The Presentations Japan Series

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.