As a presentations trainer, I can appreciate the difference between class participants when they cross that bridge and begin to display confidence when they are presenting.  Nerves and fear drive most people when it comes to giving presentations and just telling them to “be confident” is actually ridiculous.  If they could do it, they would, but basically they have no idea how to project confidence, when they are imploding through stress and fear.  The focus is all on them and not on the audience and that is a big mistake.

Here are four building blocks to improve our confidence when speaking in public.

1. Self-Acceptance

The survival of the human species has in no small part been due to fear and hence taking necessary precautions. When our brain comprehends a dangerous or stressful situation about to occur, we don’t wait around for that to unfold.  Instead, we start pumping chemicals into our body, particularly adrenaline, to get ready for fighting our way out of trouble or for flight, as we take off and distance ourselves from the danger.  We need to accept that this is entirely normal and that the flow of chemicals into the body is not controllable. 

We also face mindset issues around whether I can do this successfully or not.  Again, this is natural.  If you said, “I am going to go out there and be a total train wreck”, then there would be no fear, because we have set such a low marker for ourselves.  Rather, we set a very high bar and sometimes that bar is set way too high.   We need to be calibrating what we are doing here.  If we say to ourselves that this is a journey as a presenter and today I am going to work on three things in my talk and not worry about trying to be perfect, then the pressure is rapidly reduced. 

2. Self-Respect

When we see people highly skilled in a profession or activity, we respect them for their abilities and accomplishments.  It is the same when we see a great speaker. What we can’t see is their first presentation or their early days as a speaker, when they weren’t so skilful.  Our mindset shift has to be from lack to capability. 

We have skills in many areas, but we conveniently forget that we built those skills up over time and we weren’t complete at the start.  We can go into our memory banks and draw on our history of achievement in various areas in our lives and assure ourselves that we can become skilled in this presenting arena too, just as we have done in other areas of our lives to date. 

3. Take Risks

If we keep doing the same things, in the same way, we will keep getting the same old results. If we want to see some growth, some advance, then we need to make some changes.  Einstein is credited with saying that doing the same things over and over again in the same way and expecting a different result is basically crazy.  There will be one of two changes required.  Either we tweak something that we have already been doing or we bring in something new.  These both have risks attached to them.

To progress, we need to add new skills and abilities to our repertoire and this is what we have been doing our whole lives, so the idea is not strange.  We don’t have to start with something massively risky though.  We can start small and build from there, as we become more comfortable with our presentations.  Pick something which is a small risk and try it. Next analyse how that went and adjust for the next speaking chance. If we keep doing this, we grow our range of possibilities rapidly and dramatically.

4. Self-Talk

We have mentioned mindset and a great function of how we think is what we think about.  In the early 20^thCentury, psychologists discovered that we could change our situations in life by changing how we thought about them. Until then it was fate, luck, God’s will, etc,. and we had no control over any of that.  The idea that changing your thinking could change your life is a well accepted concept today and so we spend a lot of attention on our mindset.

What are we shovelling into our mind though?  The media is a full of bad news, fake news, conspiracy theories, etc. We need to apply some strong filters to what we allow into our mind, if we want to become more confident and successful.  Our own media – our self-talk - also must be harnessed and controlled. 

“I can’t” language needs to be switched to “I can”.  Just swapping the words though won’t get us very far.  We need to add some evidence.  For example, “Because I have done the preparation I can do it", or “ because I have done this before at a smaller scale, I can use that base to go bigger this time”, are better approaches.

Confidence is a project for all of us.  We can be super confident in some things and terrified in others.  The focus on building our confidence in new areas like presenting are key and these four tools will definitely assist in that effort.

We have been asked to speak or we have punted a chance to speak to an audience.  We will have a message in mind for the talk and we begin the process of constructing the talk.  Unfortunately we are now in the era of short attention spans, “fake news”, massive cynicism and intolerance.  Contending philosophies and diverse experience has been tossed out the window in favour of tribal agreement and solidarity of interpretation.  Cancel culture started on US varsity campuses as students began aggressively confronting Professors during lectures, if the students didn’t agree with the content or view.  As American politics has collapsed into a bi-modal equation of “us” versus “them”, bi-partisanship has been quietly taken out the back and garrotted.

“A hundred flowers blooming and a thousand schools contending” isn’t fashionable anymore, as foxholes are dug deeper and the sniping has become continuous.  Where does this leave us as speakers?  It is difficult enough to be a speaker today, without another layer of complexity.  Every time we get on our feet to speak, we are putting ourselves up as targets and are exposing our personal and professional brands.

Business topics generally are pretty boring, so the degree of angst being generated isn’t usually substantial.  Nevertheless, there are land mine fields a plenty for us to stray into.  Diversity, equity and inclusion generates attention around the configurations of the upper echelons of companies.  Plastic waste entering the food chain demands changes in the amount of plastic being used and how it is disposed of.  Floods alternating with droughts around the world and the disappearance of ice sheets at the poles, has attention focused on what companies are doing to battle climate change.  Online hacking and broadcast of personal information and internet security in general, are urgent issues without solutions in sight.  I could go on, but let me stop here to make the point that while most of what we say, we may think is harmless, we may be overly optimistic.

Captains of industry and the sub-captains are being scrutinised to an extent not seen before.  Audiences are sensitised to their preferred expectations and requirements about how they think the world should be and how companies should conduct themselves.  Next thing we pop up to give our talk and walk into any number of potential maelstroms.  Are we skill set ready?  Are we mentally prepared? 

When presenting in business, unlike at some Universities, it is unlikely the audience will try to shout us down and deny us the opportunity to speak and be heard.  Generally, hostilities and gun play are reserved for the Q&A.  Once we open up for questions, we are now in a street fight, the defining aspect of which is that there are no rules. Audience members can say whatever they like, however unrelated or off-topic to what we were speaking about.  They can be rude, arrogant, bullying, condescending and aggressive and there isn’t anything we speakers can do about that.

If we are smart, we will have set the frame of the questions by delineating the time period for the Q&A.  This is a critical move because if you ever have to get out of Dodge in a hurry, you can always say, “we have reached the end of our allotted time for today’s talk and let me make some concluding remarks”.  We insert this little time control timebomb at the start to enable us to have a dignified exit if we are being bombarded with nasty questions and swept up in oceans of invective.

We can disarm a heat seeking missile thinly disguised as a question by paraphrasing what was asked.  With any question time, it is a good practice to repeat the question so that those down the back can hear it.  Well that is except for the attack question and we definitely do not want to repeat it.  Instead, we paraphrase it to take the heat out of it.  For example, if someone asked, “Isn’t it true that you are going to fire 30% of the workforce in the next few weeks?”, we can paraphrase this as “the question was about staffing”.  We still have to answer the question though, but we have successfully reduced some of the tension in the room and we come across as cool, calm and collected in the face of incoming hot rounds of fire.

The best plan is to give our answer and smoothly and swiftly move on to the next question by saying, “Who has the next questions?”.  Do not ask the hostile interlocutor if they are satisfied with your answer by saying, “does that satisfy your question?”, because if it doesn't the brawl continues.  If your antagonist won’t be brushed off so easily and interjects during a follow-up question, denouncing you as a fraud and a charlatan for not properly answering their question the way they wanted it, we need to be careful what we say next.

We need to remember that we cannot win in a street fight with no rules, so we are better to break off hostilities with that person and just move on.  We should say, “I appreciate you have strong views on this subject, so rather than occupy everyone’s time right now, let’s you and I get together after the talk and continue our debate”.  At which point we again say, “Who has the next question?” and keep moving forward.

If things don’t get this fraught, but we still have a sizeable gap in views on a subject with one of our audience, we need to just acknowledge that and not try to “win the argument” because that is just not possible when we deal with zealots who are locked into their world view on a subject.  We can say, “thank you for sharing your thoughts on this subject and I see we are a fair way apart on this topic, so let’s just agree to disagree.  Who has the next question?”.

We cannot win in a public verbal brawl, so we are better to avoid it at all costs.  The audience expects us to be professional all of the time and many of them will view the antagonist’s activities as ridiculous. We cannot bring ourselves down to that level and so we must stay above the mud and the blood they want to embroil us in.

The date has been set for our presentation.  Naturally, we are pretty busy with work, so we borrow that Toyota production line mantra of “Just In Time:” and leave it all to the last moment to cobble together our presentation.  We rifle through our previous presentations, looking for slides we can repurpose for this topic, which of course is an excellent time saver.  We just manage to get the deck together in time and off we go to the venue.  Here we give the only rendition of this talk to our live audience.  This is such a high risk high wire act, threatening both personal and professional brands, you shake your head as to why on earth someone would choose to do it this way.

Toyota makes great cars and they have pioneered many innovations in car production, but they are not the model we need for giving presentations.  We need Aesop’s fable here about the hare and the tortoise.  The hare is so much faster than the tortoise, but in this fable the hare loses the race, because although the tortoise was slower they were more consistent and steady in making progress.

“We don’t plan to fail, but we fail to plan” is an old saw we have all heard before and which we ignore at our peril in any aspect of life.  Regarding presentations, restrain your hand for from firing up the laptop to start searching for slide decks and instead spend some time tortoising.  Who is my audience going to be?  What level of expertise will they have on this subject?  What are their seniority, age and gender splits?  What are they most interested in?  Can I get enough information from the organisers to enable me to start the planning?  Slide deck amalgamation is like firing blindly into the dark, because we don’t know what our target is for this talk.

Once we have decided who we are going to be targeting for this talk, what is the purpose of the exercise?  There are generally four purposes from which we can choose: persuade, motivate, inform or entertain.  Most public business talks are usually focused on the first three.  The entertain one is the classic “filler” role for the speaker.  You are the light variety show before or after the main event.  It might be the luncheon or dinner spot at the convention or conference.  I hate this one.  You need serious, real talent to be entertaining, which is why, in a business context, we should leave this to the professionals.  If you are a great raconteur, bully for you, but for most of us, this is a step way too far.

Once we know what our purpose is, we can fix on some key messages.  These will depend to a great extent on how much time we have been allotted.  There are only so many things we can cover in-depth in a thirty or forty minute talk.  Having our central thesis determined is fine, but so what?  We need to think about the evidence we will marshal to make our point stick and for us to be convincing for the audience.  This might include data, statistics, expert testimonials, evidence, examples, storytelling, etc.  If we find ourselves making a bold statement, then we need to pause and say the words “fake news” out aloud to ourselves, because that is exactly what the audience will be thinking, unless we can prove what we are saying.

We need a blockbuster opening to break through all the mental clutter immobilising our audience and blocking our messaging from getting through.  We need to design two closes, one for at the end of the talk and a second one for after the Q&A.  Recency is a powerful thing with human beings, so we have to go with that flow and make sure the last thing they hear is what we want them to hear.  Now we are ready to consider what visuals we need to help the audience and ourselves with the navigation of this talk.  There will be a burning temptation to load the slide deck to the gunwales with content both on each screen and with too many screens.  Go totally Zen here.  Be minimalist, stripped down to the bare essentials.  We don’t want the slides to upstage us – we must remain the main act and the slides are our servant, not the other way around.

Once we are ready, we start the hard work and that is the practice, the rehearsal of the talk. Doing a full thirty minute talk at full power, over and over again in rehearsal is seriously exhausting, but necessary.  We need to know the content, the cadence and whether we can fit it into the time constraints we are facing.  By the time we get in front of our audience we are a very polished presenter on this topic, fully tooled up to impress everyone with our professionalism.

In Part One, we explored the mental barriers around linguistic perfection which are holding Japanese businesspeople back and denying them the chance to have “executive presence”.  Once we have cleared that hurdle, then we can start to work on the other key elements for achieving “executive presence”.  Appearing confident is not a plus in Japan.  Here, being unsure, timid, shy, unprepossessing, modest, bashful are all signs of good citizenship, by fitting in with the majority and avoiding standing out.  Having “executive presence” is the exact opposite of this cultural preference, so it takes quite a lot of work to convince Japanese executives they have to stand out and be heard.

The obvious differentiators are eye contact, voice amplification, gesture usage and posture.  Looking someone straight in the eye is a western concept emphasising credibility and trust.  In Japan, it is rude, so everyone is taught to look at the forehead or the throat instead.  When coaching these executives, I have to make the point that their role is different when presenting, to other aspects of their work.  They are not having a chat with their mates now.  They are on stage presenting or in the meeting room commenting.  Six seconds of eye contact is about the right length to engage someone in the room without it becoming too intrusive.  We have some proprietary “secret” techniques for helping with this eye contact fear and we change the dynamic for these executives and they realise they can do it.  They could always do it in fact, but mentally they were not ready to do it and that is where we apply the magic.

Engaging the audience, especially an international audience, makes a huge difference to the credibility of the Japanese executive.  They come across as supremely confidence and sure of what they are saying.  Let’s face it, we are all suckers for buying the confidence of others and by extension, what they are saying.  The voice has to back it up though.  A tiny little voice gets lost very quickly and audience attention drifts away.  Speaking with a loud voice is not polite in Japan, so we run into another cultural barrier. 

We use a lot of video in our coaching and while the Japanese executive may feel they are screaming out their words, under our coaching direction for them to go louder, when they see the replay, they realise it just looked extremely confident.  “Seeing is believing” is definitely a necessity here to overcome the mindset that loud is bad.  Amplifying the message really makes such a difference to be taken seriously and for people to dwell upon what you are saying.  Again, it is adding that patina of confidence to the message and our own credibility standing behind the message.  It sounds simple – when appropriate, speak louder.  However these executives are not even close to the loudness required, so they need a lot of support to help them through this barrier.  We also have to keep pushing them to go bigger with their voice modulation, to have more vocal range, to project more power.

Holding their hands behind their back is a favourite of Japanese executives when speaking, usually because they are not sure what to do with their hands. They feel this anchors them and provides stability when they speak.  That may be true, but it negates a lot of the power available to us as speakers, especially when we can employ our gestures to really emphasise a point we want to make.  Combining eye contact and voice modulation with our gestures is a dynamite combination.  It creates so much power and credibility for the message.  Hiding our hands behind our back or locking our hands together in front of our body are denying us access to this tremendous tool.

Gestures have a very short use by date though.  Holding the same gesture beyond around fifteen seconds just sees the power of that tool evaporate and the residue is just an annoying distraction.  We have to turn the gestures on and off.   Gestures also have to be congruent with what we are saying.  We can show something large by extending the width between our hands or we can use one hand as a measure and show something tall or short.  The words have to match up with what we are indicating or it looks strange and is an unnecessary distraction from our message.

Posture is another indicator of confidence.  Slouching, leaning on something, shifting our weight continuously, wandering around the stage, walking too briskly to and fro, only engaging half of the audience are all competition with what is coming out of our mouth.  We want to appear professional and that means standing straight and tall like a professional.  It means commanding the whole room with our body language.  There is a Japanese word “ki” (気), which is describing our vital life force and we want to employ that when speaking.  We want to be projecting our energy into the audience and across the room, we want to fill up the entire space with our energy. 

Using correct eye contact, voice modulation, gestures and posture together creates an impression of solidity and gravitas.  This adds up to creating a sense of “executive presence” when we are speaking.  For Japanese executives, the hardest parts for them are straying from the cultural confines of their upbringing, to become a force in public.  Naturally, we teach them how to secure all of the attributes needed to have executive presence, but the key is how we teach them the necessary mindset shift, to bring it all together.

As a training company we are often asked to assist with helping Japanese executives to have “executive presence”.  This term is a broad descriptor, but essentially we all understand what they are talking about.  They want their Japanese executives to be seen as professionals and to have them listened to and taken seriously. Japan is the third largest economy in the world, but its star is fading.  In my observation, on the world stage of conventions and conferences, APAC executives from China, India and Korea are having greater impact.  One of the issues is linguistic expertise imbalance, with Japan usually at the back of the bus.  This is a self-induced limitation though, which doesn’t have to be such a negative factor.

The Japanese mindset is one about perfection.  There should be no defects, no mistakes and having set the bar so high, they have made it extremely difficult for themselves to deliver when speaking in English.  Chinese speakers have an advantage because the grammar is similar to English with a subject-verb-object configuration.  International Indian executives are educated in English and the main barrier for them is the degree to which their strong accent plays a role in making communication difficult, combined with the rapid speed with which they speak.  When we get to the Koreans though, the comparisons become a bit harsher, because Korean language has the same grammatical structure as Japanese – subject-object-verb.  So, why are the Japanese not doing a better job speaking the international language of business – English?

Actually they can do it, but they have talked themselves out of it and as a consequence they hesitate to speak up in English, which of course means yielding zero “executive presence” in the global arena.  This is one of the reasons they love to use slides when presenting and pack those slides with massive amounts of text, which they then insist on reading to us.  Given we can all read, this is very boring and we switch off and escape from their talk.  They are also allowing the screen to dominate the proceedings and their potential executive presence has now been surrendered to the slideshow.  Remember, we want all of the attention on us and we want to dominate the slides, not the other way around.

When we are coaching Japanese executives to have more presence, we have to deal with this linguistic issue head on. They have made a fundamental assumption that linguistic perfection is needed to be effective in communication.  Therefore, they fear failure and embarrassing themselves by speaking less than perfect English.  The best way not to fail is not to speak at all or to speak as little as possible.

This fear of failure runs through the society.  Karl Hahne, who runs Hafael here in Japan, was a recent guest of mine on my Japan’s Top Business Interviews podcast.  He made an interesting observation, which hadn’t occurred to me about failure and how it permeates itself in Japan.  He noted that in ancient times, if a samurai failed his lord, he was expected to commit seppuku or ritual suicide.  In the modern business world, we sometimes see executives committing suicide to take responsibility for mistakes.  In some cases, they even kill themselves to take responsibility for their superior’s mistakes.  The aversion to making mistakes runs deep in Japanese society and as coaches, we have to work with that fact in mind.

We work on switching their mindset to encompass the idea that you can still have effective communication, even if there are errors or imperfections.  I demonstrate this by mangling the Japanese language, using an English grammatical structure with Japanese vocabulary.  I say, “watashi Tokyo eki ikimasu” and then ask them what I said?  They tell me, “you said you were going to Tokyo Station”.  I get a bit melodramatic about this stage and feign shock and ask them how they could have possibly understood what I said, when it was imperfect Japanese.  The point I make to them is that just as they adjusted what I said into correct Japanese in their mind, we do the same thing.  They don’t need to limit themselves by fearing mistakes, because this hesitancy in speaking up is guaranteed to erode their presence in a meeting or when making a presentation.

To get attention we need to be confident when we speak.  All of us buy the confidence generated by others and we receive the message they bear as a result.  If we fear mistakes, then we just don’t speak up and even if we do, it usually isn’t convincing, so it is ineffective.  Getting over this mental barrier is hard for Japanese executives and this is where they need a lot of coaching.  In my own experience, they certainly have enough grammatical knowledge and enough vocabulary, so that is not the real barrier.  Their perfectionism has to be replaced with confidence that their message is getting through, even if there are mistakes.

In Part Two, we will look at some of the tools available to these executives, to have greater executive presence.

As Covid slowly declines here in Japan, things are slowly getting back to a semblance of normality.  Imagine my surprise, to be asked to apply for a spot in a Chamber of Commerce pitch contest, with actual people in the room.  Actually, I was a ring-in, because originally they told me I would have to join the pitch contest later in the year because this one was already full of contenders.  Covid took care of that little glitch and eliminated some of the pitch contestants who became infected, so I was shuffled into the pack at the last minute. 

I asked the organisers where in the batting order I would get my chance.  I was in the middle, which isn’t a great spot.  I prefer and recommend you go first or last.  If first, the idea is to blitz it so that the first impression is owned by you. Also all the other contestants are being measured against you and they are not going to measure up at all.  The end spot is the most preferred because this is the final impression and the one that lingers longest in the mind before the voting process starts.

Ten minutes is long enough if you know what you are doing.  The other contestants who went for a slide show made some basic errors.  You only have ten minutes, so the point is to build a strong impression for your company.  If you choose to use slides, then make them super interesting.  The other contestants didn’t go for that idea and decided to just boor everyone with lines of text and more text and some more text, for good measure.  In the case of one of them, their profession was a people business, but there were no people in the slides.  If it had been me, I would have had tons of photos of customers enjoying their service, lots of shots of happy families, some shots of the behind the scenes preparation for delivering the service.  Something visual so we could identify with the service they provided.  Text means your brain has to think whereas images tell you all the information you need to know immediately.

In my case, I decided to take a leaf out of the content marketing handbook.  Content marketing means you provide some examples of your service to show your credibility.  It might be white papers, testimonials, videos, podcasts, books – all manner of things which underline you are a legitimate expert in your field.  We have produced a handy little card to fit into your wallet called 6 Impact Points For Persuasive Power.  Before the talk, I distributed these to everyone in the room. 

When it was my turn to talk, I explained that persuasion power is needed by everyone in business, be they leaders, salespeople, colleagues and anyone who would like others to cooperate with them.  Now I have cast a wide net, to make the topic relevant to all gathered to hear this pitch.  I didn’t say much about Dale Carnegie, except that we will celebrate 60 years in Japan next year.  That is sufficient credibility by itself.   I mentioned the five core areas we cover, to give people some idea of the scope of the business and that was about the sum of the propaganda.  It is supposed to be a pitch contest, but actually waxing lyrical over the virtues of your company is pretty dull for everyone else, so it doesn’t really get very far.

I went through the six points explaining how they work and how anyone can incorporate these into their presenting skill set.  The audience feels they are getting some value for their time rather than being forced to listen to irrelevant details about another company they have zero interest in.  People are primarily interested in themselves, so by focusing on how these 6 persuasion points can help them, they feel some benefit from attending and listening to me.  The other key thing with this choice of content was that I have to be able to walk the talk.  If I am going to run around telling others how to present, then I have to be able to be the role model myself.  This is a chance to add credibility, when you can do what you recommend to others.  The speakers before me felt the gap in presenting expertise and it was also obvious to the audience.  The speaker after me publicly said that I would be hard to follow and she was right, because her presentation unfortunately was not benefiting from the points I had just been making.

The pitch contest was no contest, because I planned it that way.  No powerpoint in sight so that all the focus was on me.  I also chose a subject of universal applicability and interest.  I demonstrated what I was talking about, so that people could leave the affair thinking they learnt something from an expert and that card is for sure safely ensconced in their wallets.  One of the earlier speakers mentioned he had spare copies of the powerpoint, if people wished to have them and naturally no one was interested in the slightest.  Their carry home item was A4 size, not attractive and also not particularly useful in information terms.  A robust business card sized summary of the 6 points on the other hand was kept.  That was no accident.

So when we are presenting with other speakers, lets always assume we are competing with the other presenters and lets approach it like a contest, making sure we emerge the winner.

Remote work is a sticky concept.  Bosses may prefer to have people under direct supervision in the office, but the masses have voted with their feet and headed home.  Tokyo commutes are a shocker.  Crowded trains, standing squashed up against total strangers for long hours is not something anyone looks forward to and being able to ditch all of that and stay home instead sounds much better. There is a need for in-person teamwork and finding the balance between remote days and days in the office is a hot topic at the moment and will continue to be so. 

Internal and external meetings will need to be conducted remotely.  We are entering the hybrid world where some of the team are in the same office meeting room and everyone else is at home connecting remotely.  This will spill over to meetings with clients.  Japan is always a country where there is a surprising number of people required for the meeting on the client side.  I can’t count the number of times when there was just me on one side of the table and host of people on the other, with me wondering why are there so many required for this meeting?  That will continue in the remote world and in the hybrid meeting world too.

This presents a number of problems.  Engaging our audiences online and in the room are both difficult thanks to the technology.  When groups gather in a room for the meeting, there is normally one camera to cover all.  There are some tools available like the Owl which uses multiple cameras covering 360 degrees, to show who is speaking on the screen for those who are remote.  This is good, but there is a limit to its effectiveness, because it suits small groups gathered in a U-shape.  Sound is the issue here.  Usually there are one or two of those UFO looking microphones on the desk to pick up the audio and in my experience they are never quite satisfactory.  It is also very frustrating when those in the room react to an unintelligible remark and start laughing, while those beaming in remotely have no clue what is going on.  This really divides the group into first and second class citizens very quickly.

The other problem, which despite everyone working with the technology for the last number of years, is that few people still understand how to use the camera.  In a meeting room with one shared camera it is difficult, because the distance to the people speaking is quite far and with a wide shot, we don’t feel any connection with them.  The Owl and similar technology can help, but I haven’t seen too many firms bothering to use it when they already have installed one camera at the front of the room.

For those joining remotely, they invariably fail to look at the camera at all and are looking down at the faces on the screen.  This is understandable, because we are trained to look at people faces and this is where all the body language information is located. Unfortunately, we are not looking at the people though, because our eyes are downcast.  We are looking at the middle of the screen, rather than at the green dot, which is where the camera is located on the top of the laptop.  When we ignore the people’s faces on screen and talk directly to the green dot, we are now engaging directly with the audience because they see us looking straight at them.  For the speaker though, it is not very satisfying, because there is no sense of strong personal bond between us and the audience faces on screen, so we feel disconnected.

To add to the already heightened degree of difficulty, when we introduce slides, the speaker becomes this person trapped in a tiny little box on the screen. We cannot really see them very well, so the personal relationship is lost.  Normally when we are presenting, our face, voice and gestures are critical to being persuasive, but when virtual we are robbed of two of the elements. We only have our voice to work with.  Sadly, very few people understand the importance of how to use modulation, pauses and speed control for emphasis when speaking. Take note next time you hear people giving a talk or in a virtual meeting.   The tendency is to put the same amount of speed and strength behind every word.  Boring and often monotonous.

In fact, we need to use pauses more in the remote world, to allow people the people listening to follow what we are saying.  Also, we purposely hit key words with more power and this is a must, if we want to lift certain key words in the understanding of our audience.  This is not a word democracy. Not every word has the same value in a sentence. Most people who are not trained properly give each word gets the same emphasis treatment, so there is no differentiation.

Do we really need to have the slides up all of the time? If we can stop sharing the screen as often as possible and present ourselves in full screen mode that is best.  Yes, that may mean a bit of switching between getting the slide deck up again and alternating between it and ourselves, but this is the way for us to have more impact.  Being on full screen allows us to employ gestures, however limited and also to make the best use of our facial expressions.  These are very powerful in driving home our point and communicating our message.

Having the camera at eye height would seem to be an obvious thing, but I still see so many people just resting the laptop on the table in front of them.  Why shooting up one’s nose is thought to be professional or attractive is a mystery to me, but a lot of people have zero self-awareness and continue to make this most basic of mistakes. We want to get that camera at eye height, so we can make it easier to ignore what is going on in the main screen and just engage each person directly through the camera.  

If people don’t work these things out, we will all be treated to desultory presentations for the remainder of our working careers.  That thought sends a shiver up my spine, I can tell you. Or can we all get back to the understanding that this remote medium has its own idiosyncrasies and we have to master them, because this medium isn’t going away. 

I hope they can come up with a technology solution that give us the type of effect you can have with a teleprompter, where you can be looking straight at the camera in the middle of the screen, rather than just the green dot, which is mounted at the top. That would help us all to be better able to engage the people on screen with great eye contact and improve our communication effectiveness.  Until the technology catches up, let’s get to work on what we can control and be a professional when in person and when beaming in virtually. 

I teach presentation skills to businesspeople.  In the first class they do a simple self-introduction and this is where we instructors can tell the skill level of the people in the class.  A recent class had quite competent people and I am sure they would have been seen as already quite good by their peers and bosses.  At the end of the class on the next day, they were transformed into a completely different, highly persuasive and skilled presenter.  I was thinking what was the difference?  They were by all measures fairly good when they arrived into the class.  The obvious answer was the coaching they received, but why did that make such a major difference and can we get better at presenting by ourselves without coaching?

There are books on presenting and I have written one called “Japan Presentation’s Mastery” and there are millions of others.  There are tons of videos on presenting and I release two a week, one called “The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show” which covers leadership, sales and presenting.  The other show is called the “Japan Business Mastery Show” and it covers the same content, but in a more abbreviated version for people with no time.  There are no doubt a lot of podcasts on the subject and I release this one “The Presentations Japan Series” every week.  What I am saying is there are no shortage of resources on how to become a better presenter and I am doing my best to create content for Japan as my niche.

If you absorb all the content available there is no doubt you will become a better presenter.  But will it make you a great presenter?  To become great, I believe you need two things – lots of presenting opportunities and quality coaching from experts.  I forget which Tony Robbins book it was I was reading, but I remember he made the conscious decision to do as much presenting as he could, in order to master the art.  I thought that made sense and I certainly grabbed every opportunity after I came back to Japan to work in 1992 to give presentations. 

Things have gone quiet since Covid, as there were no events, but still I am up to presentation number 548.  I tried to incorporate what I was studying into my talks and also to note what was working for me and what was not.  Over three decades I have built up the experience now to be very comfortable speaking and presenting.  My TED talk last year did push me though, because it is very short at 13 minutes and the video goes global. If you are doing a poor job, a lot of people know about it. I also don’t count my presentations given as a corporate trainer, because that is not a public speech style presentation and has a different goal and cadence.  It is still standing up in front of people and commanding the room though, but it is different, so I don’t count the many thousands of those facilitations.

What about the coaching aspect?  The coach provides options.  We know what we know, but the coach can see more than what we can see.  When you think about it you are facing the audience and looking at them and you cannot see yourself, unless you are videoing the talk (and I strongly recommend you do that every possible chance).  The coach can see the impact we are having and can help us to ramp that up.

It might be more voice variety and modulation.  It might be larger gestures.  I might be to start moving around or to stand on the one spot and not move.  It might be to get us working on engaging our audience members through using eye contact and holding their gaze as we speak to them. 

It might be to inject pauses to slow things down.  If we are nervous or even if we are on a roll, we might be speeding up.  When this happens, each successive wave of ideas wipes out the previous one and the audience can get a bit lost trying to keep up.  The pauses allow them to digest what we are saying and get them ready for the next pearls of wisdom.  They also allow us to adjust our speaking speed and slow down. 

The coach can mention to us that we have a very serious look on our face, because we are concentrating so hard and it comes across as aggressive or angry and that isn’t the image we want to project.  We don’t notice we are doing that because we are consumed with the message and the delivery and are oblivious to the how we look to the audience.

The coach can also encourage us to take some risks.  They can suggest things which are outside our usual gamut, but which when incorporated will enable us to lift our presentation to a higher height than we could imagine by ourselves.  Sometimes we need to stretch ourselves so that we can make a bigger action in the talk and have it within the bounds of business relevancy.  The coach can help us to escape from our Comfort Zone and challenge us to be more and be better.

My recommendation is to absorb as much knowledge and information as you can about presenting, get as much frequent practice as you can manage and get a quality coach.  That is the winning combination.  Remember we are all putting out personal and professional brands out there every time we open our mouths to speak.  Do we want to be perceived as true professionals and in that way build trust and credibility?  Of course we do, so that is why this trifecta is such a winner.

This Japanese saying the “frog in the well doesn't know the ocean” is a favourite.  When I think about its application to presenting, one of the issues we face is we are all living in small wells.  We go the same conferences or events and the people presenting are rather homogeneous and so the bar gets set pretty low, because they usually are not very good.  Without understanding the process, our expectations are getting conditioned to mediocrity. 

When we are growing up, we are usually not exposed to great speakers.  High School teachers are unexciting speakers. Politicians on television are normally underwhelming, doing their best to avoid answering the questions or recommending anything too strategic, in case there is an electoral backlash.  They are all looking for the middle of the middle.  Our professors at Uni do a lot of public speaking, except you would never know that judging by how they deliver their lectures.  The speakers invited to the degree graduation ceremony are normally dull dogs.  When we get into business, we rarely encounter much professionalism around presenting. It is field of frogs croaking in their wells.

A few decades of this and you are done.  If we want to lift our game, increase our persuasion power, we need to get out of the well and start exploring the ocean.  Persuasion power is absolutely required.  The amount of data and information coming at all of us on a daily basis is staggering.  Traditional media and social media are conspiring to drown us with sheer volume. How do we cut through all of that dross and white noise and register with our audience when it is our turn to communicate? We need to be crafting our messages using storytelling and backing it up with solid and relevant data.  Just a big data dump, no matter how good the data is, won’t cut it anymore.  Audiences today have micro-concentration spans and also way too many options to escape from us.  If we are just reproducing the same old same old from decades ago, we are kidding ourselves.  The good news is it is all getting better for us.

What is amazing today is how easy it is to expose ourselves to the best speakers.  Content marketing requires that we all put our goods up on display so that potential buyers can see how good we are and if we have what they want.  This means it is all out there for free to sample.  YouTube and other platforms allow us to search out content we are interested in and find people who are knowledgeable and within that group find out the top communicators to follow. Search engines can help us to locate content from people who we know are renowned skilled speakers and we can usually access their talks easily and for free.  TED talks vary of course in quality and the format is rather limited to short presentations of under 15 minutes.  There are just so many available though, with a bit of searching, we can find the best content.  In our local areas there will be a broad number of organisations sponsoring talks. In Tokyo there are a number of Chambers of Commerce which are running talks all of the time.  If you are a Rotarian like me, then at least once a week, you are listening to a speech by some notable.

So, we have a cornucopia of options to observe and learn.  Now we hit the main barrier.  Having the ability to access the ocean and doing anything about it though, are different things.  We just keep in our lane and we don’t devote the time to exposing ourselves to the best of what is available.  We can learn from what is working and also from what is a train wreck, a shambles, a catastrophe.  Learning what not to do is also a valuable lesson and there are scores of instructors available in that regard.

We are all feeling pressed for time, but actually we have a lot of time.  If we take out working and sleeping, our available time for study is still sufficient, quite sufficient.  The choices we make determine how far we move forward.  Accepting that persuasion power is a fundamental requirement, you could argue a duty for people in business. If that is the case,  then we need to make the priority to access all of the available resources and work on improving our knowledge and understanding.

If we only watched one of the top speakers for an hour a week and took extensive notes and then referred to those notes before we contemplated making a speech, then we would be in the top 1% of presenters immediately.  This is only because most people don’t do anything and what they do do is pretty dull and awful. Presenting is the bastion of scoundrels for the most part, so devoting time to build the skills makes us stand above and apart from the rabble very quickly.

I am a hoarder.  I never throw anything out and this habit spills over into preparing for my presentations.  I always keep previous presentations and I plunder earlier slides for content I can use for the next one.  Topical content has a short shelf life but other content, particularly images, can be used for many years.  This is all well and good, however it does have one serious drawback and that is you face the dilemma of how much content to use and which content to select.  Having given 548 public speeches so far, you would think I would have this problem under control by now.  I am a glutton though for data and cool images and this sea of information gets harder and harder to swim through.

Invariably, I select way too many slides.  Trying to prune them though is tough, because we can fall in love with the quality of our research or our numbers.  The intentions are admirable.  We want to deliver the highest quality content to our audience and so the pruning shears are not being wielded vigorously enough.  Dropping out slides has a certain amount of pain attached to it, so the discipline to do it is definitely required.  We have to keep reminding ourselves of the time limit we face for the presentation.  We get caught up in the logistics of slide selection and other important aspects get missed. 

One of my pet peeves with presenters is when they have bitten off more than they can chew and the last 20 slides are raced through or skipped at the end, because they have messed up their time control. We feel cheated.  Here is some valuable information being whizzed through and we would like to know some more about these slides but we never will.  We are trading our time for value, yet due to the speaker’s ineptitude we are not getting the full value of the transaction.  So there are definitely brand damage elements to doing this and we should all avoid these every time.

Another casualty is we spend all the time on the slides and nothing on the rehearsal.  Here is the irony.  If we had spent some time in rehearsal we would have immediately realised we had too much material for the time allotted.  This happened to me when I did my TED talk.  I had prepared  eight chapters for that talk, but in rehearsal, I realised I had to axe the last chapter or risk trying to rush it all through.  One of the downsides of TED talks is that they are shown globally, basically forever.  If you make a mess of it then that knowledge isn’t limited to the 100 people in the room, as per a normal talk, it now goes out to millions who see what a dill you are.  So rushing it through would be a bad choice and cutting stuff out is the better option.

A lot of the time we are showing data, because we feel this is valuable information for the audience.  That means slide after slide of numbers, bar charts, pie charts, line graphs etc.  This can get very dull very quickly.  Also, we tend to not remember the tsunami of numbers either, so is there much point to doing it this way?  Being more selective on some key numbers would make more sense and help to cut down the pressure on time.  Rather than just relying on visuals to make the point, we can use storytelling as well to really drive home the relevance of the numbers.

Let me use an example of Voice Of Customer scores.  Say we are trying to highlight our positive reaction from our buyers for our product or service and we are referring to scores out of 100.  We could just show trend over time and make a comment about the direction of the trend.  Additionally, we could add in a story about the numbers.  If we had a number like 72% for the Voice of Customer score, on the face of it, that isn’t particularly remarkable.  We could make the comment that Japanese buyers are hard markers.  Or we could go further and tell a story about the luxury goods industry in Japan which has a permanent dilemma.  When buyers in Japan are surveyed on their happiness, the scores are substantially below similar surveys in the rest of the world.  The luxury goods companies initially thought they had a problem in Japan, but what they found was the scores for their firms’ products and services were consistently lower than other markets.  Ultimately, to make sense of the comparative scores they started adding in up to 30% additional scores to compensate for the Japanese buyer’s lower scoring scale.  So that miserable 72% score actually represented 93.6%, which was more in line with other surveys in other countries.

It takes more time to tell a story like that, rather than just show a number like 72%, but the story is memorable and people will remember that long after the talk is over.  So we have to allow time to wrap some numbers up in stories in our talks, which means we have to axe other slide darlings.  We are providing more value in this way, because the audience will recall the key points more easily and so the time trade off is definitely worth it.  So when you are thinking about creating your power collection of slides, stop right there.  Instead think about which slides lend themselves well to storytelling.  Absolutely do the rehearsal to be able to gauge how much time you have available to show the slides and tell the stories.  If you do that, then the whole presentation will accentuate your personal and professional brands.

I was listening to a recent episode of Victor Antonio’s Sales influence Podcast show and one of his guests was quoting some research which showed that assertive and arrogant salespeople did the best when it came to selling.  Their discussion pinned the key factor back to the seller’s confidence and belief in what they were proposing.  Being an arrogant presenter isn’t going to a formula for success with your audience, so I don’t recommend that route.  Being confident however is certainly a winner in the persuasion stakes.  Think about it though, how many of the people you have seen presenting looked totally confident?  I would vouch not too many.

If this is such an important attribute when presenting and it makes perfect sense irrespective of any research on the matter, then why isn't everyone when presenting doing their best to project confidence?  The pendulum tends to sit in the middle.  Not too hot and not too cold and so the presentation and the presenter both become instantly forgettable.  Vanilla style efforts are a formula for obscurity.  This is ironic really because often the intention is to increase the presenter’s profile and raise the levels of business credibility being attached to the speaker.  These are important motivations to go to the trouble to prepare a talk and to put one’s personal and professional brands out on display for all to evaluate.

How can we project more confidence when presenting?  It sounds too simplistic, but speak louder than normal.  We have to separate our normal work day roles from our speaker role.  We cannot give our talk as if we were chatting over coffee with our colleague.  We have a different set of responsibilities now and we have a greater profile to boot.  The effort to speak louder forces us to raise our energy levels.  This now sets up a transmission of our energy from our position on the stage to the audience members seated in front of us.  They can feel the energy we are projecting.  I don’t mean shouting or screaming, but I do mean trying to “throw” your voice.  One thing to help with this is to try and project your voice to the farthest wall not just to the audience members seated in front of you.  Having that distance objective in mind will help to raise your energy level and also your connection with the audience.

Another simplistic sounding piece of advice would be to look at your audience.  In Japan we don’t make direct eye contact very often, because it is considered to be confronting.  Again, there is a difference between chatting with a colleague over coffee while not staring them straight in the eye and giving a business presentation.  The roles are different and we have to accept that construct.  When we are the speaker we want to stare straight into the eyes of our audience.

The way to do this is to regulate the length of the eye contact.  Three or four seconds is too short because it doesn’t allow us to make that one-on-one personal connection.  If we start holding the eye contact for over seven or eight seconds then the connectivity bridges across into axe murderer, psycho maniac levels of intrusion.  It is too much and it makes people feel very uncomfortable in Japan.  Around six seconds gives us enough connection without too much pressure.  Living in Japan beats the direct eye contact power out of you, so it takes a bit of concentration to suspend the usual societal norms and start making eye contact with strangers.  I would notice it when I went home to Australia and I would find myself avoiding making direct eye contact with people, through force of habit from living here in Nippon for so long.  So it requires confidence and guts in Japan to make eye contact with others in a public forum such as a speech.

When we make the eye contact, we have one thing in our mind.  We want to have the person we are looking at feel as if it were just the two of us in this room and that we are giving them our full concentration.  After about six seconds we shift our gaze to the next person and then we repeat the exercise.  In a forty-minute speech, we could make one-on-one eye contact with four hundred people.  In other words, we could connect with every single member of the audience in most cases and with smaller audiences, we could do this multiple times.

We want to be unpredictable with our eye contact, so we should mix it up, rather than moving along the rows of seated audience members in a linear fashion.  We do this to keep our audience members on their toes and not allow them to zone us out and daydream about picking up the dry cleaning or whatever it is they need to be doing after this talk.  Having the speaker suddenly fix their eyes on you and stare at you while they are talking, definitely wakes you up.

So if we can just change up two things – the power of our voice and eye contact – we can make a big difference to how we are being perceived by the audience.  That high level of confidence will translate into the listeners being more open to believing what we are saying.

How do we want to be perceived when we give our talk?  What constitutes the personal and professional brand we are creating?  How can we master the first impression?  Often we are not thinking about these things at all.  We are too busy piecing together the slide deck puzzle we will use during the presentation.  Perception, personal brand, first impressions are a thousand miles away thoughts, as we tinker with the visuals.  What a big mistake.

Whether we like it or not, the audience will form an impression of us, they will perceive something about us as a presenter and they will make a judgement about our brand – for good or bad.  Given all of this is going to happen anyway, we should make a decision on all three fronts and determine the outcomes we want, rather than leaving it to chance or random luck.

Planning the talk is important, although for a lot of presenters that stops at the complexity level of the decisions about the order of the slides and not much more.  We should start our planning with the outcome in mind.  How do we want to be perceived?  Take a moment and start writing down the type of perceptions you want to enjoy after the talk.  It will probably be an easy list to assemble – “I want to be seen as professional, competent, clear, engaging, interesting, knowledgeable, etc.”  Now make a new list about what constitutes your personal brand. 

In my case, it means how I dress, because that is often the trigger for those all important silent first perceptions about who I am.  So it is always an expensive Italian suit, usually Zegna and always worn with the top jacket button done up.  It means French Cuff shirts, so that I can wear cufflinks, it means a pocket chief to be an accent to the silk tie.  The Italian leather shoes often have a brogue pattern and the shine should always be mirror like.  The hair always trimmed and neat. 

Basically, I am trying to convey that what we do is deliver quality solutions.  We do this with great attention to detail and we are reliable and by just looking at me, you can see that is true. If I turn up dishevelled, everything a complete mess, then the audience may draw the conclusion I or my organisation cannot be trusted with their business.  Boris Johnson was able to pull off total dishevelment and still become the UK PM, but I lack his wit, charm, erudition and vocabulary.

First impressions also means how I come across.  For me this usually means lots of energy and dynamism.  It means using a lot of eye contact with the audience and trying to meet as many people as possible, before I give the actual talk, to create that personal connection.  It means getting there early and checking the name badges or the attendee list, to recall any of those pesky names of faces that I have met previously and to look for people I want to meet.  Like most people, name remembering is a struggle, so a bit of early arrival name badge checking goes a long way to remedy that character flaw.

In my case with regard to perceptions and brand, I want to come across as dynamic and powerful, so the very start of the talk is critical to deliver that impression.  When my name is called, I move quickly and confidently to the middle of the stage and do not spend even one second finessing the laptop to get the slides up.  I leave that to others to take care of, so that I can take care of my audience and get proceedings underway immediately and start delivering value.  I am already set up with a lavalier microphone. This allows me to free up my hands for gestures when I need them to come forth to accentuate a point I am making.  We only have a few seconds available to cement that first impression and wasting it on playing around with the equipment is a big fail.  There are many ways to open a speech and I will have chosen one suitable for thAT particular audience in attendance on that day. 

Now it is quite possible that your audience may require an entirely different persona as a speaker.  It may require a very soft, calm, quiet approach, taking a lot of the energy down a few levels and dropping the decibel level of the voice projection as well.  The stage entry might need to be slower and more deliberate, calmer and more considered. If that is the case, then I switch gears and deliver accordingly.  For example, if the audience were in their teens or in their eighties, we would think about what would resonate best with them and then adjust our approach accordingly. It makes sense doesn’t it.

However, is this a fake presentation and are we fraudsters, if we switch gears like this?  No, but it is a calculation of how to match the needs of the audience, rather than satisfying our own needs.  This delivery may need less dynamism, volume and gestures and more pauses for reflection.  Is this still within my brand guidelines?  Yes, it is, because I choose it to be a broad tent, to accommodate my brand. The dress part may not change all that much, except perhaps the intensity of the tie and pocket chief combination, but everything else remains pretty much the same.

The key point is to consider how you need to arrange your brand and your first five minutes for that particular audience.  If you give the presentations only as you like to give them, then that will work with a certain proportion of the audience who are more like you.  It will however fail to resonate with a large swathe of the audience who you still want to reach with your message.  The planning is the key to get this right.  Thinking about who you are speaking to, what initial impression you want to form, how you want to be perceived and what is the personal brand you are projecting, are all key elements of that planning process.  This shouldn't happen by chance, it should be a product of your design.

Recency is a simple concept to understand.   It basically means that we are all simple beings and we tend to remember best what we heard last.  Given this is so simple, you would think that presenters would be masters of the wrap up.  Not so.  I am always amazed at how often speakers allow the final impression to crash and burn through neglect.  What do I mean by neglect?  They are missing in action when it came to the planning of the final impression and they are also underperforming in the delivery of the last section of their talk.  So often the voice mouthing the words of the last sentence just trails off and dies a slow death.

If we understand the importance of recency and the critical nature of determining our final impression, then we will carefully plan for it.  Often, the speakers are trying to stuff too much material into the time allotted, so you see that pathetic mad rush at the end.  They start apologising and begin skipping through the slide deck like they have been snorting cocaine, because they have grossly miscalculated the time.  As audience members we feel totally short changed and cheated.  Some of those final slides looked very valuable and we see we are not going to get what we came here for, because the speaker was so inept.

They manage to complete the catastrophe by allowing their final sentence to just trail off into oblivion, as they suck all of the energy out of the room, dribbling out the finish.  The end is a massive anti-climax and the whole presentation lands with a massive thud, as it fails on so many levels.

The planning process has one hugely significant contingent and that is the accompanying rehearsal time.  This is when you discover you have too much material for the time you have been given to deliver the presentation.  It is painful to cuts bits off the flesh of the corpus of the talk, but you need to be surgical about it and trim, trim, trim until you get down to presenting only the richest residue. 

The planning process also allows you to work out what you need to say after the end of the Q&A.  Remember, the Q&A is a street fight – there are no rules.  Anyone in the audience can take the whole talk off topic with their dubious question.  Suddenly the recency is at risk of being disconnected from what you have been talking about and the final impression is focused on their question. Everyone has forgotten all about the main body of your talk.  Your message has potentially been supplanted by something irrelevant to the topic.

We need to have decided our key message right at the start of the planning and that becomes the frame around which we build the talk conjuring up the most powerful and relevant evidence.  In the last five minutes we do a couple of things.  We reiterate our key message and we do this slowly, being in no haste, because we have rehearsed and we have allowed enough time to finish in a relaxed and professional manner.  We take our time and we again try to connect this message to the audience and how it will help them.  We try to draw out its relevancy for their work.  We might be throwing down a challenge to the audience to institute what we are suggesting and attempting to get them to take specific actions after this talk.

We are purposely slowing down the pace, talking slowly and employing pregnant pauses to allow the listeners to digest and contemplate what we are saying.  Contrast this with the mad rush through the slide deck by the disorganised speaker who is in a mad panic

 to run faster off the cliff, because they didn’t plan and didn’t rehearse.  Instead, we are relaxed and in perfect control, as we lull the audience into a psychologically safe place, before we lower the boom.

As we get to the completion of the talk, we start to inject energy, conviction and power into our voice and body.  We start to build to a crescendo, combining body language, eye contact, voice and gestures.  This is a combination of all the tools available to us, which accentuates our message and our final impression.  Our audience buys belief, confidence and commitment and our job is to make sure this is the final impression they have of us.  None of this is left to chance.  We plan it, we rehearse it and then we deliver it with a flawless execution.  It doesn’t come across as canned though and instead seems a spontaneous eruption of passion for our message.  Start with the intention to finish like this and your talks will be so much more memorable than others.  Your personal and professional brands will soar while others will just disappear from collective memory.  People will remember you and will remain impressed well after the event has finished.

It seems logical that any presentation we are giving is ours.  Well, that is sort of correct, but what I am talking about is making it reflect your style and personality.  When you talk to people about being a leader, they often bring up the word “authentic”, but when you talk to people about presenting, few ever mention that word.  They are focused on being easily understood, convincing, concise, memorable etc.  Being yourself should be the default, but somehow many people get wrapped up in being the “presenter”, as if it is a role they are playing.

I totally agree that the presenter role is a thing.  What I usually tell the Japanese participants in our classes is that when you are presenting you have a different set of responsibilities.  When having a chat with your friend over coffee, you can talk in a soft voice and not project any great energy.  However, when you are up on stage, that is a different set of responsibilities.  The volume has to be sufficient that no one in the audience is struggling to hear what you are saying. Of course, you might be thinking, what is the issue, we all have microphones today.  True, but have you ever noticed that many people have no clue how to handle the technology.  They hold it down way to too low relative to their mouth or they strangle it, by placing their hand over the mesh, which is specifically designed to pick up the sound.

The energy part is also important.  We buy enthusiasm and confidence and the amount of buying going on is in direct proportion to the amount of energy being projected.  What if I am a low energy person, aren’t I being authentic to speak with low energy - isn’t that who I am?  The answer here is that you should give up any ideas about being a speaker, because there is a range of skills and mindset required to do the job well.  If you don’t have those skills and the right mindset, why do we have to listen to you, when we can listen someone who is more professional.

We have to be ourselves but be our professional selves, not our train wreck selves.  What I am talking about is operating at a high level of skill and bringing aspects of your personality into the presentation.  Many presenters are stuck in low gear and they give a journeyman performance but we don’t feel close to them or impressed by them.  Being able to bring more of yourself means, not being afraid of adding a little flair when presenting. 

I will contrast two presenters.  I attended an event recently and the slides were well done, the presenter (I am his client by the way), was very well presented, his voice was clear and calm.  That was the problem – it was calm.  It wasn’t energised or excited by the chance to share his content with the audience.  The voice was clear but the tone was flat – it was a Johnny One Note performance which can be sleep inducing, if we get too much of it.  He is the President of his firm and he should be the chief proselytiser, he should be projecting his confidence about what a great company they are and about all of the great things they can do for their clients.  The demand for his company’s services is strong, so maybe he doesn’t feel any need to project anything, but that is a big mistake.  Markets turn and he has a professional brand for himself, regardless of where he works.

Another presenter I saw brings all the clarity, professional slides etc., to the party but he also brings a lot of himself and all of his little idiosyncrasies as well.  He brings all of the professionalism around the skill and mindset but also some of his personality.  This is what makes him memorable.  We associate the professionalism with his personal brand and he can take it one step further – he makes his talks entertaining.  This is dangerous territory because being entertaining as a speaker is the hardest element in the speaking universe to pull off.  The true professionals are just that – they are doing stand up for a living and the rest of us are amateurs delving into an area of great complexity.  I am sure you have no shortage of recollections of speakers attempting to be humorous and just falling totally flat.

We don’t need to be comedians, but we can allow aspects of our personalities to shine through which can be entertaining or at least work well in that environment.  The speaker I was referencing isn’t setting out to be humourous, but he is allowing his natural personality to come through and that makes his talks entertaining.  I realise about myself that comedy is not in my future, so I don’t even try it.  I also realise that there are limits to how much I can loosen up on stage.  I compensate for these weaknesses by being authentic, which in my case means being high energy, confident and powerful when presenting.  Think about how you can be authentic, but also be skilled and memorable when on stage and not just fade into the wallpaper and become totally forgettable after the talk is finished.

I get this question quite often: “should I follow the logic of ‘when in Rome, do as the Romans do’ with regard to doing business with Japanese companies?”. Their question is usually related to how to present to buyers. The Western “pitch deck” is usually well designed, professionally laid out and zen like in its simplicity.  Ironically, the equivalent decks from companies in the land of zen, are usually more reminiscent of the Baroque period, highly ornate and florid in design.  Polar opposites in fact.  The style of the actual delivery of the decks is usually also a world apart and it is quite shocking when you first encounter this phenomenon. What should we be doing to be effective in winning business from Japanese companies?

Very, very occasionally, when teaching presentation skills here to Japanese people, we will encounter a preference for the “Japanese way” of presenting, rather than the global standard that we are advocating.  What do they mean by the “Japanese way”?  We should speak in a monotone, with no energy, have our back to the audience and read everything on the screen to those in the room.  It also means having a slide with 5 different fonts and a similar number of colours, packed to gunwales with data.  If using graphs is a good idea, then let’s put up five on the one slide, so that everything is so tiny, you cannot make much sense of it.  If proffering information is considered important, then let’s affix vast slabs of impenetrable text to the slide and then read it to the audience.  Another favourite is to put up the entire spreadsheet, packed with microscopic numbers in the cells.  Just to spice it up, let’s add some animation and have various bits move around.

Why are the Japanese decks and every other collection of information offered often so crammed and dense?  I discovered the reason when I was a university student here in Tokyo.  Back in 1979, I attended an academic conference on Sino-Japanese relations, which was my chosen field of study at that time.  One of the professors was relating a point about the difference in thinking between Chinese people and Japanese people.  Zen travelled from India, through China to Japan and so at various points in history, Japanese Buddhist priests would go to China to study.  There was an allegorical zen tale regarding a well and a bucket, which in the Chinese version, made a macro point about the condition of humanity in the world.  The good Professor made the observation that when that allegorical tale was translated into Japanese, in addition to the macro point, there was a tremendous amount of micro detail about the construction of the well, how the rope was made, the dimensions of everything, etc., etc.

Japan Is A Data Consuming Tornado

This is the point – Japanese buyers have an insatiable need for data.  You simply cannot oversupply data to a Japanese client and they will just keep sucking it up, like a tornado devours everything in its path.  So, when we present our highly refined, trimmed down slide deck or submit our carefully manicured written proposal, the Japanese side often feels like they have just missed their lunch and are starving, ravenous for more information.  Written materials in particular can be a problem.  We are trained in the West to be succinct, to focus on the core information, to get to the point.  Japan is just not that way.

The language itself is circuitous, vague and indirect.  We are a bilingual operation here in Tokyo, so we are constantly switching between languages. Even after 37 years here, I am still amazed at how many more words are needed to express the same concept in Japanese than in English. 

So should we become Japanese when we present?  To be successful here we need two presentations.  We need the global best practice slide deck, the one which gets to the key points quickly and clearly.  The information on screen must be able to be grasped in two seconds.  If it takes longer than that, the slide is too complex and needs to be simplified further.  When we deliver it, we use our eye contact to engage the audience, our voice modulation to provide variety to keep the audience with us and use our gestures to highlight key concepts, phrases and words. 

Bring Supporting Multi Volume Compendiums

We should also bring a massively thick compendium of supporting information, so high you couldn’t jump over it, to go with your presentation which was focused on the highlights.  After the meeting or after they have received your written proposal, there will be staff designated to comb through this data to find all the problems associated with working with you and doing business with your company. 

Japan has a highly risk averse culture, especially in business.  The people you are dealing with are not going to get massive bonuses and rewards for risk taking.  In Japan, the ratio of CEO pay, vis-à-vis the median employee’s pay, is 58 times greater, compared to 670 times in the USA.  The upside isn’t big for risk taking here, but the downside for making a mistake is massive. The people you are dealing with or the people in the presentation room, will not be making any decisions, until the forensic due diligence has been completed. For that purpose, they have a data devouring demonic need for information.  Always be fully professional in your delivery, but carry a very big bag full of information and hand that over. Trust me, no one will complain about the weight. 

Once you understand the conversation going on in the mind of your Japanese customer you can meet them there and things will become much easier.  Don’t try to be Japanese.  Be yourself, but be smart, professional, well organised and come packing heavy with data – lots and lots of data.

Storytelling in business is an open field.  In most facets of commerce, the field is crowded, established foes are entrenched behind high protective walls and as far as you can see it is all red ocean.  Presenting however is all blue ocean because most business leaders hardly even get their toes wet.  They dismiss being able to present in a professional manner as fluff, smoke and mirrors, all show and no substance, inconsequential.  Their approach to speaking in public is that the audience are only there for the data, statistics, the latest information and the delivery is irrelevant.  If possible, they prefer to avoid the whole affair because it is painful for them.  Being persuasive however has never gone out of style in business and that is a universal and timeless truth.

Being persuasive has many aspects, such as understanding who is going to be in the audience and determining what is the purpose of your talk.  Are you there to inform, inspire, convince or entertain?  Research teams and underlings are good at digging out different data points and the temptation is to throw these logs on the fire to heat up the audience.  Nothing wrong with that except all of this data struggles to remain in the memory and it makes the whole talk crusty and dry, like week old bread left outside.

When we can wrap the information in a story we start to really motor with our audience.  This delivery technique is tremendously impactful because it makes the information easy to remember and makes the message clear and attractive.  Many business leaders however are never exposed to how to tell a story, so they have little idea where to start.  I cannot tell a joke to save my life, but I can tell a story because I know structures, which make this process easy for me.

There are a number of steps.

1.   We are fed a constant diet of professional storytelling in the media and there are always a number of key characters involved.  Who will these characters be in our story?  They could be the founder, members of the senior leadership team, researchers, scientists, clients, etc.  If the main characters are well known to the audience then even better.  Our object is to have those listening picture the face of that person in their mind.  If I make Elon Musk the main character, then I am guessing that everyone can see his face in their minds eye.  Maybe the company CEO or CFO is also so recognisable that the entire firm can see their face when they hear the name.

2. What is going on in the background of this story?  Why are the key points we are going to cover relevant?  What is the driving the circumstances of this story’s punchline?  When we describe the context we need some guideposts.  When was it?  Is this last month or two years ago?  What was the season?  Was it a February snowy day or a brutal Tokyo summer August day?  Where was it?  Are we in a boardroom in the HQ, a Hotel restaurant, a convention, a research lab?  Which of the main characters were there at that moment?  Remember our task is to transport our listeners to that key point in the story, to get them seeing the same scene we are describing in their mind.  That requires that we paint the location and people with a series of word pictures.

3. Conflict/Opportunity. Every drama we see on television or at the movies and every novel we read, has this construct.  The good guys and the bad guys are both there to create the tension in the drama.  In our business story there will be protagonists.  That may be the market, the currency, the competition, the regulator, the bank, the suppliers, the client, the government.  Think about the recent supply chain issues.  There are plenty of protagonists involved to explain why this phenomenon is impacting businesses. 

It could be Covid or the war in Ukraine.  It might be a technological breakthrough that destroys established players as Nokia found with the launch of the iPhone.  We need to place the conflict inside the context we have described and make it clear how high the stakes are here, because that degree of tension is gripping.  There has been no shortage of drama for my industry, the training industry, since Covid started. Probably none of us will have any trouble finding conflicts or opportunities to describe to the audience and we intertwine the main characters to make it real for the listeners.

4. This may be positive or negative, but there will be an outcome in the story.  Even if the conclusion is that this is where we are at this point and here is what we expect to be coming down the pike, should there be no ultimate resolution at this juncture.  We need to put a ribbon on the story however and tie it off, so it not just left hanging.  The audience needs a finale of some sort or they are left feeling unfulfilled.

5. After having explained the context, the main protagonists, the drama of the conflict or opportunity and how it ended, we now proffer some insights.  There is no doubt we love to hear the lessons from the train wreck more than the swan story about silkily gliding across the surface of the business context.  If my speech is titled “How I made $100 million”, for most people, it will not be as attractive as the title “How I lost $100 million”.  We all love a juicy business meltdown and all the drama which went toward creating that disaster.  We do this so we can learn what not to do ourselves.

Everyone of us has amazing business stories inside us already.  If we don’t have enough, relax, the universe will just keep minting them going forward.  If you don’t have enough of your own, just start reading the business news and there you have a cornucopia of content to work with.

Remembering Ex-PM Shinzo Abe As A Communicator

Like everyone, I was so shocked that Japan has lost such a prominent, global representative of the country to assassination. I wrote this original article back in 2016 and I thought to rework it and release it again in memory of Shinzo Abe.  Over many years I have seen him improve as a public speaker and that always encourages me to think that other prominent Japanese leaders can also break out of their self-imposed restrictions and do a professional job too.

October 2016

Japanese politicians have to do a lot of public speaking, but they are rarely engaging.  They are generally speaking at their audiences rather than to them.  I attended the Japan Summit at the Okura Hotel Ball Room run by the Economist. Sitting there listening to three leading Japanese politicians, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Shigeru Ishiba (then Minister for National Strategic Zones) and Akira Amari (then Minister for Economic and Fiscal Policy), I was struck by the lack of picture painting and storytelling in their presentations.

By the way, if you have seen Prime Minister Abe of late, he has improved quite a lot.  Previously, his presentations were terribly wooden, lacking animation and any attempt at connection with his audience. In this sense, he was firmly situated in the mainstream, because these are the typical attributes of business and political leaders when speaking in public in Japan.

I sometimes get pushback from some Japanese class participants that this is okay, because this is the “Japanese way” of giving presentations.  Total nonsense.  Being effective as a presenter or public speaker has some universal elements which cannot be neglected.  One aspect is as a successful speaker or presenter you have to push yourself forward.  Yes, it is true that this is not usually seen as a cultural positive in Japan. 

Being low key, humble, even subdued and apologetic is preferred in normal social and business life here.  This doesn’t apply though when we are speaking in public.  We now have an entirely different role and we have to be more loud, more animated, more confident, more engaging and more enthusiastic in this particular role.  When we coach softly spoken people to increase their volume when speaking, they often say they feel like they are screaming.  When we ask the audience listening during the class if they feel that is the case, the answer is always “no”.  Instead, the speaker comes across as more confident, capable and credible.  We have to understand the role is different and we have to adjust to suit that role.

Those who are failed presenters embrace the excuse of the “Japanese way” as an escape route from professional accountability, but it doesn’t work.  Good is good and we can see the difference when people speak in pubic.  They either engage us or they don’t and there is not a “Japanese way” of public speaking which can avoid that necessity.

Whether it was some coaching before the successful Olympic bid or thereafter, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is much better.  More animated, using bigger gestures, more eye contact, using those see through teleprompters to help engage the audience, rather than looking down at a page of notes. He had humour, pauses for clarity and some voice modulation.  Hey corporate Japan, take note, it is possible to become better at public speaking! 

Everyone, please take note – don’t bore us with your data.  Tell us a story, pleeease!  Bring the points being made to life by connecting them to some people and events you have encountered.  Our minds are well trained to absorb stories, because they are the first educational structure we encounter as young children.  The story should start with taking us to the place of the story, the location, the room, nominate the day, month or the season and introduce the people there, preferably people we already know, to make it real for us. 

By getting straight into the story we can draw our audience in.  We can now intertwine the context behind the point we want our audience to agree with.  By providing the background logic, cloaked in a story which is vivid, we can see it in our mind’s eye. We will have more success convincing others to follow us.  Having set the scene, we finish by outlining our proposition or proposal and tie the ribbon on top, by pin pointing the major benefit of doing what we suggest.  This is elegant and powerful.

In business, we should use storytelling appropriately but powerfully.  Less is more, but none is particularly bad.  Unite our disparate audience from multiple backgrounds by wrapping our key message in a story and if you do, what you say will be remembered, unlike almost all messages from Japanese politicians.  Let the story create your context, evidence and sizzle for your key message

Action Steps

1. Stop believing the quality or quantity of your information is enough
2. Don’t try and pack too many stories into your presentation
3. Start the story by creating a vivid mind picture of the scene

Vale Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest serving Prime Minister

Imagine an experienced, senior executive from a name brand major company giving a one minute introduction of the company, while holding a piece of paper, reading the introduction to the audience.  What would be your impression of that executive and by extension the professionalism of that company?  I am sure it would be highly negative.  If a senior person can’t manage a one minute talk without reading it, we will be wondering what sort of people are working there? 

The problem today is we are awash in high levels of professionalism around presenting from the professionals.  Netflix, Disney, Hulu, HBO etc., are pumping huge budgets into streaming content with unbelievably high production values and oozing with high levels of script quality and professional actor delivery.   We become accustomed to these images of professional presenters and then a lame amateur turns up, holding their piece of A4 paper and just destroys their reputation on the spot.

Business seems to be the last refuge of scoundrels who cannot present in a professional way, but that is not an acceptable situation.  The audience today are heavily armed with mobile phones which can connect them to the internet in seconds. The delights of social media can quickly outweigh the appeal of the speaker and their topic, if the delivery isn’t professional.  Even when the content is good and the delivery is okay, it doesn’t hold the audience’s attention as it once did. 

I was at a presentation recently and the speaker was doing an okay job – not great but not horrendous either.  That didn’t stop the gentlemen sitting next to me at my table from getting out his phone, then his iPad and later his laptop during the presentation.  He was checking and answering emails, scrolling around social media and generally “multi-tasking”.  This is the nadir for the speaker – to be reduced to competing for audience attention when they are half listening and are simultaneously busy doing something else.

The paper reading speaker I mentioned earlier puzzled me, so I approached him and asked him why he had to read a one minute speech.  He told me he was afraid of his English ability.  This was an interesting comment, because we were famously chatting away in English for about five minutes before we go to this gritty subject.  I said to him that was a surprising comment given his English was absolutely fine. 

Actually he didn’t need the piece of paper, but his fear of linguistic imperfection was driving his behaviour.  He had been focused on the wrong thing.  Perfection is not required in communication.  I know this because my Japanese is certainly not “perfect” but I can communicate freely in Japanese and listeners can follow what I am saying. 

This is the same for English, a language mainly spoken by non-native speakers in fact, if you add up the population numbers.  That means that a good portion of the time, native speakers are listening to a variety of accents in English with some exciting departures from grammatical norms.  No problem though, because we can connect the dots and work out what it is they are trying to say and without missing a beat, give them a response which matches the flow of the conversation.

Fear was his impediment, but a false fear, a self-induced and self-limiting fear. This happens in our presentation classes too.  The participants start totally consumed by their concerns and worries and are relatively oblivious to the audience, because they are totally focused on themselves.  After a few hours of practice with coaching, they, without knowing it, have now switched their focus from themselves to trying to engage with their audience.

If our speaker had thrown away the A4 paper and instead used his minute to engage his audience, he would have rescued the brand.  If he had done all of that and spoken with great energy and enthusiasm he would have actually accentuated the brand.  If he had a few grammatical errors or pronunciation slip ups, no one would have cared, because they would have been tuned into his communication, not to the actual degree of linguistic perfection of his delivery. 

Interestingly, he was not Japanese and yet the majority of the audience were Japanese speakers.  When we speak a foreign language, it is often the case that we can be more easily able to understand non-native speakers because they have very simple vocabularies.  He didn’t take this factor into consideration when thinking about who would be in his audience.  That was another error on his part – his preparation didn’t factor in who would be the audience for this one minute promotion of his company.  This has to be the first thing we do, every time! 

Don’t let the fear of speaking hold you back.  Prepare thoroughly, understand who is going to be in your audience, spend your delivery time focused on engaging your audience, bring your enthusiasm and passion and forget about linguistic perfection.  If he had done that, then his personal brand and his company’s brand wouldn’t have been shredded on the spot, as actually happened.  Today, the risk is simply too high to let people who have no clue what they are doing, to go around representing the brand in public. Why do it that way?  Give them training and then let them go forth and become a terrific brand ambassador for the organisation.

Recently I have been coaching people on their presentation skills.  It is always amazing to me how some small changes can balloon into major improvements.   If these things are so simple, then why aren’t they making the changes themselves?  Why do they need coaching?  Basically, we all wander through life with a minimum level of self-awareness about anything, let alone how we appear when we present.  The other problem is the zone of vision when we are presenting is in an arc in front of us. It takes some organising to be able to see how we are doing in the eyes of the audience. Most of us are just not that well organised.  So we wind up giving the presentations into the void and are not really sure what needs improving.  Enter the coach.

I found I was focusing on a few items to help the participants in my class improve their persuasion power.  The six elements were eyes, hands, face, voice, toes and energy.  Let's dig in a bit deeper with each of them.

1. Looking at your audience and engaging your audience are not the same thing. You often see politicians in Japan scanning their eyes across a crowd, trying to give off the vibe that they are connecting with the punters. However, it is a fake construct, because the length of time allocated is only around two seconds per person.  We need around six seconds of one-on-one sustained eye contact, before we can create a sense of “the speaker is talking directly to me” in the audience member’s mind.  If we just keep staring at them, they start to think “axe murderer”, because it is too intrusive.  Six seconds seems to strike the right balance of being personable without becoming threatening.

2. This is a perennial problem people have of what to do with their hands. Holding them behind the back is a favourite of many, simply because they don’t know what to do with them and this pose seems to anchor their upper body for them.  Holding them crossed in front of our body, where all the soft organs are located, creates a barrier with audience which we don’t need.   Thrusting them into pockets gets them conveniently out of the way, but it also gets them out of the way, which is no particular help to us.

As a presenter, our hands have only one purpose – to strengthen the verbal point we are making.  To find where your hands should be held, just hold your arms out about a shoulder height, then drop them – where they land is where you should keep them until you need to bring them up to bolster some thesis you are promoting.

3. Dr. Albert Mehrabian’s research at UCLA found that we get the maximum concentration from our audience on the words we are saying, when what we say is matched by how we say it.  This sounds simple enough, but what I found when  coaching the class was that they tended to have one expression on their face throughout the talk, regardless of the content of the message.  People put a lot of attention into the visuals for their presentation, slaving over the slide deck preparation, but forget the most powerful visual medium they have, which is their face.  If it is good news, then smile when you tell us.  If it is bad news, then look serious.  If it is exciting news then look excited.  I think you get the idea.

4.    Having a deep DJ style voice is definitely an advantage.  I remember when I met fellow Aussie Chris Glenn in Nagoya.  He was a local DJ there and out of this tall, slender frame came this astonishingly deep voice.  I didn’t get issued with one of those and have probably fried my vocal cords, with a million karate kiai over my career, so I have a rather husky number.  Folks, we go with what we have. 

We do our best though, to make the most of it by having a good vocal range around tone, speed and strength.  The monotone delivery is the killer of audience attention.  Side note: Japanese is a monotone language!  Uh oh.  Does that mean Japanese speakers are forever doomed to be the denizens of the boredom zone?  Not all. Japanese speakers can create variety through speed and strength changes, which will be enough to keep the attention on them when presenting.

5. What on earth is he doing talking about toes when presenting?  More correctly, I am talking about the angle you are pointing your toes.  Without thinking about it, I noticed a number of presenters would stand with their toes pointing off at an angle, rather than at ninety degrees to the front.  This alters the body mechanics making it difficult to turn in the other direction.  The result is we don’t turn, so effectively we are now speaking with only one half of our audience.

6.   Passion, commitment, belief, enthusiasm for our subject are all communicated by the amount of energy we pump out.  We cannot turn the throttle up to maximum output for the whole talk though. We have to release it in bursts, so that we don’t wear out our audience.  On the other hand, if we turn that throttle right down, we will not be projecting enough energy to grab attention and the entire audience will be leaping onto their phones to find something more interesting happening on the internet at that moment.  The key is the energy output has to match the content of what we are saying. 

Think of the key points in the talk where you want to place emphasis and then marshal your energy to help you highlight that part of the talk. A very common error is that speakers allow their energy to drop right off at the end of their talk.  Don’t fade out.  Finish with a bang – remember final impressions are the lasting impressions and we want to be recalled in the right way.

These six points are so simple, but when corrected each of them made a significant impact on the quality of the talk.  I would make the correction and then ask the audience to compare with what the speaker had been doing.  When you see this before and after it is convincing.

I am just back from a highly pointless presentation.  The bureaucrats who run the Tokyo Metro subway system and the Tokyo Government Planning Division were presenting on their plan for a new subway line to be constructed in my neighbourhood.  This is my second occasion to attend one of these types of presentations.  The previous one was about changing the direction of aircraft landing at Haneda and for planes to fly low over our neighbourhoods, which unfortunately are in the new direct flight path.  These “explanation sessions” are pointless for many reasons, including the way they are conducted.

There is no real appetite to entertain the viewpoint of the assembled residents and so the design is to obscure, divert and suck up as much time as possible with administrative aspects of the meeting, in order to limit the question time. 

Interestingly they had a slide show, which had an announcer read the whole content to us.  Why was that required, when everyone can read what is on screen?  To use up the question time of course.  Question time itself was interesting in the way they handled it.  Somewhat surprisingly, they do what we teach regarding hostile questions.  They had a navigator take the hot question, then paraphrase it, removing all the venom and spiky bits, before handing it over to the supposed experts.

You might be thinking, “well these are government bureaucrats, so there is no relation to the world of commerce”.  Often we can see the flaws in others, but ignore those same flaws in ourselves.  Japanese business presentations are very formal.  There will be a navigator to tell us things, like where the exits are located and to turn off our phones.  The President giving the talk will often not be highly familiar with the slides prepared by the underlings and will read the whole thing to us. 

Sometimes, if there is a screen located behind the podium, they will unhelpfully turn their back to us and their head toward the screen and then read the whole content to us.  Often, there will be a slick corporate video shown, the main purpose of which is to reduce the President’s speaking time burden and which adds very little value to the presentation.

Taking the sting out of questions is a legitimate technique, but you still have to handle the questions.  Today there was a lot of dissembling of answers and that is never satisfactory.  The same things happen in business.  You can see the speaker is flustered by the question and doesn’t know how to handle it.  The first problem is they go directly to answer mode, instead of creating a little brain space to think about the answer.  Invariably, we have all had the experience of coming up with the killer answer about two hours too late, for when we needed it.  What came out of our mouth though was the first thing which popped into our mind and obviously that will never be as good as a more considered answer.  Our mouth was too close to our ear and our brain wasn’t engaged fast enough, before we blurted out our response.  We can wind up sprouting nonsense in reply to the question.

Just adding a little cushion makes a world of difference.  The cushion is that space between the question ending and the answer proper beginning. You might ask them to repeat the question or you can paraphrase what they said or you can make a neutral comment such as, “that is a very important consideration” or all three, to gain thinking time.  Five seconds does a wonder of good when it comes to contemplating how to handle tough questions.  Naturally, our answers won’t always be satisfying for certain members of the audience, but we need to explain the logic of our approach, decisions or our actions. 

If we don’t know the answer, then trying to snow the audience, instead of admitting the truth is a guaranteed way to destroy our reputation.  Audiences will accept it if you say to the questioner, “I don’t have an answer for that point at the moment, but let’s exchange business cards after my talk and I will find the answer for you.  Who has the next question?”.

Now this only works when the question is very specific and the answer is not something that you would be expected to necessarily have at your fingertips.  If it is within the scope of your subject and you don’t know the answer, then that is a black mark on your professionalism.  You see this sometimes from jet setting VIPs who swoop in to give their talk, before they head off to their next engagement.  It is a PR exercise which can go wrong very quickly.  Their presentation was prepared for them and they think their job is to just read it out to us.  Again, it is better to be honest and admit you should know that answer, apologise that you don’t and promise to get the answer to the questioner.  None of us are perfect, so we will accept your odd flaw and imperfection.

We should always keep in mind that every time we get up to speak, we are punting our personal and professional brands out there for all to see.  Prepare thoroughly and rehearse, rehearse, rehearse is the right formula.  If we do that, people will come away impressed with us and feel the time spent was worthwhile and they will be looking forward to hearing from us again in the future.

The request has been made to give a talk on a certain subject.  The date and time are fixed and now the work begins on the preparation.  Here is how not to do it!  Start with plundering previous slide decks for re-usable content and create new original content for this particular presentation.  Fuss mightily over which slides go in and which go out.  Discover even after that Herculean effort to pare down the beast, that it still needs bits to be lopped off.  Does this sound tremendously familiar to you when getting ready to give a presentation?  Well if this is what not to do, then exactly what are we supposed to be doing?

The warm embrace of an existing tried and true slide deck and the excitement of grabbing new materials and wrangling it into a slide, can be intoxicating I know, however we have to consider what is the point here.  A collage of slides is not a central message and there lies the problem.  Before we even think of any cool visuals, we need to plumb the depths of our brain for what it is we want our audience to know and believe. We need to boil all the possibilities down to a single, crystal clear and pungent message.

This is harder than it seems, because there are a number of attractive messages we could be focusing on. So which is the right one?  This is where we discover we have to take one step back and understand better, who is going to be in our audience.   The topic will give us a hint of prospective acolytes, we can urge to join our cause.  The organisers will have a good idea of who normally turns out for this topic. As they get the registrations, we can know precisely who will be our listeners, presuming the hosts will share that information.  Even if they don’t pony up the info, they will usually tell us which companies are going to be attending.  Once we get some indication of who will be our audience, we can start to think about which message is most likely to hit the bullseye the best.

Having done this part of the preparation, the temptation is to now plunge into the slides and start arranging them accordingly, simultaneously working out which new slides are needed.  We have to switch the mindset from slide equals important to story equals important.  The dilemma with data and information is that it is raw and inert.  When we can wrap that information up in a story, we are really starting to motor along.  The reason is simple.  Data by itself lacks context and colour.  Also a lot of data is hard to visualise or comprehend.  Rattling off some statistics may have our audience’s eyes glazing over.  If we convert those numbers into something they can understand, then it has potency.  A classic example is numbers of football fields to represent the area’s size.  If we can tie that data to a person and what it meant for them, then we bring the whole point alive.

It is almost impossible to relate to measurements, but we can easily relate to someone else’s experiences.  Hopefully, it is no longer the case, but beer has been an arbiter of distance in Australia.  I remember meeting a fellow student at University and when he told me his home town, I asked him how far away it was from Brisbane.  His answer was a classic. In true laconic fashion, he casually replied, “about six stubbies”, meaning the time it would take you to drink six small bottles of beer, while driving the distance.  Jail time today, but this was back in the day.

The beauty of telling stories is it forces the focus to be on us, the speaker, rather than the screen.  Today’s video meetings make this even more pressing.  I was coaching a senior executive regarding a talk she had to make to senior management.  In the process, it became obvious to me that she should either scrap the slides altogether or just use a very small number. Her objective was to have impact, to propel her personal brand forward and position herself for a major global position.  If she used a lot of slides in the limited time she had for their attention, on video, she would be captured in a tiny little box on the top right of the screen monitor, while the slides monopolised most of the screen real estate.  By dispensing with or paring back the screen “share” function, she would have the chance to look straight into the green dot, where the camera is, on the top of her laptop and be seen by the viewers in full and seen looking straight at them.

Without visuals she now has to paint a picture for the audience.  She can tell a story about when this incident took place.  For example, she can create the temporal indications by referring to the season, “it was three years ago and heavy snow fell in New York that day”.  Now we know when it was, where it was and have a mental image of snowy New York streets.  Next, we need some people in this story, preferably people the audience will know.

“I bumped into Warren Buffett who was wearing a thick coat and a long scarf, as he was leaving the Rockefeller Center and I asked him….” 

Most people know of the Rockefeller Center and Warren Buffett, so they can imagine the snowy scene in their minds.  Do we need a slide with a photograph of a snowy New York street or one with Warren Buffett in it? Probably not, if we are telling the story well and it keeps all the attention on us and not letting it leach out to our tough competitor - the slide deck.

Slides have their place.  I do Iike photographs with no words on the slide and then I tell the story, explaining the symbolism of the image.  Unlike text, detailed spreadsheets, graphs or tables of numbers up on screen, the slide with a photo takes about one second to process and then the listeners are open to my story. We don’t have to make or recycle slides, if we change our mindset to storytelling and then plan the talk from there rather than the other way around.  When it is your personal and professional brand out there on display, these choices make a big difference.

Self-awareness, self-belief, self-direction, self-discipline – there are a host of these “self” aspects to who we are and often related to who we are not.  If you grew up with a silver spoon firmly in your mouth, went to expensive, exclusive private schools, extensively travelled abroad with your parents at a young age and enjoyed the summers at your Swiss Boarding school in your youth, that is terrific.  The chances are strong that your self-belief is strong and your expectations even higher.  A lot of things have coalesced to help you be successful in life and along the way, you have been in an environment where being able to speak in front of others has been as natural as learning how to swim well.

Probably for most of us, me included, this sounds like exceptional skill in parent selection.  If the path in life has been rocky or even just “ordinary”, none of these advantages have been a factor in your life and career progression.  Maybe you were able to pull yourself up by your own efforts and have achieved some success, to the degree that you are now someone who is asked to speak in front of others.  Or maybe, you are an ordinary mortal, but through some strange fate, the firm wants you to speak to your team or the broader organisation or even in public, to industry groups.

I now own my own company outright, have a Ph.D. in political science and international relations, am a 6th Dan in traditional karate and so you might be tempted to think, “naw, he wouldn’t be someone who suffers from imposter syndrome”.  I wish that was true.  You may know this saying, “You can take the boy out of Brisbane, but you can’t take the Brisbane out of the boy”.  I have spent over half my life living in Japan now, but I am still that boy from Brisbane, with the poor parent selection abilities.

In my case, I do a lot of public speaking. I also release six podcasts a week, of which five are what I write, based on my own experience and the curriculum from Dale Carnegie. I am constantly putting myself out there into the world, publicly exposing myself to judgement and critique.  How do you go from where you came from, to now positioning yourself as an expert?  This is where the imposter syndrome raises its ugly head.  “Who do you think you are, to be putting all this stuff out into the ether?”, says the voice of doubt deep inside your head.

Perfectionism is a big blocker for all of us.  We feel because we are still incomplete, not perfect, we don’t have the right to stand up in front of others and speak about our topic.  We worry about being judged and found short.  This is the highest hurdle to clear.  Rather than perfectionism, we need to be thinking in terms of relativities.  There is an old saying that “the one-eyed man is king, in the kingdom of the blind”.  That is us.  We have some small extra degree of concrete knowledge or experience, which may be more than what most people have accumulated, but it is certainly not absolute.  We don’t claim to have absolute knowledge on any subject. We note that we are perpetual students of the subject and are treading the path still, on the learning journey.

This is very freeing.   If we are speaking in front of others and we discover we have a bona fide expert on our subject in the audience, we shouldn’t feel scared, diminished or that we need to become competitive with them. We should celebrate the fact they are attending and ask their views on some pertinent aspect of the subject, in particular an area where they may have substantially more knowledge or experience that we have.  Here is the surprise.  Your audience will appreciate their attendance and your ability to have them share.  They will not stand up and start denouncing you as a charlatan, a fraud and someone who should be run out of town on a rail. 

We all understand that none of us have perfect knowledge on any subject, that we are all in the process of progressing and when you freely admit this, there is no target to attack. In karate we call it taisabaki – a movement to the side, which robs the attacker of a hard target. All they wind up doing is striking thin air, because you are no longer there directly in front of their blow.  When presenting we do the same.  We slip off to the side and admit we don’t have perfect knowledge, we acknowledge the expertise or experience of members of the audience and we keep out brand intact.

The golden rule is never argue with the members of the audience.  Accept they may have a different view, allow them to express it and let the audience make up their own mind about the point at issue.  If you become obstinate, then you are getting into the perfectionism zone and you will always be found wanting. 

The hardest attack is when the person cherry picks something you said, takes it out of context or misrepresents it, trying to make you look stupid.  This happened to me during a Clubhouse discussion on selling in Japan.  I should have handled it better, but the sudden public opposition to my opinion released a fog in my brain, so it wasn’t as sharp as it should have been.  I did have the perfect rejoinder about an hour later, but it was way too late by then.  I did beat myself up about that, but then I realised, “hey, I did have the rejoinder for the next time and I will be ready to go in the future”.

If we have integrity and admit we don’t have perfect knowledge or complete experience, we are in a good position to stand up in front of others and offer what we do know.  If we have the humility to allow diverse views and opinions, we don’t present any target for someone the hit.m If we honestly face out own limitations, then we will interact with others in a manner which invites trust and acceptance. If we are supremely nervous about giving this presentation, then we are never, ever going to betray any sign of that. “Keep it to yourself” is the best policy.  No one will notice, because they want us to succeed and we will.

How good is your Mongolian?  Well, I don’t know even one word in Mongolian, but I learnt a powerful lesson about presenting and communicating, when grappling with this language recently.  I am a Master Trainer for Dale Carnegie and most of my time is spent working here for Japanese clients.  Occasionally, I am asked to work with Dale Carnegie colleagues from other parts of the world, usually in APAC, to help certify their new trainers.  This is how I came to be working with ten budding trainers from Ulan Bator.

My instruction was given in English, but their own role plays and practice pieces, were done in Mongolian.  I wondered at the start, how on earth can I coach these people, if I can’t understand their language? I was surprised though by a number of things.  We communicate with words, but we also communicate with structure, energy, passion, voice pacing and body language. 

Listening to their role plays, I could tell if they were not following the structure they were supposed to be using, even though I couldn’t understand one word of what they were saying.  This just reinforced for me the importance of designing our presentations using a clear structure, such that one each section flows seamlessly into the next section.  We will have a number of points and sub-points in our talks and we will have chapters in the talk as well, as we move from one subject to the next.  We need to make sure the sub-points flow and are obviously relevant, regarding the main thesis we are making in our presentation.

We also need to make sure we have bridges to link the chapters together.  If we just leap from one topic to the next, our audience may get lost and not make the connection.  We know our subject intensively and extensively, so we have no problem juxtaposing the chapters together.  However, someone hearing about content like this for the first time may struggle to follow the arc of the narrative we are explaining.  The bridge doesn’t have to be extensive or complicated, but it needs to be designed from the start. 

I enjoyed the Chinese classic, The History of The Three Kingdoms.  At the end of each chapter, the author would say something like, “if you want to know what happened to Li Xue, then read the next chapter”.  Such a primitive tool to link the story together, but it worked, because you were really wondering what was going to happen to Li Xue.  We can do much better than that I am sure and we should.  Let’s work on our bridging technique to link the talk together using all the component parts.

The energy levels of the different trainers were also a good indicator for me of the attractiveness of the content.  I had no idea what the exact content was in Mongolian, but the degree of energy each speaker employed, transposed to me the amount of interest I should have in what they were saying.  I noticed that if they were not injecting enough energy, I didn’t feel much resonance with them.  Those who could operate at the higher energy levels kept my concentration, regardless of the 100% linguistic barrier separating us. 

Training people and giving public talks, basically requires the same skill set in communication terms.  Both need to be pumping out vast levels of energy throughout.  Remember, the level of energy we employ for a chat over coffee is not what we need to be tapping into when we are on stage.  Our role is now totally different and we have to move up some gears and adopt a much more powerful persona when we are on stage.

Vocal variety is so important.  If we are too soft or too strong all the way through, as if the volume control was stuck on the one setting, then we will lose the attention of our audience.  If the speaker is too low key in their delivery from start to finish, the audience quickly gets bored and they start daydreaming about something else or even more likely today, they are lunging for their phones to escape from us, to the lure of the internet. 

If we are all relentless fire and brimstone, they get tired under the relentless bombardment from us.  What I noticed from the class participants was the variation in their vocal delivery kept my attention, even though I was oblivious to the meaning of what they were saying.  I thought, “Wow, if you can get this much impact in a foreign language, how much more potential is there when you are using your own native language when presenting”.  The issue is often we forget about this and we get stuck in the one groove throughout our talk.

None of the things I have mentioned here are new, complicated or difficult, but like a lot of things we know but don’t do.  Teaching the candidates from Mongolia was a good reminder for me of things I should be paying more attention to in my presentations.  We all get into habits and lose some of the self-awareness we need to keep improving in our craft.  Let’s not do that!

The rule in business is to stay clear of religion and politics, because you risk alienating a chunk of your audience who hold different views to you.  That is clear and sensible. What about other points of view (POV) however which are more related to business itself.  This could be about government regulatory policy, industry trend predictions, marketing issues, quality control, your purported product benefits or any number of contentious items.  When we are giving presentations, should we avoid stating our point of view or should we be open, even if it means being contentious?  Is being contentious a strategy for gaining profile?

Our main objective in giving business related presentations is to gain a positive impression for our company and make ourselves top of mind and tip of tongue, when people are considering the need for our solutions. Most small to medium sized companies are basically invisible to their potential clients, because they don’t have the advertising or marketing muscle of the large corporations.  Giving presentations, getting quoted in the media, engaging in content marketing in social media are all typical ways of overcoming that problem.

How much profile do we want?  If we want to fly under the radar, we are not going to be giving highly opiniated presentations, commenting on issues of the day.  On the other hand, we might do just that, to seek some opportunity to be controversial, so that we get talked about. I see there are some local entrepreneurs here, who have taken a strategic decision to offer opinions and viewpoints, which are designed to counter conventional, accepted wisdom.  This is clearly an attempt to breakthrough all the noise in the marketplace and to try and court the media, which as we know, loves controversy.

I do six podcasts a week, of which five are my opinion pieces on what I think about in regards to leadership, sales, communication and presenting.  My other podcast conforms to the normal arrangement of the guest supplying all of the IP and the host is just there to extract it.  Nevertheless, putting five opinion pieces a week, every week, into the ether could be considered risky. 

When I look back on what I write for my podcasts, there is always a distinct point of view on these subjects.  When I reflect on the public presentations I have given, there is always a strong point of view on these subjects.  The 1000 plus videos on our website are all brimming with my point of view too. Also, the four books I have published are all full of my points of view.  So where is the line when we are communicating our point of view, that we shouldn’t cross. 

I have written about Boris Johnson and Donald Trump in relation to their public speaking techniques.  In both cases, I have sidestepped whether I agree or like what they are doing as elected officials of their countries and just focused on what we can learn from what they are doing as presenters.  This was a conscious decision to avoid alienating my audience one way or the other.  With politics and religion, it is easier to make these judgements I think, because you know the percentage split between their followers and opponents.

What have I done in regard to the Japanese Government’s handing of Covid and the myriad regulations that it has spawned, including shutting the border?  Nothing. This issue doesn’t fit into the four areas I write about, even though the regulations have had a direct impact on my training business, as it has made face to face training extremely fraught.  Whatever my personal views on Government policy may be, I have decided not to seek out advocating any positions at all because they are outside the scope of my area of coverage.  Another factor is I am a migrant here and can have my visa not renewed and have to leave the country, so do I want to poke the beast which is the Japanese Government, specifically their Immigration Department?  I judge that fight not to be worth it.  I did cover ex-Prime Minister Suga’s presentation abilities though in Episodes #233 and #255 and was quite tough in my evaluations.  I didn’t talk about his policies though, so there was a line there I thought I could walk without getting deported. 

The point is to make a decision about how controversial you want to be, why you are deciding that calculation and what are the ramifications, both positive and negative for your positioning.  You can have a clear point of view on subjects without upsetting your audience.  Giving your viewpoint can be useful for your audience, as it helps them to think about their own position in the topic.  As the President of Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan, which is a business built around how to be really good with people, probably avoiding controversy would be an obvious authentic positioning. 

How about your business and your company, are there natural limitations which will apply to how stridently or controversially you can pursue your point of view?  Have you thought about it and decided where the line is located?  Have you set out some points of view on where you stand on relevant topics?  Probably this would be a useful exercise before you promulgate your views into the ether or at public presentations to business audiences.

I sometimes read about certain celebrities, historical figures or leaders who are described as being better presenters with small groups or being better presenting to large groups.  I wonder what they mean and why that would be?  I presume the inference is the person is more impactful with one group rather than the other or feels more comfortable addressing one group rather than the other.  Why would the size of the group make any difference?

Perhaps presenting to a tight circle of listeners makes the speaker feel more pressure because the audience is so physically close and immediate.  Up on the stage there is a good distance between the speaker and the audience and maybe that provides less pressure.  The stage is usually a raised platform or the speaker’s position is at the front of the room, so there is more formality in those settings, which therefore provides more authority and credibility for the presenter.

On the other hand, being up on stage, with thousands of beady eyes boring into your skull can be a lot of pressure for some speakers.  The sheer scale can be overwhelming and the serried ranks of listeners confronting. Looking down at that sea of scowling faces and crossed arms can be spine decalcifying. The small group on the other hand may feel more intimate and safe.

There are some things which work well for both groups, so let’s take them separately.  For small groups, the intimacy means our body language, pacing and volume has to be different than if we were up on a vast stage facing thousands.  We will have a better chance of knowing more about a small audience than a mass audience.  The organisers probably know everyone and can brief us about therm.  This helps us in the planning stage to think about what will be of most value for the audience.  Once we have prepared that talk, we will feel very confident we will get a good reception from the people assembled.

Even if it is a small group, we should stand when we present.  The organisers may try to get us to sit down and present, but we should resist that idea. Standing is better for us to free up our body language and deal with any nerves we have.  It also gives us elevation above the crowd, which also gives us more authority regarding what we are saying.  We can easily see everyone and they can see us too.  We want to be working our eye contact, such that we hold the gaze of each person for around six seconds.  Less than that is not effective in creating a bond and if we go longer it becomes intrusive.  When we get the eye contact balance right, the person on the receiving end feels as if we are speaking directly to them and no one else in the room.  It feels like we are having a cosy chat. It is very powerful and attractive.  Our gestures need to be smaller and less energetic or we can overpower our audience.

When we are facing those thousands of people up onstage in a big venue, there is a big difference between those in the audience, depending on where they are seated.  We see them as an anonymous granite block but they are not. Those down the back, those up on the first tier and up on the second tier can feel remote.  We are remote to them too.  If you are ever speaking in a big venue, get there early and go and sit in the seats at the furthest extremes.  This is when you realise you will appear like a peanut to these members of the audience.

In the same way, we had the small group earlier and we apply the same logic.  We don’t talk to thousands of people.  We speak to one person at a time.  We divide the venue up into six sectors, like the baseball diamond.  We have the inner field and the outer field, the left, center and right field and this includes those seated in the second and third floors.  When we are at distance from these people seated far from us and when we select one person to speak to, the thirty people seated around them, all think we are looking directly at them too.  The effect is the same – they feel we are having an intimate conversation with them despite there being thousands of people in the hall.  Don’t look at the sectors in order though. Make it completely unpredictable and random, to keep people on their toes. 

In the big venues, we need to use huge gestures.  Because of the distance, we have to make a much bigger effort to project our energy all the way to the back wall.  We have a microphone, so we are not yelling, but we are trying to drive our physical energy all the way to the rear of the venue.  The people at the back will feel our energy and will be drawn toward us.  We also have to make more use of the stage.  Not running around on stage from left to right like a maniac, as you will have seen by some people, but purposely spending time on the left, center and right of the stage, trying to get as close to the audience as possible.

Regardless of the size of the venue, we have a plan and we know what to do.  We can be effective regardless of the circumstances, because we decided to be in control and we are well organised.