The Presentations Japan Series

We know that being formal and stiff creates distance between the speaker and the audience. We also know that a "conversational tone" is ideal, as it creates a strong feeling of inclusivity between the presenter and those in the room. That conversational tone means a relaxed style on the part of the speaker, but how relaxed? We gauge people's education and intelligence level by the way they speak. So we want to sound smart, but we don't want to sound snobby. Where is the line?

If you speak with a regional or national accent, should you stick with that or should you OxBridge it up? Typical Australians have very strong accents. Educated urban Australians speak quite differently to rural dwellers and the further you go from the coast, the stronger the accent becomes. Television presenters in Australia all spoke as if they were aping BBC presenters until the 1960s, when television commercials started adopting the lingua franca of the masses. I have read that in the USA, regional accents are a barrier in many cases and as people move around for work, they have to change the way they speak to be better respected. So, when presenting should you present in a more highbrow fashion and change your diction or speak as if you would to one of your local neighbours?

It will depend to a great extent on your audience and the topic. If I was presenting to a room full of Aussies and I put on a posh OxBridge accent, that would be seen as fake and lacking in authenticity and would impact how my message was received. If I was presenting to a room full of well educated Aussies, in a down and dirty local Brisbane boy accent, that would also have a negative impact. If it was a highbrow topic, I would be seen as uneducated and therefore not seen as credible for that audience.

In Japan, I often speak to national Chambers of Commerce. Often these are mixed audiences of non-native speakers. Generally, the international businesspeople you meet in Tokyo speak excellent English, no matter where they come from. However, my Aussie vowels can confuse people at times. I think I am saying "a" and they are hearing "I". It is always a surprise for me, because I thought I had moved on from that. I have learnt to neutralise my accent for the most part, when speaking to these groups, in order to have the greatest shot at getting my message across.

Am I being authentic, if I am not speaking as I would back in Brisbane? I think there is room for variation of our accents to give us the best communication vehicle to get the job done. If I go all OxBridge though, then that is too much, because I am not British and not a graduate of either of those storied universities and now I am just faking it for effect. If I put on an American accent, that would be ridiculous as well and I am not sure I could carry it off anyway. I go for a neutral accent, which will give me the greatest access to the listener's attention and will sound both natural and unforced.

What about the way we present? Should we be standing around in a relaxed fashion, as we would down the pub or should we be there ramrod straight and upstanding? Should we put our hands in our trouser pockets or keep them out? Should we be leaning on the rostrum as we talk or should we be standing with 50/50 weight displacement on our feet? I think standing up straight with a 50/50 split is the most professional approach, but it doesn't have to be stiff and tense. Just standing up straight with the knees unlocked is enough. You look good without looking forced.

Hands in the trouser pockets is usually the male speaker thrusting them in there, because he doesn't know what to do with his hands. The most natural position is for the hands to just hang by the side of your body. To find that magic spot, just raise your arms up to a 90 degree angle to the floor and then drop them. Where they land is the most natural position for them when you are not employing them for gestures. Hands in the pocket, behind the back, fig leaf in front of the groin, are all guaranteed to restrict your use of gestures and that should be avoided at all costs.

We need our hands to add power to the point we are making and we want to treat it like a faucet. We turn the gestures on and then we turn them off again. We don't hold the same gesture for longer than 15 seconds, because the power just dies after that point and it adds no value to anything we are doing. Don't forget about your hands and just allow the same gesture to linger long. People become self-conscious about where their hands are, but if you are using your eyes, face and voice to engage the audience, they won't be paying any attention to your hands in the rest position. Your gestures will come up in a natural way and the audience won't think twice about what you are doing, as it just fits in nicely with the whole flow of the presentation.

Our audience and topic will determine how we choose to speak and how we decide to present. There is a range we can adopt and we should use that range to suit our purposes. The extremes of that range are where we will get ourselves into trouble and we should avoid doing that if want our message to get through.

There are facts, provable information, data, research results and opinions. What is the right mix when presenting? Should we just marshal the detail, lay it out for the audience and let them draw their own conclusions or do we need to direct them? How expert do we have to be to start handing out advice to others? Are we seeding the emergence of opposition to what we are talking about, because members of the audience don't want some speaker lecturing to them? Are we setting ourselves up for a very hot Q&A session, where some of the assembled masses are about to tear shreds off us?

These types of questions are difficult for those of us in industries where we have points of view and are recommending certain actions on the part of the audience. The training industry is a hot crucible for advice and recommendations for others. We are suggesting things which we believe will help them do better in their companies. Or it could be that through your own firm's experiences, you have observed some things to be careful of and you are going to enlighten the audience, so that they don't repeat the mistakes you made.

There is certainly a demand for case studies, warnings, examples and the sharing of experiences, in order to guide audiences about where the dangers are and the traps are set. Just stating our opinion though won't cut it. We have to set that up with some evidence, something relatable for the audience, so that they feel what we are saying is credible. The best options are personal experiences. These always have the most credence and authenticity. The second best is the experience of others and the last is published, public information. In Japan, any time you are tempted to use data to prove a point, you need to have the Japanese version too. If it is only information collected in the US or in Europe, then Japanese audience members will just discount it, because as far as they are concerned, Japan is always different and the data won't travel well.

Often though, we start out with some data and we even raid previous presentations for slides brimming with graphs and diagrams, to use for the next presentation. That data is too valuable to just leave for one presentation, so we want to recycle it. Or we might have some recent survey data, which will be fresh for the audience and we want to impress them. One of the dangers is we get stuck at the data provision level and we don't relate this to the realities of the audience members. Data by itself is good, but "what does it mean for me", is always in the minds of the audience.

This is where we get into the advice business and we have to tread warily. We have to remain the expert, without becoming the schoolteacher, bossing the audience members around and telling them how to fly straight. Extrapolating what the data shows is a good idea, but there is an element of prophesy built in and basically that is just our opinion. Instead of getting sucked into the "listen to me now" business, we can approach it in another way.

Rhetorical questions are brilliant for this. We can lay out the facts or the argument and instead of moving into the advice component, we can ask the audience what they think, without requiring them to vocalise an answer. We frame the construct and let the question hang there unanswered, so that the audience has to draw their one conclusions. When we want to add in our point of view, we can do so in a very small target way. Rather than spruking the answer, we can cloak it in camouflage.

We can say, "there is a view that…" or " a common conclusion has been….", or "a perspective I quite like is…." or "most experts seem to agree that….". In this way we proffer an answer, without having to attach ourselves to it. This reduces the friction with highly opinionated audience members, who may want to argue the point with us. We come across as reasonable, balanced, open, flexible as well as humble.

We can say, "I will leave it to everyone to make up their own minds on this one". That is fine but often we are asked to speak because we supposedly know something about the topic and this may come across as a cop out and audience members may feel cheated. They don't want a lecture from us, but they are interested in what we think, and they want to hear about that.

Rhetorical questions and a small target strategy will go a long way toward setting the right frame for the talk. Audiences will vary of course, but if you don't know what you are facing then caution is a good policy. You have assembled valuable information, given some guidance and have respected the audience to be capable of reaching their own interpretation of what it all means, while offering your humble insights. That is a killer combo.

I was held up at the hospital, which those who live in Tokyo will know, is a typical occurrence, so I was late to the presentation. One of the speakers had just started, as I slid into my seat at the back. The screen was hard to read, because the scale of the content was small. The presenter was speaking in a voice range which was probably fine for those seated at the most proximate tables, but was hard to catch at the back of the room. I missed the very start, but I could tell the speakers hadn't tested the audio or the screen for visibility when they were doing their set up. They just turned up and turned things on and away they went. Not a great idea for presenters.

I always recommend to get there early and check for sight lines, audio quality and screen accessibility. When we are using a screen or a monitor, we have to be careful where we stand, because we can be cutting people out, if they are seated in a spot where we are blocking their sight access to the screen. We need to know where these invisible boundaries are before we get going. That is a simple task. We just go and sit on those chairs and see where the boundary will be for us, when we are standing and presenting. The same with the size of the fonts and diagrams. Go to the extreme corners and rear of the seating area and see how clearly those audience members will be able to see what we are presenting on screen. In this case, there were a lot of small drawings and diagrams and at the back of the venue, they were hard to see.

The audio is another key point. Speakers are not sound engineers, but they can have the tech team help them to get the volumes right. In this case, the volumes were too low for the size of the room. If they had checked it when they arrived, which I doubt, the room would have been empty. We need to allow for the host of bodies in the room, which will weaken the spread of the audio, once the audience has filed in. The volume control needs to allow for that and to be set a little higher than normal. This is another reason why professional speakers always repeat the questions they receive from the audience, if there are no microphones being employed. The speaker may be able to hear the question, but other members of the audience will have trouble catching what was being asked. In this case, there were hand microphones for the questioners, so everyone could easily hear the questions.

The other issue was the size of the presentation. By this, I mean how big were the speakers going with their voices, energy and gestures. There were two speakers and in both cases they were very contained. For those seated at the front, it was probably fine, but quite a different experience for those seated at the back. We have to remember the importance of having "speaker presence" and adjust ourselves to go bigger when presenting. This is why sitting in the extreme distance seats at the start, before the audience arrives, is so insightful. You realise that you are much smaller on stage, for those at the rear, than you imagined.

Getting the voice strength up is important, but often speakers cannot gauge how much stronger they need to be. They somehow imagine that a normal chatting voice volume can be applied, when they are the presenter. As presenters, we want to be conversational, but we shouldn't misunderstand what that means. We should be relaxed, but louder than in normal conversation. For those seated down the back, we need more energy from the speaker, in order to be able to connect with them. We buy energy, passion, confidence, commitment and the voice is a major tool to project all of those things. We don't have to be shouting, but we do have to be projecting our energy to the far reaches of the room.

Gestures need to become bigger. They don't have to be too exaggerated and massive, but they do have to become bigger. One exception though, is that if you are ever presenting in a 5000 seat venue, then your gestures really have to be ramped up. On stage, you are a peanut in size and it is super hard to connect with the people in cheap seats, right down the back. Even if the venue isn't that mighty, we still need to be conscious that we have to up our gesture game, to accommodate the audience members at the back. We cannot be only presenting to those seated up the front.

The output level of these speakers was at about the 75% range. They clearly needed to do more to reach all of the people in the room. If they had these thoughts in mind, when they arrived at the venue, then they would have made the necessary adjustments. Like a lot of speakers though, they got there, made sure the slides were working and that was the end of it. Just a little more attention to the venue considerations and the audience positioning and things would have been a lot better.

"You are too loud", "You are too high energy". These were some survey comments following some training I was delivering for 60 managers for a client. You can imagine that the venue to hold ten tables of 6 participants each has to be quite large and spacious and that was the case. To project to an audience that size, in such a large venue, means you have to really lift yourself and pump out a lot of energy. The brief from the client was that many of these managers had lost their mojo over the course of Covid and the organisation needed lifting and these were the people who needed to provide that lift. They wanted the first session to be a motivational speech to inject some missing mojo back into those in the team who were lacking in that department.

With some of those comments coming back in the survey after the session it was obvious that for some of them I was too strong, too powerful and they found that threatening. Out of 60 how many do I think felt like that? I would say two or three and as a trainer I would just ignore that group and go for moving the mass of the people and getting them fired up. If I was the boss, I would look at replacing them with others to lead who would be more suitable for the task. I would be asking, "if they can't take a one hour motivational speech, how can they deliver as leaders to their teams?". Other comments were "powerful", "motivating", "enthusiastic", etc., so you can see it hit the mark with the majority and as a trainer that is a good result. Training is one thing and presenting is another, but there are obvious overlaps, especially given that first session was a motivational talk.

Is there the danger that if we are too strong as a presenter, we will lose some of our audience, who don't like all of that power close up and personal? Also, how much power is too much? Where is the line to determine we have gone too hard and too far? A talk is usually around 40 minutes and there are 15 minutes for questions, so the amount of presenting time is contained. Is it legitimate to go hard during those 40 minutes?

There are a number of factors to consider. Who is the audience and what is the point of this talk. The brief in my example was clear – restore their broken mojo and fire them up. To do that I have to be fired up, high energy, driving, powerful. If I want to lift them to 100%, then I have to go to 150%. In a typical business speech we won't be asked to perform that role. The topics are usually more technical, we share experiences, explain how we got results and cover problem solving. We are there to stimulate the thinking of the audience and get them on the road to success. Do we need to go to 150%? Actually we might in very short bursts, if we need to make an important point, but we are talking nano seconds here not minutes.

There is also the question of the brand we want for ourselves personally and professionally. How do we want to be perceived in the market? If we are coming across in a very mild, low energy manner, that may work for our brand and for some industry audiences, particularly technical groups. If it was an audience of salespeople, it would be a total dud. I am a trainer and a salesperson and if I presented in a highly calm, no energy manner, it would be the death knell for my business. No one would hire me, because I wasn't being congruent with what I am doing.

Generally speaking, our talks should be a mixture of energy outputs. There are certain words we want to highlight to lift their importance above the parapet and make sure they resonate with the audience. We inject a lot of energy into those words mimicking the highs of classical music. Classical music cannot just be crescendos or the audience becomes overwhelmed. There must be lulls too and that contrast is what make both work so well and so it is with public speaking. All soft or all hard are both bound to fail.

Most speakers deliver their content to the audience in a monotone voice, which is a great formula for putting people to sleep. We need to match our energy to our content. Professor Mehrabian discovered in his research in the 1960s, that if the way you are delivering the content doesn't match the content, then that lack of congruency confuses the audience and they get distracted. In his day, that distraction would be evidenced with the audience concentrating on how we look and how our voice sounds, instead of on what we are saying. Today the audience would be lurching for their phones to escape the speaker and get on to the internet to access their social media feeds.

This means where there are points in the talk which call for more enthusiasm, we should raise our energy and voice and show more passion. If it requires a calm demeanour, then that is what we need to be presenting to the audience. We cannot have a Johnny One Note approach of one setting on the energy dial from start to finish. Our variation in energy and output is the key.

"I have been presenting since I was 17, but I am not good at engaging the audience". This comment from a man in his fifties was telling. He was in a very technical area which requires a highly acute mind and he is a leader in that field. He has a big job today for a famous brand name firm. If he has been getting lots of practice presenting since a young age, why has he not been able to transition across to engaging his audience? He made the comment to me unprompted, so he was aware of the gap and had not been able to bridge it yet under his own steam.

I told him that in one particular course we have, that stretches over two days, by mid-afternoon on Day One the participants start to stop focusing on themselves and really start working their audience and this just continues for the next day and a half. If it is that quick, why can't he get to that point by himself? The simple answer is the expertise of the instructors and the coaching being handed out.

If you don't know what you are looking for, it is hard to hit the target and by that, I don't mean having some vague idea of what you want to achieve in audience engagement terms. The instructors know what they are looking for and so they push the participants to rise to the occasion and start connecting with the people they are talking to. The coaching shows the way forward and the repetition with feedback is the key to refining this part of the presenter's arsenal.

The big breakthrough comes in a couple of forms. One is the energy flow. When we are just handing over information, we retain all the energy within ourselves and are just going through the motions with a major data dump. We are putting the information under the audience's noses and then just leaving it up to them to digest it. When we want to engage the audience, we start directing our intrinsic energy known as "ki" in Japanese, into the audience. Anyone who has studied martial arts will have a good idea of what I am talking about.

This requires that we are pumping out energy to those in front of us. That sounds simple enough but a lot of people are very mild mannered and softly spoken. Consequently they become invisible to their audience and nothing they present resonates nor retains. We need to purposely lift our energy and then direct it to the audience members and we need to do that one person at a time. Pushing the energy out en masse, means the energy is diluted and the spell is broken.

For some people pushing out a lot of energy is something they don't normally do, so they are resistant to increasing the energy flow. They imagine they can address the audience just as they would their friend over coffee. That is definitely not the case and presenting and chatting are light years apart in the galaxy of public speaking.

I saw this recently with a very senior person giving a talk. She is a very mild mannered, softly spoken person. That is fine, except if you want to have impact with an audience you need to increase the energy and particularly the voice volume. For her, anything above a chat level of speaking would feel totally crazy, as if she was hysterical and was screaming at people. Not true. What happens is we feel your confidence and we feel your energy and we gravitate toward both.

I know I could get her from totally forgettable to remarkable in thirty minutes of coaching, but mentally she is not interested in that, because she doesn't value public speaking enough to want to make the change. So be it, but the downside is, she stays invisible. I think that is a bad idea.

By talking to the audience one person at a time, we can direct the energy flow straight to each person, one by one, and they immediately feel it. We combine this energy direction with our eye power. The usual formula is for the speaker to look at everyone and therefore no one. Our eye power is now diluted. When we give six seconds of eye power to each person, we are making a powerful direct connection, which for the audience member is tremendously impactful. They really feel we are talking to them only, in the room, for that moment and the link between us is palpable.

When we add in our gestures to the pot, we are now cooking up a magic broth, which really engages the audience. There is the issue of knowing what to do, getting coached so that you can refine it and having the desire to make the necessary changes to accomplish this connection with the audience. If the desire isn't there, than no amount of professional coaching will work. The problem for most people is all they have ever seen are presenters talking at their audience rather than speakers deeply engaging their audience. When we see what is possible, it opens our eyes up and we realise the gap between where we are today and where we could be. Get the desire and get the coaching.

How much is too much? For the expert, the boundaries on this equation can be quite broad. For them, we are only tapping into the very superficial elements of this worthy subject. They have so many layers at their disposal and they can go to exquisite depths of complexity and nuance, within a heartbeat. When they are addressing the great unwashed, the best laid plans can go astray.

I was one of the great unwashed, turning up to a complex subject in search of some better understanding and education on the topic. The expert's temptation is to try to cram as much material as possible into the talk and show both their tremendous expertise but also the depths of the beauty of the topic. They are at the "art" end of the scale, while the punters in the room are more at the utilitarian end. The bombardment of the depth of materials can cause brain whiteout, as our cerebral capacities are severely challenged by the concepts, the data and the complexity of the delivery. Concentration spans take a hiding and we start to fade.

That was happening to me. We all turned up at night-time after completing hard toil down at the salt mines, so as a group, we were already mentally taxed. Naturally, a complex topic attracts experts in the field, who want to attend the talk to steal from the presenter's materials or concepts and to gauge how big a threat they are as a competitor. This emboldens the presenter to turn on the expertise faucet and to go deep on the subject to justify why they are the one standing up in front of everyone and presenting, and not one of these other experts in the crowd.

Tonight's expert also made the typical mistake of pounding us with slides, which were packed to the gunwales with information. We are talking beautiful slides, but so dense. If you were in the front row, you had a shot at being to read the detail, but anyone else would have been struggling, because of the density and small font sizes being employed. He also needed, like a lot of experts, to break his own slide into three or four slides.

Slides are free, by the way, so we don't have to be parsimonious about their usage. It is better to have one idea per slide than lots of slides with too many ideas on each individual slide. Having complex configurations rarely works because the scale of the font and the micro-detail has to become too small, to fit it all in. Yes, he kindly supplied the slides after the event, but as a presenter, this is too late. We have to deliver our message in that moment, with that crowd and get to them then and there.

He made the mistake of suggesting we could stop him whenever we wanted to during his talk. I don't recommend this, because you can so easily lose control of the time, because there are now no limits. When you have presentation followed by the Q&A there is a time allocated for the later for a reason. When we mix it up we are in danger of being distracted from our message or having to spend too much time on a relatively minor point to satisfy that questioner. It is also a free for all, with who can ask questions and suddenly you can get into a group debate about a point. This is very exciting, but it destroys your time allocation for the presentation and like him, race through the last 10% - 15% of the slides to finish on time.

One thing he did very well was to come across as an expert without being a pain and a know-it-all. He could phrase certain things which said, I believe this to be true based on my current knowledge and experience, but I could be mistaken. This is quite artful because he is making himself a small target. When you come across as "I am the expert here" then you invite people to want to prove otherwise and bring your ego down a peg or two. He did a good job being the legitimate expert and creating no enemies in the room.

As I have stated many times, it is always a good practice to get the list of who is coming to gauge how expert the crowd will be and also to get there early to suss out the interests of various people in the room. Actually, he didn't do either of those judging by his late arrival and his high-level approach in presenting his information. I believe in these cases you can demonstrate sufficient expertise to convince the room you know your stuff without having to beat everyone into submission with a relenting "death by powerpoint" performance. He could have shown less and had just as successful a presentation. Less is more, as we say and a handy thing to remember if you are ever asked to give a presentation as an "expert".

When we are giving a public presentation, it is rare that we will be given carte blanche by the organisers to promote our product or service. That type of blatant self-promotion is frowned upon and your reputation in the market will be negatively impacted. Great, but I want to sell more stuff. How can we promote ourselves without seeming to be breaking the boundaries of common sense? The hero's journey is a popular Hollywood trope and it works equally well for us when presenting.

Let's begin with laying out the situation in the market and at this point we are describing what has gone before and what has been accepted as normal. Now we need to raise the stakes and jack up the tension for the audience, so that they feel what they are hearing is worthwhile. We all love a warning about some impending disaster, because we feel more protected and bettered secured to weather the changes. Most of us respond more easily to addressing our fears than maximising our opportunities. As they say in the newspaper world, "if it bleeds, it leads".

Changes in the market can be good of course, but we need to zero in on the negative consequences of the coming changes. We need to lay out what could go wrong and try to tie this back to the interests of the audience. If they feel this isn't going to affect them, then they have a minimal commitment to doing anything about it. This obviously requires some pre-research about who will be in the audience and what they are interested in. That should be standard procedure for any speaker.

Storytelling at this point is a powerful tool. We can use the example of another organisation and what happened to them, because they weren't able to respond fast or thoroughly enough to the changes. We need to set the scene and put the story in a timeframe based around a season and a place. If we can introduce characters into the story who they will know, even better. Our object is to transport them to the scene which they see in their mind's eye.

If we can come up with a villain, all the better. It might be an actual person or it could be a circumstance or a piece of technology. ChatGPT is performing wonders for a lot of writers at the moment, as they blast our screeds of text full of doom and gloom and impending disaster. It makes for graphic reading and we are all aware that this is a pivotal change but we don't quite know the ramifications as yet. That is enough to grab the interest of the audience. This is a gift which will keep giving for a long time and so look for a constant flow of commentary on this subject.

After we have engineered a good dollop of fear to spread into the hearts of our audience, we need to relieve that tension with a way out. Now, we cannot just pound away with the negatives, because that causes the audience to lose hope. We have to balance it out with a way forward. At this point, we may refer directly to a solution which already exists and which is available. That pivot though, is in danger of crossing the line of self-serving promotion. It is better to talk about current research and progress in addressing the issue. The fact that you have identified the problem and that you are actively addressing it, tells everyone you are the one to go to for help, when they need to work on fixing this issue.

Referring to your research finding is much better than referencing the product or service. It elevates the discussion to a point where your credibility is sky high and yet there is no feeling of a bait and switch going on here. You lured the audience into this venue with a sexy presentation title and then when you had them assembled, you switched in a massive commercial for your product or service. We don't do that. This is where the latest findings, complete with convincing statistics etc ., come to the fore. You are not seen as someone organising this presentation as a group prospecting exercise. Instead, you are seen as delivering a neutral exploration of things everyone should realise. People like to know about a problem and even better, they like to know there is a solution at hand or under close development. When we outline the manner in which the problem will be dealt with, it gives off a tone of scientific breakthrough and we like science more than we like being sold to.

Being able to describe the likely events we will face and also the likely solutions is comforting for people and they are keen to hear the detail. That engagement is what we want as the presenter and we love it when everyone is hanging on our every word. That is a rare event, of course, but if we craft the story well, then that is a distinct possibility. We can paint a word picture of a future state with which everyone can identify. The outline of a better future leaves everyone feeling relieved. The journey from fear to freedom is important and we finish on this note, so that the whole presentation apparatus is felt to be positive and worthwhile. We have sold them on our solution, without anyone feeling they were being sold.

This last week I saw two speakers who were presenting, but both managed to do so with absolutely no presence. They could not command the room and they were both hard to hear. One was hosting an event with experts assembled, there to gain more knowledge. The other was leading the opening of a prestigious event to a very large audience in a big ballroom. I don't think there was any great self-awareness going on with either speaker. They had divorced what they were doing, from how they were being perceived doing it. When we stand up to present, we are putting our personal and professional brands on the line in public and we have to be aware of that.

The speaker hosting the expert event spoke very softly and was hard to hear, even in that relatively small room. There was no energy behind the words, no pacing, no highlights, all lulls and no crescendos. Some female speakers don't change gears enough when they have to speak in public and don't project with enough vocal strength. They often have soft voices to begin with, but they need to switch gears and ramp up the volume and power. Speaking with staff or with friends allows for a soft voice, because of the situation and the proximity involved. Speaking to a group is an entirely different animal and has to be approached with a professional attitude and to realise this is a speaking spot which requires a different mindset.

Our speaker didn't employ eye contact with her audience and this was a big missed opportunity. In such a smallish room, our eye contact can be very powerful and can personalise the talk so much more. It has the effect of drawing the audience in toward the speaker and creating the feeling that the presenter is talking directly to each of them. This engagement level is very high and makes the message accessible to the audience and that is what we want isn't it – to get our message through.

Gestures were also missing. She was using a microphone and that tied up one of her hands. Also the audio set up hadn't been checked prior to the event. I know that, because the speaker box wasn't amplifying her voice very much at all. A non-working microphone with a softly spoken person is a problematic combination. If she had used gestures, even with only employing one hand, it would have driven home her points much more powerfully. Her body language was also non-existent, so there was no feeling of attraction, charisma, or presence when she was presenting. Sadly, we were just left with a soft voice, which was hard to hear.

The gentleman tasked with leading the toast at the large event was struggling with the roar of the confab down the back, as he tried to get everyone's attention and get proceedings underway. Clearly, he had no idea of how to tame an unruly gathering and just stood on stage looking lost. This is extremely damaging to your personal brand, because it reveals you are clueless as a leader. Standing up on stage looking lost isn't a great brand builder either. I had met him previously and he is a well-educated, capable, intelligent guy, but he revealed he was totally clueless on what to do with his responsibility for that evening. He is rather short as well, so he cannot use his frame to impose order on the crowd and get them to shut up and listen to him. There is a reason a lot of leaders are often very tall. Unfortunately, I am not in that group either.

Regardless of our size though, we all have the opportunity to use our voice to still the madness. His choice of voice volume was for a close proximity, one-on-one conversation situation, as opposed to addressing the masses. What he should have done was to speak very, very loudly to command to audience to pay attention. Usually one outburst is never enough, because the alcohol is flowing and so is the conversation. People just pay no attention whatsoever to the proceedings and that in turn, means they pay no attention to the speaker. Maybe others can suffer that indignity, but we cannot have that occur when it is our turn.

He needed to keep repeating "Ladies and Gentlemen, may I have your attention" in a loud voice, until even the most wayward conformed to shut up and listen to what was going on. In my experience, it usually takes three or four renditions of this very loud opening to get people to quieten down.

His remarks when he finally got the room down to a low white noise background hum, were not well prepared and were not interesting. He should have considered that his audience had many representatives assembled and used that to get people excited about the evening. He invited the different groups representatives to come up on stage, but then he did nothing with them, so their presence was irrelevant. He could have introduced each representative and then easily encouraged all the members of that organisation to give them a big cheer. This sets up a competitive spirit which makes the occasion more fun and interesting. He could have made some comments about the significance of the gathering and pump up the activity's importance. None of that happened and quite frankly, I cannot remember anything about what he said, because it was not gripping. Remember, we are competing with the food and drinks and so we have to make it worthwhile for the audience to give us their time.

His talk had no presence and he and his talk have already disappeared into the mists of time and both are already totally forgotten by everyone who was there. He could have used this occasion as a platform for his personal and professional brands, if he knew what he was doing. Clearly, he didn't know what he was doing and the opportunity was completely missed. When it is our turn, we need to seize the moment and plan the talk so that it is a triumph and not a fizzer.

The best personal branding is to say something useful and interesting in a compelling, professional way. That is a snap right? Maybe not. What constitutes useful and interesting will vary, depending in who is in the audience. If we pitch the content complexity too high, we may be over the heads of our audience. They will take nothing away, because they are lost and they will hate us for making them feel dumb. If we pitch the complexity too low, they may become insulted. They feel we are purposely speaking down to them, to emphasise our own genius ability.

I have seen this occasionally where a speaker has taken no notice of who is in the audience and gives the talk the speaker wants to give. Ironically, one of those speakers was talking about "personal branding". Unfortunately, the context for the speaker was her own massive global organisation. She was intent on branding herself to stand out internally in that grandiose world of big egos. If she had looked at the guest list for that speech, she would have realised straight away these were small to medium-sized companies and mainly people not yet very advanced in their company's echelon. I surmised that her speech was more for bolstering her resume with the title of "public speaker" than providing useful advice on how to create an individual brand for the audience. Her own personal brand was utterly extinguished after forty minutes of her nonsense. The lucky thing for her was that only those gathered in the room put a line straight through her name, to eliminate her as a professional "public speaker" and self-promoting "personal branding expert".

Regularly check the guest list to see who has signed up and then adjust your talk accordingly. Usually the organisers will share that list with you, but even if they are rather bolshie about it and won't for so called "privacy reasons", then get there early and meet people. In Japan, because we all use business cards, it is very easy to find out the rank of the person and the industry they are representing. On the fly, we can alter the complexity of the pitch for our topic and tailor it to the level of the audience.

Useful, valuable, fresh, differentiated, rare information is a big attraction for the speaker. We think that because what we have to say is so valuable, that the information itself will do all the heavy lifting for us and we can get a free pass on the professional delivery bit. Not true. I saw this trotted out recently with some visiting high-powered speakers. I realised later that the talk we received in Tokyo was actually a dry run for them, for a speech they were going to give later in the Kansai region. The ultimate intended audience were experts in the field and so the talk was pitched deep in terms of detail density. The audience assembled in Tokyo, including me, were the great unwashed and not very expert regarding this area of speciality. We needed a different version for us, but the speakers didn't care about that. They were selfishly giving the talk they wanted to give. We were not their target audience and were just the patsies for their practice run.

What also surprised me was the unprofessional way they presented their information. Obviously, their company's global headquarter team had prepared the slide deck for them, so it was beautiful, properly fitted out and branded etc. It was also obvious that the slide designers were not public speakers, because the beauty part was there, but the messaging part wasn't. When you litter a slide with too much unessential text and then add insult to injury by making the text font too small to read easily on the screen, you are killing the messaging.

Their industry is awash with data and so naturally we had to have a lot of graphs to illustrate the numbers. That would be okay if they had observed one simple rule – one graph per slide instead of two or three. The graphs were also drowning in a sea of micro accompanying text vying for our attention. The numbers on the graphs were simply too small to read, so the points were lost on the audience. This is not how a professional presents their information. The speakers were oblivious to all of this, because they thought they were cleverer and much better paid than those in the audience and that we should lift our game to keep up with them.

I am positive they were being better paid than those of us in the room listening, but so what? They were there to impart a brand image for themselves and their company and they failed on both counts. I doubt the Kansai version for the expert audience went any better. All the same flaws we were presented with here in Tokyo, would have been transported by Bullet Train down there and given the same treatment. Their personal brands were diminished and also that of their firm. Remember, we judge the entire company on the quality of the people we meet from the firm. If we meet really capable, smart people we generously apply that idea to everyone down there. If we meet a dud, then we assume they are all duds down there.

Certainly have great information. The key is to make sure the way it is presented is suitable for the audience in attendance. Also, it must be presented in a way which invigorates the message, not emasculates it.