes, tidbits, curiosities and stories which we can purloin and insert into our presentations.  This will make us more memorable and spice up our talks. All we have to do is open our eyes, start looking for them, then reach out and nail them down for future insertion.

How To Liven Up A Speech You Have To Read

Watching a friend of mine deliver his speech to my Rotary Club reminded me of the perils of reading speeches.  In his case, he was giving the speech in Japanese and so he chose the route of linguistic perfection over audience engagement.  We do this in our own language too when the speech content is complex or of high sensitivity.  Politicians have learnt they usually get themselves into trouble when they are adlibbing, compared to when they are reading from a carefully prepared and fully vetted speech. 

Do I recommend reading the speech?  No, but sometimes the stakes are too high or the situation demands you read the whole thing. My Japanese is not perfect, but I prefer to engage my audience than lose them by having to look down to read the content.  Depending on the formality of the situation though, I might choose to read it.  How can we liven this process up though?

What could my friend do when he was reading his speech to make it more engaging for his audience. He could have departed from the text and just spoken directly to the audience, while maintaining full eye contact for some of the sentences.  Looking down at our speech means we have to break eye contact and this creates a barrier between us and the audience.  By having a few sections where we replace sentences in the text with bullet points, to which we can speak will give us that chance to make continuous eye contact with members of the audience.  His Japanese ability was sufficient for him to do that.  For most people, they will be operating in their native language anyway.

We can do a similar thing with slides.  We might show a picture, a graph or some key words and just talk to them, rather than read from the notes.  The visual aspect supports what we are saying, so we lessen the burden on our words to sell the message.  If we are doing it in a foreign language like my friend, we can have the perfect grammatical clarity needed up on screen to describe what we want to say and then just deliver the same key message in our own more natural if imperfect language.

He could also have used stories more in his speech.  Stories engage our audience and we can transport them to specific locations, seasons of the year or times of the day through telling our stories.  They key thing with stories is to tell something about locations or people with which the audience will be familiar.  I heard a great one the other day from the head of Japan Post Mr. Masatsugu Nagato.  He was speaking to the Economist Conference Network in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and doing so in English.  He told an amusing story about when previous Japanese Prime Minister Mori met US President Bill Clinton when japan was hosting a G7 meeting in Okinawa.  The point I want to make here is his audience were familiar with Mori, Bill and Okinawa.  We should do the same.  Try to get your audience seeing the scene in their mind’s eye.

Rhetorical questions are also great for getting engagement.  When we ask a question of our audience, we are forcing them to concentrate on what we are saying and think of the answer.  Depending on the occasion, sometimes it is hard to know if the speaker really expects an answer or not.  That is the ideal situation.  We want to create some tension in the room because that creates connectivity between the speaker and the listeners.  By throwing out questions we get everyone on the same wave length, at the same time and that builds our connection with our audience. We don’t need twenty of these, just a few will do the trick.  For example, in a twenty minute speech, probably one every five minutes or so would work well.  Remember, we need to step it up in our speech about every five minutes to keep everyone attentive.  This might be using questions, employing the slide deck or telling a story.

So we don’t have to become captives to the text and lose our engagement with our listeners.  These have been some simple ideas we can use to keep the talk interesting and engaging.  It doesn’t matter if you are speaking in a foreign language or your native tongue.  These ideas will work a treat.

The Importance of Analysing Your Own Presentation Performance

The presentation has come to a close and we are relieved it is all over.  We pack our stuff up and get back to work.  Back to the office now and the emails have been flooding in during our absence, there are meetings a plenty to join and tonnes of projects begging for our attention.  The memory of having done the presentation quickly fades and we find we have lost the opportunity to build on our experience.  We usually don’t get all that much frequency with our business presentations and so every shot we get is a great chance to grab lessons from it and improve.  But we don’t.

We don’t because it wasn’t factored into the planning at the start.  If it is an afterthought, it will get overcome by all the other pressing matters requiring our attention the moment we hit the door of the office.  So as part of the planning process we should include a review of what we did, compared to what we planned to do.  We need to gauge how it went and which parts we thought resonated more with the audience. 

When is the best time to do that?  Immediately the presentation is over.  Don’t organize your schedule so that you have to go into client or internal meetings straight after the presentation.  Head for a coffee shop, sit down, relax a bit and start making some notes.  If you are a high energy presenter like me, you will be drained at the end of the presentation anyway and a brief rest is a good idea.  I leave nothing on the table when I present, I try to put it all out there and give every ounce of energy and passion I possess.  It is exhausting.

So go back to the presentation in your mind. Were you able to get there early, check out the venue and meet audience members as they filed in, getting to know about their interest, why they came, gauging their level of expertise on the subject?  Did the MC quote from your carefully crafted introduction or did you have to fill in the missing bits yourself. How was the opening? Did it go as planned?  How was your speaking speed – did you speed up or were you able to keep it at an even, easy to follow pace?  Were you using voice modulation to keep the audience interested or was it all the same strength from beginning to end?

Were you consistently making six second eye contact with members of your audience, so you could connect with them, sell them on your key points and judge their reaction to what you were saying?  Were you able to use your gestures to emphasise your argument?  Were you able to keep the order of your key points after the opening?  If you were using a slide deck, were you dominating the screen or was it dominating you.

Were you controlling the proceedings well, marshaling the various stages of the presentation.   For example, did you go into your first close, receive the applause and then call for questions, nominating how many minutes there were for questions?  Were you remembering to paraphrase the questions, so that everyone could hear them. Did you control the final impression by adding your second close, so that the last thing the audience heard was what you wanted them to hear?  Did you come down off the podium and mix with your audience at the end to extend your personal brand?

Having done this checklist of how it was supposed to flow, then think about how it went.  Were people nodding to your points, were the questions hostile or more on point wanting more detail?  How many people stayed to talk with you?  How many compliments did you receive which were genuine as opposed to flattery?  How did you feel it went?

Now ask yourself, what did I do that was good?  Then after listing these up start asking yourself, how could I make this better for next time.  This will include general points which will be relevant for any topic and any occasion. Do not get into beating yourself up over what you perceived went wrong.  Keep the momentum going forward, keep it focused on the positive.

If you were able to record your talk, then certainly play it back and have a close listen to it.  If you were able to video it, even better. Seeing and hearing yourself is a great antidote to the paucity of presentations you may be able to give in a year.  These records help to keep you focused on improvement.

Don’t bother asking what people thought.  You will get a whole bunch of uninformed opinions from people who hardly ever give presentations.  If you want to get expert opinion, then invite an expert to attend and have them give you professional level advice.  The average punter will only give you critique and work on destroying your confidence.

This whole exercise will probably take about 40 minutes. Time enough to relax over a coffee or a tea and reflect on where you can improve.  Make sure you write it down and keep it as a record, which you can consult before your next presentation.  Keep doing this and you will definitely improve.

How To Speak To 5000 People Audiences

The chances of this happening and happening regularly are remote for most of us.  The happening regularly part is the key, because when you are dealing at this scale, you need to get practice to really master the big stage. Nevertheless, in case you find yourself in front of a very large audience, here are a few hints on how to adjust to the increased size of the event.

Get there early and go and sit in some of the most far flung locations.  It might be the last row at the back or the rear seats on the elevated third tier of the venue.  What you will notice, is that anyone on stage is quite small at that distance.  You realize you will seem like a peanut to audience members seated at the far extremes and so you need to “big up” your presentation to suit the tyranny of distance.

The stage area is usually quite long and wide in big venues, but you need to be investigating the front of the stage.  Often there is an orchestra pit or a defined space between the front row of seats and the stage itself.  You will be standing very close to the apron of the stage, so that you can be more easily seen by your audience.  The thing is to try not to fall off the stage when you are presenting.  That is why you need to check it out beforehand, so that you know how far is far enough forward.  You may laugh, but once you are into it and your eyes are searching for faces up on the third tier at the back, you are not looking down where you are walking anymore.  Often those stages are curved and not in a straight line and so it is easy to forget that and down you go.

Definitely go for the pin microphone, so that your hands will be left free for gestures.  These gestures will have to become much larger than anything you have been used to before.  Remember you are a peanut waving your arms around to those in the cheap seats at the back. This means go for double handed gestures as much as possible, to fill up more of the stage with your presence. 

Normally when we hold our hands out, palm up toward an audience in a sign that says “you can trust what I am saying”, the arms will be within the bounds of the sides of our body. On the big stage those hands will be almost drawing a straight line across your body so the hands are super widely spread.  If you are raising your hand to indicate something high, like a number, usually it would be slightly above head height.   Not this time.  You need to raise your hand as high as possible above your head to have any impact.

Don’t overdo it, but get your audience involved by asking them to raise their hands if they have had this or that experience.  Pick something which is fairly common, so as many hands will go up as possible.  This is using crowd dynamics and crowd psychology. When a huge number of people do that same thing, at the same time, it infects the entire audience with that energy and agreement.  You will also get a huge energy boost as their energy connects with you on stage. That is a serious high. Trust me, when any audience leans in toward you, it is electric and at scale.  What an incredible feeling. It is like a drug and you want more of it. I don’t know how rock stars calm down after having hours of that amount of monster energy directed at them.

The other thing is having your ki or chi marshaled for the task.  Ki or chi is the intrinsic energy we possess and it is most famously seen in martial arts like aikido and taichi.  When you are on stage, you have to try and push your energy, your ki, to the very back wall of the hall.  You have to mentally project your energy that distance.  Your voice helps with this task.  You have to be directing your voice all the way to the last rows of seats. I don’t mean yelling, because you are set up with a microphone and if you start yelling you will only distort the sound.  What it means is push your voice strength to the back walls.

Your eyes also come into play here.  You need to be breaking the audience up into a baseball diamond.  Left, center, right field, inner field and outer field. These six sectors have to be worked hard by your eye contact to be picking out individuals and looking straight at their faces.  Now if your eyesight isn’t up to the task, don’t worry.  Only you will know that the person you are directing your gaze to is a blurry outline in the crowd.  The act of looking straight into the eyes of audience members means that at a certain distance, the twenty people seated around that person, all believe it is them you are looking at.  In this way, you can engage with many more people, no matter how far away they are seated.

Normally I am not keen on having speakers wandering around the stage when presenting. You have seen this I am sure.  The speaker is nervous and they are going up and down, up and down, up and down, the whole time they are speaking, totally detracting and distracting from their key message. 

I want you to use the left, center and right sides of the stage.  However walk slowly to the extreme edges, stop, settle and talk to the audience on that side.  Walk back to the center and talk to those located in the center seating, then walk to the right and do the same for that side of the venue.  Keep repeating this walk and stop, settle process throughout your talk. For those in the front row, definitely don’t forget to look at them, because you are so close and can have the greatest impact with that group because they feel your presence most immediately.  Don’t fall off the stage unless you want to make it a really memorable speech.

Presentation Practice Frequency

The usual frequency for most people for giving formal presentations is once in a blue moon.  In other words, we don’t do so many in a year. This presents a problem, because as we know, repetition is key to learning and improvement.  If we were giving formal presentations 50 weeks a year, we would see remarkable improvements as we honed our craft.  In business though, this rarely presents itself as an opportunity.  We may be lucky to give two or three presentations in a 12 month period.  In this case, how can we improve our skills?

The obvious method is to proactively increase the frequency.  Instead of hanging around waiting for someone to invite you to speak, you need to get out there and beat the bushes for opportunities to present. There are many organizations who are constantly on the look out for speakers.  Rotary Clubs need speakers every week.  Chambers of Commerce need a constant flow of speakers as well.  There are innumerable interest groups who would love to have someone come and speak on an interesting and relevant topic.

This throws up the issue of what to speak about.  There will be a natural alignment between your own areas of experience, expertise and knowledge and popular demand, which will determine the types of subjects you will be able to speak upon.  If these areas are such that there is a common interest in this subject, you will find there will be groups who will be interested in having you speak.  The trick is to let them know you exist as a speaker.

This is where you need to be strategic.  Investigate what sorts of groups exist in your area who regularly feature speakers. Make a matrix between the subject areas they cover and your own range of interests and capabilities.  If there is a match, then contact them and ask if they are looking for future speakers.  The person tasked with finding speakers will be very happy to hear from you, because they have a difficult job finding good speakers.

If you are an unknown quantity, then there may be some hesitancy about taking a punt on you as their designated speaker.  A simple way to demonstrate your ability is to do speeches on relevant subjects, video them and out them up on YouTube and your website.  You don’t need a live audience for these speeches and it is quite sufficient enough for people to see if you have the goods or not, when they are considering you as their potential speaker.  The videos don’t have to be “War and Peace” either.  Short videos will suffice to demonstrate your expertise.

Once you get a chance to do a formal presentation, to a live audience, make sure you get it on video. The audience laughing at some humour during the speech, applauding, asking questions, etc., all adds to the atmosphere and makes the video a type of show reel for yourself, to demonstrate your goods.  You can point the event organizers to the videos, to give them an idea of your ability. Remember your main competition are the totally hopeless and those devoid of any clue whatsoever about public speaking to business audiences.

When the speech is set, then use your social media to blast out information about the speech.  The number of people who see the posting and the number who can turn up are going to be vastly different.  Don’t worry, the fact that many people see you are a public speaker, talking on these various subjects, will alert people to the fact that they can ask you to speak for them. 

After the speech you post the video to a link to your website so that people can see you in action. If you have the technical capability, you can turn a 30 minute speech into 5 or 6 videos through editing of the original.   A speech has a number of points you cover and each of these can be lifted out into a separate video. 

So you finish up with the complete speech and then a video for each of the sections of the speech. Again blast all of these out on social media and on to your website for maximum exposure.  With all of this content floating around you start to become a known face and people will start contacting you.  We get into a virtuous cycle here where success breeds success. Consequently, our frequency of practice goes right up and we solidify our learnings and improvements.  In short order, we will be joining the ranks of those in the most professional speaker groups. This is really great for personal and company brands and that is what we want.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How To Rehearse Your Presentation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

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

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

Rhetorical Questions When Presenting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

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

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

Giving Presentations: It Is Harder Than It Looks Folks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve Got My Eye On You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outstanding Japanese Presenters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Powerpoint Free Presentations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

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

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

How To Select Data For Presentations In Business In Japan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

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

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

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

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.