The Presentations Japan Series

Our mental approach to our activities determines our success. We know this in sports and in business, but when it comes to speaking in public, we somehow manage to forget this vital point.

We know we have to make a presentation, so we get straight into the details and logistics, without spending even a moment on our proper mindset for the activity. Given we are putting our personal and professional brand out there for all to see, you would recognise this was a fairly important opportunity to get it right.

The mindset game is a critical one, especially if we are nervous about giving presentations. Confidence is paired with credibility in the presentation game and we have to exude both. We may be very unsure, nervous, even petrified but we must never show that side to our audience. Hesitation kills the message delivery and therefore the impact.

Often we think that our wondrous content will carry the day, that we can be hopeless presenters, but somehow it won't matter. There are few subjects where we are the font of all knowledge and therefore everyone else has to put up with our ineptitude.

Normally, we are competing for the attention of our audience. Social media has made a hell for presenters because within two seconds our audience can escape to any number of other more interesting worlds. People are becoming used to multi-tasking, reading their Facebook feed, while they are doing something else like listening to us.

We need to have a powerful faculty to compete with the wonders of the Internet. A big part of our appeal is our message's worth and the delivery of that worth. Both are required. To get the right combination, we need to sell that we are confident in what we're saying and our content is valuable. This means we are able to deliver the talk without having to read the text. We can talk to key points in front of us or up on the screen. This is different from burying your head in text notes and not engaging your audience. To have the confidence to work the room while speaking, means you have to know the content. You created it or adjusted what someone else put together for you.

Start with a powerful opening, including the key message captured in your conclusion. Isolate out 3-5 key points so make your argument and support them with evidence. Design both your first close and your second close for after the Q&A.

You have managed your schedule well, so that there has been ample opportunity to practice the delivery. People who are spending all their time on the making the slides

forget they have to rehearse the delivery for an audience. They usually prefer to practice on their audiences, then wonder why the whole thing was very flat with no engagement of their audience.

In the weeks leading up to the talk we are the thinking about what we want to say and how we might say it, we are combing the media and books for juicy quotes and examples to back up what we are saying. We are playing it out in our mind's eye. During this mental imagining, we see ourselves as very confident and successful - we are predicting our success by seeing it before we even do it. We are seeing the audience nodding and agreeing with what we say. We can see ourselves enjoying the moment and feel in full control.

When we have rehearsed, we know the timing, the cadence of the talk. We know where to pause, which words to hit harder than other to emphasize our key points. We are confident on the flow of our talk and with this knowledge we can now relax and enjoy the process rather than dreading it.

Action Steps

1. Decide you will have the right mindset for your talk
2. Understand your delivery is what makes your content work, not the other way around
3. Don't read the text – speak to your points or use the screen for your prompts
4. Carefully design your opening, your key points (3 to 5) and your two closes
5. Use mental imaging to see yourself being successful giving the talk
6. Rehearse – don't practice on your audience

We may not have the chance to give that many public presentations in a year, but usually we will have some common themes which we can speak on. As businesspeople, we will have our areas of expertise and experience and based on those attributes, the hosts will invite us to present. Basically, in the lull between hostilities, we do nothing and just wait for the next chance to speak. If we want to improve as presenters, that passive approach doesn't make any sense. There are a number of things we should be doing between presenting gigs.

Further researching our expertise areas should be a constant item for us. We are daily looking for things in the media, in journals and on social media which we can collect and stash away for when we need it. We can't put it in the shoe box like our tax receipts, because we need to be able to find it when we need it. So a simple sorting system is required, so that we can extract what we have found, when the occasion presents itself.

We need an idea collection system as well. At different times we get some genius inspiration about one of our topics and then that thought is totally overtaken by the next thought and then lost forever. Instead, we need a place where we can quickly grab that thought and keep it for later when we need it. Ideas pop up at the most unlikely times, so we need something with us all the time. Usually, our phones have apps suitable for that quick notation we need. Again, we need a basic filing system, so that we can locate that excellent insight, observation or idea.

We may have a great amount of knowledge and experience on certain topics, but those searching for speakers may never know we exist. This is where we need to be constantly making any effort to alert others that we know lots about a few things. I was reminded of how important this whole "be found" thing is recently. Ironically, we were doing leadership training for a large consulting firm and had been doing it for quite a while. One day, out of the blue on LinkedIn, I received a message from a junior person in that firm asking about whether I could speak to a conference they were holding. In the note to me, it was mentioned that two people who knew me had recommended me for the gig.

I was happy to be considered, but confused as to why the connection had come through this circuitous route? I have given over 550 public speeches, pump out six podcasts and three TV shows a week, have written the book Japan Presentations Mastery, have 27,000 followers on LinkedIn and have published thousands of articles on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Maybe the person doing the research was hopeless. Maybe it was Covid, where public presentations basically vanished, I don't know, but it really highlighted for me how invisible we all are. Anyway, we have to make a positive effort to be found and we have to calculate in that the designated researchers may be sub-standard, so we need to do even more to be found.

Also, we should always try and video our presentations. This provides us with material for our "show reel" where we can select the bits and pieces to show a prospective speaking gig host our goods. As I mentioned, the chances to speak in a year are relatively limited for most of us, so we need to produce some proof that we are the one they need for the next speaking spot. Videos can be edited and flashed up to make us look even more amazing than we already are and they can be on our websites, on YouTube or sent to the hosts, when they inquire about speaking to their audience.

We shouldn't be too snooty about taking speaking gigs either. Imagining you will save it all up for the big stage and be totally awesome is wishful thinking. We should grab every spot we can get, however humble, so that we build our craft. We should also keep notes on where we went well and where we need to improve, so that the real time insights are not lost in a busy life. A lot of little events can help hone our skills to really shine at the big events. As I have mentioned a million times, having incredible data to share doesn't mean your presentation is going to be spectacular. The brilliant content won't save you from decimating your audience with ums and ahs, or a monotone, boring, wooden delivery.

Speaking in front of others, in this Age of Distraction and this Era of Scepticism, means the act of presenting has never been harder. Audiences are well equipped with their gateway to the internet in their hand. In the first ten seconds, if you sound dull, they bolt and don't wait. Also, the "fake news" era has driven up the scepticism scale people are gauging us by when speaking. The bar has never been higher for public speakers. That means we have to become Masters of the Mechanics of speaking at the very least. Great content is meaningless, if no one is taking any note and you have lost control of their attention

So, between major speaking gigs, we have work to do. We should be in a constant state of prep, always anticipating our next chance will emerge and making sure that we will be more than ready to take that opportunity.

The chances of this happening anywhere is pretty remote, but especially so in Japan. Audiences here are polite and wouldn't be so rude as to interrupt the speaker. Having said that, things can happen for which you are not prepared. I was delivering my debut speech in Nagoya, as the founding Australian Consul, in Japanese, and the unexpected happened. A local representative of one of the main Japanese government organisations was sitting in the front row on my left. I began the speech with a very standard Japanese opening, appreciating everyone coming to hear me when they are all so busy. I barely got that phrase out of my mouth when he erupted in very loud laughter.

The unexpected is more likely though, with foreigners in the audience. Depending on the occasion, it could be one of the big bosses weighing in on what you are saying or one of your ambitious colleagues trying to make you look bad, so that they get the promotion and not you. Regardless, what can we do in these unexpected situations?

In that first example, I was nervous enough giving my debut speech as the Consul and giving it in Japanese. I was dumbfounded by his outburst, because I took it he was laughing at my language skills and I still had another thirty-nine minutes to go speaking in Japanese. I girded my loins and kept going because I didn't have a choice. I wasn't reading the speech, so it was all coming out of my brain, trying to follow the navigation I had planned for the talk.

I noticed that some members of the audience were appreciating the fact I was speaking in Japanese and seemed to follow what I was saying. I ignored that ignoramus and concentrated on the people who were nodding, smiling or at least looking neutral. This helped my confidence to return and I could carry on. I recommend you do the same. There is very little chance of a cabal of hecklers disrupting your talk, so you will probably only face one person and there are plenty of other people in the audience to interact with.

If there is just one comment, I would just ignore it and carry on as if nothing happened. If the talk is internal and heckler is your boss, then you have a different problem and you need to stop and get more detail on what is causing the unhappiness. If it is a sharp elbowed rival, I would just ignore the interruption. If the rival or the heckler at a public speech should continue with their outbursts, then you have to stop and deal with it. How should we deal with it though?

First of all we need to understand this person is not your friend, so forget trying to win them over to your point of view. They are interrupting everything to show the rest of the audience how awesome and smart they are, by challenging the speaker on what they are saying. I would ask them to elaborate on their point. I would look straight at them the whole time and not nod or move my face. Nodding looks like you are agreeing with what they saying and we may do it out of nervousness or habit. Don't. Just look at them and let them speak. When they finish, we start our reply and we keep maintaining eye contact and after that we never give them any more eye contact. We address the rest of our answer to the other members of the audience.

By ignoring them, we are taking all the air out of their balloon and withdrawing the ego driven attention they have been so fervently seeking. We look at the members of the audience who look friendly, supportive or at least not negative. We give them each six seconds of eye contact and we just keep repeating this throughout the rest of the talk.

We will do our best to answer their concern and one thing we should never do is ask if they are happy with our explanation. They are not heckling to get illumination. They are there to provide heat to the speaker and make us look bad. We just give our answer and we say something like, "Now I will get back to our topic for today" and we just keep going, ignoring them the rest of time. If the heckler is taking the talk off topic, we should stop them and say we will be happy to discuss their point after the talk and then get back to what we were saying. If they still want to continue, again, we tell them we are happy to talk at the end and we pick up where we left off.

The key to remember is that even though we can be quite nervous without this extra pressure, the majority of the audience are with us. They think the heckler is a jerk and very rude, so they immediately side with us against them. They didn't come here to be part of a bun fight between the speaker and the crowd and they feel their time is being wasted by this very selfish person. So keep going and look confident and positive, no matter how you are feeling on the inside. The audience will go with your confidence and support you.

We often mix up words like metaphor and analogy, using them in the wrong context. Anecdote is another word we often use, but sometimes are not sure what it means. Basically, it is storytelling about a real incident or about a person. I was reminded of the power of the anecdote the other day, when listening to a presentation to a select private group, by an international captain of industry. He was going through what their firm was doing globally and particularly here in Japan. As presentations go, it was mostly the "inform" variety with a few sprinklings of the "impress" dimension. That is to say, it was fairly dry, except for a couple of occasions when he related an anecdote about what they were doing and what they had found.

These brief interventions lifted the whole proceedings up into the "insight" category of communication. That is a much richer dimension and as listeners, we feel we are getting real value here from this speaker. The speech basically followed the guidelines of a similar speech he had given recently and he was using slides as his navigation. The rules of this private study group is that we don't use slides to show what we are talking about. We just speak and then take questions in depth on the topic. He was allowed to use the slide deck as his personal navigation for the talk. Interestingly the anecdotes were not in the deck. They came out spontaneously as he searched for illustrations and examples to further flesh out his points. What a contrast. We were getting fed corporate pap for the most part and then "bingo", out pops a valuable morsel.

This tells me that he had not planned his talk to maximise the insights they had learnt from running their business globally and in Japan. Why would that be? This is a very common problem with presenters. They are in the "inform" mode of presentations and think that reeling off data and facts is all that is required. These accidental sharings were the most valuable part of the whole talk. We should try to eliminate the accidental nature of these sharings and actually plan to inject them into the talk from the very start.

I am sure his approach was to take a chronological survey of the company and then just build on that, to highlight the main iterations over time. What if he had said, "right, I am going to sit down and draw out what we have learnt from doing business here in Japan and gather the widsom together". Following that he could arrange the structure of the talk around these learnings and present the context and background, so it would be easy for the audience to follow. We still need the "inform" part, because that context gives the insights their power. It makes them stand out from the ordinary and trumpets the learnings. Business audiences, in my experience, are always hungry to learn. In particular, they love to hear about disasters, so that they can make sure they don't replicate the same issue in their world.

It is hard to be bursting with insights, so we are not talking about a talk with wall to wall insights flowing constantly like a massive waterfall. However, we do things and we do learn what works and what doesn't. The difference is the speaker has a mind to capture these and store that information away for when it is needed. Most people just forget about the insight and move on, because there is always so much more data and information coming at them. That endless supply dilutes the key points we the audience need to retain. So from now on, if you hear a good insight or you discover one in your business, find a place to capture that and have it in your mind to use in a future talk.

One other thing is to be excited about the insight and frame it for the audience. Our speaker on this occasion never got excited about the insights and spoke throughout with the exact same energy when describing something terribly mundane and when talking about something much more breakthrough. We need to raise our energy and enthusiasm when we get to the juicy bits, so that the audience knows – here comes something very valuable. We can frame it too. We can say, "Let me tell you about something which proved to be such a valuable lesson for us", or "I came across this understanding which really transformed our business here in Japan" or "let me tell you an insight which saved us from disaster". The audience will be guaranteed to be on the edge of their seats to hear what is going to come next and that is exactly where we want them.

So, start with the insights when designing the talk and wrap them up in a clear context. Make sure the audience can fully appreciate the value they are receiving. Seize those anecdotes and put them to good use.

The chances of this happening anywhere is pretty remote, but especially so in Japan. Audiences here are polite and wouldn't be so rude as to interrupt the speaker. Having said that, things can happen for which you are not prepared. I was delivering my debut speech in Nagoya, as the founding Australian Consul, in Japanese, and the unexpected happened. A local representative of one of the main Japanese government organisations was sitting in the front row on my left. I began the speech with a very standard Japanese opening, appreciating everyone coming to hear me when they are all so busy. I barely got that phrase out of my mouth when he erupted in very loud laughter.

The unexpected is more likely though, with foreigners in the audience. Depending on the occasion, it could be one of the big bosses weighing in on what you are saying or one of your ambitious colleagues trying to make you look bad, so that they get the promotion and not you. Regardless, what can we do in these unexpected situations?

In that first example, I was nervous enough giving my debut speech as the Consul and giving it in Japanese. I was dumbfounded by his outburst, because I took it he was laughing at my language skills and I still had another thirty-nine minutes to go speaking in Japanese. I girded my loins and kept going because I didn't have a choice. I wasn't reading the speech, so it was all coming out of my brain, trying to follow the navigation I had planned for the talk.

I noticed that some members of the audience were appreciating the fact I was speaking in Japanese and seemed to follow what I was saying. I ignored that ignoramus and concentrated on the people who were nodding, smiling or at least looking neutral. This helped my confidence to return and I could carry on. I recommend you do the same. There is very little chance of a cabal of hecklers disrupting your talk, so you will probably only face one person and there are plenty of other people in the audience to interact with.

If there is just one comment, I would just ignore it and carry on as if nothing happened. If the talk is internal and heckler is your boss, then you have a different problem and you need to stop and get more detail on what is causing the unhappiness. If it is a sharp elbowed rival, I would just ignore the interruption. If the rival or the heckler at a public speech should continue with their outbursts, then you have to stop and deal with it. How should we deal with it though?

First of all we need to understand this person is not your friend, so forget trying to win them over to your point of view. They are interrupting everything to show the rest of the audience how awesome and smart they are, by challenging the speaker on what they are saying. I would ask them to elaborate on their point. I would look straight at them the whole time and not nod or move my face. Nodding looks like you are agreeing with what they saying and we may do it out of nervousness or habit. Don't. Just look at them and let them speak. When they finish, we start our reply and we keep maintaining eye contact and after that we never give them any more eye contact. We address the rest of our answer to the other members of the audience.

By ignoring them, we are taking all the air out of their balloon and withdrawing the ego driven attention they have been so fervently seeking. We look at the members of the audience who look friendly, supportive or at least not negative. We give them each six seconds of eye contact and we just keep repeating this throughout the rest of the talk.

We will do our best to answer their concern and one thing we should never do is ask if they are happy with our explanation. They are not heckling to get illumination. They are there to provide heat to the speaker and make us look bad. We just give our answer and we say something like, "Now I will get back to our topic for today" and we just keep going, ignoring them the rest of time. If the heckler is taking the talk off topic, we should stop them and say we will be happy to discuss their point after the talk and then get back to what we were saying. If they still want to continue, again, we tell them we are happy to talk at the end and we pick up where we left off.

The key to remember is that even though we can be quite nervous without this extra pressure, the majority of the audience are with us. They think the heckler is a jerk and very rude, so they immediately side with us against them. They didn't come here to be part of a bun fight between the speaker and the crowd and they feel their time is being wasted by this very selfish person. So keep going and look confident and positive, no matter how you are feeling on the inside. The audience will go with your confidence and support you.

I had an interesting collision of presenting styles recently. We were conducting one of our High Impact Presentations Courses and I was one of the two instructors for this programme. On Day One, a very important pivot takes place. They do three presentations that day and during the third one, they stop focusing on themselves. In the first two, they are consumed with nerves and trying to remember all of the things they are supposed to be doing.

One participant publicly mentioned that she hates having a room full of people staring up at her when she presents. It makes her feel tremendously nervous and she feels great fear as a result. Sure enough, she looked totally nervous and very uncomfortable during that first presentation. We have two instructors, so that one can review the video of the presentation with them, immediately after they finish in the main room. What a change, when I got to review her third presentation with her that first day.

Like all class participants, she was looking for all the things which were imperfect. In Dale Carnegie, we don't dwell on what isn't working, because we are too busy looking for what is working and for what can work even better. I said to her, "Look at this person on screen. She looks very confident and not at all nervous". Sure enough, by the third presentation, she had made that important pivot to stop focusing on her nerves and to try to start engaging with the audience in the room. Everyone assembled in the room was directing their eyes to her, watching her, staring up at her. The very thing which she had noted made her supremely nervous, yet by number three, she had forgotten all about that. She was totally focused on others and not on herself. Now she was concentrating on engaging her audience with her message.

After the two days of teaching the main modules, I attended an event the next evening for a major luxury brand. The Japan CEO gave a brief presentation. He was bilingual, handsome, and full of confidence. He gave a very good presentation, but it wasn't the full package. Why? The missing vital ingredient was that he wasn't engaging his audience and using that framework to drive his message home. Like most public speakers you will see, he was lacking that engagement factor. Check it the next time you see someone present. Are they talking "at" their audience or "with" their audience?

His voice was clear and at a good volume, he used humour well, the slides were acceptable, his energy was great, but he wasn't getting his message through. He was spraying his message to those assembled that evening. Everyone was getting the message at the same time, in the same way, so it meant that no one was actually getting a personalised message. It was a shotgun approach, and he needed to be a sniper instead.

If he had directed his eye contact for six seconds each, with each person gathered there, he could cover ten people a minute. That is a very powerful personal connection – one on one, rather than en masse. In his fifteen minute talk, he could have easily made a direct connection with one hundred and fifty people. There were only about fifty people, so he could have covered every single person in that room multiple times.

The next morning, I attended another networking event and here was another bilingual, handsome, confident CEO presenter. He had a good voice, good phrasing, displayed lots of energy. The slides could have been simpler, though. Unlike the presenter the evening before, he was spending a lot of time wandering around when speaking. The movement added no value to the talk and in fact, was distracting. By the way, next time you have a chance, take note of presenters who wander around and ask yourself – is their movement habit adding any value to their message? Back to this speaker. He almost had the full package, but again that same vital ingredient of audience engagement was missing. He was another shotgun speaker. He was spraying his message across the entire room to everyone, at the same time and so to no one in particular.

There were about 60 people sitting there and he spoke for forty minutes. That means he could make direct six second eye contact with four hundred people, so again a chance for at least six multiple direct touches with each person in that size of crowd. Engaging the listeners is how we get our message to sink in. Just speaking at them doesn't do it. it is like being bathed in a morning mist and you feel a little damp, but soon that evaporates and you move on. His message mist evaporated and was not retained by his audience. If we asked those assembled what they remember from the talk, I will guess not much and probably not the key points he wanted them to keep.

Just making that one switch in eye contact in the training made a total difference to how well the class participants got their message across. These two CEOs also need to get their message across too and yet they are falling short at the finish line. The takeaway here is don't spray your audience. Instead, engage them, one by one, and keep engaging them right through the talk. If the object is to get them to accept your message, then this is the secret of how to achieve that goal.

Presenting is physical labour. We can do it with minimal energy or we can expend large amounts of effort. There are dangers with both extremes. The dull speaker, barely getting the words out of their mouth and hard to hear, isn't going to ignite much interest from the members of the audience. The nervous speaker, pacing across the stage like a junk yard dog prowling the fence perimeter, is very tiring to watch. The energy output cannot be at one constant setting either. Full bore on being boring and hard to hear and full bore on extreme outputs throughout, both tune the audience out. Variety is the key to keeping the audience with you. They get into a rhythm, and we have to become asynchronous in our delivery, to break their rhythm to maintain a stranglehold on their attention.

Today we are in the Age of Distraction, with our audiences being trained on social media one minute video outputs, sharply shortening their attention spans. Anytime the audience gets too much of the one thing they get bored. They are scrambling to get their phones to escape us and access more interesting content, all instantly available on the internet. Delivery which is too soft, too loud, too continuously the same thing, will see audiences flee us.

There are key words and phrases we need to highlight with either more power in or less power in. A secretive yet audible whisper is just as powerful as shouting a word to the audience. The point is the whole sentence can't be a whisper or a shout, but only handcrafted words and phrases which we highlight for effect to get into the febrile attention span of the listeners.

Pauses are blank space which can elevate words and phrases which come before or after. It allows the audience to focus on what is coming or on what has just been said. When we speak continuously without breaks, it is like winter surf, where the big rollers crash on to the shore, each one wiping out the residue of the previous one. We want a break here with a pause where the attention span can be elevated and the content can receive the concentration it deserves.

Our gestures must link up with our words and be congruent with what we are saying. If we need a big gesture we should deliver one. Often, when we are teaching participants public speaking, they are fearful to make a big movement with their gestures. When we replay the video and ask them if the larger gesture we have coached for looks crazy or out of place, they always say "no" it looks congruent. We can use gestures in creative ways. If we talk about something in the past, we can thrust our arm backward to emphasise the point, this is in the past, it is behind us.

If we refer to ourselves, we can bring both hands back to point at our chest. It indicates we are talking about ourselves and not someone else. If we want to involve the audience, we can spread our arms wide and open our palms out, to indicate our listeners. If we want to show some scale either small or large, we can use our hands to do that. If I lift my right hand to the top of my head or above and cup the hand, so it is ninety degrees to the floor, it indicates a measuring rod to show height or scale. If I push my hand down by my side and hold the palm ninety degrees to the floor, it indicates a low height or a small amount. If I say, "the whole world…" a good gesture is to spread my arms wide and extend my hands to the side at about 170 degrees. Bringing my palms together right in front of my chest shows something very small or narrow.

Breath control is important for singers who are using their voice as their medium. They get training for this but what about speakers, who are using their voice as their medium of communication. Normally, no one gets any training. The singer and the speaker secret is lower diaphragm breathing. This means the lower abdomen expands and contracts as we breathe, rather than having the breath focused in the upper chest. Place your hand on the front of your tummy at about navel height. When you breathe in the tummy should expand out and push against your hand. When you exhale, it should contract and draw your hands into toward your body. This gives us a rich source of oxygen and breath control to use when speaking, such that we never sound tinny and short of breath.

Another powerful element for speakers is to project your ki (気) or intrinsic energy into the audience. By directing your energy into those in front of you, they feel energised by you and they keep listening, rather than reaching for their phone to escape. Try to imagine you are pushing your energy to the back wall of the venue, covering the entire audience. Don't keep your intrinsic energy bottled up inside of you – share it with the assembled masses. To help with this, use big gestures and use voice power when speaking loudly, to drive the force into the audience in front of you. This requires conscious thought at first, but after a while you will be doing this naturally, without any thought required.

We have physical power and we need to plan for this when we are preparing to give talks. This is another reason why rehearing our presentations is so important. If we work on these things in preparation for the talk we will be able execute them during our presentation.

Japanese culture is pretty specific about making eye contact with people. In ancient times, a commoner might lose their head if a samurai felt they were making eye contact with them in an arrogant or disrespectful way. Even amongst samurai, in the presence of superiors, you would only raise your eyes to make eye contact when invited to do so, otherwise your right place would be looking down at the floor with your head bowed. Here we are in the modern era and making direct eye contact is still felt to be inappropriate. The guidelines are look at the person's throat or forehead or chin, but don't make eye contact. It is thought to be too aggressive and rude, especially if they are older or higher in status than you. Okay, you might not agree with it, but so what, that is how we do things around here.

As a result, I rarely ever see Japanese presenters making conscious, specific eye contact with the people assembled before them. I don't see too many foreigners doing it either. My old Japanese history Professor at University, had the habit of looking at the joint between the back wall and the ceiling behind us in the lecture theatre and looking there whenever he wasn't reading from his text. Zero eye contact and engagement with any of us plebs.

Now "when in Rome, do as the Romans do" is ancient wisdom, so should we foreigners blend in with the locals and avoid eye contact with our audiences? Absolutely not! This point can become contentious, but we are mixing up scenarios. Chatting with your colleague, boss or friends while not making eye contact is fine, if that is the appropriate relationship. I had to retrain myself to make eye contact when I went back to Australia after studying here for the first four and half years. I had automatically gotten out of the habit, which was treated with suspicion back home. Why couldn't I look people in the eye? Was I hiding something or was I a dodgy character you couldn't trust?

As a presenter, we may be conversational in our delivery, but this isn't the same as a chat over coffee. We are on stage and we are the person commanding the attention of the room. The formality associated with this speaker scenario is a lot more substantial than chatting together. So we need to make eye contact, because we want to engage our audience.

This audience engagement piece is where a lot of speakers fail. They spray their eye contact equally over the whole ensemble. They give everyone the same degree of eye contact at the precisely same time and in effect, make eye contact with no one in particular. I am looking at you all, so I am making eye contact is the theme. This is fake eye contact. You see it most often with politicians, who try to look like they are at one with the masses, but actually don't engage with any of them. They dart their eyes left and right, but they are not really looking at anyone.

One of the reasons it is hard to make eye contact is we are not taught how to do so when we are speakers. We just take our cues from the people we see presenting and imagine that must be how we should do it. With a large crowd of people peering up at us this can be confronting and make us self-conscious and nervous. Any plans for looking at people are now out the window, as we mentally retreat in fear. The answer isn't to look at the crowd as one entity but to look at one person at a time. We need to break the room up into segments. You will have those on the left, those in the middle and those on the right. We can cut this in two and break the venue into those up front and those down the back in the cheap seats. Our aim is to engage as many people as possible and the best way to do that is to cover each of these segments. If we are too predictable, say going from left to right, the audience will realise it and will tune us out. The element of surprise is a good one to keep audiences engaged.

We take one of these segments and then we choose a single person and we make eye contact with them. It is very confusing to look at two things at once, so don't bother with that. Select one of their eyes and use your two eyes to make eye contact with their one eye. You will find this much easier. We have also removed the fear of having a mass of people looking up at us, because we are only looking at a single person. At a distance, the twenty people sitting around that individual, will think we are looking at them too.

In short order, we can cover a large amount of people in the crowd. We are only engaging with them for around six seconds, so we can cover a lot of ground in a forty-minute speech. In fact, we can make eye contact, one on one, with 400 individuals in that one speech. If we have an audience of fifty people, we can do eight rotations during the forty minute speech and really personalise the occasion.

Why six seconds and why not four or twenty? Burning a hole in someone's retina by making overly long one-on-one eye contact is a bit creepy, a lot of pressure and feels intrusive. Six seconds gives us enough time to make close contact, personalise what we are saying and yet not be too oppressive for the audience member. Four seconds just isn't long enough and we meld into the fake eye contact world.

Engaging our audience is what we are after. Making eye contact, with one individual for six seconds is how we do it and we try to interact with as many people in the audience as possible over the course of the talk.

It is a mystery why more people don't bring storytelling into their presentations. Technical subjects may seem to be oblivious to storytelling, because we are only dealing with hard data. Absolutely not the case. This type of dry talk really benefits from injecting stories into the presentation. Numbers can be brought to life through telling stories. Our minds are geared up to absorb stories much easier than a download of numbers, so it makes a lot of sense to introduce the stories behind the numbers. One of the reasons presenters don't use more stories is they don't have any. Or more correctly, they don't think they have any, which is not the case.

Things happen and there is always a background and a context tucked in behind. Targets have some basis, but usually we just get the number and not the explanation of the basis. Strategic directions are set and we just hear the outcome, but we are not told the basis for the idea. You get the picture. Behind all of the things which happen in business, there are individuals and circumstances involved and this is where the stories can be found. We hear about the direction of the new marketing campaign, but that is it. We need to broaden out the WHY behind these decision and tell the story of how we got to this point.

For example, if the new marketing campaign is going to be using more influencers we need to explain how that decision came about rather than just announcing "we are going to use more influencers". We could explain, "In January this year Takahashi san and Suzuki san in the marketing department had received a tip off that our key competitor Z Corporation was having success by driving sales in e-commerce, due to recommendations from influencers in social media. They have been gaining market share of late and initially we didn't know why. Suzuki san did some checking on the influencer costs relative to their return and the numbers stacked up very well and so a pilot programme was suggested to test it. Over a three month period, the pilot programme showed a 27.5% uptick in e-commerce sales".

This little vignette is a lot more powerful in persuasion terms, than just saying "we are going to use more influencers". We have introduced characters who people will know – Takahashi and Suzuki in the Marketing Department, so this gives more credence to the talk. We have a timeline – this January and a three month pilot period, so that the audience can plot the timing. There is the bogeyman of Z Corporation getting ahead of us by using influencers and the luck of the tip off, so there is a sense of heightened risk involved if we do nothing. The outcome of 27.5% is a solid enough improvement during the pilot period to warrant continuing with the e-Commerce strategy using influencers.

All of this information was already available. The difference is the presenter harvested this context to explain the strategy direction as opposed to just announcing the direction. That WHY component is absolutely critical to getting people behind the effort. Without it, all we have is a chorus of critics and naysayers, who want to argue the point based on opinion and no information, other than the announcement. Once we feed in the background we redirect people's brains and it is easier to get them to support the new initiative, which is what we want.

On top of the background detail there are other stories we can tell. These might involve our own experience or the experience of others in the company. For example, "When Takahashi san and Suzuki san first noticed this influencer strategy by Z Corporation, the Head of the Marketing Department Tanaka san, recalled how in her previous company there had been success using influencers and she encouraged them to investigate if we could match this strategy or not". This lends further credence to what we are saying. Or we might reference something from research or from the media. "Last year, Takahashi san had come across a broad based five year study on influencer's impact on e-Commerce sales covering various industries. The report concluded that for certain products and services there was a very positive ROI involved and that traditional marketing was ignoring this new trend at its peril".

We are all seeing reports in the media about trends which influence our markets, but we usually ignore them. We are not thinking that we can possibly use some of these in our presentations and that is a mistake. Keeping abreast of trends is a basic element of professional life. Researching what is out there around the theme of the talk will quickly bring up data which we can turn into stories to support our thesis in the presentation. The key is to be looking for how we can translate information into stories. Once we have that idea as a central plank in constructing our talk, we will find there is a rich cornucopia of information out there waiting to be scooped up and converted into stories for our presentation.

In some professions, there is a lot of media scrutiny on what the speaker is saying. The organisation they represent also has very strict rules around who can say what. This makes giving the presentation very restrictive and difficult. Usually, the people in that line of work, are used to giving these types of presentations, so they are accustomed to be being very guarded in their remarks. They also become very guarded in the way they deliver the presentation. The danger is the message transmission is being killed off by the restrictions and rigidities of the content and their delivery methodology.

Sentences contain words and they deliver those words. The problem is they are giving every word equal treatment. Public speaking is not a democracy, but a dictatorship. A world ruled by key words and phrases, which must absolutely dominate the plebeian words which link and connect the core content together. These key words are handcrafted for special attention, with the view that their elevation during the presentation will drive home the key messages more effectively. Our speaker was a democrat, as far as not granting special favours to key words by hitting them harder or softer than the rest. He spoke in an even tempo, with the same power throughout the talk.

Given his profession, it was natural that he would read the document. That document had to be cleared for release and many eyes would have scrutinised it for any irregularities. It had been thoroughly cleansed of any potential controversy by the time it was presented. There was also simultaneous translation going on and in fact the translator had the same text in Japanese to work from. This is a golden way of ensuring that what is meant to be said, is coming across exactly as it should, in Japanese as well as English. Freestyling is frowned upon because this is where things can be said, as an aside, which make the front pages of the media and cause the speaker to lose their job. No wonder caution is the name of the game.

Does this mean that these types of talk are doomed forever to be dull and boring? I have mentioned voice modulation, through word and phrase emphasis as a way of departing from the usual monotone delivery. The latter is almost 100% guaranteed to put people to sleep. Pauses also can add gravitas to what we have said, as we allow our audience a little time to digest the deeper meanings and nuances of what we have just said. We can add gestures to bring strength to a point we are making, as we engage our body language and don't just abandon our hands to the task of page turning.

We can work the room with eye contact. We can look at individuals in the audience, grab their attention and then read the next sentence to them. They feel we are appealing directly to them, as we again direct our eyes to theirs, after we finish the sentence. We cannot be satisfied with a broad sweep of the room with our eye contact, effectively looking at everyone at the same time and so therefore, no one in particular. This is where pausing is so powerful. By stopping what we are saying, we are forcing the audience to look at us, to hang on our next words in anticipation. This is how we can funnel attention. This means the speech has to be designed for this and not created as a mad rush to the end, to get it all done in the time allocated. Less is more for us and we should build in pauses into the delivery.

Our facial expressions are so much more powerful that any slides on a screen. We need to engage our face and combine our expressions with certain key words and phrases. It may mean becoming more animated in our expression, looking quizzical, upset, concerned, happy, excited, etc.

One notable absence from these types of rigid talks is storytelling. The presenters are usually elite, powerful people. They can relate stories about well known figures. They can drop names and get away with it, because it is all congruent with the circles they move in. The story can be cleared for telling and if necessary the name of the key person in the story can be hidden. The point can be attached to that individual, without identifying them by name and a strong connection made about the key message being communicated. It also allows the message to be humanised and as an audience, that is very appealing because we may not be able to move in such stratospheric circles, but we love hearing about what they are getting up to.

Getting our slide deck functioning properly is another simple fix. We don't compromise the approved content, but we can make it more accessible to the audience. As with many others, this speaker often had three or four slides all combined into one, such that the individual parts were too small in size and so hard to see. We should be aiming for one idea per slide and to make the content as large as possible on screen.

With a few tweeks, even the most rigid talk can be brought to life in the hands of a polished speaker. Because it so rare to see this done, most people go through life squelching the life out of their super formal talks, in their attempt to conform to the rigidities the organisation demands. If we know what we are doing, we can stand out and show how it should be done, no matter how restrictive the occasion.