Our presenter was vivacious, sparky, bright and engaging. She works in a cool area of business and has the opportunity to see what works and doesn’t work in many industries.  This enables her to pull together terrific insights and back these up with hard evidence based on numerous case studies and who doesn’t love a good case study.  A big crowd turned out to hear her talk, so the place was packed. Chatting before we started, she mentioned in passing that she had not planned the talk and was going to wing it.  I thought that was “brave” but in a bad way.  The talk has been advertised for weeks. She knows when it is on, so why would she want to wing it?  I just dismissed that as either bravado or laying out an early excuse, in case it bombs as a presentation.  Either way, I didn’t believe it and sure enough, when she went through the slide deck it was obviously structured and well planned.  She was speaking to what was on screen, so definitely no “script” required, but it had a plan. Early in, she said something disturbing.  She mentioned that she intended for this to be an interactive talk.  This sounds pretty sexy, getting the audience involved and it can be, but I got worried immediately.  Her invitation to contribute to participate flags the issue of time control.  Whenever we invite the audience to chip in with their thoughts and experiences, we lose the ability to keep on time.  Some responses are short, but many are surprisingly long.  I am always amazed by how much pent-up demand there is out there for people to add their two bobs’ worth. Maybe these days, with everyone so engrossed with their individual phone screens, the opportunity for some people to speak up has shrivelled and they are desperate for their thoughts, musings and comments to be heard by others.  When you make that “interactive” invitation, there will be a proportion of people who will take you up on your offer and more.  The “more” bit is where we lose control. That impacts the overall discipline of the talk to conform to the schedule for start and finish. There is nothing wrong with involving the audience, but it requires discipline on our part to control proceedings such that we finish on time. When we combine this interactivity at scale, we can blow out the time required to get through the prepared material.  This happened to me recently when teaching a class on presentations for a luxury brand.  In typical Dale Carnegie fashion, we plan our classes out to the second.  People in the class, however were much more talkative than I expected and I found a dilemma of more material to cover than the time allocated.  I had to drop some parts out because we had a hard stop. The secret in this case is to skip those parts, but in a way which is not obvious to the audience.  Only you know what is in the slide deck and so you can make adjustments if you need to.  I just jumped to some later slides in a way which was not public to the participants.  As far as they were concerned, this was all part of the plan. Our speaker ran out of time and made the amateur error of showing us al what we had missed out because she wasn’t able to control the proceedings.  This is really bad.  Now the audience feels unhappy because they were enjoying the first part of the presentation and they want to receive all the value they are trading their time for.  Seeing sexy slides whiz by with no commentary or explanation is really a tease, but not one we can enjoy. My calculation was she needed about another thirty minutes to cover what she had prepared. If she had been more disciplined, she could have allowed some degree of interaction bit capped it so that it didn’t blow up the presentation time schedule.  She got caught by the organisers, giving her the bum’s rush to get off stage because the time was more than up. Reflecting on the structure, she had spent a fair amount of time at the start establishing her credentials through trip down memory lane with her career.  It was relevant to what she was presenting about and it was incredibly charming, but I think it went a bit too long. Consequently, at the end she had to sacrifice the juicy bits about the case studies.  She could have let her evidence do the hard lifting to establish her credibility on this subject, because she certainly had the goods.  This is another discipline point – don’t get too caught up in talking about yourself, as fascinating as that is to you. Her takeaway points were a letdown at the very end, as she wrapped up. She had the right idea, but the content was a bit ho hum.  She could have come up with some harder hitting recommendations at the end to really provide benefit to the audience.  No one was photographing the take aways, and that is always a bad sign with any sort of summary. Her final impression was her rushing through the content, teasing us with the sexy bits we didn’t cover and then leaving us high and dry with humdrum guides to our next steps. The lack of discipline meant the presentation started well and just slowly imploded and collapsed at the end. She was still vivacious and charming, so that always helps.  Better though to be more professional and bring value to the audience. That is what we want them to remember us for.

Foreign companies often want to appoint a Japanese person to be the head of their Japan operation.  This is done on the basis that they will know what is best for the business.  This proclivity has made many washed up, tremendously mediocre Japanese Presidents a lot of money and substantially extended their careers.  At some point the shareholders, or the Board, start to ask why there are no results in the Japan operation.  The local chief usually manages to fend off these “rude” enquiries for a few years until the jig is up.  In comes the shiny new President from headquarters who has been despatched to “fix” the Japan operation and turn it around.  This typically leads to another array of problems, but that is another podcast.  The idea is that the Japanese way of doing things is the best for Japan – “when in Tokyo do it the Tokyo way” kind of thing.  I remember trying to sell our High Impact Presentations Course to a foreign financial firm.  The Japanese lady I was speaking with told me she wanted the “Japanese way” of presentations instead of the Dale Carnegie global best practice way.  It is an interesting question, isn’t it.  How far do we go to accommodate the Japanese culture and way of doing things, while still getting the maximum benefit from doing things at the highest possible level? We do meet foreigners here who have been here for a long time and have quietly gone troppo.  They are trying so hard to assimilate they are out Japanesing the Japanese.  What should we do about how we present in business?  Should we go troppo too and do it the Japanese “way”?  What is the Japanese “way”?  Here is your handy dandy guide to going troppo when presenting in Japan and how to blend in with the locals. 1.        Monotone Speak in a complete monotone voice and forget about using any voice modulation, pauses or hitting of keywords and phrases.  Some people will say this is just how it is because the Japanese language is a monotone language and so there is no chance for vocal variation, as we have with foreign languages.  That is almost true, except even Japanese speakers can use two mighty levers to elevate their presenting world. Speed and strength will produce the variety needed.  Slowing words down for emphasis or speeding them up both work well.  Taking the strength down to speak in a conspiratorial whisper is good and so is using power to hit keywords. 2.        Be Seated Invariably, when I am invited to speak in Japanese the layout will feature a desk with my name written on paper either draping over the desk or sitting upright on a paper tent.  The microphone will be on a low stand. This is to make it clear that I am humble and I am not standing above the audience, making myself out to be better than everyone else.  It also means I lose my access to my body language and most of my gestures. 3.        No Eye Contact Looking a superior in the eye in samurai times would get your head cut off for insolence.  The culture ensures that we don’t make direct eye contact with people when we speak and so Japanese presenters have migrated this into their presentations.  They never look into the eyes of their audience members. It also means that they haven’t realised that normal conversation and giving presentations are two different things and different rules can apply.  The engagement of the audience members through six seconds of individual eye contact are foregone in order to keep your head on your shoulders. 4.        Weak Voice Speaking softly is a cultural preference and so why not keep that going when presenting?  The speaker is under-powering their presentation, so often, it is hard to hear what they are saying and there is certainly no passion involved as demonstrated through voice projection.  This guarantees the speaker has almost zero presence in the room. 5.        Few Gestures Holding the hands in front of the groin, behind the back or together at waist level are all favourites.  Each position locks up the hands and cancels out using any gestures to emphasise the message being delivered.  6.        Casual Posture Having the weight displacement 70/30 is common and usually it results in one hip being kicked out to the side.  Swaying around is also popular as they speak. These are all distractions from the message, but no one is conscious of that, so they keep doing it. 7.        One packed slide Cramming everything on to one slide, with five tiny different fonts and six colours, is definitely a typical effort by Japanese presenters.  The rule that we have to be able to understand the point of the message on the slide in two seconds has been tossed overboard in favour of a full noisy baroque effort. Good luck with out Japanesing the Japanese when it comes to the Japanese “way” of presenting.

The Lord Mayor of London covers the whole con-urban spread of greater London and the Lord Mayor of the City of London covers 1.12 square kilometres of the financial district with a population of nearly 11,000 people, so it is a bit confusing.  Alderman Lord Mayor Professor Michael Mainelli gave a speech to the British Chamber of Commerce recently.  I didn’t know anything about him, but sitting there listening to him, I immediately noticed how smooth his delivery was.  He had good pacing, good voice strength, some appropriate humour and an engaging manner. He is well educated at Harvard University, Trinity College Dublin and the London School of Economics.  We all know that being well educated and teaching at University are no guarantees of public speaking ability and prowess.  In the Lord Mayor’s case, he has had a very successful business career as a founder. He is a chartered certified accountant, computer specialist, securities professional and management consultant. His talk was an amalgamation of capabilities built up across a broad spectrum career. Being highly successful in your career is a great contributor to exuding quiet confidence as a speaker.  Often, when we are making our careers, we may be trying to be a bit too strong, a bit too strident, too loud, too forceful because we are in a hurry.  Bringing these attributes into the speaking world is not a great idea.  Professor Mainelli’s demeanor was that of a person with good levels of self-awareness and an unhurried manner.  That unhurried manner was very convincing.  He didn’t come across as trying to be persuasive, but was persuasive.  I was thinking about that for myself.  I am a very high-powered presenter, well that is always the feedback I get after my presentations, so I take it at face value.  However, can I learn something here and take a leaf out of his book?  Obviously, throughout his career, Professor Mainelli has had numerous opportunities to speak in public, and it shows.  What we see today is the accumulation of all of those years of speaking, and it is a very polished example of how to be persuasive.  Was he like that at the beginning?  I doubt it because this is a finite skill we develop, not something we are born with.  We all benefit from substantial practice of any art.  Perhaps speaking opportunities were thrust upon him and he learnt how to become better.  I should have asked him, shouldn’t I, when I was chatting with him after the talk.  I will remember that for the next time I meet someone who is so highly skilled. What can we take away from his example?  Firstly, study the art or do as much speaking as possible and keep adjusting your techniques on the basis of your evolution as a speaker or even better – do both.  This sounds simple, except I ran away from every speaking opportunity until my early thirties.  I was terrified of public speaking and would have been one of those people ranking it in surveys ahead of death!  You may also be an avoider like I was.  If you want to become competent as a speaker, you have to give talks.  It is like trying to teach someone to swim on the deck of the pool.  It is a great theory, but nothing happens until you dive into the water and get wet and start swimming around. Grab the slightest chance of speaking in public.  Yes, it is terrifying at the start, but it gets less so as your frequency mounts up.  Tony Robbins, in one of his books, talks about how he purposely decided to speak as much as possible.  He realised that most speakers only get a few chances a year and he could match their annual total experience in just weeks, if he got enough speaking spots.  He went for it and has turned that speaking facility into a career, business and massive wealth. Being nine feet tall probably helped too. Getting proper coaching is also the quickest way to get much better.  I have done some public speaking training with different organisations, but nothing has matched the High Impact Presentations course that we teach. I don’t say that to sell training, but as an objective statement based on my experiences.  My broader point is to go get the training.  I lost a decade of potential experience and career advancement because I let fear rule me. I didn’t engage my brain and say, “the way to overcome the fear I have is to get proper training”.  I was too stupid for that logical consequence of having a problem and needing to fix it.  Don’t be like Greg! I still look for any chance I can get to speak, because I know this will help me to keep pushing myself and keep improving. My records tell me I have delivered 558 public speeches so far.  Am I satisfied with that?  No, I am certain that I can still improve and get a lot better. All I need is the chance to keep polishing and keep improving.  I now aim to achieve the zen like “mind of no mind” effortlessness that the Lord Mayor of the City of London displayed in his remarks.  What about you?  What are you going to do to become competent and comfortable as a speaker, someone highly persuasive and influential with those around you?

“Will It Blend” was a genius idea from Blendtec, kicked off with a $50 budget in 2006. The campaign saw Tom Dickson’s videos go viral and take a boring blender manufacturer into the pantheon of marketing presentations.  They have 187 videos on YouTube and 845,000 subscribers to their channel. So far, their YouTube channel has had 294 million views. Not bad for a blender maker duking it out in a red ocean of blender suppliers.  I suggested to a client of mine that they take a leaf out of Blendtec’s playbook and do the same for their boring drill bits.  Being my client, I actually never used the word “boring”, but at least floated the idea for them.  “Will It Drill” I thought could be a goer for them, however they never went for it.  Instead, they keep doing the same old promotions using catalogues of products with potential buyers.  Another client of mine is an equipment manufacturer, and I came up with a suggestion for them.  They get a lot of calls to their call centre for help with running the equipment.  These calls often come from part-time staff in the stores who can’t understand how to use the machinery or fix simple issues.  They are not well trained and with the difficulty of recruiting staff only likely to get worse, the chances of them getting better trained are fairly remote. I suggested that they create a series of “reality TV” style tutorial videos for the 20% of the problems which make up 80% of the calls to the call centre.  This would relieve the call centre staff of boring, repetitious work. It must be extremely hard to tell someone over the phone how to fix machinery.  You make the videos once and so the investment is able to be amortised over many years, because the machines don’t change that much and the issues are probably the same all the time. This means no scripts and low production values.  Initially I thought to get a real technician in the company’s technician uniform, to go through the 12 steps or 7 steps or 5 steps or whatever, to fix the problem.  Edit the video well, to make it easy to follow and put this up on YouTube and on their website.  When people call in with these typical issues, the call centre staff can just direct them to the videos and say “call us back if you have any further problems”. The chances of that will be very low I would guess.  This was an elegant solution, I thought. Then I had a further thought and a more radical consideration. I wondered about going a completely different direction from reality TV to Hollywood.  Given the people in the stores are not technical people, why not get someone who is also not technical to walk them through the steps, so it is more accessible?  There is a local foreign businesswoman here I know, who does a lot of MC work for luxury products.  She is really beautiful, really blonde and speaks excellent Japanese.  That would be a killer combo for this job in Japan.  I would also dress her up in an evening gown, with her hair done perfectly, to accentuate the tinsel town glamour.  Get her to point out what needs to be done step by step.  It is a counterintuitive approach and may even go viral like Blendtec. This got me thinking about how we present what we do.  Are there some areas where we can think in a differentiated way about how we present our solutions to potential clients?  What about for your business?  What are you doing now and what could you do if you really considered something innovative and differentiated?  We all get into a rut of the same old, same old about how we present our brand and our solutions. Year after year, we do the same thing and probably basically the same approaches as our competitors. Blendtec has shown how to take a very dull, utilitarian solution and make it sexy.  My “Will It Drill” client never took any action when it wasn’t so difficult. For whatever reason, inertia took over, and he is still working hard to sell drill bits in a crowded market. He can only differentiate on price, which is not something any of us want to do. I don’t know if my client will go for the glamourous blonde Hollywood bombshell solution to fixing common requests for help from clients, but I hope he does.  I am also thinking now about how do I take my own advice and what can I do with my training business?  How about you?  Has this article stimulated any would be Blendtec marketing innovations for you?

We are usually asked to speak at events by some hosting organisation and these can be breakfast, lunches or evening occasions.  Each has its challenges.  Not that many people seem to be great in the early mornings and the energy level of the audience can be very low, as they are still sleepy.  This sleepiness is definitely a problem for after lunch presentations too.  Many are ready for a nap after hoeing down a big meal in the middle of the day.  In the evenings, people can be tired after a hard day’s work and their concentration spans can be limited. As the speaker, we may suffer the same issues, but the adrenalin kicks in and we become sufficiently energised to complete the presentation.  There are issues around how much information an audience can absorb when attending our talk.  We, of course, are sold on the topic or subject because we have prepared a presentation on it.   We have gone to a lot of trouble and have been highly motivated to give the talk.  We may let that enthusiasm blind us to the reality of what it is like on the receiving end. This is where presentation technique become very important.  I see so many speakers who ignore half their audience when they present, by simply not getting the feet placed at the correct angle – ninety degrees to the audience.  These speakers get their feet angle at forty-five degrees and without releasing it, they are now only talking to one side of the room and are deleting the remainder from their view and attention.  Don’t do that. Another issue is they lose sight of their audience.  They are looking over the heads of everyone or looking at the screen or looking down and not making any eye contact with the attendees.  This is a massive mistake.  We have to make sure we are watching our people like a hawk.  If we see they are losing interest or their energy is flagging, we can take remedial actions to fix the problem.  By looking at members of our audience for six seconds each, we can make sure we not only engage the listeners, but we can always gauge their interest levels in what we are saying. If the energy goes down, we may need to get them physically involved by raising their hand to a question.  This question should be designed so that basically everyone has to raise their hand.  This way we get the maximum involvement and this helps to wake up those who are drifting off into slumber, with their eyes open. As we say “the lights are on, but nobody is home”. Another method is to pause and stop speaking for about ten seconds. Actually, ten seconds can feel quite long, as we are used to continuous palaver from speakers.  This is called a “pattern interrupt” because we provide a consistent audio rhythm when we are speaking. When we turn it off, the sleepy attendees wake up because something has changed. They become alert again, springing from a deeply rooted and basic survival tactic. If we have been going hard with our delivery, we can wear some audience members out.  We are hitting them with so much energy, it is thrashing them.  This is something I have to be careful about, because I am a very high energy presenter.  If I see I am wiping people out with my overpowering energy, I need to bring in more lows and reduce the crescendos.  This is not that easy, because as the speaker, we get into a rhythm too with our pacing.  We are up and away and it is hard to rein yourself in, especially when you are enjoying yourself. One of the unnecessary pressures we place on ourselves can be too much content for the time available and we rush.  This gets very ugly, very fast.  The audience realise immediately that the speaker has screwed up the time allocation for their delivery and now panic is setting in, as the presenter races through their slides.  It looks very unprofessional, and as it comes at the end, it poisons our final key impression with the crowd.  We may have been doing very well and everyone is enjoying the talk and getting a lot of value.  We suddenly go crazy and start rushing.  Effectively, we delete all that good will we have built up during the presentation and we replace it with a negative recollection of ourselves. Rehearsal is the cure for the time control problem.  However, if you cannot do a rehearsal and you realise during the delivery that you have to stop, don’t rush through the slides.  When you do that, the jig is up and everyone is on to you. Instead, just stop on the slide you are on, wrap it up and call for any questions they may have. Remember, only you know what is in the slide deck. When you race through and show them what they missed out on, the unhappiness is increased. It is better to not reveal the gap. When doing the Q&A, don’t forget to repeat the question, so that everyone can hear it, as long as it isn’t a hostile question.  Never repeat or amplify an incoming unfriendly missile.  With that situation, we always paraphrase to take the heat out of the question.  Don’t just look at the questioner either.  Give them some eye contact and then share your answer with the rest of the audience as well.  Finally, close it all out by repeating your main message and take your bow, enjoy the applause and finish on the mark.  Everyone will be very happy you respected their time and they will regard you as a professional.

I am terrible.  I procrastinate about starting the assembly of my presentation.  Invariably, by holding off starting, I create time tension, which forces me to elevate the priority of the presentation and lift its urgency above all the other competing demands on my time.  I should start earlier and take some of that tension out of my life.  So, everyone do what I say, don’t do what I do!  Start early. The first point of departure must be working on the clarity needed around the key message.  What is the point we want to get across?  There are always a multitude of these and it is quite challenging sometimes to pick out the one we want to work on.  Part of my problem is perfectionism immobilising me.  So let’s all suspend perfectionism and just be happy to get started, knowing we can finesse what we are doing later. Once we have settled on the key message, we need to make sure that anyone would care about that message.  It might be intoxicating for us, but it may not motivate anyone else to get excited.  A reality check is in order before we move forward.  Will there be enough traction with the audience we are going to be presenting to?  We should have a fairly clear idea about who will be interested in our topic and what some of their expectations will be. After the reality check, we start to construct the talk.  Counterintuitively, we start with the end.  We settle on the actual words we need for our conclusion, because this is a succinct summary of what we will talk about.  Getting that down to a few sentences is no easy feat.  It is simple to waffle on, but it requires skill to be brief and totally on point. Next, we plan out the chapters of the talk to deliver the goods to prove what we are saying in our conclusion is true.  In a forty-minute speech, we can usually get through five or six chapters.  Here is a critical piece of the puzzle.  We need to rehearse the talk and carefully watch the time.  It is very difficult to predict accurately the required time until you run through the talk. We may find we are short on the content or too long and we need to make adjustments.  We certainly don’t want to discover that on stage in front of an audience.  We all feel cheated when the presenter start rushing at the end and the slides go up and come down in seconds. You simply can’t follow what they are showing to the audience and that leaves a very negative impression at the end of the talk. Now we plan our start.  This is the first impression of our talk.  Well, that is not quite true.  The audience will be making critical judgements as to how we command the stage and how we get underway.  Juggling slides on the deck is a bad look at the start. That should definitely be left to someone else, so we can get straight into our opening.  Don’t thank the organisers at this point, we can do that in a moment.  We don’t want to waste the opening with a bunch of generic bumf.  We need to grab hold of our audience at this point and then never let go of them. The audience may be seated in front of us, but they are a thousand miles away with their collective consciousness floating above the clouds. They are focused on everything else but us and we have to induct them into our orbit and command their complete attention.  So, we need to plan this first sentence extremely well, because it will set the tone for the rest of the event.  Remember that fear of loss is greater than greed for gain, so we hit them with how they can avoid losses. We might say something along these lines, “it is shocking how much the change in the market is going to cost us all and we are talking about serious money here”.  That start fits just about any talk subject and is a bit of a Swiss Army Knife of starters.  The market is always changing and invariably some will gain and others will lose. Our job is to point the audience in the direction of how to avoid losing money. The cadence of the talk is we need to tell a story every five minutes to keep our audience with us.  Storytelling is like superglue and will bind the listeners to us until the end of our presentation.  That means we need at least five or six good stories which make the point we are selling.  Including people they know or know of, is always good because that technique is a great equaliser and connector with the audience. We need to prepare two closes – one for our formal end to the talk and another for the final close after the Q&A has ended.  We need to brief the organisers that after the Q&A we will wrap it up and then they can bring the proceedings to a formal end.  If we don’t do that, they will just end the talk before we have a chance to drive in our key message for the last time. We will know if the talk has succeeded by the faces we see in the audience.  If they are paying attention right through, that is a good sign.  If they are nodding in agreement, that is an even better sign and if they are engaged through their questions, then there is real interest.  A sea of bored faces is not what we want to be looking out at.  If that happens, we really need to raise our energy and start getting the listeners physically involved.  We can do this by getting them to raise their hands in answer to a question from us.  We can’t overdo this or it quickly becomes manipulative and, it is obvious to everyone what we are doing.  But we need to raise our energy and their energy to keep them with us. So don’t be like me and instead start the prep early!

I was in a recent debate with the Dale Carnegie organisation about approving the publication of my new book “Japan Leadership Mastery”.  There were concerns about copyright, because I was drawing on the Dale Carnegie curriculum for the book.  A book is a powerful content marketing tool, so excluding the Dale Carnegie oeuvre defeats the purpose.  One argument I made to them was I could rewrite the book and strip their content out and replace it with generic stuff summoned up from AI.  This is the problem we all face. AI makes originality very difficult to sustain when it is so easy to coagulate all that is currently out there. I create these podcast episodes every Saturday morning and when you have composed over three hundred articles on presentations, it gets harder and harder to come up with something original. I try to find angles I haven’t explored before and to write them in a way which an AI prompt could not replicate. When we are creating our public presentations, we face the same problem.  Any fool armed with AI can come up with a presentation which will assemble the best of what has been published already or at least what the machine could find from public sources.  How do we make sure that what we are presenting is not getting pushed down into the sludge to battle with what AI can churn out in under a minute?  How can we thrash our AI powered competitors within an inch of their lives? At this point in time, we are lucky that most of the AI production for presentations is generic and sounds generic.  Originality for me means the choices of words like “thrash”, “oeuvre”, “coagulate”, “sludge”, and “churn”.  These are unlikely candidates to emerge from an AI prompt to create a presentation on any subject.  I have always tried to write like this anyway, to make myself stand out from the crowd.  Today that AI assisted crowd is surging. In fact, it is accessing the entire global production of text on every topic. Don’t panic yet. Our experiences are sacrosanct turf, which protects us from AI mindlessness.  No AI prompt can capture what has happened to us and our recollection of it.  In our storytelling, we access those incidents and we use them in concert with our take on the lessons from what happened.  This is a guaranteed way to remain one step ahead of AI generated content.  Of course, AI can magically  bring forth a slew of stories of other people’s experiences, but as a presenter relating to an audience what happened to us is unbeatable for making that human connection. I resisted sharing a lot of personal insights and experiences for a long time.  I am a very private person, an introvert in fact, who has to operate as an extrovert. It is always tough.  People who know me would never know that because I push myself in public to be outgoing.  When I finally got over myself and started including more things about me and my family in my talks, I noticed that I connected more powerfully with the audience.  AI won’t know that level of detail and so can never match us in a live situation. The other arena in which to slay the AI dragon is when we are on stage, standing there in front of a live audience.  Our rival presenter may have been fed a steady diet of homogenised content from AI in prepping their talk, but can they rock the audience like we can?  This is where knowledge and execution diverge.  It is the same with technical presenters.  They have all the data, statistics, details, etc., but they speak in a monotone and murder their listeners.  They are dull dogs, with way too much micro data plastered all over their one slide, which in fact should have been spread over six slides.  They are unable to create some buzz with the crowd. They have no clue how to penetrate that invisible barrier between speaker and those being spoken to. They don’t know how to bring gesture, voice tone, body language and eye contact together in an unstoppable vortex to completely capture the room and drive in their message. No amount of AI prep will help them.  This is where the AI powered speaker runs out of gas.  They can put up the bare bones of the AI generated presentation, but they don’t have the ability to flesh it out and make it a triumph. When you know what you are doing, you can dip into elements of AI for help, but for presentations, you have to be able to stand up and cut it. This is the Age of Distraction and Era of Fake News and we only have one shot. These days, with the micro patience of audiences we face, you don’t get any margin.  If you sound boring, they will immediately lunge for their mobile and depart from you and your message.  They will escape straight to the internet, to much more intriguing worlds like their email, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. AI is only a problem if you are a crap presenter.  For the rest of us, let’s give AI powered presenters a sound public thrashing and blow them out of the water.

Almost 100% of presentations that I see in Japan are one directional.  The audience sits there passively and the speaker presents to them.  There is no interaction with the audience.  I was watching an interview with Clint Eastwood in his approach as a movie director.  He was talking about his famous Western “The Unforgiven” and talking about how he shot some key scenes, such that the faces of the actors were in the shadows and not fully revealed.  I can’t remember exactly how he expressed it, but he said you don’t have to show the whole face with full lighting, because the audience is intelligent. They can fill in the gaps.  I thought that was a good metaphor for presenting. As the presenter we don’t have to show everything in full lighting from our side.  We can create some gaps and allow the audience to fill in the blanks themselves from their imaginations and their viewpoint.  We do this to some extent already when we use rhetorical questions.  These are questions which we pose to the audience but we are not actually asking them for an answer – we provide that after a suitable hanging pause.  What about if we actually make it a real question and source the answer from the audience?  Now we cannot be doing this every five minutes, as that will be massive overkill, but we can drop some questions into our talk. We might plan to use these questions to overcome flagging energy and declining interest from the audience.  This is why you never want to be lowering the lights when you are presenting.  You want to be able to study the faces of the people arrayed in front of you for any signs of distraction, boredom, or tiredness. When I did my TED talk, the audience was in complete darkness because all the lights were blazoning away hitting me up on stage and making it impossible to read any reactions.  It was very unnerving, especially when you are used to being able to study the audience reactions to what you are saying. Now when we ask a question to the audience here they are confused.  Firstly, they are not trained for this and they are not sure if this is a rhetorical question, which we will answer or whether they actually have to answer.  The next line of confusion is who amongst the audience should answer this question.  In Japan, no one gets any prizes in life for going first, so it almost guarantees that everyone will be holding themselves back.  The third line of confusion is fear.  They worry if they get the answer wrong, they will look like a fool in front of everyone.  They also fear that someone else will come up with a much more intelligent answer than theirs and they will look stupid. So casting a question before an audience here is bound to get no immediate answer.  We have to help them by setting it up.  Just blasting forth with a question is a bit shocking, as this is not how things are normally done.  We need to say something like, “In a moment, I am going to pose a question, because I am very interested to get your experiences and ideas on the issue”.  Now we have fired off a warning shot, so that when the question is unloaded, no one is surprised. We help them even further by using our eye contact and gestures to indicate to an individual or a group of individuals that we want to hear their answer.  By holding out our hand gesture palm up, it is very unthreatening.  If we used a pointed finger instead, that is very aggressive and will drive a shudder of fear into an audience with its power. We simultaneously use our eye contact and look at a member of the audience we are indicating to, thus requiring an answer.  It is always good to pick those who were seated on the same table as you, if it were a luncheon or breakfast event, or someone you were chatting with at the start, as you will have established some rapport.  Depending on the relationship, we can call out their name as we ask the question, “So Suzuki san what has been your experience with….”.  We should immediately thank them for contributing and start applauding and inviting the rest of the audience to join us in recognising them.  We might even say, “let’s thank Suzuki san for sharing her experience and let’s also recognize her professionalism to volunteer her answer”.  This opens up the floor now to call on other people.  We don’t do too many of these at the same time. It can become a distraction. It can also suck up a lot of time.  Not everyone is able to be succinct and get to the point.  You may also inadvertently discover some people who have a lot of pent up need to talk and they will hijack your presentation.  Now you are on the back foot trying to regain control of proceedings, and that is not a good look for the presenter. At the very end wrap up of your talk you can again recognise those who contributed their ideas and get everyone to applaud and thank them.  They leave feeling a mile high and the rest of the audience feels you did the right thing by the volunteers.  It ties a nice bow on the presentation and ends it elegantly.

TikTok, Reels, Shorts, etc., are video snippets training everyone to micro absorb information and stimuli.  If it doesn’t grab our attention in three seconds, we are off that screen and scrolling forward to find something more interesting.  The modern instrument of torture for the presenter is the mobile phone. It whips our audience away from our message and us, to the siren calls of the internet.  Presenters must understand that how they start the presentation is that same three second space which will determine whether the audience pays any further attention to us or starts reaching for their phone. When we are called up to start speaking, the uber judgmental audience assesses us for reasons to flee.  The worst mistake we can make is to dive straight into the laptop screen and get bogged down in the logistics of getting our slides up on screen.  Either have your slides up ready to go or get the event hosts to remove their holding slide and replace it with your slide deck and your first slide.  Do not become the mechanic and have your head down under the hood.  Your body language is screaming “I am ignoring my audience”, while you tap away on the keyboard, looking totally absorbed by the screen.    Instead, walk to the center of the stage facing your audience, command the room and add in a dramatic pause of ten seconds before you start speaking. You need guts to pull this off, because ten seconds of silence is long. Silence creates a vacuum, which confuses audiences used to feasting on constant stimulation.  It creates a postive tension in the room which stops people chit chatting and being absorbed with each other.  It forces everyone’s attention to the stage and they mentally begin asking “what is going on?”.  This is good, because they are focused on us now and we can use our body language to project, “I am so confident, I can hold all of you in silence, before I choose to start”.  This confidence is convincing and sets the right platform for us to launch forth from. There are physical and mental barriers separating the speaker from the audience.  We must shatter that barrier. We do that with our stage positioning, body language, eye contact, gestures and how we direct our voice.  Depending on the venue, the stage could be at a distance far from the audience or we could be able to walk inside the audience area.  If we are far away, we need to work on projecting our ki – our intrinsic energy - to reach the farthest members of the crowd.  We should be pushing our ki all the way to the back wall and sending our energy to the audience members in the cheap seats at the rear. We can also move to the apron of the stage and stand as close as possible to the audience, towering over them to bring more physical presence to our talk.  People talk about having “Executive Presence” and this technique is that “Presence” on steroids. We can choose to move to the wings of the stage and standing on the apron, work on those members seated to the sides as well, to bring them into our web. When we are far away from the audience, we need to make the most of our gestures to bring energy to the point we are making.  You cannot get this effect if you have your hands behind your back, in your pockets, arms folded across your chest or hands coyly protecting your groin from the audience. Open body language must communicate, “I am not afraid of you. I welcome you close to me to receive my message of hope. Come to me, come to me”.  The gestures add to this openness by using inclusiveness through open hands and the wide spreading of the arms.  Many speakers in our training are afraid to use big gestures, yet once they use them and review them on video, they realise it doesn’t look too much as they feared. In fact, they can see it makes for much better communication of the points of their message. We add to the power of the gestures by locking our eyes with each member of the audience, one by one, to drive in the message. The objective is the eye contact is so intense that they feel we are speaking exclusively to them and there are only the two of us in the whole room.  An important point is to lock on to just one eye of the person you are looking at and not split the power of your gaze. By moving from one audience member to the next every six seconds, we use the power of our eye contact to fill the entire space in the venue.  In one minute, we can make direct, intense eye contact with ten people and in ten minutes we have covered off one hundred audience members. If the talk is forty minutes long, we get to repeat this engagement intensity four times for each individual. We will fill the entire room with our presence when we do this. If we are at floor level amongst the crowd, we can use our physical proximity to connect with the people seated, by standing over them at close range, to drive home a key point.  We can’t stay there though, because the pressure is too strong.  We must retreat to a more neutral location to reduce the intensity. We don’t just do this once - we go back in again and again and take a series of bites like a shark in a feeding frenzy.  It is like a blast of unassailable energy, which we choose to release whenever we want to make a strong point and drive home our message. Body language, in combination with our full delivery onslaught, makes for a differentiated, powerful, memorable brand building presentation and that is what we want, isn’t it?

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is a bad idea and yet so many presenters do it.  I was attending an Annual General Meeting event and the organisation President gave a short talk.  The content was appropriate for the occasion. The length was good, not too long and not too short, the voice strength loud enough to be easily heard, and the cadence was easy to follow.  Unfortunately, he managed to slip an “um” into just about every sentence.  This is a filler word to allow the brain to assemble the next words, and it is always a catastrophe for presenters.  He was a mature man, so presumably, he has always been peppering his sentences with this filler word and has now built it into a solid habit.  I am not even sure he is aware he is doing it, but as the listener, it grates on you and grates every sentence. Effectively, he is opposing himself whenever he speaks.  He has his message he wants to impart, and he defeats that message getting through, by creating an annoying distraction for his audience. There is a cure for this bad habit and it just talks time, patience and discipline to break it.  Pursing our lips becomes the technological intervention we need to stop using filler words.  When we start a sentence, hit the first word with a little more strength than the other words, so that no filler word can intervene.  We now concentrate on speaking continuously and smoothly with no breaks – again we deny filler words any entry points.  When we get to the end of the sentence, we purse our lips together, so no words can emerge and we get ready to hit the next first word in the sentence slightly harder than the other words.  We just keep repeating this process.  It won’t eliminate filler words automatically or immediately, but you will find you no longer start your sentence, as a lot of people do, with “um”.  The flow continuity of the sentence is important. That doesn’t mean we cannot use pauses.  The pauses need the same application I described we should use at the start of the sentence.  When you get to a pause, you are effectively starting again, so purse the lips so no “ums’ can emerge and hit that next word a little harder, so no “ums” can intervene when you restart. Keep working on this pattern and eventually you will almost entirely eliminate filler words.  I know this is true, because like everyone else, I was using “ums’ and “ahs” too.  Once I worked on eliminating them using this technique, life got a lot better.  It is a very rare occasion today that a filler word slips into my sentences.  I do a lot of training and public speaking which is not me reading stuff but coming straight out of my brain.  This means there is always the problems of trying to think what I want to say and having a filler word pop up. When I look at the videos of my presentations, I can see that there are almost no filler words, so the system is working. I was watching a video on how shoes are handmade and the cobbler had a habit of saying “you know” in almost every sentence.  Technically, this is not a filler word, but it is a bad habit and again distracts the audience from our message.  Not just humble cobblers get trapped with these junk expressions, which add no value to what we are saying.  I was chatting with a high-powered lawyer here about how important presenting skills were for lawyers. He agreed, and he assured me he was always making an effort to speak well and differentiate himself from all the other hungry lawyers out there looking for new clients.  Lo and behold, next minute he was up on stage in a panel discussion and there they were, a continuous string of “you know” combos distracting from what he was saying. Another one is “like” which gets thrown in for no reason.  It gets quite sad, when the really challenged start linking them together, “Um, well you know, like.…”.  This is a lifetime of habit formation with no conscious thought going into the process of presenting in front of others.  As I said, video is such a great tool.  Whenever I present, I always try to video myself.  I do this to drive the content out through social media but also so that I can check myself to see if I have any bad habits creaping in. Just in case you get the impression I see myself perfect, I am working on my overuse of “so”.  I have a habit of abusing this word as a bridge between chapters or sections of what I am going to say.  I will finish one point then add “so” with a pause and move on to the next section.  Once in a talk is okay, but more than that and it becomes a distraction I need to eliminate.  I need to train myself to use a variety of expressions such as, “let’s move on”, “another key point is”, “next”, “let’s talk about”, etc. I realised I had developed this habit when I watched myself on video. I was not conscious I was using that bridge so often, so video review is always a good idea, no matter how much presenting we do.

What a double act they were. Two economists giving us some insights into where the markets are going and making sense of the world we face.  Anytime you see an event where there is going to be some crystal ball gazing going on about where we are headed in the global economy, you want to be there.  We are all more risk averse than greedy, and we want to cocoon ourselves from trouble by getting some early warning of what to expect.  This was a Chamber of Commerce event, so I knew a lot of the attendees and did my best to exchange business cards with those I didn’t already know. In the process of doing so, I gained a very clear idea of who was in the room, what industry sectors they were in, and the relative size of their companies.  Neither of the double act speakers did that. They migrated straight to the VIP table and sat there waiting to go on.  They were there to present, and that was it in their minds. For speakers, that is a basic error.  In many cases these days, the event hosts won’t share the details of who is attending.  We should always get there early and try to meet as many of the members of the audience as we can.  This does a couple of things.  It connects us with complete strangers and creates a level of rapport with the listeners, which translates into support for us as the presenter.  It also enables us to gauge who is in the room, how senior they are, how big their operation is and how long they have been in Japan.  This is important, because we can adjust the level we set for the presentation to make sure we are not speaking down to anyone or over their heads.  Our speakers didn’t bother to analyse their audience before they launched forth with their canned presentation. I say “canned” because it was obvious they had been travelling around APAC giving this same presentation to various audiences.  The first speaker was comfortable as a public speaker and had given many talks in his role as an economist.  He did a couple of things I found annoying, as someone in my role who instructs people on how to present.  He was good in many ways, but certainly not perfect.  One thing I don’t recommend is wandering around the stage as you talk.  He did this and really, the movement had no relevance to the talk.  There should be some theory behind the movement rather than just sashaying around the stage to show you are a seasoned speaker.  There are three distances we can use.  If we want to make a macro point we can move to the back of the venue, away from the crowd.  If we want to make a micro point, we can move very close to members of the audience and deliver our comments at a very close quarters.  We shouldn’t stay in either position for too long and we should then move to a middle, more neutral position. When we move around, we create a distraction from our message.  If we move, then we move with purpose and use those three distances, I noted, to our advantage. Otherwise, we anchor ourselves and use our neck to swivel around to make eye contact with members of the audience.  As he was wandering around, he was looking in the general direction of his audience and successfully making no specific eye contact with anyone.  That is a big opportunity lost to connect one on one with members of our audience. There was one more problem with his talk.  The flair of public speaking was on display but the content was rather “so what”.  I keep up to date with the media and probably so did everyone else in that audience, so there were no “oh wow” moments.  I felt cheated that I had wasted my time and money listening to someone who didn’t deliver any value to my investment in attending the talk. His colleague had the same wanderlust, although a little more restrained.  He also was someone who did these types of talks on a regular basis, so he was plainly comfortable to be standing up in front of a crowd and talking.  The problem became obvious almost immediately when he started putting up his slides.  They were very difficult to understand.  For whatever reason there were a lot of acronyms in use and abbreviations.  This made parsing the content on screen extremely difficult. His method of explaining it all was also complicated to a simple punter like me.  People I spoke to afterward said they were also struggling to follow where he was going. This was an unforced error on his part. He didn’t research his audience to understand at what level he needed to pitch the talk.  It was way over the heads of this audience, but he probably still has no idea of that, because he wasn’t engaging his listeners.  When you single people out for six seconds of eye contact and you work the room using this technique, you can see in their eyes if they are following you or not and you can adjust.  He was blind to the take up of the talk, because he wasn’t using any eye contact. As a double act, they were duds, for different reasons and they hurt their personal and professional brands.  It didn’t have to be like that and with some minor adjustments, they could have done a much better job.  We should take their faults to heart and make sure we are not reproducing them ourselves.

Value is a difficult thing to pin down.  In any audience, there is bound to be a wide range of interests, needs, and wants.  How do we decipher that array into a presentation which meets all expectations?  Well, we can’t.  There are too many variables at play, so we have to work on hitting the target for the majority of those who have assembled to hear us speak.  There is a designated theme for the talk, hosted by an organisation whose members have aligned around a central set of interests.  That is a good starting point to ascertain which angle of approach will be the best and most effective. Within that broad spectrum, we have our own areas of expertise and interest, and we seek the nexus of those two forces to find the right theme for the talk.  Having worked out which theme and approach will meet the needs of most of the audience, we need to look for our value bombs.  What do we know which they don’t?  What valuable experiences have we had, which they won’t have had?  What dead ends and failed missions have we experienced, which they won’t have had as yet and will want to avoid?  The process of elimination is at work here as we dissect our own knowledge bank and our host of experiences, as we draw on the resources we have available to us for assembling the talk. There is a balance between talking about ourselves and making it relevant to the audience.  Some speakers get that line of demarcation confused and spend too much time on their own glorious career.  They forget the audience is not like us and have different drivers of importance to them.  Our examples, from our own hard wrought experiences, are certainly powerful and appealing to an audience.  However, we have to move from the specifics about us to the broader frame of reference to how the audience can apply the lessons we have learnt. This is where the value transition takes place.  We need to craft that transition carefully.  This is what happened to me – the incident; this is what I learnt as a result – the insight; and here is what you can learn and apply for yourself – the application.  This incident-insight-application formula is a very handy frame of reference to throw over the talk we are designing, to make sure we can draw out the value for the listeners.  Because it happened to us, it is true.  Now what we deduce from the experience can be debated, but usually when everyone shares the same context, the chances are high that similar conclusions will be reached. This lessens the chances of an audience disagreeing with our findings.  The application has to be broad enough to capture the various situations of those in the audience.  There is usually a range of industry sectors, ages, genders and experience sets we have to appeal to. A good way to cover off this variety is to think about what would be the top five possible applications of our insight for this audience.  Probably we won’t get everyone perfectly included, but the chances are high we will get the majority catered for.  Even if we use the rule of three and say here are the three best applications of this idea, that will usually be enough if we think that five is stretching things too much.  When we line up the experience, insight and application, the audience can all see that we are providing value, even if it happens that we are not hitting that particular person’s bullseye.  That effort to make the talk relevant for the listeners will be appreciated and it shows we really know what we are talking about.  Pontificating is great fun, but audiences usually want the lessons on what not to do and what to do in that order.  The risk averse nature of people requires that we outline where we failed as a warning lesson to others, that they should avoid doing what we did and save themselves a lot of money and trouble in the process.  Everyone loves a good train wreck story, and I am sure we all have plenty of them to share. The design stage of any talk is critical and so let’s make sure we are thinking value provision from the very start, as an overall guiding light before do anything else.  What value do we have to offer and work from there to align that with the likely members of the audience for our talk.  Include some “don’t do this folks” lessons and everyone will be happy.

We love another acronym, not!  It is a handy memory jogger though, so let’s persevere with yet another one.  Whenever you are in a situation where you need to get collaboration,  support, funding or agreement, then the EAR formula is a very effective tool for presenters.  It is simplicity itself in terms of understanding the formula.  The delivery though is the key and this will make all the difference. The Formula stands for E – Event, A – Action and R – Result.  It is quite counterintuitive and therein lies a lot of its success.  It is disarming and makes the presenter a small target for opposition to what they are recommending.  Often, we have something we want and our first instinct is to just blurt it out.  We have convinced ourselves that it is the best course of action, the most logical, high value approach and obviously the weight of all of these factors will automatically sway our listeners to adopt our recommendation. What is the reaction to all of this blurting though?  Immediately the audience hears what we have to say, we are suddenly facing a crowd of card carrying sceptics.  We shouldn’t be surprised but we usually are.  What have we done?  We have offered the flimsiest tissue of an idea to the listeners and expected them to extrapolate what they have heard to encompass the full weight of our argument.  Of course we are intending to now launch into the detail of the idea, the rationale, the evidence etc.  This makes sense.  We are taught at business school to get the executive summary to the top of the report and then go into labyrinthine detail on why this idea makes a lot sense.  When it is in document form, the audience do read the detail and do pay attention to the proof of our idea. Sadly, when we are live, they lose all senses and depart from the plan.  They hear our raw unaided, unprotected, unabashed idea and they go into deafness.  Their eyes are open but their mind has raced away to a distant place, where they are roiling through why this blurted idea makes little or no sense, or why it flies in the face of their experience or expectations, or a thousand other reasons why this simply won’t work.  We have lost their attention. Instead we apply the EAR formula and we take them to a place in their mind’s eye.  There must be a reason why we believe what we think and that must have come from a limited number of sources – what we heard, read or experienced.  The Event piece is to reconstruct that moment when we had our epiphany, our realisation our breakthrough on this idea.  We want to transport them to the spot too, so that they can reconstruct the roots of this idea. We don’t have unlimited time for this and we are telling a story, but it is a brief story.  If we get tangled up in the intricacies of the story and are going on and on, then the listeners will become impatient and dissatisfied.  If they are our bosses they will just tell us “to hurry up and get on with it”. The secret is to put in the season – a snowy day, a hot summers day, a fall day, a spring day.  We can all imagine what that would look like, because it corresponds to our own experience and we can visualise it. We now locate the moment – a dark wood panelled boardroom, a meeting room at the headquarters, a Zoom call, on the factory or shop floor etc.  Again we paint the picture of the scene.  Not just a factory, but which factory, what type of factory, how did it look.  People they know should be introduced into the story where possible.  These actors may be known to them and this adds credibility to the story and the point.  The bulk of the speaking time is given over to the telling of the background of how we got to this idea.  An excellent outcome is upon hearing all of this background context, the listener is racing ahead of us and drawing their own conclusions on what needs to be done based on the evidence given.  Given the same context, the chances are strong that they have reached the same conclusion we have, looking at the same evidence. After we tell the story we lower the boom and hit them with our call to action.  This is A- Action we want them to take component.  The big mistake a lot of people make at this point is to just keep adding a series of actions, rather than singling out one central action we want executed.  We cannot distract them or nudge them away from considering one decision only.  Take action or not.  This part of the puzzle is about 5-10 seconds long.  This forces us to be crystal clear on what is the one thing we want them to do.  For example, “So based on the research, I recommend we begin a prototype and test our assumptions”.  We cannot let that hang there alone.  We need to back it up with one of the goodies that will come with it and we must settle on the most powerful “Result” we will enjoy if they take our advice.  We do not keep adding benefits and dilute the core message.  We go for the blockbuster benefit and that also only takes 5-10 seconds and then we shut up and wait for their response.  We could say, “if the prototype works, we are looking at an immediate 30% lift in revenues just in the first year”. The EAR formula is a jujitsu move, because we are navigating around their potential objections.  They just cannot disagree with our context.  Our conclusions yes, but not the background to that conclusion.  They also have to hear the whole story first before they jump in with a rebuttal.  This formula provides us with the means to be heard in a genuine and fair manner.  We can keep doing things the hard way or we can use the EAR formula and make business a lot easier for ourselves.

Where is the line between referencing our experiences and insights and just talking about ourselves?  I attended a talk recently where the speaker had a perspective to share with the audience, to add value to their careers and businesses.  What surprised me was how much of the talk was cantered on the speaker rather than the audience.  I was thinking about this later and wondered what the better balance would be?  When we go on about ourselves, we are getting further away from points of relevance for the listeners.  We have to remember that people are unapologetically 100% focused on themselves and their own interests and don’t care all that much about our story. As the speaker, the closer we can align what we are saying to the listener’s interests, the greater the acceptance of what we are saying and the bigger the impact we will have as the presenter.  That is fine in theory, but we can’t just make a series of pompous statements about how things should be and not back them up with evidence.  Often that evidence is coming from our own experiences and that can be the most convincing variety.  Unveiling a lot of sexy data during the talk is interesting, but a mud and blood rendition of what happened to us in the trenches, is always more gripping and compelling. This speaker, in my mind, strayed across the line and was wallowing in too much self-indulgence about what they had been doing. How do we balance our story with the audience's need for alignment with their benefit?  What the speaker could have done was better draw out how to transfer their learnings into concrete examples, where the listeners could apply them to their own circumstances.  Instead of just saying this is what I did, and this is how it worked for me, they could have gone a bit deeper on the application for others who are not them.  When the example is too idiosyncratic, the agency for others becomes diminished or diluted. We could say, “I did this and got this result.  Now here are three ways you could take this same idea and apply it to your situation”.  We have now crossed over to the audience’s application of the knowledge. By giving more than one opportunity, we are more likely to hit on what the majority of audience members are looking for.   Importantly, by prior analysis of who is showing up the talk, we can anticipate common needs and circumstances. This allows us to get closer to the mark of listener reality when we explain our examples. A simple rule of thumb should be 20% of what happened to us and 80% of the time on explaining why this will work for our audience.  Our speaker, in this case, reversed those percentages and spent the majority of the time talking about what happened to them. The problem with this is we in the audience are not them and we have to parse out what we can apply from their story.  It is much better of the speaker saves us that drama and they tell us what we can apply.  We draw out the key points we want to make for the audience, align our war stories with the points and then add a significant section in the talk on explaining why doing this is a great idea and specifically why it is a great idea bolstered with concrete cases and options.  This is an unbeatable combination.  We demonstrate in words that because we did it, they can, too.  We draw out how it will work for the audience and convince them that it has a broader application than just working for us alone.  We have to marshal the benefits of taking our advice, and the more concretely we can do that, the better. Our speaker convinced us that it worked for them, but failed to make the case that it would work for us.  They hinted at it, but statements are cheap and we sceptical folk want more evidence.  We are all risk averse, so we want chapter and verse and solid provable details. When constructing the talk, keep that 20%-80% dichotomy in mind.  Certainly use ourselves as proof, but don’t rely on it exclusively.  If we can talk about others doing marvellous things with our advice, that is the icing on the cake.  We love to hear case studies and then draw our own conclusions on how much we can take from the example and apply it in our world. That idea is something we need to be constantly hammering away at too.  Keep telling them to think how they can adapt it, and apply it for themselves.  In this way, we can keep switching the focus back to the audience away from us and we will get the balance right.   Would the people who know you or meet you describe you as persuasive? Do you think you are persuasive enough? Persuasion power is the most important, but the most commonly lacking skill in the business world. Do it yourself trial and error wastes time and resources. It is time to change things up and get that key skill.  There is a perfect solution for you- to LEARN MORE click here (https://bit.ly/3VhvR2B ) To get your free guide “How To Stop Wasting Money On Training” click here ( https://bit.ly/4agbvLj ) To get your free “Goal Setting Blueprint 2.0” click here (https://bit.ly/43o5FVK) If you enjoy our content, then head over to www.dale-carnegie.co.jp and check out our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules and our whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. About The Author Dr. Greg Story, President Dale Carnegie Tokyo Training Contact me at greg.story@dalecarnegie.com Bestselling author of “Japan Sales Mastery” (the Japanese translation is "The Eigyo" (The営業), “Japan Business Mastery” and "Japan Presentations Mastery" and his new books "How To Stop Wasting Money On Training" and the translation "Toreningu De Okane Wo Muda Ni Suru No Wa Yamemashoo" (トレーニングでお金を無駄にするのは止めま Dr. Greg Story is an international keynote speaker, an executive coach, and a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. He leads the Dale Carnegie Franchise in Tokyo which traces its roots straight back to the very establishment of Dale Carnegie in Japan in 1963 by Mr. Frank Mochizuki. He publishes daily blogs on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter Has 6 weekly podcasts: 1.     Mondays -  The Leadership Japan Series, 2.    Tuesdays – The Presentations Japan Series Every second Tuesday - ビジネス達人の教え 3.    Wednesdays - The Sales Japan Series 4.    Thursdays – The Leadership Japan Series Also every second Thursday - ビジネスプロポッドキャスト 5.    Fridays - The Japan Business Mastery Show 6.    Saturdays – Japan’s Top Business Interviews Has 3 weekly TV shows on YouTube: 1.     Mondays - The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show Also every Second Thursday - ビジネスプロTV 2.    Fridays – Japan Business Mastery 3.    Saturdays – Japan Top Business Interviews In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making, become a 39 year veteran of Japan and run his own company in Tokyo. Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate (糸東流) and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

I was recently reminded of the importance of openings and transitions when presenting watching a new speaker in action. They were using the occasion to establish their business here in Japan.  Like this speaker, most of us face an audience who don’t know us when we start speaking.  They may have glanced at the blurb from the organisers listing our accomplishments and background, all proving we are a legitimate expert, someone people should listen to.  Regardless of the massive self-promotion we passed across to the hosts of the event to send out to everyone, we still have to deliver the goods.  The audience enters the room thinking about a lot of things, but thinking about us isn’t the highest priority.  They have that day at work to process what has happened so far. They also think about things they must do after our talk and what is coming up later that day or the next day.  In other words, mentally they are pretty busy and then we turn up. Usually, the MC will introduce us and set the stage for us.  The quality of these introductions is scarily various.  Some MCs are arrogant and won’t be guided by the carefully hand crafted, elegantly wordsmithed script we have laboured over. We have been working hard to marshal all of our key selling points, aiming to stack high our massive credibility.  Whenever one of the MCs goes off piste, it is rare that they do a better job than what we have put together.  They often get the facts wrong and miss the key selling points.  As the speaker, we should “insist” to the meeting hosts that the MC read out what we have prepared and not ad lib, freestyle or indulge themselves with our entry point to our talk.  Be firm with this.  Most people don’t give talks and don’t put their personal and public brands out there. They have no idea how important these small details actually are. In this speaker’s case, the MC did a great job of selling them to the audience. What comes next is very important.  We have to say something which grabs attention and sets the stage for the main points we are going to make.  Remember, the entire crowd are fully obsessed with themselves and not us, so we have to smash through that mental preoccupation they have with their world and bring them into our world.  We should have received a list of company names and their positions before the talk.  This is a big help.  It allows us to gauge the temperature in the room.  Are they experts or amateurs or a mix?  Depending on who is in front of us, we construct our opening.  We know they are all self-interested, so if we can open with something which appeals to that obsession all the better.  In this speaker’s case, the opening was all about them and not about the greatest interests of the audience.  That was an opportunity missed.  We need to connect us with what the audience is most interested in and typically with the thing they fear the most.  We are all risk averse and we gravitate toward our fears before we head for our pleasure points.  That means scaring the hell out of your audience is always a reliable starter to make sure they have forgotten all about the day and are now solidly with us in the room. Think about the hottest topics with the greatest sex appeal at the moment.  Talk about that.  Always avoid controversial elements like politics and religion, though.  As Michael Jordan famously said, “Republicans buy sneakers too”.  We do not want to create hostiles in the audience, if we bag Trump or Biden in our opening.  There are plenty of other scary topics to choose from and something closer to home is always best.  For example, in Japan, we have a major decline in population underway.  That is an abstract idea for most of us. We just see the media headlines.  We don’t really notice the decline though, because it is gradual. The trains seem just as crowded as ever, when we are going to work.  However, if we can connect that to our own futures, we can bring that scary topic alive.  We can say, “It is good that we have a Government run pension scheme in Japan that we all contribute to.  It is a worry though, that probably by the time you are ready to collect, your money may not be there.  That scheme works based on the younger generation paying into the scheme, so you can get our money out when you are older.  If there are not enough young people contributing, there won’t be enough money for you when you retire.  That is what declining population means for most of us.  Are you going to be okay when you stop working?”.  After hearing that opening, the audience will be all ears to hear what we have to say on the subject.  They are expecting we come with a solution and they are ready for it.  That staff meeting they have after this talk or them picking up the dry cleaning is now completely out of their minds and they are fully concentrated on us.  This then sets us up the transition to the main talk where we outline our key points, backed up with evidence which is unassailable. Our speaker didn’t manage to pull that off. Basically, they focused on themselves and missed the chance to really snag the audience’s fears and therefore their full attention.  We can hit the listeners right between the eyes with our opening and then inject a short piece about ourselves before we transition to the main body.  That is a much better approach, than jumping straight into talking about ourselves.

When we are planning our talk, we have to decide what is the purpose of this presentation?  In business, typically, we most often deliver the “inform” type.  We will pass over information we have come across in our travels and research for the edification of the audience.  They have turned up to learn something they didn’t already know and expect value for the time and money they have invested.  It might be the “motivate” talk to bolster the fandom numbers for our brand.  We extoll the virtues of our firm and our widget and get the listeners excited about buying our offerings.  If we give an “inspire” talk, then we are appealing to the audience to become the best version of themselves and maximise their potential.  This is often the “rags to riches” type of encouragement, using our own example as a source of inspiration.  If we could do it, then the audience can also do it.  If we are giving the “entertain” talk, this will mainly be a light presentation between the arrival of the next rounds of heavy red wines after a big dinner. Regardless of the type of talk, we face a problem of too much information for the time we have to present.  I am sure you have made this fatal error like me.  Before doing any serious planning, we plunder other presentations for interesting, relevant and cool slides to add to this talk.  We start from the wrong point and before you know it we have fallen in love with a lot of content.  We have missed the viewpoint of deciding our central thesis and then going around and matching the proof and evidence to drive home our conclusions. This bottom-up approach usually means we have way too many slides and certainly many more than we need to make our point.  What we think is adding power and strength to our argument is, in fact, weakening it.  The problem is one of dilution.  If we give the audience too many things to consider and take in, then they don’t gain a strong central message from us.  I notice this tendency when we are teaching the Magic Formula to give talks.  There is a period at the beginning of the talk to set the stage, to draw out the context, explain the background.  Then we recommend an action and we follow this up with the benefit of taking that action.  It is a very simple and tight formula.  What always happens though, when we do the roleplay, and the coaching is people go off the track.  They need to nominate the one central, most important action they want the audience to take.  That instruction is fairly easy to understand, but most people manage to get it wrong.  They wax lyrical about the many great and wondrous actions the listeners should take.  They also pile on the benefits of the various actions.  For the listener, it is overwhelming. They cannot remember any of it.  If the audience can’t recall what we said, then we will have to count that presentation as a failure. The idea of three things for your audience to work on is not new.  However, common sense is not common and established, proven ideas have to be re-discovered every generation.  For any talk, there will be three main elements which are the most powerful components of supporting the argument we are making.  Within each of these points, there will be three key aspects which prove our point.  We are already at nine points and we haven’t added in the start and close of the talk yet.  In a forty-minute speech, we will be bumping up against the time limit.  Remember, we also have a ton of sexy slides we want to use, which will blow the time out completely. We need to exercise great discipline in our selection of what to keep and what to discard. Forcing the Rule Of Three on ourselves is a very good way of making sure we get the key point fully supported and convincing, without confusing our listeners about what it is we want to say.  I would like to say it is more complex and difficult than this, to make myself look more “presentation guru” like.  The reality is that simple is always best when presenting.  Confusing people and therefore distracting people from our key message makes no sense. However, often we do a good job of doing just that by overcomplicating the messaging.  Next time you put a talk together, apply the Rule of Three and see what you can trim to make the key ideas shine more brightly.

Navigation is critical in presenting.  This is how we keep the audience with us and keep reinforcing our key messages.  Years ago, I attended a speech by a serious VIP.  He had jetted in from the US to visit Japan and made time to give the Chamber of Commerce members the benefits of his insights.  It was a seriously meandering and confusing talk.  I was left befuddled and bemused. Later, speaking with others, I found I wasn’t the only one struggling to understand where he was going with his messaging. What was the impression he left with me – negative, unimpressed, insulted.  He did serious damage to his personal and professional brands that day.  Here we are years later I and I am still recalling that catastrophe. Recently, I was asked to provide a review of a new book and because I am always time poor, I thought listening to the audio version would give me more flexibility to work my way through it.  I have narrated my own book on “Japan Sales Mastery”, so I know how tough that recording process is. Interestingly, apart from being reminded how exhausting doing the narration was, I was noting the importance of navigation in that medium.  I was trying to scan the subject matter to be able to cobble together a review which captured the breadth of the topic and the point of view being offered.  This meant I had to stabilise a lot of information in my mind and draw on that to pull the threads together. Actually, I found it hard to do and had to listen to the audio a second time to get the overview I needed. So much for saving time! You only have voice on the audio and that is very similar to our presentations.  Of course, we can add visual stimulation through the slide deck and that mechanism also adds great navigation possibilities to keep the listeners with us.  Nevertheless, I was thinking about those occasions where you don’t or can’t use slides and what were the learnings about navigation, when all you have to work with is voice. This is where signposts come in.  As trainers, we are taught to set up the phases of the training.  For example, if we are going to go into small groups to discuss a point, we don’t just say, “break into three groups”.  We will say, “In a moment, we are going to break into three groups to discuss XYZ”.  The reason for this is we need navigation for the participants during the class. They need to mentally prepare themselves for the pivot from what they have been doing to what is coming in the next phase. Our presentations are like that too.  We will have certain topics in the speech providing the points we want to make and the evidence to support our position.  Generally, in a forty-minute speech, we will have a limited number of “chapters” for our speech.  We have our overarching key point we want to make and then we back that up with sub-points arranged as chapters and then surround those sub-points with proof.  There are a series of pivots, from one chapter to the next, throughout the talk. We need to make sure we are guiding our audience to come with us, rather than making a pivot and losing them on the turn. We might bridge from one topic to the next if the theme is related, or we may need to make a sharp turn to a new topic.  Either way, we need to announce it to the audience.  For example, “we have been talking about the economic ramifications of this change in regulation.  Let me now talk about the HR dimensions of these proposed changes”.  The regulatory changes are the common issue and we are slightly elongating the topic to cover another different but related angle, so the transition is easy for our listeners to follow.  If we are making a major pivot, then we need to set that up.  For example, “we have been talking about the economic ramifications of this change in regulation.  Let me switch gears and talk about a new topic, which we will all have to deal with in the next six months”.  In this way, the audience understands that regulatory issues as a topic is completed and now we are moving to an entirely new subject.  When we warn them that this switch is coming, they mentally adjust their concentration to deal with the new direction. If we don’t do this, we are changing topics and listeners are left to their own devices to understand if these two topics are related or different and what is the connection between them, if there is a connection. You can see how easily we can confuse the crowd when we pivot subjects.  So, let’s leave some breadcrumbs so the listeners can stay with us, as we move around the topic and make our main points during the talk.   If we do this, they will be with us at the end, rather than lost and reaching for their mobile phones to find something infinitely more interesting than us.  We can’t have that now, can we!

Does introducing emotion when presenting mean sharing a good weep with the audience?  No, that is way over the top in a business context and would be the death knell of the speaker’s credibility.  We are not turning up to your talk to see you burst into tears, carried away with your lack of emotional control.  We are there with you for one of four reasons.  1. Most typically, we aspire to be informed about some relevant aspect of our business.  2. We might be there to be motivated to take some action, which we have procrastinated on and have you convince us to swallow the frog and go do it.  3. It could be to gain inspiration about you, your brand, your organisation and we become fans. 4. Entertain us.  This could be an after dinner speech, where over copious great food and grog, we desire your raconteur wit and repartee. In all four cases, random or spontaneous tears, are not on the menu.  When I talk about emotion, I am referring to stopping the Easter Island statue impersonations you have been pulling off.  If you have ever seen photos of these statues carved out of stone, the faces depicted are hard, unrelenting, and never changing.  This could be you, by the way, when you are presenting. I was reminded of this phenomenon the other day when teaching a class on presenting.  The difference it made when the speakers smiled rather than being stone faced while presenting was remarkable.  Why were they stone faced, like their ancient kin on Easter Island? This is our problem as speakers when we are concentrating on the content of what we are going to say. Because of this, we are not conscious about the delivery of how we say it.  Professor Albert Mehrabian cleared this point up in the 1960s during his research.  He is often misquoted. If you ever want to defrock the credentials of someone claiming to be an expert on public speaking and presenting, see if they get his facts confused.  You will see the following numbers thrown around with shallow abandon and they are wrong.  Dubious presentation teachers will tell you how you dress is 55%, your voice quality 38% and your words 7% of the ratio of how you make an impression on an audience.  So dress well and sound nice. I was watching some “expert” on LinkedIn Learning sprouting these numbers with firm conviction.  Run far and fast when you encounter these fake people. The good Profs research point was these numbers are only relevant when you lack congruency between what you are saying and how you are saying it.  If you said the words “the gap was huge” but you were holding your hands only a few centimeters apart to show the gap, that action wouldn’t be congruent with your words.  If you were relaying some good news, but your face was projecting a dark, unhappy scowl, that wouldn’t be congruent with the words.  As per Mehrabian’s research, when we are confused by your lack of congruency, we wander off and start noticing how you are dressed or how you sound and we are distracted 93% of the time from your message. That is a very bad result for a speaker. Rather than having only one expression on our face when presenting, we should have a constant barrage of expressions unfurling, each perfectly matched to the message we are delivering.  If it is good news we are purveying, then we should smile.  If we proffer bad news, we should look concerned. If something is puzzling us, we should look puzzled.  If it is a bit odd, we should look curious. As speakers, we want to connect with our audience and there is no better guarantee of failing in that regard than having the wrong face for the message we are conveying.  If we have one constant “serious” face throughout our talk, it will be unlikely we can connect with the listeners.  We need to relax our face to be more approachable and to engage with the audience. Sounds simple, except if you are nervous or deep in concentration on what you are going to say next, all thoughts of audience connection can sail out the window and we are left with your best Easter Island statue impersonation.  Like any activity, repetition teaches us how to relax when we are doing it.  When we first learnt to ride a bicycle or to drive a car, we were tense and stressed.  Our face can be as hard as stone and our body contorted with stiffness.  After many repetitions, we are able to relax and ride the bicycle and drive the car while multi-tasking (certainly not recommended folks).  The point is, we learn how to relax and this happens when we do a lot of speaking repetitions. Our face is the most powerful tool we have, so vastly superior to any monitor and slide deck.  We need to access this power and work on matching the congruency of our words with what is on our face when we present.  The best way to check your face is to video yourself. It can be shocking at first to realise the distance you have to bridge, but now you have awareness, you are a long way closer to being able to engage your audience.

I was reading an interesting LinkedIn post about how at the start of your presentation in Japan you need to have slides on your background and credentials to get the trust of the audience. Let me quote from the post, so that you can get the flavour: “Most of the presentations I’ve seen by Japanese professionals tend to start with a detailed profile of the presenter’s career and professional accomplishments. Yes, a lot of these slides are information heavy and (no offence but) not aesthetically pleasing, but the average Japanese user is thinking “this person has many qualifications. I trust this person.” It’s not their fault, but Japanese people culturally tend to be wary of foreign brands and companies. The best you can do is try to break that barrier by listing all your accolades and making it clear that you are a trustworthy professional” This post has attracted a lot of discussion so far and I added my two bobs worth as well.  The point being made was that Japanese doubt what they are being told unless they trust the person making the presentation.  Fair enough. The suggested way to gain that trust is to provide a lot of data on who you are, what you have done, where you have worked etc., at the start of proceedings. The author noted that, “a lot of these slides are information heavy”. I disagree with this approach if you want to engage your audience. First impressions are critical and the first one minute of our talk is the decider for a large portion of the audience.  My biggest concern isn’t that they won’t trust what I am saying.  Today, we all have to worry that they will vote with their hands and grab their phones to escape from us to the internet.  They stop listening to our message.  It would be extremely rare that a Japanese audience would have people actually get up and walk out while the speaker is presenting.  I have never witnessed that. No one is that bold or rude.  Rather, they will just grab their phone and disappear in plain sight, right in front of you. My suggestion in the LinkedIn thread was to try to get that biographical detail into the blurb advertising the talk.  We could also have it as a handout, which the audience can reference.  The idea of telling people who you are and why they should listen to you is a good idea.  This is especially so in this Era of Cynicism and fake news and I don’t see this as solely a Japanese issue. My suggestion, though, is to not waste the start of the talk with this type of heavy background detail. We are vying with so many distractions in the minds of the audience sitting in front of us.  We have to grab their attention right from the start.  That means not tinkering around with the slide deck if we are switching it across from the previous speaker or from the host’s introduction.  We should get someone else to load up our slide deck, so that we are free from the start, to engage our audience.  There are two favourite strategies I apply.  One is to find some really shocking statistic or piece of information which will scare the pants off the audience.  We all react to fear and loss, more so than gain and greatness. I saw one the other day in the Financial Times.  There was a statistic that from 2010 to 2020, Japanese companies on average were paying over the odds to acquire foreign companies to the tune of a 34% premium. Also, between 1990 and 2014, twenty-five percent of Japanese M&A acquisitions were failures and had to be written off.  This compared with only 5% of US deals ending in failure.  If I was using this information, I would start, “Japan should immediately halt doing foreign M&As. Demographics are driving Japanese businesses to go offshore and buy businesses, but this strategy is super high risk. Japanese buyers of foreign companies are overpaying an average 34% premium to acquire businesses, but one in four fail and they are losing their investment. Are you ready to lose money too?  Let’s find out what they should do”. With a start like “Japan should immediately halt doing foreign M&As”, and a finish with “are you ready to lose money too?  Let’s find out what they should do”, no one in a Japanese audience will be focused on my credentials.  They will be worried about losing the investment and attracting potential blame if things go wrong.  My aim was to seize their attention and that opening will do it. As far as gaining credibility goes, I need to back up my statements with provable facts and data.  Statements are just opinion and the audience needs to know where I am getting this information.  In this case, the Financial Times is owned by the Nikkei and is considered a reputable journalistic source.  Our main body of our talk needs references to proof of the points we make to sustain our argument.  This is where we prove our credentials as a speaker, because we show we are an expert who have assembled the needed information to back up what we are saying. The other technique I like is to tell a story.  By the way, a personal story is the best.  It needs to take the audience with me back to the point when I discovered this truth I am telling them. By taking them back to the context, they will probably draw the same conclusion I have reached based on the same data.  If I have it, I might relate the gory story of a foreign M&A deal that nearly bankrupted the Japanese company and weave in the FT statistics. If you still feel you need a biography slide, then please, please, please make it able to be understood in two seconds. Don’t force people to wade through the slide deck swamp you have created on screen.  Just include the strongest points to gain the credibility you feel needed. Absolutely don’t make this your first slide or the start of the talk.  Get the attention grabber opening working first to grab the audience and then you can unveil your most powerful credentials. Pour on the proof in the main body to get acceptance of you and your message and deliver the talk competently. This protects your personal and professional brands.

It was a big affair.  Many supporting organisations had promoted this expert dual speaker event and the large audience filed into the prestigious venue.  I was sold on the advertising too.  I was intrigued by the pairing of topics and according to the blurb, the speakers’ backgrounds looked the money. The MC kicked things off and handed the baton off to the first speaker.  Things went off the rails immediately.  The initial thought was the microphone wasn’t on, but sadly it was.  The speaker just wasn’t on.  This was a rookie tech mistake. I didn’t expect to see that from a very senior guy in his sixties.  Here is a side note for the rest of us - always get to the venue early and test the microphone set up.  Often the venue sound system is also a problem and there need to be changes made to the volume controls to get more out of the system.  It was a good reminder to me to not trust the given equipment as it is.  Also, often in business venues, the people organising the talk are great at moving tables and chairs around, but less expert when it comes to the getting the sound system to work properly.  This was an evening event, so the tech people have long departed and we amateurs are the only ones remaining. That is why we need to get there early and check everything before we are ever handed a microphone in public and expected to perform. This gentleman’s frail, wispy, low energy voice was speaking to us, but I really struggled with hearing what was being said.  I was sitting in the front row, but even at that distance, the voice volume being generated was insufficient to follow the thesis being presented.  For the next twenty minutes, I had no idea what he was saying. Actually, it was worse than that, which was already bad enough. Our speaker was an expert from the finance sector and had held many leading positions here in Japan, including Country Head and President of a number of big name brands.  You would think with a resume like that, he would know better, but he  spoke in a monotone.  This meant that each word was delivered with exactly the same strength as every other word in his sentences.  Now we all know that words are not democratic.  Some have more importance and prestige than others, and so need to be lofted above the hoi polloi.  We need to hit those words harder or alternatively much softer to create variation.  This variation is a simple pattern interrupt, which is what keeps the listeners with us.  The problem with a monotone delivery is it has no pattern interrupt and so makes the audience sleepy. That is precisely what happened to me.  I couldn’t for the life of me follow what on earth he was saying, so I became drowsy.  The speaker was not an English native speaker and so there was a slight accent. However, he has spent almost the entirety of his career in international finance, so his English was very good and not an issue for him to deliver this talk. This foreign language aspect is definitely not an excuse. I am convinced he would have delivered the same talk in his own language, in exactly the same way.  This is how he speaks in public, period. He also spoke his monotone sentences in long bursts, sans pauses.  I have this trouble too when I speak in Japanese, because I tend to speed up.  This means that the words become jumbled and are hard to dissect.  There are no “brain breaks” to allow us to digest what we have just heard.  When you combine an accent with a fast clip, it makes it more difficult for the audience to follow you.  When I speak in Japanese to a public audience, I have to keep telling myself to slow down and inject pauses, to help the crowd stick with my message. Combining all this with a complete lack of energy made his speech a serious pain.  Speaker energy is infectious.  We create an electricity in the room which envelops our audience and transports them to the place we have decided to take them in our talk. When a speaker doesn’t project energy, the audience has to mount their own energy sources to get involved in the speech.  If the talk is gripping, even if the speaker isn’t generating a lot of ‘ki” (気) or intrinsic energy, we can meet them in the middle and stick with the talk.  But a wispy voice, devoid of energy, speaking in a monotone, with an accent, is the coup de grâce for a public speaker’s reputation, no matter how senior they may be or how grand their resume is .  The other two weapons in the public speaker’s arsenal were also sheathed.  He was using a podium to hold his notes.  This meant that the height of the podium came up to his waist level, hiding his body from the audience.  You often see speakers resting their laptop on the podium when they are using slides.  In both cases, you don’t need to stand behind the obstacle.  With slides you can have a slide clicker and stand anywhere you like.  Just using his notes, he could have stood to the side to use more of his body language to bolster his words.  It makes such a difference and you will notice how much the next time you see a speaker come out from behind the podium. Eye contact wasn’t being employed either to engage the crowd.  He wasn’t trying to connect one-on-one with the audience, as he could easily have done.  When you stare straight into one eye of an audience member for around six seconds, they really feel the close connection with you.  For them, it seems as if time and space have been suspended and it is just the two of you in the room, having a private conversation.  It is so powerful and as speakers, we definitely want to employ our eye power.  Gestures were also absent.  Part of the problem was he was holding the microphone in one hand and resting his other elbow on the podium, thus ensuring the free hand wasn’t being used, either. What a wasted opportunity. The vortex of voice, body language, eye contact and gestures all zeroing in on the audience members, one by one, is what makes a speaker have real impact.  That much concentrated energy coming at you is irresistible. Now here is the rub.  He has been working away for over forty years and he has always been like this.  That means he has been destroying audiences with a toxic regularity stretching over decades. It was obvious he was totally oblivious to how much damage he was doing to his personal and professional brands.  His time past cannot be reclaimed, and that is sad.  What is even sadder is he will keep going like this for the rest of his career.  Don’t squander your working years like he has – get the training and make presenting a powerhouse support for your career and brands.