Presenting online is difficult.  Presenting in person is difficult. The new hybrid version is a combination of the worst of both online and in-person worlds for the presenter.  We teach presentation skills and one of the big breakthroughs for our class participants is the ability to get engagement with their audience.  In the online world of presenting this is almost impossible.  You become this tiny talking head, trapped in a tiny box on screen, every time you are using slides.  If there are no slides it gets better.  It also gets better if you stop the sharing function as you get a little more screen real estate. The trouble is this feature is clunky every time you want to go back to using the slides again and the interchanges are not very elegant. If you can have the speaker view only function working, then you get a lot of screen ratio focused on the speaker and that is good.  Usually though, we are using slides and so it is back to the tiny box for all of us on-screen.

The real dilemma with hybrid is where some members of the audience are sitting there right in front of you and the rest are scattered to the four winds, coming in via the hosting platform, be that Zoom or Teams or Webex or whatever.  There are issues with the camera angles, the camera zoom-in function and especially with the audio quality.  If the camera is mounted at the back of the room, then the audience on-line gets a wide shot of those in the room, as well as the speaker up at the front of the room. In this case, we are very remote from the people watching from home. This insignificance factor is intensified by the fact we are highly diminished on screen, stuck in that tiny little box and being presented at a distance to our audience.  Our facial expression power is greatly reduced and even our gestures are not having much impact, because they seem so small when on screen. 

I was giving a talk recently using the hybrid system and I realised this particular set up was for people who don't know how to present and actually favoured those who like to lecture.  By that I mean the speaker is there to convey information and isn’t thinking how to engage the audience.  The camera was mounted on a screen to my right, up high.  There was a distance between that camera and my face and if I moved toward my audience in the room, I found I was tracking away from the camera set up for those at home.  Don’t forget, for those viewing from home, I was doing all this while trapped in that tiny box on screen, because I was using slides.   

The set up meant I couldn’t move much from the spot and that spot was set behind a podium.  Now I don’t recommend moving around too much when speaking because it can be distracting from the message. However, being able to use your full body language is a powerful tool we don’t want to negate if we can avoid it and getting out from behind the podium is preferred.  In this case that wasn’t possible, so the audience in the room wasn’t getting full access to me as the speaker.

The easy out is to ignore the needs of the audience coming in online and just present to those in the room. For those at home the video presentation is like that for a third party. They are there watching remotely and there is zero connection and engagement with the person on screen.  If we go the other way, then we just engage those at home and don’t worry about those in the room.  That isn’t a very natural or an easy thing for a speaker to do, when all of these faces are sitting there and staring up at you in the room.

We have to accept that so far, we cannot easily get this to work perfectly when using two competing mediums.  Having said that, we can try and improve on it being a disaster by a couple of tweaks.  If the camera is close to us, then regularly switching our attention from those in the room, to those at home is possible.  We just look straight into the camera and we can speak directly to this segment of the audience.  We can make our point to this audience and then switch back to those in the room and make our next point.  The key is to look at the camera and not the screen.  We just treat the on-line camera as another member of the in-room audience.

Eye height is ideal for the camera mounting, so adjust it if you can, to get that perspective.  Make sure the audio quality is well served by having a good microphone set up, so that people online can hear you.  If the in-room audience is under 30 people, then you can get away with not needing a separate microphone for them. 

The better solution requires some preparation.  Have a monitor at the back so the speaker can see the remote audience and also themselves, with everyone equally trapped in their little boxes on-line.  The slide deck is also being shown through Zoom etc., so that the remote audience can see what is going on, while the live audience has a screen in the room they can see. Have the speaker fitted with a pin mic, so that they can move and not be trapped behind a podium or a desk. 

Have three video cameras set up.  One zoomed in on the speaker for a tight shot and one for a wider, more full body shot.  Have another set up at the front of the room to capture the shot of the audience. This requires a connection to a control box, where the camera angles can be switched easily by a controller.  The speaker now only has to engage the live audience. The camera angles are set up from the in-room audience perspective so that those at home get the same sense of the presentation as those present.  They are getting the video of the speech live and all the speaker has to do is engage by looking straight at the cameras while giving the speech, to help the remote audience feel included.  We spend six seconds each time looking at our live audience members and we just do the same with the two cameras facing us, as if they were also audience members.

The setup I had for my recent talk was not satisfactory and I felt both the remote and in-person audiences had been cheated.  I also felt my personal brand had been tarnished by this less than satisfactory experience.  When we are invited to speak we have little control over how the hosts arrange the venue and the equipment.  One of my take aways for next time was to engage the hosts more in depth on how they are going to handle this hybrid medium presentation.  If they are not going to do it in a way which builds, or at least maintains, my professional brand, then I would decline the offer to speak.  I might offer to give two talks - one for those in the room and do a separate one for those at home.  That isn’t always possible, but as the speaker, tasting the bitter ash residue of a failed, half-baked presentation isn’t great either.

Major money has been spent for decades by the Japanese Government, to improve the level of English in Japan and you would have to say with fairly limited success.  Japan faces a declining population and the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research estimates Japan’s population will decline by 21% to only 100 million by 2049.  At the same time Japanese companies are looking outside to grow their businesses.  This is good for Japan, except that when you become international, you need to deal in English.  Where are these English speakers going to come from?

Prior to the Lehman Shock there were over 80,000 Japanese students travelling abroad to study.  After the Lehman shock this number dropped down to 50,000 a year and has crawled back up to around 60,000. Lately, seventy per cent of those studying abroad only stayed for one month, which makes you wonder what they picked up in that short period.

Another worrying thing is that young Japanese are not interested in going abroad to study.  Over 60% of High School students said they would rather stay in Japan and over 50% of young people in general, said the same thing.  So where are the needed English speakers going to come from?

The answer is from inside our companies.  Larger companies will send their Japanese staff abroad to work and in the process they improve their international understanding and their language skills.  In the past, these returnees have been an alien force for companies, because they come back with a different mindset and the companies haven’t been flexible enough about integrating them into the mother ship.  This is getting better and where it hasn’t, these valuable employees jump ship to a better environment, that is to say our firms, where their talents, particularly language ability, can be fully utilised.

The general acceptance of mid-career hires has improved a lot in Japan too and we can all thank the 1999 collapse of Yamaichi securities for that. A lot of loyal, lifetime employees were thrown out on the street and were picked up by other companies, reducing the stigma attached to mid-career hires.  The Lehman Shock in 2008, the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor meltdown in 2011 and the pandemic since 2020 have all continued this trend of people losing their jobs through no fault of their own. Mid-career hiring has continued to be more accepted as a function of the modern world and this gives all of us better access to English speakers moving companies.

English language lessons are often prevalent inside organisations, as they work to help their staff do better in communicating with the outside world and with staff in Japan from overseas.  The problem for some of them though is no amount of English language lessons will convince them to speak up in meetings or to volunteer to present in English.  This is where they need additional help. 

When forced to present in English, the reflex action is to put all the text up on the screen, so that they can read it to their audience.  If that isn’t possible, then they print it all out and read it, word for word, while diligently looking down at the script, ignoring the audience altogether. “Painful” is the main word to describe this experience for those on the receiving end.  Why are they destroying their presentations in this way? 

The simple answer is perfectionism, driven by fear.  This is a country of no defects, no mistakes and no errors.  Making a mistake while speaking in English therefore is not possible, the loss of face unimaginable, so all manner of artifices have to be employed to avoid this inadequacy.  For the foreigners listening to mistakes made in English by Japanese speakers, this is usually nothing to worry about.  We are coming from multi-cultural societies and are used to non-native speakers making pronunciation errors and grammatical mistakes.  We just mentally rearrange what they said into the correct alignment and answer their questions or make our contribution to whatever they said, without missing a beat.  Basically, we are not demanding linguistic purity or perfection – this need is all in the heads of the Japanese when speaking English. 

We must help them by giving them the freedom to make mistakes, to free them from the chains of grammar, to overlook the butchering of certain words when spoken out loud.  We need to encourage them to concentrate on communication and not language. 

What I mean by that is putting their passion behind what they say.  To speak a little louder than normal, in order to sound more confident, which helps with the credibility of what is being said. To employ pauses to moderate their speaking speed, in case they get nervous and start prattling along.  To use the slide as a prompt and speak to the point with the English they have, rather than losing their audience by reading off the screen or script.  To try and engage their audience by making eye contact for at least six seconds and to try and make eye contact with as many in the audience as possible during the course of their talk.  In this way they can establish the feeling of a personal connection between speaker and listener which is completely independent of language capability.  To employ gestures to strengthen the point they are making and not to feel self-conscious about doing so.

We have limited access to those Japanese who have lived abroad and so have to make the most of those we have managed to attract into our companies.  Whatever level of English they have has to be worked on beyond English language classes, to enable them to present in a professional manner.  If this support is there, then they will become more comfortable dealing with foreign colleagues and speaking in English.  They will become fully functioning members of the team and able to work across borders and language barriers.

How could we lose track of buyers?  Unfortunately it is very easy.  That nice person we have been dealing with inside the company, the one with whom we have built a solid relationship, where the trust is brimming and the bonhomie is pumping, is transferred to another section or they leave the company for another job.  Suddenly we are left with nothing.  If it is an internal transfer, we may find there is a new person who decides they will put their own stamp on things. They bring in their own suppliers who are their favourites.  They have a competing established relationship or maybe they don’t like the cut of our jib.  If a new person is being hired in to replace the incumbent, then there will be a break in the traffic for a couple of months and before you know it, things have begun to drift and we have trouble making the connection with the new person. 

Maybe there is a global pandemic and everything shuts down for a couple of years.  The company has stopped spending on what we offer and when we go back to rekindle the relationship quite a lot has changed.  The people may be gone, the budgets may be gone, the strategy may be new and different.  Basically, we have to start again.  We know the history with the client, but often the new people we are dealing with have no idea who we are and we are basically doing a cold call to this company.  Some are working in the office and some are still at home.  Getting hold of people puts us in quandary. 

That iron wall of disinterest on the part of those answering the phone is there in all its confronting glory.  In Japan, if you don’t know the actual name of the person, you are almost guaranteed to never get through to the function you need to be speaking with.  “We will take a message and let them know” in my experience never translates into getting a call back, no matter how many times you call.  The junior person answering the phone fully believes their duty is to keep you as far away from their company as possible and they are incredibly diligent in that endeavour. If you ask them the name of the person performing that functional role they won’t tell you, as if this information was a major corporate secret and you are an industrial spy.

I remember there was a change of President in an international luxury firm here we had been dealing with and I tried to speak with the new President. Unfortunately, I didn’t know the name of the replacement and no matter how many times I called, the young woman answering the phone would block me and was most unhelpful.  Frustrating doesn’t even begin to describe the feeling.  I never did meet the new President 

What can we do?  If there is going to be an internal transfer, these usually take place every April in Japan, as that is the start of the new financial year.  It is a good practice to check with our champion that they are not getting transferred to a new section and we shouldn’t assume they will be staying put.  Every year we should get it into our calendar to check in on any likely staff movements which might effect them. 

If they flag a move, then we need to ask them to sprinkle the sacred water on our brow and anoint us into the bosom of their colleague who is taking over.  Being introduced by our champion is very powerful because it helps us to overcome any likelihood their replacement may go crazy and introduce our competitor.  There is an implicit obligation to honour what their predecessor was doing, otherwise it looks like an oblique criticism of their work.  When we meet the new person we have to start again and build the trust.  What personality style are they?  Highly analytical, time is money, have a cup of tea together or a big picture person?  What communication stye do they prefer?  We need to rejig everything. 

If there is a new person being recruited from outside then the whole effort becomes more difficult.  Our existing champion has left the building, so they have no influence any more on what happens.  How will we know when they have recruited the new person?  This is not very easy because when we call, we get that junior person who is highly motivated to tell us absolutely nothing about what is going inside the firm.  We can try and ask our champion to nominate someone in the same section or in a related section, who will take our call and who will share the name of the new person. 

Another tack is to ask the junior person who usually answers the phone to help us meet the new person.  We can explain that Suzuki san is leaving and we know that it will take a few months for the replacement to arrive and that we would like to call them every now and then and get an update, so that we can meet the new person.  Given we have a relationship with Suzuki san, there is a super slim chance they will agree to help us.

Sometimes our champion is the President of the organisation. As we know, corporate life can be brutal and suddenly your President champion is out of the organisation.  This has happened to me a couple of times recently. One was through a merger and the conquering acquirer ditched my guy, to put in their own guy.  In another case, I happened to see a LinkedIn post where a mutual friend was congratulating my champion on his new venture.  New venture?  What new venture?  I discovered he had quit the company and was now doing his own thing.  That happened very fast.  A third President, who had been very, very effective in his role and a great client, was suddenly gone.  I still don’t know why, but my champion has been pushed out. We need to keep a close eye on our champions!

All of this presupposes we are well organised.  We need to keep checking on the internal transfer plans for our champion and also to take action immediately we know they are leaving to be able to track the arrival of their replacement and find out the new name.  We need to keep up a regular contact with our President champion, because there are no guarantees of corporate loyalty or longevity anymore. None of this guarantees anything, but it is a lot better than trying to batter down the iron wall keeping us out.  Sales is hard anywhere but Japan just adds that patina of difficulty which makes everything much harder here.  Yes, it should be better, it should be different but it isn't. We have to adapt and be both agile and nimble.

I have a couple of very good books here at home on how to create your visuals for the slide deck.  The layout clearly does make a big difference to the quality of the message.  If you ever doubt this, take a look at most Japanese business presentations.  The slide will usually be amazingly overcrowded and dense to a degree you cannot comprehend in a traditional culture, which has embraced zen simplicity at its highest levels.  Four or five slides worth of content will be crammed on to one slide and the messages feel like they snapping at each other for our attention, like small dogs nipping at your heels. 

Occasionally, here in Japan, you do see a professional job on the visual side of the presentation.  In my experience, this is usually the case of a foreigner giving their presentation.  The counterpoint from some Japanese to this exemplary effort is to tell me that okay for foreigners but “we Japanese have own way” of doing presentations.  This nationalistic anachronism is basically crap and what I see as a pathetic exercise in justifying the unjustifiable. 

“Whoa Greg! Mate, you are going a bit hard there on the Japanese aren’t you?”.  Trust me after living here for 38 years and having seen hundreds of Japanese presentations in business, I feel my scepticism is warranted.  Message clarity is message clarity. No amount of nationalistic posturing and excuse making will overcome the basic fact that you cannot have four different fonts and five colours on a massively overcrowded screen and expect that your principal message will be getting through. You might think I am kidding about multi-font and multi-colour slides, but I am merely capturing what we see here from some Japanese business presenters.

Okay, Japanese presenters are not the only ones who do crazy stuff on screen and I have certainly coached Western executives to change the way they present, to make it more clear and powerful. The point is what we put up on screen should be clear and easy to digest. I believe if the audience cannot get the key message on screen in two seconds, then the content is too complex and needs to be simplified.  This has always been my motto. Today, thanks to social media, the attention span of people has radically shortened and the time on screen equation has gotten even tighter, than say ten years ago.  For all of us, the pressure is really on to improve our communication ability, regardless of nationality

Another trap with visuals is making them too good.  That sounds counter-intuitive I know and there are plenty of authors doing well by teaching us how to pimp our slides.  What I mean is we can suffer the opposite problem of the dismal slide effort and have something that is so attractive, it cuts us out of the limelight.  Never forget, our face rather than the screen is the most valuable real estate during a presentation.

Using our facial expression is one of the most effective tools we have.  Think back to stage plays you have seen where the character is using their face to communicate an emotion or a thought on a bare stage with a simple set.  Their face can transmit so many ideas, emotions and thoughts and do it in nano seconds.  A quizzical look, scowl, grin, sneer, smile, puzzlement, triumph, loss are all facial expressions at our disposal as speakers, to be matched with our words and then add on our gestures to create a powerhouse of communication.

Presenting gets a bit harder when the venue is quite big and there are two enormous screens up high behind us, competing with us.  The sheer size of the images dwarfs us on stage and we shrink in importance.  If we are ever in that situation, then we have to really work hard to counter the competition we are getting from the visuals. We need the audience to stay with us.  We don't want them ignoring us because they are captivated by visuals which are overpowering the speaker.

 In these situations, we have to amp up our voice and gestures to keep the audience with us.  By using pauses, we can tap into pattern interrupt psychology, to force the listeners to refocus on us and what we are saying.  When the visuals are super attractive, we can easily become some annoying white noise going on in the background, while the audience is fascinated by the visual images being presented.  When we stop speaking, the listeners get their fill of the visual image and are then looking for the next round of stimulation. That stimulation has to be focused on what we are saying. 

We should definitely use this if we are playing video during the presentation.  Most video is off the mark anyway, being produced by the PR department to fit across a general need, rather than the specific needs of the topic we are speaking on.  Sometimes the visuals can be very attractive in the video however and the audience can get engrossed by the action and images.  The danger is we are the next item and we are boring, nowhere near as attractive as the models in the video and a bit dull visually compared to what has just been presented.

This is why as the speaker we should inject a longish pause after the video, rather than just carrying straight on.  By doing this we create some space and distance between what they saw on screen and they have some time to adjust to us back in the room.  They are also anticipating what we will say next, because we haven’t started speaking immediately and there is a slightly disconcerting pause in place.  Fifteen seconds is a long pause and it will be a very valuable fifteen seconds to get the audience to forget what they just saw and get them back concentrating on us.

“Never let the visuals dominate your presentation” should be the basic rule.  They are a slave to our will and a tool at our disposal and that is all they are.  Let’s keep the power equation in our favour and always remain the centrepiece of the presentation.  Our face, gestures and voice are more than up to the task, if we know what we are doing.

 The raconteur is admired and the reason is because they are brimming with interesting stories, incidents, vignettes and amusing reflections.  We don’t need to be a gold medal winning raconteur to be a presenter, but we do need to borrow from their catalogue and start building up stories.  I was listening to an interview with a rakugo professional. They make their living telling stories.  They do this while sitting stationary on a big cushion dressed in kimono, employ only a fan as a prop and use their facial expressions, eye power, voice modulation, body language and delivery timing to captivate their audience.  We have many fewer restrictions in what we are doing when presenting, but there is much to learn here.

They start by copying the stories of their master and then they bring their own flavour to the story once they have mastered it.  We can do the same.  When we read a biography of a famous person, we will find there are many interesting turning points, eureka moments and key incidents in their story, which we can use in our presentations as examples.  The big difference is we have probably read these before, but without the mindset to capture them, note them down where they can be found and then to employ them. 

Once we decide that we are going to employ more stories to make our points, we start to read and search with a different purpose.  Generally, there are only a few topics on which we will give a public speech and so there is a defined world in which we can search for stories.  If we think we have to read everything available and search for stories across a broad front, we will give up, because the task is overwhelming.  We select the areas we will cover and then we think about where can we find stories on these topics. 

Another way is to think about people who will resonate with the audience.  If you think Steve Jobs is a likely example who people will pay attention to, then we search out what he had to say or what people have said about him and try and find relevant stories and examples we can use. There is no shortage of famous people we can draw upon, we just have to make simple list and then start.

There are plenty of speeches available on TED talks and on YouTube or on podcasts where we can locate content we can use.  We can search from the content point of view or from the individual whom we think will have something worthwhile to say.  There are thousands of blogs, articles and books on the subject we have chosen.  The key is to absorb them with a viewpoint that we are looking for content we can use, rather than just absorbing the content for its own sake.  We can do both of course and we should be doing both.

In our communities, there are bound to be people giving talks.  We should attend these and see if they have any interesting examples or stories we can use.  There is no shame in attributing the stories to the person you heard it from – no one marks you down for doing that because all they care about is do they get value from the story.  Ripping off other people’s stories and then manufacturing them as if they are your own cases is a very, very bad idea.  Plagiarism of any variety shouts that you are an intellectual lightweight and pathetic thief.  This is not a reputation building plus, so don’t steal. 

Remember, our reputation in the business world is all we have really.  Lose that and life in business gets very hard, as no one will trust you or want to work with you.  If you are so duplicitous as to steal someone’s story material, then why would we see you as a reliable business partner?  Well we won’t and you don’t have to do this anyway because there are tons of stories available.  We will have our own home grown experiences and there will be plenty of these to draw on.  What we usually lack is the ability to capture what happened and use it.  Often things happen and we just keep moving forward and don’t capture the detail so that we can use it later.  Or if we do capture it, we can never find where we put it.

This requires a good record keeping system, with a robust filing and recall mechanism and also the discipline to look for good stories to capture in the first place.  It means we have to be well organised.  We don’t exactly know which story we will need or just when, but if we can locate what we need, when we need it, then we are good to go. To get to that stage isn’t that easy, but today there are digital records we can access from anywhere.  I use Evernote on my phone to capture items I think will be useful for later.  I can re-type it or photograph it, so the process becomes fast. I can download this content and move it around to file it, categorise it and find it later.  I am sure there are many other apps for this purpose and that is the beauty of this age - we have few excuses for not being able to capture useful information.

How many stories do we need?  Not that many because we don't get that many chances to give a public talk.  As I mentioned the speech topics will probably be limited.  When you combine few speaking opportunities with a limited range of topics, then the number of stories required becomes relatively small in number.  If you said I need ten stories, that would be relatively easy to assemble over the period of a year.  If you said one hundred, then that thought will probably have you zooming straight to the couch to lie down for a while and recuperate.  Start small and capture them one on one and before you know it, you will be surprised with how many useful pieces you have assembled.

Don’t Forget To Pause When Presenting

 Nervousness drives speed when we are speaking.  Without even realising it, the adrenaline pumping through our veins is speeding everything up.  Once we get on a roll, it is hard to get off that speeding, runaway train.  The speed may not always be driven by nerves though.  Sometimes expertise can be our downfall. I was listening to a speaker being interviewed on a podcast and I was vaguely wondering why I was having trouble understanding what she was saying.  It slowly dawned on me that she spoke for long passages, quite quickly, injected no pauses into her flow and she also had an accent when she spoke in English.  That combo was a message killer.  She was quite expert in her field, so she certainly had a lot to say and was confident to say it. 

The content wasn’t satisfying though.  Why was that?  She was making me work too hard to get her message.  She had “message giver” consciousness but she didn’t have any sense of the “message receiver” side of the equation. The podcast host just let her ramble on and that didn’t help either.  If he was a bit more experienced, he would have realised she needed to speak in segments, rather than in one long monologue. He could have helped her to package up her message into more bite sized pieces.  Even without speaking fast and having no pauses, her message was going to be hard to grasp anyway, because she was providing a lot of content.  This massive content hits us like continuous waves and each successive wave wipes out what came before it, so it is hard to internalise.

From this perspective, we realise that having a lot to say and a lot of knowledge doesn’t mean anything in terms of message delivery, unless we know what we are doing.  So whether it is nerves or knowledge, driving the problem, we need to give the audience the chance to chew a bit on what we just said.  This is where the pause comes in.  Once what we have said has sunk in, they are ready for the next section.

If we are to stop the runaway train, we have to inject some silence into the proceedings.  This presumes we notice what is going on.  I doubt our speaker on the podcast had any clue on how she was coming across.  She was powering away, ignorant of whether the way she was delivering the talk was effective or not.  Unless she recognises herself in this podcast of mine, she is probably still clueless and is likely to remain that way.

This is a big danger, because we can spend our whole career or big chunks of it doing things the wrong way.   Most people around us are equally untrained, so who is there to give us the necessary feedback to be able to adjust and fix the issue?  Usually there is no one around, so off we go, year after year, repeating the same fault. 

It doesn't matter whether we are speaking, answering questions on a panel or in a podcast, we have to be in control of the delivery.  We need to break our talk up into small packages for delivery and we need some “white space” between them.  The pauses are usually not overly dramatic and long.  A five second pause sounds entirely normal and unremarkable.  Ten seconds or more however and the audience wonders what is going on.  Have we forgotten what we want to say or are we lost in our flow, is there something wrong?

On occasion, we may use that doubt and employ a long pause for dramatic effect.   

If we feel we are losing the attention of or concentration from our audience and we see they are getting distracted, we need to get them back to listening to us.  A longer pause has the effect of a pattern interrupt and those who have tuned us out, thinking about something else, become puzzled by the change.  This pattern interrupt forces them to come back to us to find out what is going on.  Or we may use the longer pause to let a rhetorical question hang in the air for longer than normal.  This creates some tension in the room because there is now a question as to whether we the audience, have to come up with the answer or whether the speaker is going to answer that question.  This tension is very useful for keeping the audience’s attention focused on our talk.

Soundbites, followed by pauses, may be useful for media interviews, but they don’t work well in speeches.  We need to make sure we have enough substance to our points, to back up any statements we may be making.  So the balance between speaking and non-speaking periods needs to be considered.  We can inject short pauses for audience comprehension purposes and still keep the flow going.

Don’t forget to pause when you are delivering your talk.  If you do, then you can be much more confident that the message you want to get across will be percolating away nicely in the brains of the audience.

“Man, it feels hot in here.  My throat is parched.  My hands are sweating and butterflies have taken over my stomach”.  These are some typical symptoms of nervousness about getting up in front of hundreds of sceptical, beady eyed people looking up and boring a hole into us as the speaker at the event.  We are concerned about whether what we are going to say is going to be well received or not.  Our voice may waver a bit when we first start because of that nervousness and now we feel even added pressure, because this isn’t going so well.

What we are doing is digging a hole for ourselves to bury this speech, as an example of one of the dismal efforts by speakers who have little idea of what they are doing.  The focus is on us.  I saw this speaker from the USA, at a Chamber of Commerce event just have a meltdown because she was so nervous.  Tall, well-coiffed, suited and booted, she looked the money.  She was using slides and she started well.  However, it soon became obvious that she had tried to memorise what she wanted to say, as she went through the slides.  

Memorisation puts enormous additional pressure on the speaker, in fact, way too much pressure and sure enough she cracked.  Suddenly she announced, “I need to take a breath”.  Okay, we forgave her that one.  But two minutes later she stopped again for another breath.  Her credibility along with her message, just sailed out the window.

The whole affair was her focused on her.  This is the issue with nervousness – we are the focus and not the audience.  So many conversations are going on in our head, all centered on ourselves and what we are doing and how we are doing it.  This is natural and nothing unusual.  The point is to get beyond that self-focus.  How do we do that?

A good starting point is to not try and memorise what you are going to say.  Our American lady could have just spoken to the slides.  You have to know your material, so this isn’t a big demand really.  You know what you need to say, so just say it as each slide comes up.  

The other key is rehearsal.  She was giving this talk for the first time.  She was practising on us, the audience and that is an extremely bad idea.  We don’t rehearse because we have sucked up all the preparation time on getting the slides together.  If she had rehearsed, she would have been more comfortable with the content for each slide and she could have switched the focus from herself to the audience.

The other key point is only we know what we are going to say.  If we depart from our rehearsal content regarding comments on a certain slide, only we know that.  If we carry on regardless, no one will notice and they will just accept this is what we wanted to say.  Telling the audience “I need to take a breath”  is an admission of defeat, lack of preparation and the self-induced collapse of professionalism.  

I was giving a closing talk at the end of a convention and even though I had practiced this talk fifteen times, I still had trouble.  For some unknown reason, in the moment of delivery I decided to go to point four and skipped point three.  Now I kicked myself and had a short internal conversation, “you idiot, you skipped three”.  I didn’t declare this to the audience. I just placed point three after point four and charged on as if it was all part of the grand plan and there was nothing amiss, nothing to see here.  Only I knew I had mixed up the order and that is the important part.  If things awry, keep it to yourself, because there is a microscopically slim chance the audience will ever notice.

Once we can get over our self-focus, we can really start working on our audience.  We bring the big three to bear in them – our voice, eyes and gestures.  Voice modulation keeps people with us. It also allows us to select certain key words for more emphasis, by either adding or subtracting volume – both work.  A secret whisper is just as effective as a stentorian outburst.

When we add to the voice with our eye contact with members of the audience, that makes the message so much more individual and powerful. I don’t mean trying to take in the whole audience at one time with eye contact.  I mean to zoom in on one person at a time, for about six seconds.  They idea is to use both of our eyes to focus on just one point of concentration and that is only one of the eyes of that audience member.  If we keep this single gaze for too long, the pressure is too great, so after around six seconds we need to move our eye contact to another audience member. Here is a funny thing.  In a big crowd, the twenty people down the back sitting around that one person we have selected, will all feel we are talking directly to them.

So we are using our voice and eye contact for bolstering our message and then we add in gestures.  We don’t point our finger at people, as that is too aggressive and seems almost accusatory.  We open the hand up and turn the palm upward, as we indicate to that person sitting there in the audience quietly minding their own business.  Why palm up?  This is an indicator from prehistoric days of “I come bearing no hidden weapons. I come in peace and you can relax”. When we hit them with voice, eye contact and a gesture like this we have their undivided attention for our message.

We have moved the focus off ourselves and how nervous we are feeling, to actively engage with the whole audience – one person at a time.  We transport ourselves from a focus on “me” to “you” and we will be so much more effective as a communicator when we make that transition.

What do we bring to our presentations?  Usually we have two things – information and a point of view.  For a lot of presentations, the information element becomes a data dump.  This is very boring and tedious for the most part.  The issue should always be “okay, what does this information mean and what does it mean for the audience?”.  We should always try and break numbers down to word pictures because once we get into big numbers the level of abstraction goes through the roof.  For example, for you, what exactly is a billion or a trillion of anything?  It is very hard to understand that many zeros.  This requires some level of interpretation and once we get into interpretation, we get into debate.

Having a point of view is the other pillar of talks.  We want our audience to do something, think something or feel something.  We believe something to be true and we want to alert our audience to this valuable morsel of wisdom.  As soon as we start venturing down this path, we trigger a degree of debate in the minds of the listeners.  Their experience may be different or missing.  They may even have different information, data or “alternate facts”, the latter otherwise known as errors and falsehoods. 

Whether we are pouring on the data and then adding an interpretation or elucidating our point of view, there is a good chance that when we get to the Q&A component of the talk, we will flag some opposition to what we have said.  I am often surprised, listening to the Q&A for my own talks or those for others, how often the questioner has missed the point or misinterpreted what was just said by the speaker.  Obviously if they have misunderstood what we are saying we have to correct them.  This is where we can bridge into argument with some members of our audience.  How should we approach this? 

If you are strong in your advice and opinion and then just roll over at the first whiff of opposition to what you say, the listeners conclude you are a flake and don’t believe what you are promulgating.  So you cannot ignore or agree with what was said, if it contradicts your line of argument.  You have to stand your ground and back up your assertions.  The problem becomes where is the line between an assertion and an attack on the questioner. 

There are two levels here.  What we say and how we say it.  The worst outcome is when we become spontaneous and engage our mouth, before we turn on the brain completely.  Blurting out a response, especially an emotional response, to someone questioning what we have said is bound to end in a trainwreck of our reputation.  This is easier than you think.  You are isolated, standing on stage and everyone is looking at you and you hear the sound of that incoming heat seeking missile aimed at you and what you have said.  We can take the comments personally and feel we have defend our good name and off we go on the counterattack.  This is definitely one approach to avoid. 

Instead, we should use a trigger in the form of a cushion, to break the mouth-brain cycle and reverse the order.  A cushion is an anodyne statement which will not prove or disprove what they said and being rather neutral, won’t inflame the situation.  An example would be, “That is a point we should explore a bit further”.  In the few seconds we take to make that statement we switch gears to engage the brain about how best to answer the question/attack from the listener.  A considered answer is always the preferred methodology for speakers and sometimes we just need to buy some time to move from our emotional state to a more logical construct.

Now we are better armed to answer the point.  The key is to not debate them.  We do not want the proceedings to derail into a dialogue between the speaker and one member of the audience and allow everyone else to leap for their phones, during this boring, self-indulgent interlude in the talk.  There are other people waiting with their own questions and we have a hard stop for the talk. We must keep within that time frame or we risk upsetting everyone in the audience, if we make them late by going over our allotted time.  They don’t blame the questioner – they blame us.

We should answer their question or complaint to the best of our ability and then seamlessly and velvet like, glide into the next question by saying, “who has the next question?”.  In my view, we should never ask the person with an opposing opinion, “Does that answer your question?”.  Some people who teach presentations skills disagree and believe we should take this high road to show how balanced we are.  I wonder how many public talks they have given, rather than just teaching presentations skills? In my experience, all you are doing is opening a can of worms and the debate rapidly spins out of control into an argument.  

If we have a questioner with an agenda, they won’t let go so easily and may try to chime in before we move to another question.  They will demand we debate them on their enquiry.  This is bad form, cringe worthy and drives up the tension gauge in the room, but that doesn’t stop some people.  This is when we hit them with “Thank you.  I see you are passionate about this topic and in order to give others a chance to ask their questions, shall we continue this discussion together after the talk?  I am happy to stay on after the event has finished”.  They have nowhere to go with this clever volley return.

We should back up what we are saying and try to defend our point of view, but not let the presentation slip into a slugfest of contrasting opinions.  We are the speaker, so it is up to us to control the flow and the architecture of the talk.  Audience members are under no such restrictions and can do whatever they like.  We can debate the point, but we should always avoid lapsing into argument.  This is the sign of the amateur when presenting, because they don’t know how to control the street fight, which can be thinly disguised as the Q&A.

Normally a talk for a business audience will be around 40 minutes long.  That seems a lot until you start putting the talk together and you always feel you don’t have enough time to include all of the cool information and stories you have at your disposal.  The absolutely wrong way to start is to harvest slides from previous presentations and then start cobbling together all of the visual pieces and make that the talk.  Why?  The format for a presentation has various cadences and we need to master each stage.  That requires planning and rehearsal.  I would guess 99% of business talks are given once - on that day, to that live audience.  What that means is that the talk wasn’t refined through rehearsal to make it sparkle and for it to fit perfectly into the time allowed.  Businesspeople buy bespoke clothing and shoes, because they want these items to fit perfectly and we should apply the same logic to making our talk fit perfectly for our audience. 

The start and end are two specific cadences with clear purposes and so are easy to understand.  ADD or Attention Deficit Disorder is now a global pandemic infecting all of our business audiences.  That is why the opening has to break through that attention deficit problem and grab everyone’s attention.  The process starts from the moment we arrive before the audience, to check all the tech is working and to start engaging with the listeners as they enter the room. We want to build a personal connection, which will make it more likely they will actually pay attention to us when we start.   

It also continues the moment we are being introduced.  Often there is a lunch before our talk and we are placed on the table with all of the big shots.  I don’t recommend getting up from the table and walking to the stage.  As soon as the MC begins our introduction, we should stand up and off to the side, so that we are clearly visible to everyone right from the start.  This gives the audience the chance to look us up and down and get through that initial judgement they make on how we are dressed and how professional we look.  It also makes it smoother and quicker to mount the stage when it is time to start.

We get straight into the opening, using our blockbuster statement to grab attention, to tantalise the listeners with what is to come and then we can introduce ourselves and thank the organisers.  Preferably someone else is switching the slide decks over or getting ours slides up. We don’t want be distracted from focusing on our audience, especially at the start, when all of those first impressions are being created. This standing up, getting on stage and getting started takes around five minutes and we try and break the forty minutes into eight five minute blocks.  Our talk has been rehearsed, so we know exactly how long each section takes.

We are doing all of the talking and that can be tiring for an audience to sit there and listen to us blabbing away.  We need to have it planned such that we switch up the action roughly every five minutes.  This is using what is called a “pattern interrupt”, so that the listeners are not getting what they expected.  Expectation in audiences can lead to them day dreaming and leaving us, as their thoughts take over. They stop taking in what we are saying or even worse, they are now looking at their phones. We might use a great visual we have selected or we might change our energy during the delivery.  Classical music has it cadences from highs to lows to highs, to make sure we don’t get bored listening to it.  Our talk can copy this idea.  Maybe we drop our voice down to a conspiratorial whisper or we raise it to stentorian heights – it doesn’t matter, because the point is to use our energy to create a change, which adds interest to what is going on.  We don’t want to be predictable, because this is when attention will stray on the part of the audience.

The end cadence is actually split into two parts – before the Q&A and after the Q&A.  We can use a summary of our key points or a call to take action and man the barricades.  We need to put a bow on this talk and draw the whole apparatus together so that the main message remains the message the audience retains.  We switch over to Q&A, which invariably will take the whole talk off track and there is no way of controlling that.  What we need to do though is to repeat our summary or call to action. We must monopolise the messaging after the Q&A, for that audience and make sure they get what we want them to get.

Naturally the talk won’t fit into precise five minute segments, but the key is regularly change the content, the energy, the delivery, the flow so that we keep a stranglehold on the attention of the audience and no phones are being surreptitiously engaged instead concentrating of us.  There is no doubt that this outbreak of ADD, combined with the mobile phone, has made our task as speakers, so much more complex and fraught.  We can rage against the inequities, or we can adjust what we are doing to overcome these challenges.

We have a talk coming up which we have to give to a business audience and we work hard on the preparation.  We make sure that we don’t suck up all of the time though, with preparing the slide deck and forget to do our rehearsal.  This run through of the talk before we give it live, is a key component of getting our timing right and our cadence flowing.  This makes us easy to follow for the listeners and allows the talk to move seamlessly through the different chapters of the content.

We arrive early to the venue and start interacting with our audience as they arrive.  We try and meet as many people as possible and build that powerful personal connection.  We ask them why they chose to attend, what are they doing at the moment, what are they interested in, etc.  As the speaker we want to try and demolish that invisible wall separating us from the attendees. We are trying to form a collective, where we are all members together, trying to locate pertinent answers to business conundrums we are all facing.  Their feedback is also useful for us to further refine the delivery of the talk to include some issues they have raised. 

Everyone is naturally totally preoccupied with themselves and their problems, so we need a blockbuster opening to grab everyone’s attention from the start.  At the end, we wrap it up with a sharp summary or a call to action, such that our words are still ringing in their ears, as they wind their way out of the venue.  All the technical aspects of the talk need to be in place.

We can’t be satisfied with this though.  We need to be aiming to strongly engage our audience during our talk.  Sounds easy.  However, think back and consider how many speakers you have sat through, who managed to really engage their audiences?  I am guessing very few or certainly not enough.  Why is that the case?  We would expect that this engagement process would be a big part of the speaker’s efforts to sell their message. 

We want to get the audience on our side and we want to establish rapport and build trust, so they buy what we are saying.  The problem is often the speaker has a misconception of their role.  They think they are there to pile on the information, data, statistics, evidence, etc., and if they do that, then they will be successful as a presenter.

The problem with this approach is it can be very dry, boring and painful to sit through.  Reeling off numbers is a favourite but often it is an abstraction.  We leave the listeners to do all of the hard work to connect these numbers to their individual realities.  For example, I could note that Government figures talk about the number of Japanese aged 15-34 having halved over the last twenty years and that they will halve again by 2060.  Now this is a very abstract idea and useful to a point, but what are the audience members supposed to do with those numbers?

Instead, I could reference those same numbers and then add, “So what does this mean for all of us in this room?”   This is a nice framing exercise to stimulate everyone to start thinking about how to connect the data to their own situation.  We could then go on to add, “basically the data shows we are running out of young Japanese to hire for our firms and we are heading into a zero sum game headwind of winners and losers in recruiting staff.  Which one are you planning for, to be a winner or a loser, in this war for talent?”.  Now I have successfully connected the numbers with a real business problem, they are all either facing now or will face in the future, regardless of their industry or the age and stage of their business.

I could take it even further and start adding in a story from my own experience to really drive home the point and make a common cause with my audience.  After telling them the numbers and asking about whether they will be winner or losers, I could relate a relevant anecdote. 

I could say, “As I stand here, I reflect on this for myself.  Ten years ago, I would have a nice thick pile of resumes on my desk to sort through and plenty of options about who to choose for my new staff.  Each year however, I started to notice that the size of that pile of resumes was getting smaller and smaller and so were my options. I also noticed that the candidates seem to be gaining a lot more choices about accepting offers.  They were becoming pickier and pickier about who they would choose to join.  It has become harder than ever to actually recruit staff. I am sure I am not the only one here to have this experience, which just underlines that we have to switch our thinking about recruiting and retaining staff”.

Even if they hadn’t personally been in a position of responsibility to recruit staff, everyone in the room can get the point. It makes the statistics come alive as a real business problem we are all facing, as the Japanese population continues its unstoppable decline. They are going to be sitting there contemplating the ramifications for their own firm.

We can use a combination of pointed questions to drive the audience to react to a problem or a topic and also add in stories, which further highlight the issues.  Questions are powerful, particularly rhetorical questions, for which we don’t expect an answer.   They are useful in order to direct the listener’s attention to a problem we want to highlight and engage their problem-solving thought processes.

When using storytelling, personal stories are best.  Within the personal story group, disaster stories are the top of the tree for effectiveness.  If I said, “let me tell you how we increased our revenues by 300%”, that will not be as interesting to an audience as if I said, “let me tell you why we saw revenues drop by 300%”.  We are geared up for lessons to avoid mistakes and we love a good train wreck story, so that we don’t repeat that same misfortune ourselves.

Ideally, we would have a train wreck story and a salvation story of how we turned things around.  That makes for a brilliant combination and the audience will be all ears to discover the solution, so that they can learn from it too.  The key is to translate the data into issues they will be facing and to make our story delivery as personal as possible.  If that isn’t necessarily available, then referencing third party examples and what happened will also work.

By doing some simple adjustments to our talk, we can elevate if from a remote topic, which is pretty boring, to a theme of hot interest and relevance.  The key is to start from a point of view of how can I find a connector to my audience’s interest, which will engage them, such that they want to hear more from me.  In this way, we can become very effective in building up our personal and professional brands.

The beauty of being the presenter is that for the majority of the time we are dominant, the lord or mistress of all we survey, we are the big shot.  We can craft the speech anyway we wish and deliver it as we see fit.  We control the content, the pacing, the delivery, the engagement with the audience.  Things can a sudden turn for the worse though, when we utter these fateful words, “We have 20 minutes for Q&A and who has the first question?”.  Suddenly we have entered the world of the bare-knuckle street fight, with no rules and no quarter given.  The audience members can say whatever they like and we cannot control them.

Knowing that we can go from hero to zero in record time if we make a mess of the Q&A, are we taking it seriously enough?  I was reminded of the importance of preparation recently.  My son had a job interview to complete and the amount of preparation he did was impressive.  He did a thorough analysis of what he would bring to the firm and he came up with about twenty questions he anticipated they would ask him.  He enlisted me to be his training partner on numerous occasions and ask the questions and then pass on my feedback.  By the time he got to the interview he was fully prepared and even then they asked him questions he wasn’t anticipating and had to deal with them on the fly. 

I was reflecting on this and comparing with what I usually do when I prepare my talks.  I plan the talks very thoroughly and I do rehearse them, but I realised I was a bit light on my preparation for the Q&A.  “Once over lightly” would be a good descriptor.  This is a bit curious though because in a public talk we are launching forth with our personal and professional brands and putting our goods out there for all to see.  Normally I do list up what I think will be the most likely questions and then that is it.  I don’t spend any time constructing my answers, as I rely on my knowledge of the subject and my presentation skills to enable me to handle whatever comes at me.  I have fallen into the Comfort Zone trap of making “being good” the enemy of “being great”. 

I have seen speakers destroyed by questions they couldn’t handle.  They were doing so well up until the Q&A exposed a weakness in their professional capability and it shone a light on their credibility, bringing it into question.  I haven’t suffered that ignominy as yet, but maybe that has just been a lucky run?  When we do practice our question handling with a partner we have to be very careful how we do that.  Most people are not very skilled at this stuff and their advice can sometimes be harmful or demotivating.  We need to project confidence and being fully prepared for the main talk and the Q&A will help with that aim.  We also need to prepare our partner by asking them to give us very specific feedback.  We want to know (a) what we did well and (b) how could we make it even better.

As much as we may do this, the first response of most people is to start weighing in with their critique of what we didn’t do well. This is where we need to introduce some discipline.  The moment they start to criticise you, politely stop them and then redirect them to follow your original guidelines and tell you the good/better answer you are seeking.  Looking backwards is no help and we need to project forward and determine our future state, rather than having someone drag us backwards to a place we cannot change.

The other issue with preparation is to not sound robotic or too prepared.  Our delivery should be conversational and seemingly spontaneous.  It isn't spontaneous in the least because we have drilled the answers thoroughly but we don’t want to come across like that.  When we are asked the question, do not nod your head as if you are agreeing with the speaker.  We can do this unconsciously, trying to be affable.  We don’t know what they will ask, so we don’t want to be seen nodding to a very combustible question, as if we agree with it, so let’s have no head nodding while we listen carefully to what they are saying.

Many speakers then give the entire answer to the questioner and keep their focus on the one person.  Instead, we spend the first six seconds of our answer giving them eye contact and then we switch our gaze and start giving six seconds of eye contact to others in the audience.  We want to be inclusive so let’s use the baseball diamond method of six pockets - left, center and right field, as well as inner field and outer field.  Naturally we don’t spread our eye contact around in a geometric pattern which is predictable.  We mix it up and we catch people unawares as we address the answer to as many members of the audience as we can.  In this way we can engage the entire audience with our answer and we try to deliver it in a casual, relaxed “good bedside manner”.

I am constantly amazed at the lack of thinking about seizing opportunities for storytelling to be more persuasive in business.  Most interactions are one dimensional.  We want to buy something and the seller supplies it and that is the end of the transaction.  This is particularly so in the retail environment.  What is ironic is that vast swathes of products have huge budgets devoted to creating the story behind the product or service.  Somehow it doesn’t leap across to infect the staff who are selling it.  They just operate at the transactional level and don’t make any effort to go beyond that.  Why would one part of the organisation be ploughing big money into storytelling at the marketing level and not be making use of that same effort at the point of purchase?

Mindset and training are obviously the issues.  It is up to the company to work on the thinking of the staff and educate them why this is a gamechanger for the business. The people taking the dough off the buyer are not trained to think holistically about the brand or the business.  Every company has amazing stories about the origins of the firm, the amazing clients they have served and the fantastic results they have secured.  Sadly, they keep all of this stuff to themselves and we never hear about it.  Let me prompt some re-thinking here.

Imagine when someone is making a retail enquiry, that the salesperson was well trained and able to go beyond telling the client they are “there to answer any questions they might have”.  By the way, at least in Japan, there are staff there to serve you.  With the green eye shade bean counting crew running riot in big Western retailers, there is always that constant search for finding someone to serve you or to answer a question.  I was in Brisbane recently shopping at a major department store and there was stock everywhere on the floor and very people to process the sale.  Anyway, the person serving can become a storyteller as well as a transactor.

They could approach you and say, “Thank you for shopping today and thanks to you and our other valued clients, we are celebrating out sixtieth year in business.  If you have any questions, I am right here to answer them for you”.  That simple additional statement adds credibility to what is being sold because it says this company has stood the test of time and as a consequence, must be reliable. 

When explaining the good or service they can tell a brief story about the provenance of the solution.  How did this solution come into existence, who was involved and when did it happen.  There are so many rich stories tied up there and they are all known, but often not collected or promulgated.

In a B2B example, if a client was looking for sales training, we could just say we have various training courses available and then go through the detail.  Or we could say, “the roots of our sales training stretch back to 1939 when Dale Carnegie had reached global fame with his best selling book How To Win Friends And Influence People and responded to requests for public training classes in sales.  Prior to that time, if your company provided training you were looked after, otherwise you were on your own.  Dale Carnegie really democratised the process and made it available for everyone.  What we have today is the product of 80 plus years of experience, research and kaizen”.  That little story takes about 25 seconds to tell, which means it is rich enough and compact enough to give the client a solid impression of our credibility as a supplier of sales training.

Buyers, be they retail or B2B want to know who they are dealing with.  None of us want to make a mistake, so we are all looking for risk reduction. One of the most visited pages on our website is the section called “About Dale Carnegie Training”.  People want to know the backstory.

Another common interest part of website is the “About Us” segment. We are all looking for reassurance that we are dealing with the right people and that these are people we can trust.  So in our case, we have a section on the company, Frank Mochizuki who started the business in Japan, me as the President and then brief histories of our leadership, sales, presentations and communications core courses.  We are telling stories to persuade buyers that they are making a good decision to buy from us.  How about your website, what stories are you telling about your solutions?

This is the easy part of course and the hard part is training the team to both know the stories and to be able to communicate them concisely and powerfully in front of the buyer.  We need to create the content and then the time to teach people what they can say.  The key part is shifting gears away from a passive approach of serving, to a proactive approach of really serving the buyer, by going the extra mile to assure them you are a safe supplier they can trust. 

This is a major mindset shift and if that is all that is achieved, it will still put you far in front of the competition.  It is up to the firm of course, to do the backfill and give the team the tools and training to be more effective in their storytelling.  The cost is minimal in the big scheme of things and the outputs will be disproportionate to the effort to organise the inputs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We all know that first impressions are critical, but what happens if you blow it?  There are a couple of typical ways we can hurt our credibility at the start.  Trying a joke that bombs is a very common credibility and personal and professional brand destroyer.  You think you are funny, when you aren’t.  Or you think the joke is funny, but you are a crowd of one in agreement on that point.  Think back to how many talks you have attended, where the speaker told a joke that made you laugh, rather than cringe?  I doubt there will be many and probably you just observed the joke, laughed and then moved on, rather than analysing why that humour worked.  This means you gained no insight into joke telling, but here you are the amateur comedian trying out your own untested material on this business audience.

What do you do when it bombs?  You can just ignore the groans and move on or you can attempt a recovery. If it is obvious that joke wasn’t funny, you can say, “Too bad - that joke seemed to work much better in rehearsal with my subordinates”, or “that joke clearly indicates my intended career switch to comedy needs a re-evaluation”, or “Oh well, that joke seemed like a good idea at the time”, which will get people laughing, as you make fun of yourself.  The key is to let it die a natural death and not keep referencing it after the initial recovery.  You are hopefully going to provide things in your talk which will grab the audience’s interest and they will forget that as a comedian you are pretty ordinary.

Once upon a time, I was the MC for an event involving Paul Keating, then Australian Prime Minister.  He was in the green room upstairs in the Hotel and the plan was as he entered the event hall, I would say in a deep baritone announcer voice, “please join me in welcoming the Prime Minister of Australia Paul Keating”.  Pretty simple really except the logistics had a few flaws as we discovered.  The timing had to be as he entered, I would start the welcome.  He would come from the elevator and enter the room and this would require a signal to me on the dais, that he was about to enter the room.  It was a relay system. One of the Japanese team was posted near the elevator to signal another colleague near the doorway, who would then signal me to get started.

The problem is that Prime Ministers travel with a large body officials and press entourage and the Japanese colleague near the elevator saw a bunch of Aussies coming out of the elevator and set off the smoke signal.  I enthusiastically launched into my introduction, to rapidly discover no Prime Minister, as it was a false flag.  It was pretty embarrassing and lonely up there on the dais.  Somehow, I managed to eek out, “thank you everyone for the rehearsal, the Prime Minister will be here shortly” and covered the error with some humour. Unfortunately, my colleagues managed to send another false signal and the second time I had no witty comeback, just deep embarrassment.  Third time lucky we got it right.  My point is you can sometimes cover a mishap with some humour.  I certainly wasn’t expecting that slip up and had not prepared for it, but after that event experience I vowed I would be ready if ever there was a next time.

Another common opening problem is the tech.  Everything was working like a charm when you got there early and checked the equipment, but of course as soon as you start, the slides won’t come up or the computer stops working.  An audience doesn’t like it when they have to sit there and watch you trying to reboot the computer or do some deep diagnostic dive to get things working properly.  They feel their valuable time is being fritted away by you. Often audience members will shout out useful advice on what you need to be doing which makes it even worse, because you look even more incompetent.  What do you do?

There are a couple of choices.  If you have someone handy who can work on it to fix the issues in the background then certainly get them involved and you get straight into your talk, sans tech for a little while.  This presumes you are prepared enough to give the talk without any slides and we should all be ready to give our talks without any visuals.  This is a vital part of the planning stage and shouldn’t be overlooked, because according to Murphy’s Law, if something can go wrong it will and we need to be ready.  Once the colleague or staff have resurrected the slide deck, you can just pick it up from there.  Don’t go back and start again – you have already started, so keep moving forward.

The other alternative is to give up on slides altogether and use storytelling or word pictures to draw out the detail you want to communicate.  You should be using both devices anyway, but you may need to ramp these up more than usual.  When I was training to become a Dale Carnegie instructor my senior instructor played a trick on me, seconds before we were due to start the first tandem class together.  He suddenly announced the slide deck wasn’t working and we would have to run the class without any visuals to test my reaction.  I was well prepared and had given a lot of talks without slides, so I said “no problem”, I was ready to go anyway, which wasn’t what he was expecting.  The point is, we should always be ready to go without slides every time.

Planning for a disaster is 99% of the solution.  Our usual problem is we are taken by surprise and have no back up alternatives.  There are only a limited number of things which will rob us of our acing the first impression, so let’s work up a Plan B for those occasions.  They will certainly happen and usually at the worst possible time, so let’s be ready for them.

As businesspeople, we don’t get that many chances to face a public audience and give an actual talk.  The majority of the time, we are giving internal weekly reports on projects or revenues.  We feel constrained to deliver in the same way everyone else is delivering – monotone, lifeless, dull accounting of the progress or non-progress of our section.  We fear if we start ramping up we will be disparaged as an idiot, so we keep the lid on what we are doing.  Going full Hamlet on the project update will certainly draw some negative criticism from our bosses, who will quickly tell us to stop clowning around and get back to the usual methodology.  Are we doomed to stay in first gear as presenters for eternity?

Probably.  Work reporting has a certain format and level of expectation which is it should be hum drum and ordinary, not melodramatic or dynamic.  What can we do though within that frame to work on our skills?  Firstly, we need to re-set our habits.  We need to develop a work rhythm presentation which won’t get us called in to the boss’s office for a dressing down, but which also allows us to work on some of the basic skills. 

Planning the report needs a makeover.  Usually the planning component is pretty marginal.  Instead let’s think about what is the key insight from the numbers or the project progress or lack thereof.  What is the message we want to convey?  Once we determine that, then we start to build the framework for the delivery.  Usually we are one of a number of people presenting and the rest of the troops will be doing a sterling job to put everyone to sleep with their efforts.  That means we need to plan our opening of our report in a way which will grab attention but without being too over the top. If we start with the equivalent of “the sky is falling” that will get flagged immediately by the boss as negativity, seeding panic and will warrant a powerful scolding about our negative impact on the team spirit.

So we are looking for a start which is less powerful, but powerful enough. For example, we could say, “We had some surprises this week”.  Those surprises could be positive or negative, but that simple statement will get everyone wondering, “Oh, yeah – what surprises?” and we will have achieved our aim to grab everyone’s attention.  We are basically practicing the dark art of creating newspaper headlines.  The start should be short, sharp and attention grabbing.  We are trying to work a pattern interrupt into our headline, to break though the mental barriers in the room.

When we get into the main report it is a good idea to frame the key points.  We could say, “We had some surprises this week.  Let me go through the three things which were unexpected”.  Now we have set up a simple navigation process to allow our audience to follow our report.  We could have said, “We had some surprises this week.  I will go through the macro and micro factors behind these”.  Now we have framed two chapters of the report, making it easy to follow.  Another approach could be using time.  “We had some surprises this week.  Let me go through the lead up, where we are now and what we can expect next”.  We can now cover the past, the present and the future in three chapters and this is simple to follow.

Our final message needs to be clear.  It may just be a simple summary of the key points, a call to action, a recommendation, a warning, or a rallying call for support from other teams.  Our report may be only five to ten minutes long, but it gives enough scope to apply these frames to the talk and mimics exactly what we do in a forty minute public speech.  We get to apply the formula we need, even if only on a smaller scale.  We need to be using our voice to highlight key words and phrases, our gestures to accent data or insights and our eye power to connect with everyone in the room.  There is no reason why we shouldn’t be doing this every time because this is what makes for effective communication. 

If we do draw some negative comments take a long hard look at the perpetrator.  Are they skilled in communication and presenting?  If they aren’t, then just ignore them.  What if it is the boss?  We should always keep a professional tone, no going over the top, but keep going, because often the boss cannot present to save their own life and are no model for us.  Just tell them you are taking these weekly reporting opportunities to develop your communication abilities.  If you are not leeching into thespian antics, then there should no basis to be reining you in.

Another area where we can excel is in using our slide information.  I say this because everyone else will be making all the usual mistakes of cramming everything on to one slide, having too many fonts and too much data which simply cannot be read.  If we are using spreadsheets, then distributing copies to everyone beforehand is a better idea than putting up columns of numbers no one can understand.  If we are paperless, we can still show the spreadsheet. Usually there are only a few numbers to highlight, so we should concentrate on those.  The spreadsheet becomes wallpaper and we use animated popups to highlight a specific number in very large font.  We can then talk to that number. We keep repeating this process for the specific numbers we need to talk about and there usually aren’t too many of those in a short report.

Graphs are a good way to show numbers.  We need to recall the golden rule of a slide has to be fully understood within two seconds of it going up.  The key is to avoid having more than one graph per slide if possible or a maximum of two slides, if a comparison is required.  Line graphs are good to show trends and pie charts are great to show proportions.  Try to keep the animation to a minimum, because it just distracts from the key message.

Our thinking changes to “I am giving a five minute or ten minute segment of a forty minute speech and I will prepare accordingly”.  This way our frame of reference is always the full professional presentation rather than the sad excuse which most people deliver.  In this way, we are able to practice our skills within the realm of weekly reporting reality.

There are some fundamental mechanics of the presentation delivery.  I would call these hygiene factors for presenting.  Eye contact, facial expression, voice modulation, gesture usage, pause insertion and posture are the basics.  Unfortunately, in my observation, most business presenters have not mastered these core skills.  This despite all of the training available, all of the free information being plastered all over the internet.  “Content Marketing” experts are establishing their credibility by providing phenomenal information for free.  What an age we live in, yet we still have presentation train wrecks.

Let’s presume some have mastered the basics, so what comes next? Here are three elements we need to be working on.

1. Clear Meaning

When we ask our presentation class participants what are some of the attributes they want to achieve when speaking in public, “being clear” is always prominent.  However, what is required to be clear?   The audience has to be able to navigate the talk and follow the direction the speaker is taking everyone.  I attended a talk by the President of a huge global organisation here in Tokyo and he “wandered like a cloud” all over the place. It was a navigation nightmare. Let’s not make our audience work hard to keep up.

The chapters of the talk should be clear, the flow logical and the points quite apparent. The delivery needs the right pacing, with sufficient pauses to allow the messages to sink in.  We need a pattern interrupt every five minutes of the talk, to keep the interest of the listeners.  We will ensure there are highs and lows in the delivery, so that it is not all delivered at the same pace.  This is a very common mistake amongst business speakers – they have only one speed setting from start to finish.  We need to mimic classical music with its ebbs and highs, it lulls and crescendos.  Certain critical key words are culled from the herd and given special attention and treatment to make the message clearer.  We might hit them with a stentorian outburst of raw energy or we might drop it all down to a cupped hand, conspiratorial whisper, for which the audience has to mentally lean in to hear.

2. Message Appeal

If your core message is mundane, boring and unremarkable, it will be hard to excite the assembled masses about what you are saying.  Storytelling in business is one of the dark arts. It is rarely mastered, poorly understood and infrequent in its application.  Presenting statistics for example, can be boring, but wrapping them up in the drama of the story can be gripping.  Reveal who were the heroes who forensically excavated these numbers and their herculean efforts to dig into the data to find the gems.

Delve into what are the ramifications of their findings.  Extrapolate into the future to paint a picture of hope or despair with these numbers presented as early warning indicators. Capture which careers are about to be shredded or heralded?  When storytelling, we need to take the listener to a place, in a season, at a time of the day, with people they know and all of this located in their mind’s eye.  We take the audience with us to the precise moment it all happened and draw out the hard lessons we have won as a consequence.

3. Passion and Engagement

Talking in a monotone, matched with a wooden face devoid of expression, quickly becomes a funereal distraction for the audience.  Removing all the physical energy from the talk sets it adrift from the listeners.  They feel no connection and no interest, because the speaker themselves doesn’t seem interested in what they are saying.

Enthusiasm is contagious and we hunger for a speaker with fire in the belly.  Instead we usually get the legions of the walking dead of business speakers – those armies of the grey, gaunt, forgettable and dull.  We are not simply advocating high energy, almost crazed hysteria here, but considered belief and real commitment to the message, one which the audience will definitely buy.

Your energy sets up a vibration.  it transports your passion and commitment to what you are saying directly to us and infects and envelops the whole room.  When we speak, we employ our “ki” (気), our intrinsic energy and we push that energy out all the way to the back wall, as a conscious effort to fill the room with our presence.  I am sure you have had the experience of when someone enters a room, they literally fill it with their presence.  That is precisely what we want to achieve as presenters – to dominate that meeting room space with our power and “ki”.  The first step is to have that mindset to want to do that and then direct our energy outward, rather than bottling it up, restraining it.

We specifically want to engage that entire audience and connect with them all.  We use our eye contact power to make that connection.  We should focus our gaze on a single point, so select one of the eyes of each audience member. We look so deeply into their eye we feel we can delve into their soul.  Well delve for only about six seconds however, because with that intensity, it soon becomes intrusive.  The impact of that one-on-one engagement is enormous.  They feel they are the only one in the room and we are talking directly to them.  That connection triggers tremendous continued support for our personal and professional brands

The basics platform allows us to take our presentations to the highest levels.  We must work hard on amplifying the connection between our message and the audience. Therefore, we are the rare ones who can break through all the communication dissonance. Others simply fall by the white noise wayside.  Being a presenter has never been tougher or more demanding. In our Age of Distraction and this Era of Cynicism, we have to stand tall as highly capable, skilled communicators, showing everyone the way forward.

There are some levels of presenter and so where do you fit in?  The scaredy-cat like I used to be, avoiding all opportunities to present.  The novice presenter trying to work it out by yourself through trial and error?  The student of presenting who has worked out the connection between persuasive ability and career and business success.  The semi-pro who holds down a full time job which does provide a number of chances a year to keep working on advancing your presentation skills?  I don’t include the professional presenter because that has become their livelihood and is out of scope for 99.99% of people in business.

For those in denial, I know, I get it.  I was so terrified of embarrassing myself I decided the best course of action was to escape all chances to present.  As we advance in our careers though, the room to hide starts to disappear and we have to face the reality – if you can’t present you cannot advance in your career or business.  Here is some clear advice – don’t struggle along.  Become proactive and go and get the training.  Find a class where there is a psychologically safe space where you can learn with positive encouragement.  Our ego is already fragile about presenting and the last thing we need is someone criticising us.  Look for trainers who follow the good/better school of feedback.  That means they tell you what you are doing well and encourage you to keep doing that and explain how you can make it even better.

If your colleagues are not paid up members of this school of feedback and all you get from them is critique, just be polite and thank them and move on.  They are clueless about developing people so just blank them out and keep up your training and study.  As you advance you will actually become a problem for other presenters.  Some of them will try to pull you back down to their level, because they are aware they are hopeless and prefer everyone to be the same, so that they don’t stand out.  A cutting comment from a work colleague is seared into my mind, “Greg is all style and no substance” after my presentation to the whole company.  Ouch! Fortunately, I knew why he made this stupid comment and just ignored it.  If you bump into these people, just ignore them and keep working on your skills.

For those who have started on the path, the trick is to keep going.  I remember reading one of Tony Robbins’s books where he realised most business speakers only get a few chances a year to talk in public and that he could get the equivalent of years of experience in a few months, if he got enough chances to speak in public.  I followed that same idea myself and looked for every opportunity to speak and I still hold to that strategy.  Event organisers are always looking for free industry speakers.  I am sure Tony Robbins had to give a lot of unpaid talks before he become good enough to get paid.  Anyway, we are not in it for the money, we are trying to get a professional capability and we need an audience to work with.  As you build up a resume of speeches given, more chances will flow to you.  It has been a long drought of opportunities thanks to Covid, but in 2023 we should start to see the reappearance of in person events and the chances to speak at them.

This will be good for the semi-pro who may have gotten a bit rusty having had no spots for the last three years to keep advancing their art. It would be a very good idea to go back to the basics to make sure we have not forgotten any of the professionalism we had previously developed. It might also be an idea to proactively reach out to organisations who are slowly emerging for the shadows and starting to host in-person events again and let them know you would be happy to give your talk.  The audience size may be considerably smaller and some of them will probably be watching you online, which is not as good as having them all in the room, but better than nothing.

Review how you went and analyse what needs to change to make your presentation better.  Simple things you did before may have evaporated and will need to be re-introduced into the mix.  Eye contact will definitely be one of them for a lot of people.  We don’t just look at our audience en masse.  We single out people and use our eye contact to engage them during our talk.  Too much is too much though, so around six seconds each is the formula we need.

I have only seen a couple of speakers live in the last few months and they were pretty rusty I thought.  My guess is they just carried on from where they left off, except they are not at that previous level anymore and need to rebuild their skills.  When we get back to basics, we plug any holes which have appeared or we make sure everything that should be happening is in fact working for us.  This won’t happen by itself, so we need to work at it.  The beauty is if we do this and everyone else just carries on as if there hasn’t been a three year break, then we will instantly stand out as an excellent presenter.

Our personal and professional brands are invaluable and we have to invest in them and presenting is the one time when all is revealed publicly.  We have to make those chances winners and build our reputation and take it even higher.

Chris Anderson is a curator for TED talks and so far there have been a billion views of TED talks since they started forty years ago. He wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review titled “How To Give A Killer Presentation” which was published back in June 2013 and it still stands up well today.  I have given a TED talk myself and so have had some exposure to the process and the rules they have around giving presentations.  Let’s look at the 5 key points from Chris’s article. I will add my take though, because the original article can easily be accessed for his advice in detail.

1. Frame your story - figure out where to start and where to end.
   There are four basic presentations we have to choose from: inform, motivate, persuade or entertain. All of them will go much better if we have storytelling as a key component of the structure.  In particular, potentially “dry” inform types of talks can be brought alive by adding a story which highlights the facts.  Going behind the numbers to the drama involved is always more interesting.  Heroic tales of how the revenues were won against the trials and tribulations of the market or despite the competitor’s dirty tricks, rather than just stating the numbers, is a lot more gripping for an audience.

The story requires a meeting of the audience, their mind’s eye and our tale.  We want to get them to the spot where it happened, when it occurred, who was involved, what transpired and what was the result.  We have to explain things in a way in which the audience can see the scene we are describing in their own mind.  That makes it so much more real for them.

2. 
   Plan your delivery - decide whether to memorize your speech word for word or develop bullet points and then rehearse it—over and over.
   Chris Anderson does mention memorisation as one possibility but actually suggests it is better to have points to speak to and I totally agree. The memorisation path is strewn with trip wires, steel traps and squelchy bogs. Reading it to us is doom, be that off a piece of paper or from text on screen, so certainly email it to us, instead of that very bad delivery idea.

The key secret here is simple.  Only you know what you are going to say, so if you mess up the order or leave a bit out, only you know that and please, do us all a favour and keep such a piece of intelligence to yourself.  I had rehearsed a talk for a Convention audience as the closing speaker and despite all of that effort, I was suddenly and inexplicably going from my point three to my point five, while I was delivering it.  It was like an out-of-body experience, observing myself departing from what I had rehearsed. Only I knew the order though, so I just plonked point four down after point five and carried on shamelessly, as if this was all part of the grand plan.

3. Work on stage presence - but remember that your story matters more than how you stand or whether you’re visibly nervous.

Chris makes the point that jiggling the body around when speaking is distracting for an audience. Quite true, but some speakers can’t help themselves. The adrenalin being pumped into the body by the brain which was sensing fear, is such a strong chemical reaction they cannot control themselves very easily.

The solution is stand on the one spot and don't move. Also do tons and tons of repetition in rehearsal, so that you are so confident in your material, that you can order all the butterflies zapping around in your tummy to fly in formation.  Look at the people in the audience who are nodding their heads or smiling in approval of what you are saying and avoid all eye contact with those who look grumpy, adversarial or negative.  This will boost your confidence and help you to control the nerves

4. Plan the multimedia - whatever you do, don’t read from PowerPoint slides.
Yes, please don’t read to us.  Using photos is a bit of a favourite of mine, because the audience can understand the photo in 2 seconds and then I can add my spin to what this photo represents.  When I did my own TED talk, this was the technique I used.

5. Put it together - play to your strengths and be authentic.

Being natural and conversational rather than pontificating, lecturing or sermonising is a good idea, as the audience can absorb the message more easily. None of us need a wannabe thespian or a baroque orator for our next speaker.  Using pauses is a good idea too, because it is a natural phenomenon and it helps to direct your mind to what needs to come next. If the nerves are driving the speaking speed up too much, then a short pause gives you the break you need to redirect to the right speed.

When presenting some things work better than others.  The good news is there are tons of resources to guide us on our quest.  Using trial and error is an extremely bad idea because remember this is your personal and professional brand which you are exposing to the world every time you get up to talk.

When I was preparing for my TED talk, the thought that this talk of mine could potentially be accessed and assessed by millions of people, scared the hell out of me and made me rehearse like a demon on speed.  I suggest we all do that for every talk, TED or otherwise and when we do, we will do a much better job of it.

In the sales world, it is well known that as buyers the first purchase we make is the salesperson serving us.  We decide we like and trust this person and therefore allow them to extract our money in return for a service or product.  It is the same in the world of presenting.  We buy the presenter first and then we absorb their message.  Given this is fairly obvious, why aren’t all presenters doing their best to sell themselves to their audiences?

In some cases, this leads to failed attempts at straight up humour or self-depreciating remarks faintly disguised as humour.  Interestingly, recently I was asked about humour when I was giving a talk on how to be persuasive when delivering presentations.  It was actually an ambush question.  The questioner had in fact taken lessons on doing standup comedy and was testing me on what I knew about the subject and what I might be recommending.  I didn’t know his background of course, so I just made my standard point that we should leave humour to the professionals, unless you are remarkably naturally gifted.  He told me later how hard he found it to try and be a comic, which was in fact a reinforcement of my advice – leave it to the pros.

So if we remove failed attempts at humour as a way of ingratiating ourselves with our audience what else is left for us?  One thing to make sure of is consolidating your existing fan or potential fan base before the talk. Make sure to let your business contacts know that you are giving this talk and when and where it will be held and encourage them to attend.  There is nothing more relaxing for a speaker than to look into an audience and see a lot of positive, friendly faces who the speaker already knows.  Magically, their supportive vibe surreptitiously spreads to others in the room.

Another ploy is to get there early and go through the guest list or check the name badges for people you know, but whose name and face combination may be a challenge for you to put together.  Seeing a familiar name makes it easier for you greet them as they arrive by using their name and it gives the impression that they are an important person for you.  It is flattering and it creates a bond of familiarity which again helps with the speaker’s connect vibe with the audience before you even start.

Starting strong is important and the start kicks off from the time you arrive at the venue.  Get there early and check the tech is working, because that allows you to have peace of mind and remain cool, calm and collected about giving this talk.  If there are issues with the computer or the monitor or the projector, this can take years off your life if it occurs just before you are due to go on.  We don’t want that. 

When you are called to the stage to give your talk, don’t fuss around with the slide deck and getting things up on screen.  These first few seconds are critical to creating a positive first impression and we need to really work on getting it right.  Go straight into your well designed opening, which will immediately deliver the audience into the palm of your hand and have them eager for more.  Only after that, introduce yourself and thank the organisers and all of that standard, good stuff.  If possible, have someone assist you to get the slides up on screen, so you can skip that distraction and remain fully focused on your audience.

Don’t imagine you have to recite your resume to have credibility with the audience, because that should have been done for you by the MC.  Trying to sell the audience on how great we are isn’t going to be a winner.  It is a tightrope, but we have to be confident yet humble. Our job is to make sure we supply the MC with what we want them to say about us. We may need to stiff arm them about delivering it exactly as we have written it.  Some unprofessional MCs imagine that they are soaring eagles, unbound by the earthly laws and can do a better job than we can. They will decide to wing it, by coming up with their own version of our introduction, which invariably in my experience is a pale shadow of what we have written.  We have to maintain 100% editorial control of our brand and insist they follow the script.  If they resist that idea, then we should take that task off them and do it ourselves – it is definitely not ideal, but it is better than someone else butchering our introduction, first impression and brand.

The first words out of our mouth have to evoke massive levels of inner confidence, because audiences buy confidence.  They reject doubt, insecurity, gratuitous pleading and weakness, so don’t start with an apology or an excuse.  No one cares about your problems anyway, because they are totally preoccupied with their own.

Get your most valuable insight, data, statistics, narrative right up the front.  Don’t imagine you can warm this audience up by slowly releasing all the gold in dribs and drabs, as you move through the talk.  Give them the best you have from the start and they will stick with you to the end.  If you start slow and average, trying to gradually warm them up, they will immediately be on their phones, plugging into the internet, before you can say “trainwreck”. 

The key is to plan the start meticulously.  If we get this right, then we will carry the audience with us and be in a position to deliver our key messages, thereby enhancing our personal and professional brands.

I attended an online presentation recently and the presenter was from one of the HUGE social media companies and the presentation was very different from the norm.  He was using his company’s internal platform to deliver the presentation, rather than using standard tools like PowerPoint or its equivalent.  He could conduct comprehension tests of his content using a sophisticated timing mechanism, which would rank people in terms of who were the fastest to complete the test and do it the most accurately.  It was quite snazzy and there were other little flourishes which were quite cool. 

It was all going pretty hummingly, until he introduced his colleague who was going to add to the conversation with her experiences and views.  This is when things came crashing down. Her delivery was done in a monotone, which had the effect of making me suddenly feel drowsy during the session.  Her lifeless presentation was in complete contrast with the all the bells and whistles this company had been putting on display, before she was introduced.

This made me think about was that high tech presentation actually effective in terms of communicating the core messages?  When I thought back to the guys talk, I realised that I had been distracted by the tech and hadn’t fully absorbed the points he was making.  This is a distinct danger when presenting using “cool” tools. 

I am not a fan of anything distracting from the speaker. Online presentations in particular are the refuge of scoundrels.  While we are talking there are members of the audience who are completely distracted by doing their email or some other task and are not really taking in what we are saying.  The first hint is when they won’t turn on their camera.  This is a sign they don’t want to be involved fully in the meeting and are there, but not really. 

Usually online, there is big screen real estate taken up mainly with the slides and a tiny little box, with a postage stamp sized image of the presenter.  In this situation, it is super hard for the speaker to connect with their audience. If you decide to torture your audience by speaking in a monotone as well, then expect trouble.  All we really have is our vocal modulation because they usually cannot see our gestures or much body language, including our facial expressions.  We have to be working hard to make that vocal range compensate for all the other parts of the presentation tool box which are missing.

If we are online, we should try to turn off the “share screen” function as much as possible.  Yes, it is a bit of fiddling around to get the slide deck back up, but on balance we are better to appear in a larger format on screen, rather than being trapped in that little postage stamp.  The same applies when we are presenting in person.  Most people start with the slide deck and keep it up throughout the whole presentation.  Yes, we can do that, but why not hit the “B” button on the keyboard sometimes and send the screen into blackness, so that the only thing to focus on now is us.  We just hit the space bar and the screen is back up again and this is so much easier that trying to do the same thing when online and operating in Zoom or whatever.

I am not a fan of using video in presentations.  It is extremely rare that the video actually adds any value to the talk.  It is often “filler” for speakers who don’t like speaking and want to reduce their bit as much as possible.  They think that a glossy PR Department “high production values” corporate video will make up for their lack of delivery ability.  It won’t.  We as presenters have so much more high octane potential than a corporate video. If the video is too slick, we come off as second best and our messaging capacity is damaged.  If the corporate video is rather ho hum (and that is usually the case), we have lost the audience and now we have to work so much harder to get them back with us.

Simplicity in terms of what we show on screen is good for us as speakers, because we are the star, not the slide deck and we need to keep it that way.  Too much information, too many fonts, too many colours, too much animation, is a nightmare for us to break through with our message.  Yet, we see presenters doing this to themselves, making their job as a communicator so much tougher than it already is.

“Go light on the bells and whistles gimmicks and be the bells and whistles yourself”, would be my advice if you want to get your message through.  If you just want to project a high tech image and don’t care about getting your points registered with the audience, then knock yourself out and go for it.  The only problem with this approach is it is so transitory and ephemeral, you have to wonder why you bothered in the first place.  We go to all of this effort preparing our talk, so why not make sure our key messages are resonating with our audience, be that delivered online or in person.

“Urgent – we need help” is the type of text message you love as a training company.  It means the “why now?”, part of the question has a train wreck answer that you can fix.  In this case and in many similar cases, it is not the big bosses getting difficult or disgruntled clients acting up.  It is a grass roots rebellion against colleagues who are clueless when presenting.  At a certain point, the lack of professionalism becomes a restraint on the forward momentum of the organisation.

The road is rocky though for the presenter. There may be resistance from guerrilla groups who feel threatened if others start to make progress leaving them forlorn and exposed.  I remember going on stage after one of my colleagues, who had given his presentation to the entire firm.  It was a dud and he knew it.  There was no excitement and his messaging fell on stony ground.  I was an experienced speaker and presenter by that stage and I knew how to rock an audience.  I heard later that my persuasion free zone colleague was telling anyone who would listen after my presentation, that I was “all style and no substance”.  It was a clever putdown, because it sort of sounds smart.  This is the type of nonsense you may have to put up with from nobodies who are threatened by your professionalism.  It is better to suffer this invective though, than to stay hopeless and be just like them - a dud when it comes to persuasion power. 

The message I received was a case of rebellion.  With many retail operations there are seasonal changes of the product line-up and the marketing department have to infect the salespeople with passion for the brand’s latest offerings.  When the marketing department presentations are as a dull as dishwater and are failing in the persuasion stakes, then sales suffer.  The salespeople go on silent strike.  They are not motivated to move sales, because they don’t believe in the selections.  The marketing department presenters didn’t engage their internal audience. They didn’t use storytelling to fire up content for the salespeople to use with buyer.  They didn’t persuade their listeners to trust their marketing expertise.

Bosses have an uncanny ability to spot trouble early and realise that the next season’s results are not going to make the targets, because the enthusiasm for the seasonal selections isn’t inspiring much confidence in those who have to move the merchandise.  Hence the panic message to come and fix this issue.

Marketing departments, R&D centers, and middle management are the groups most often required to have persuasion power.  When they are not trained they are under powered for the task.  This has a flow on effect and the full potentiality of the organisation’s messaging capability isn’t being maximised.

When presentation training is invested in, it has the immediate impact of fixing the problem at hand, but it has other effects as well.  If we are all watching skilled presentations by our internal colleagues, it says a lot about the professionism of the organisation, boosts our esprit de corps and builds our pride in ourselves, to belong to such an organisation.  These skills spill outside the firm and show up when we meet clients and give them presentations which persuade and lead to increased sales. When we representing the organisation in a public setting at say an industry event, other groups note that we are doing a professional job and then they extend kudos to the rest of the entire organisation.  If we see you are a dud, we assume everyone is a dud.  If you are a star, we think they are all stars over there.

Salespeople are like water – they are always looking for the path of least resistance.  If the firm relies on them to sell the range of goods selected by someone else, then that internal presentation has to be professional and convincing.  In the case of this client, we have known them for a number of years and could have done the training much earlier, but there was no appetite for it.  Often the time and money combination conspire to stop bosses taking action until it is almost too late.  This is the tension between the “urgent and important” time management quadrant and the “not urgent, but important” quadrant.

These types of fundamental skills are not urgent but important and need to be raised up the hierarchy of priorities for the firm in order to head off trouble before it can ever arise.  Who wouldn’t want to work in an organisation where everyone was professional and persuasive when making their report or recommendations.

As speakers we have a tremendous amount of things to concentrate on when presenting.  Is my speaking speed at the right cadence?  Am I being clear with what I am saying?  Are the audience able to follow the navigation of my slide deck?  Am I losing attention to the wiles of the mobile phone, as people escape from me to the internet?  We can all have a lot of considerations buzzing around inside our brains. These considerations are all directed to ourselves.  Our delivery of the message to the audience can get lost in all of this mental effort and consideration. 

Let’s assume the fundamentals have been completed.  The audience analysis has clarified at what complexity level we should deliver our talk.  We have planned a blockbuster opening to seize the audience’s attention away from all of the competing distractions for our message.  We are providing evidence and proof to back up what we are saying, in this disgruntled, newly cynical world of “fake news” phobia.  We have cleverly designed two closes, one for after the main body of the talk and the other for after the last of the enquiries in the Q&A.  We want to dominate proceedings and ensure we control the last thing the audience hears, rather than the content of some random offering which was totally off topic.  Most importantly, we have not spent the majority of our preparation time jostling one slide with another to build the deck.  Rather we have been rehearsing our talk to ensure we have it within the time limit and that we have the right structure and flow for the presentation. We have pre-prepared possible answers for the most likely questions we can anticipate, so that we are never caught off guard.

With all of this in the bag we are ready to rumble with the delivery. Many technically oriented speakers believe that the delivery is trumped by the high value of their content.  They have written themselves a “Get Out Of Jail” card for this component, to excuse their lack of skills in this area.  Delusion reigns.  If you are droning on in a monotone, saying “um” and “ah” every five seconds and generally demonstrating no enthusiasm whatsoever for your topic, then no matter how brilliant the content, many in the audience will simply escape to the internet to get away from you.

Here are six points of persuasion for your delivery, which will ensure the audience stay their hands and don’t lunge for their phones as soon as you start speaking.  To help us recall all of them, we will move from head to toe as a simple memory trick, so that we don’t forget them.

Eyes

Eye contact is powerful and totally underused by most speakers.  If you fear your audience, making eye contact with them is terrifying.  If you have followed the fundamentals outlined earlier, your fear will diminish and you can get on with the business of engaging your listeners.  Our rule is 6x6.  We want to look deep into the eyes of our audience members one by one and hold their direct gaze for around six seconds.  Less than that and there is little engagement. More than that and it becomes intrusive.  Here is a little trick.  In a big audience, when you select one person in the crowd to engage with, at a certain distance the twenty people sitting around them all believe you are looking at them.  It is also hard to look at two objects simultaneously, so focus on just one eye of the audience member and talk directly to them for six seconds.  Mentally divide the audience into a baseball diamond, so that you have the inner and outer fields, left, center and right fields.  This gives us six sectors to engage with at random, to make sure we are covering the entire venue and not favouring those closest to us rather than those at the rear or those on our left side over those on the right.

Face

The slide deck mustn’t dominate that most powerful illuminator of ideas – our facial expressions.  However, many speakers have one facial expression throughout, regardless of the content of what they are saying.  We want to perfectly match what we are saying with how we are saying it.  If it is good news look happy, if it is bad news look serious, if it is puzzling, look curious, etc.  Professor Albert Mehrabian’s research showed that when we are incongruent between content and delivery, our audience becomes distracted from our message.

Voice

Voice modulation provides contrast and variety, which are important elements to keep our listeners with us until the very end.  An audible, conspiratorial whisper is just as powerful a message communicator as a stentorian outburst.  All loud or all soft are the attention decimators we need to avoid.  Mix it up and go for variety.

Gestures

Holding the same hand position for longer than 15 seconds, saps all the power from it and it just becomes annoying.  The faucet idea of “turn it on, turn it off”, is the right metaphor for how we should be thinking about gestures.  Combining gestures with our eye contact, facial expression and voice power can really project our words and phrases into the minds of our audience.

Pauses

We need small breaks to allow our audience to digest what we have said, rather than snowballing them with the next offering, until they cannot remember what we said five minutes ago. Pauses help us to control our delivery speed too, so that we are not rushing through the content.

Stance

Standing with our weight split 50/50 across our legs always looks professional.  Don’t slouch, stand up tall and straight.

These six delivery reminders will ensure your message is received clearly. We go to so much effort to prepare our talks and so much stress to deliver it, then it will be a total waste if our message is not getting through.

The Japanese idea of Shu-Ha-Ri is a combination of three characters – 守破離.  I first came across this concept when I was living in Australia and studying karate there. It is a very typical concept in all traditional arts in Japan.  Each character has a separate meaning, so they don’t make up a compound word, as is often common with Japanese phrases.  The idea represents a learning journey.  Shu is to protect the traditional techniques, the basics, the fundamentals.  Ha is to detach and break away from the tradition, to innovate and depart from our attachments to what we are doing.  Ri is to transcend to a level where there is no self-consciousness of what we are doing, we make it our own, because we have absorbed it all and it is now part of us.

This is very much the journey of the presenter.  I was reminded of this the other day when I was giving a talk to a Tokyo American Club audience. I was the guest speaker and I chose as my topic the Six Impact Points Of Persuasion.  One of those six points was on the use of gestures.  In the Q&A, one of the audience members asked me if I was using gestures during my talk with conscious thought or whether they were just happening naturally.  Actually, I had never thought about that and I realised these were unconscious acts driven by the content of what I was saying and by my delivery skills as a presenter.  I was in a mental state of Ri, in the Shu-Ha-Ri format.

For most businesspeople this is a very hard stage to reach.  They often get only a few opportunities a year to speak.  Unfortunately, they usually do no rehearsal and only deliver that talk once in their lives. Also, they get no coaching on how to make their next talk even better.  Even if there are only a few chances to stand up in front of an audience, we can get to work improving trying to move to the next stage.  It may be that stage one – Shu – could occupy us for a number of years, but as we say, the best time to start becoming excellent at presenting was yesterday and the second best time is today.

In this first stage of Shu, we need to consciously remind ourselves what we are supposed to be doing.  We need to make sure we get our feet in the right position to make sure our body posture doesn’t start excluding audience members, because we are only facing half the hall.  We need to remember to look people in the eye when we speak, as opposed to letting our gaze wander aimlessly like a cloud over the whole audience and find we are paying no attention to anyone.  We need to engage the audience and using direct eye contact is the best way to do that.  We need to manufacture our gestures to match the content of our message and to hold them for no longer than 15 seconds so that the power doesn’t disappear from the gesture.  We have to get our face involved rather than letting it become wooded and that is actually a pretty hard habit to break. We have to remind ourselves not to slip into a monotone voice when presenting and make sure we have vocal variety and that we are not getting too fast.

As we get more chances to speak, we keep concentrating on these points, so that we make sure we are covering all the bases. At a certain point we start to internalise what we should be doing and have to expend less energy to keep checking what we are doing.  We are getting into the Ha stage.  We start to think of new things we could be doing.  Perhaps we will move around the stage a bit and try and get closer to the audience. If it is a big stage, we want to move to the left and right extremes and try and connect with the members of our audience there.  We are no longer worried about out foot position, because we are capable of re-setting our body so that we never eliminate half the audience from our gaze by looking off to only one direction.  We become more comfortable with our gestures and they are not needing to be forced anymore and are occurring naturally.  In fact, we might be getting more flamboyant and larger with our gestures to reap a bigger impact on the audience.  We are getting better at being more focused on the audience, than on what we are doing.

In the final stage of Ri, we are not even conscious of all of these little building bricks we need to make the presentation a success.  We are not even conscious of ourselves because we are now totally focused on the reaction of the audience and reading their thoughts about what we are saying, to see where we need to make some adjustments.  We are now focused on what they like and what interests them.  We start to get into a close embrace with our audience as we move them around, dancing to our tune.  We are in sync with them and they with us, as we become one unit.

Next time you present, make a mental note about which stage you feel you are in.  Start thinking about what you need to be doing to move along the journey to the next stage.  When you break the process up, like this, it provides good insight into our progress and helps us to move forward.

Contemplating this title you may be thinking “I am not boring”.  You would be a rarity in business then, because think about how many interesting business presentations you have heard in your life to date.  I would reckon you would have trouble counting them on one hand.  If you believe you are not boring, then you are one of the elite amongst business presenters.  Is that the case?

Why are so many businesspeople such duds as presenters?  The answers are not hard to find.  There is a basic miscalculation going on about content and delivery capabilities.  The underlying mistake is thinking that if my content is really good, I don’t have to be really good in delivering it.  Once upon a time, information was hard to find and speakers could bring something fresh to their audience. Search engines have ended that monopoly on insights and data.

The other issue is audiences today are tough, tough, tough.  Steve Jobs has ruined it for all of us.  In 2007 he introduced a weapon of audience mass distraction called the iPhone.  If we sound even vaguely boring, audiences abscond to their conduits to the internet and leave us behind, no longer listening to what we have to say.   The Jobs era has overtaken the Mehrabian era.

Professor Albert Mehrabian did some research in the 1960s and found some disturbing trends regarding audience attention deficits.  His research however has become some of the most misquoted and poorly understood in the modern era.  His numbers are heralded and trumpeted far and wide, but usually totally out of context.  He found three statistics which help us to identify the issues we face as presenters.  If you ever hear any guru or pseudo guru telling you that presentations are broken up into brackets of 55%, 38% and 7% run for the hills yelling “fake news”.  They will explain that 55% of a presentation’s messaging success is made up of how we are dressed and our appearance, 38% based on how we sound and 7% on what we have to say for ourselves.

What Mehrabian actually found was that these statistics only become relevant when what we are saying is incongruent with how we are saying it.  What does that mean?  I am sure you have seen this – the president is reporting the excellent results in a monotone voice, with a wooden face devoid of any expression, with zero body language.  The delivery doesn’t match the message and we get easily distracted.  In the Mehrabian era, that meant getting focused on what the speaker was wearing or how their voice sounded and audiences were missing the messaging.

Today they are lunging for their app encrusted mobile phones to get to TikTok or their email or one of their other favourite social media platforms.  Our message is out the window, often even if we are a highly polished, professional and engaging speaker.  We have to do our best to reel the audience in to hear our message and we need to use some key leverage points to achieve that.

A monotone voice is guaranteed to have the audience flee from us, so we need to use voice modulation to create the variety we need to retain attention.  We can elevate key words for the audience with either power or softness, using a type of conspiratorial whisper to grab attention.  The key is in the variation and the link to volume control to raise the attention given to certain key phrases or words.  Pauses are another voice control aspect which makes a big difference to how easy we make it for our listeners to follow what we are saying and for them to navigate our presentation.

To voice we add gestures to dramatize what we are saying.  The coordination of strong gestures and sets of key phrases really lifts the message in the minds of our audience.  The gestures tap into our body language and we can accentuate good and bad news accordingly.  If we also add in direct eye contact with members of our audience, the effect is mesmerising and will stop them from reaching for Steve Job’s speaker tool of attention destruction.  They will stick with us right to the end and absorb the messages we are promoting and that is why we are giving these talks in the first place isn’t it?

It seems ridiculous that such simple tools can lift us from speaker Death Valley oblivion to being listened to without distraction.  Mehrabian gave us hints on Stage One of the Death Valley escape routes, but Steve Jobs threw down a much more formidable challenge as speakers.  The numbers are more like 99% mobile phone competition and 1% message success today.

Being boring and incongruent isn’t even the divide anymore.  Interest isn't enough to escape the gravitational pull of the mobile phone.  We have to be very effective, engaging and professional, in full command of all the tools at our disposal to vanquish the siren calls of the internet for our listeners.  And you think your quality of information will restrain them from escaping?  That is a massive delusion. Even worse, for the rest of our working lives, the situation will never improve for us as speakers.  Time to face the reality.