The Presentations Japan Series

Major money has been spent for decades by the Japanese Government, to improve the level of English in Japan and you would have to say with fairly limited success. Japan faces a declining population and the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research estimates Japan's population will decline by 21% to only 100 million by 2049. At the same time Japanese companies are looking outside to grow their businesses. This is good for Japan, except that when you become international, you need to deal in English. Where are these English speakers going to come from?

Prior to the Lehman Shock there were over 80,000 Japanese students travelling abroad to study. After the Lehman shock this number dropped down to 50,000 a year and has crawled back up to around 60,000. Lately, seventy per cent of those studying abroad only stayed for one month, which makes you wonder what they picked up in that short period.

Another worrying thing is that young Japanese are not interested in going abroad to study. Over 60% of High School students said they would rather stay in Japan and over 50% of young people in general, said the same thing. So where are the needed English speakers going to come from?

The answer is from inside our companies. Larger companies will send their Japanese staff abroad to work and in the process they improve their international understanding and their language skills. In the past, these returnees have been an alien force for companies, because they come back with a different mindset and the companies haven't been flexible enough about integrating them into the mother ship. This is getting better and where it hasn't, these valuable employees jump ship to a better environment, that is to say our firms, where their talents, particularly language ability, can be fully utilised.

The general acceptance of mid-career hires has improved a lot in Japan too and we can all thank the 1999 collapse of Yamaichi securities for that. A lot of loyal, lifetime employees were thrown out on the street and were picked up by other companies, reducing the stigma attached to mid-career hires. The Lehman Shock in 2008, the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor meltdown in 2011 and the pandemic since 2020 have all continued this trend of people losing their jobs through no fault of their own. Mid-career hiring has continued to be more accepted as a function of the modern world and this gives all of us better access to English speakers moving companies.

English language lessons are often prevalent inside organisations, as they work to help their staff do better in communicating with the outside world and with staff in Japan from overseas. The problem for some of them though is no amount of English language lessons will convince them to speak up in meetings or to volunteer to present in English. This is where they need additional help.

When forced to present in English, the reflex action is to put all the text up on the screen, so that they can read it to their audience. If that isn't possible, then they print it all out and read it, word for word, while diligently looking down at the script, ignoring the audience altogether. "Painful" is the main word to describe this experience for those on the receiving end. Why are they destroying their presentations in this way?

The simple answer is perfectionism, driven by fear. This is a country of no defects, no mistakes and no errors. Making a mistake while speaking in English therefore is not possible, the loss of face unimaginable, so all manner of artifices have to be employed to avoid this inadequacy. For the foreigners listening to mistakes made in English by Japanese speakers, this is usually nothing to worry about. We are coming from multi-cultural societies and are used to non-native speakers making pronunciation errors and grammatical mistakes. We just mentally rearrange what they said into the correct alignment and answer their questions or make our contribution to whatever they said, without missing a beat. Basically, we are not demanding linguistic purity or perfection – this need is all in the heads of the Japanese when speaking English.

We must help them by giving them the freedom to make mistakes, to free them from the chains of grammar, to overlook the butchering of certain words when spoken out loud. We need to encourage them to concentrate on communication and not language.

What I mean by that is putting their passion behind what they say. To speak a little louder than normal, in order to sound more confident, which helps with the credibility of what is being said. To employ pauses to moderate their speaking speed, in case they get nervous and start prattling along. To use the slide as a prompt and speak to the point with the English they have, rather than losing their audience by reading off the screen or script. To try and engage their audience by making eye contact for at least six seconds and to try and make eye contact with as many in the audience as possible during the course of their talk. In this way they can establish the feeling of a personal connection between speaker and listener which is completely independent of language capability. To employ gestures to strengthen the point they are making and not to feel self-conscious about doing so.

We have limited access to those Japanese who have lived abroad and so have to make the most of those we have managed to attract into our companies. Whatever level of English they have has to be worked on beyond English language classes, to enable them to present in a professional manner. If this support is there, then they will become more comfortable dealing with foreign colleagues and speaking in English. They will become fully functioning members of the team and able to work across borders and language barriers.

How could we lose track of buyers? Unfortunately it is very easy. That nice person we have been dealing with inside the company, the one with whom we have built a solid relationship, where the trust is brimming and the bonhomie is pumping, is transferred to another section or they leave the company for another job. Suddenly we are left with nothing. If it is an internal transfer, we may find there is a new person who decides they will put their own stamp on things. They bring in their own suppliers who are their favourites. They have a competing established relationship or maybe they don't like the cut of our jib. If a new person is being hired in to replace the incumbent, then there will be a break in the traffic for a couple of months and before you know it, things have begun to drift and we have trouble making the connection with the new person.

Maybe there is a global pandemic and everything shuts down for a couple of years. The company has stopped spending on what we offer and when we go back to rekindle the relationship quite a lot has changed. The people may be gone, the budgets may be gone, the strategy may be new and different. Basically, we have to start again. We know the history with the client, but often the new people we are dealing with have no idea who we are and we are basically doing a cold call to this company. Some are working in the office and some are still at home. Getting hold of people puts us in quandary.

That iron wall of disinterest on the part of those answering the phone is there in all its confronting glory. In Japan, if you don't know the actual name of the person, you are almost guaranteed to never get through to the function you need to be speaking with. "We will take a message and let them know" in my experience never translates into getting a call back, no matter how many times you call. The junior person answering the phone fully believes their duty is to keep you as far away from their company as possible and they are incredibly diligent in that endeavour. If you ask them the name of the person performing that functional role they won't tell you, as if this information was a major corporate secret and you are an industrial spy.

I remember there was a change of President in an international luxury firm here we had been dealing with and I tried to speak with the new President. Unfortunately, I didn't know the name of the replacement and no matter how many times I called, the young woman answering the phone would block me and was most unhelpful. Frustrating doesn't even begin to describe the feeling. I never did meet the new President

What can we do? If there is going to be an internal transfer, these usually take place every April in Japan, as that is the start of the new financial year. It is a good practice to check with our champion that they are not getting transferred to a new section and we shouldn't assume they will be staying put. Every year we should get it into our calendar to check in on any likely staff movements which might effect them.

If they flag a move, then we need to ask them to sprinkle the sacred water on our brow and anoint us into the bosom of their colleague who is taking over. Being introduced by our champion is very powerful because it helps us to overcome any likelihood their replacement may go crazy and introduce our competitor. There is an implicit obligation to honour what their predecessor was doing, otherwise it looks like an oblique criticism of their work. When we meet the new person we have to start again and build the trust. What personality style are they? Highly analytical, time is money, have a cup of tea together or a big picture person? What communication stye do they prefer? We need to rejig everything.

If there is a new person being recruited from outside then the whole effort becomes more difficult. Our existing champion has left the building, so they have no influence any more on what happens. How will we know when they have recruited the new person? This is not very easy because when we call, we get that junior person who is highly motivated to tell us absolutely nothing about what is going inside the firm. We can try and ask our champion to nominate someone in the same section or in a related section, who will take our call and who will share the name of the new person.

Another tack is to ask the junior person who usually answers the phone to help us meet the new person. We can explain that Suzuki san is leaving and we know that it will take a few months for the replacement to arrive and that we would like to call them every now and then and get an update, so that we can meet the new person. Given we have a relationship with Suzuki san, there is a super slim chance they will agree to help us.

Sometimes our champion is the President of the organisation. As we know, corporate life can be brutal and suddenly your President champion is out of the organisation. This has happened to me a couple of times recently. One was through a merger and the conquering acquirer ditched my guy, to put in their own guy. In another case, I happened to see a LinkedIn post where a mutual friend was congratulating my champion on his new venture. New venture? What new venture? I discovered he had quit the company and was now doing his own thing. That happened very fast. A third President, who had been very, very effective in his role and a great client, was suddenly gone. I still don't know why, but my champion has been pushed out. We need to keep a close eye on our champions!

All of this presupposes we are well organised. We need to keep checking on the internal transfer plans for our champion and also to take action immediately we know they are leaving to be able to track the arrival of their replacement and find out the new name. We need to keep up a regular contact with our President champion, because there are no guarantees of corporate loyalty or longevity anymore. None of this guarantees anything, but it is a lot better than trying to batter down the iron wall keeping us out. Sales is hard anywhere but Japan just adds that patina of difficulty which makes everything much harder here. Yes, it should be better, it should be different but it isn't. We have to adapt and be both agile and nimble.

I have a couple of very good books here at home on how to create your visuals for the slide deck. The layout clearly does make a big difference to the quality of the message. If you ever doubt this, take a look at most Japanese business presentations. The slide will usually be amazingly overcrowded and dense to a degree you cannot comprehend in a traditional culture, which has embraced zen simplicity at its highest levels. Four or five slides worth of content will be crammed on to one slide and the messages feel like they snapping at each other for our attention, like small dogs nipping at your heels.

Occasionally, here in Japan, you do see a professional job on the visual side of the presentation. In my experience, this is usually the case of a foreigner giving their presentation. The counterpoint from some Japanese to this exemplary effort is to tell me that okay for foreigners but "we Japanese have own way" of doing presentations. This nationalistic anachronism is basically crap and what I see as a pathetic exercise in justifying the unjustifiable.

"Whoa Greg! Mate, you are going a bit hard there on the Japanese aren't you?". Trust me after living here for 38 years and having seen hundreds of Japanese presentations in business, I feel my scepticism is warranted. Message clarity is message clarity. No amount of nationalistic posturing and excuse making will overcome the basic fact that you cannot have four different fonts and five colours on a massively overcrowded screen and expect that your principal message will be getting through. You might think I am kidding about multi-font and multi-colour slides, but I am merely capturing what we see here from some Japanese business presenters.

Okay, Japanese presenters are not the only ones who do crazy stuff on screen and I have certainly coached Western executives to change the way they present, to make it more clear and powerful. The point is what we put up on screen should be clear and easy to digest. I believe if the audience cannot get the key message on screen in two seconds, then the content is too complex and needs to be simplified. This has always been my motto. Today, thanks to social media, the attention span of people has radically shortened and the time on screen equation has gotten even tighter, than say ten years ago. For all of us, the pressure is really on to improve our communication ability, regardless of nationality

Another trap with visuals is making them too good. That sounds counter-intuitive I know and there are plenty of authors doing well by teaching us how to pimp our slides. What I mean is we can suffer the opposite problem of the dismal slide effort and have something that is so attractive, it cuts us out of the limelight. Never forget, our face rather than the screen is the most valuable real estate during a presentation.

Using our facial expression is one of the most effective tools we have. Think back to stage plays you have seen where the character is using their face to communicate an emotion or a thought on a bare stage with a simple set. Their face can transmit so many ideas, emotions and thoughts and do it in nano seconds. A quizzical look, scowl, grin, sneer, smile, puzzlement, triumph, loss are all facial expressions at our disposal as speakers, to be matched with our words and then add on our gestures to create a powerhouse of communication.

Presenting gets a bit harder when the venue is quite big and there are two enormous screens up high behind us, competing with us. The sheer size of the images dwarfs us on stage and we shrink in importance. If we are ever in that situation, then we have to really work hard to counter the competition we are getting from the visuals. We need the audience to stay with us. We don't want them ignoring us because they are captivated by visuals which are overpowering the speaker.

In these situations, we have to amp up our voice and gestures to keep the audience with us. By using pauses, we can tap into pattern interrupt psychology, to force the listeners to refocus on us and what we are saying. When the visuals are super attractive, we can easily become some annoying white noise going on in the background, while the audience is fascinated by the visual images being presented. When we stop speaking, the listeners get their fill of the visual image and are then looking for the next round of stimulation. That stimulation has to be focused on what we are saying.

We should definitely use this if we are playing video during the presentation. Most video is off the mark anyway, being produced by the PR department to fit across a general need, rather than the specific needs of the topic we are speaking on. Sometimes the visuals can be very attractive in the video however and the audience can get engrossed by the action and images. The danger is we are the next item and we are boring, nowhere near as attractive as the models in the video and a bit dull visually compared to what has just been presented.

This is why as the speaker we should inject a longish pause after the video, rather than just carrying straight on. By doing this we create some space and distance between what they saw on screen and they have some time to adjust to us back in the room. They are also anticipating what we will say next, because we haven't started speaking immediately and there is a slightly disconcerting pause in place. Fifteen seconds is a long pause and it will be a very valuable fifteen seconds to get the audience to forget what they just saw and get them back concentrating on us.

"Never let the visuals dominate your presentation" should be the basic rule. They are a slave to our will and a tool at our disposal and that is all they are. Let's keep the power equation in our favour and always remain the centrepiece of the presentation. Our face, gestures and voice are more than up to the task, if we know what we are doing.

The raconteur is admired and the reason is because they are brimming with interesting stories, incidents, vignettes and amusing reflections. We don't need to be a gold medal winning raconteur to be a presenter, but we do need to borrow from their catalogue and start building up stories. I was listening to an interview with a rakugo professional. They make their living telling stories. They do this while sitting stationary on a big cushion dressed in kimono, employ only a fan as a prop and use their facial expressions, eye power, voice modulation, body language and delivery timing to captivate their audience. We have many fewer restrictions in what we are doing when presenting, but there is much to learn here.

They start by copying the stories of their master and then they bring their own flavour to the story once they have mastered it. We can do the same. When we read a biography of a famous person, we will find there are many interesting turning points, eureka moments and key incidents in their story, which we can use in our presentations as examples. The big difference is we have probably read these before, but without the mindset to capture them, note them down where they can be found and then to employ them.

Once we decide that we are going to employ more stories to make our points, we start to read and search with a different purpose. Generally, there are only a few topics on which we will give a public speech and so there is a defined world in which we can search for stories. If we think we have to read everything available and search for stories across a broad front, we will give up, because the task is overwhelming. We select the areas we will cover and then we think about where can we find stories on these topics.

Another way is to think about people who will resonate with the audience. If you think Steve Jobs is a likely example who people will pay attention to, then we search out what he had to say or what people have said about him and try and find relevant stories and examples we can use. There is no shortage of famous people we can draw upon, we just have to make simple list and then start.

There are plenty of speeches available on TED talks and on YouTube or on podcasts where we can locate content we can use. We can search from the content point of view or from the individual whom we think will have something worthwhile to say. There are thousands of blogs, articles and books on the subject we have chosen. The key is to absorb them with a viewpoint that we are looking for content we can use, rather than just absorbing the content for its own sake. We can do both of course and we should be doing both.

In our communities, there are bound to be people giving talks. We should attend these and see if they have any interesting examples or stories we can use. There is no shame in attributing the stories to the person you heard it from – no one marks you down for doing that because all they care about is do they get value from the story. Ripping off other people's stories and then manufacturing them as if they are your own cases is a very, very bad idea. Plagiarism of any variety shouts that you are an intellectual lightweight and pathetic thief. This is not a reputation building plus, so don't steal.

Remember, our reputation in the business world is all we have really. Lose that and life in business gets very hard, as no one will trust you or want to work with you. If you are so duplicitous as to steal someone's story material, then why would we see you as a reliable business partner? Well we won't and you don't have to do this anyway because there are tons of stories available. We will have our own home grown experiences and there will be plenty of these to draw on. What we usually lack is the ability to capture what happened and use it. Often things happen and we just keep moving forward and don't capture the detail so that we can use it later. Or if we do capture it, we can never find where we put it.

This requires a good record keeping system, with a robust filing and recall mechanism and also the discipline to look for good stories to capture in the first place. It means we have to be well organised. We don't exactly know which story we will need or just when, but if we can locate what we need, when we need it, then we are good to go. To get to that stage isn't that easy, but today there are digital records we can access from anywhere. I use Evernote on my phone to capture items I think will be useful for later. I can re-type it or photograph it, so the process becomes fast. I can download this content and move it around to file it, categorise it and find it later. I am sure there are many other apps for this purpose and that is the beauty of this age - we have few excuses for not being able to capture useful information.

How many stories do we need? Not that many because we don't get that many chances to give a public talk. As I mentioned the speech topics will probably be limited. When you combine few speaking opportunities with a limited range of topics, then the number of stories required becomes relatively small in number. If you said I need ten stories, that would be relatively easy to assemble over the period of a year. If you said one hundred, then that thought will probably have you zooming straight to the couch to lie down for a while and recuperate. Start small and capture them one on one and before you know it, you will be surprised with how many useful pieces you have assembled.

Don't Forget To Pause When Presenting

Nervousness drives speed when we are speaking. Without even realising it, the adrenaline pumping through our veins is speeding everything up. Once we get on a roll, it is hard to get off that speeding, runaway train. The speed may not always be driven by nerves though. Sometimes expertise can be our downfall. I was listening to a speaker being interviewed on a podcast and I was vaguely wondering why I was having trouble understanding what she was saying. It slowly dawned on me that she spoke for long passages, quite quickly, injected no pauses into her flow and she also had an accent when she spoke in English. That combo was a message killer. She was quite expert in her field, so she certainly had a lot to say and was confident to say it.

The content wasn't satisfying though. Why was that? She was making me work too hard to get her message. She had "message giver" consciousness but she didn't have any sense of the "message receiver" side of the equation. The podcast host just let her ramble on and that didn't help either. If he was a bit more experienced, he would have realised she needed to speak in segments, rather than in one long monologue. He could have helped her to package up her message into more bite sized pieces. Even without speaking fast and having no pauses, her message was going to be hard to grasp anyway, because she was providing a lot of content. This massive content hits us like continuous waves and each successive wave wipes out what came before it, so it is hard to internalise.

From this perspective, we realise that having a lot to say and a lot of knowledge doesn't mean anything in terms of message delivery, unless we know what we are doing. So whether it is nerves or knowledge, driving the problem, we need to give the audience the chance to chew a bit on what we just said. This is where the pause comes in. Once what we have said has sunk in, they are ready for the next section.

If we are to stop the runaway train, we have to inject some silence into the proceedings. This presumes we notice what is going on. I doubt our speaker on the podcast had any clue on how she was coming across. She was powering away, ignorant of whether the way she was delivering the talk was effective or not. Unless she recognises herself in this podcast of mine, she is probably still clueless and is likely to remain that way.

This is a big danger, because we can spend our whole career or big chunks of it doing things the wrong way. Most people around us are equally untrained, so who is there to give us the necessary feedback to be able to adjust and fix the issue? Usually there is no one around, so off we go, year after year, repeating the same fault.

It doesn't matter whether we are speaking, answering questions on a panel or in a podcast, we have to be in control of the delivery. We need to break our talk up into small packages for delivery and we need some "white space" between them. The pauses are usually not overly dramatic and long. A five second pause sounds entirely normal and unremarkable. Ten seconds or more however and the audience wonders what is going on. Have we forgotten what we want to say or are we lost in our flow, is there something wrong?

On occasion, we may use that doubt and employ a long pause for dramatic effect.

If we feel we are losing the attention of or concentration from our audience and we see they are getting distracted, we need to get them back to listening to us. A longer pause has the effect of a pattern interrupt and those who have tuned us out, thinking about something else, become puzzled by the change. This pattern interrupt forces them to come back to us to find out what is going on. Or we may use the longer pause to let a rhetorical question hang in the air for longer than normal. This creates some tension in the room because there is now a question as to whether we the audience, have to come up with the answer or whether the speaker is going to answer that question. This tension is very useful for keeping the audience's attention focused on our talk.

Soundbites, followed by pauses, may be useful for media interviews, but they don't work well in speeches. We need to make sure we have enough substance to our points, to back up any statements we may be making. So the balance between speaking and non-speaking periods needs to be considered. We can inject short pauses for audience comprehension purposes and still keep the flow going.

Don't forget to pause when you are delivering your talk. If you do, then you can be much more confident that the message you want to get across will be percolating away nicely in the brains of the audience.

"Man, it feels hot in here. My throat is parched. My hands are sweating and butterflies have taken over my stomach". These are some typical symptoms of nervousness about getting up in front of hundreds of sceptical, beady eyed people looking up and boring a hole into us as the speaker at the event. We are concerned about whether what we are going to say is going to be well received or not. Our voice may waver a bit when we first start because of that nervousness and now we feel even added pressure, because this isn't going so well.

What we are doing is digging a hole for ourselves to bury this speech, as an example of one of the dismal efforts by speakers who have little idea of what they are doing. The focus is on us. I saw this speaker from the USA, at a Chamber of Commerce event just have a meltdown because she was so nervous. Tall, well-coiffed, suited and booted, she looked the money. She was using slides and she started well. However, it soon became obvious that she had tried to memorise what she wanted to say, as she went through the slides.

Memorisation puts enormous additional pressure on the speaker, in fact, way too much pressure and sure enough she cracked. Suddenly she announced, "I need to take a breath". Okay, we forgave her that one. But two minutes later she stopped again for another breath. Her credibility along with her message, just sailed out the window.

The whole affair was her focused on her. This is the issue with nervousness – we are the focus and not the audience. So many conversations are going on in our head, all centered on ourselves and what we are doing and how we are doing it. This is natural and nothing unusual. The point is to get beyond that self-focus. How do we do that?

A good starting point is to not try and memorise what you are going to say. Our American lady could have just spoken to the slides. You have to know your material, so this isn't a big demand really. You know what you need to say, so just say it as each slide comes up.

The other key is rehearsal. She was giving this talk for the first time. She was practising on us, the audience and that is an extremely bad idea. We don't rehearse because we have sucked up all the preparation time on getting the slides together. If she had rehearsed, she would have been more comfortable with the content for each slide and she could have switched the focus from herself to the audience.

The other key point is only we know what we are going to say. If we depart from our rehearsal content regarding comments on a certain slide, only we know that. If we carry on regardless, no one will notice and they will just accept this is what we wanted to say. Telling the audience "I need to take a breath" is an admission of defeat, lack of preparation and the self-induced collapse of professionalism.

I was giving a closing talk at the end of a convention and even though I had practiced this talk fifteen times, I still had trouble. For some unknown reason, in the moment of delivery I decided to go to point four and skipped point three. Now I kicked myself and had a short internal conversation, "you idiot, you skipped three". I didn't declare this to the audience. I just placed point three after point four and charged on as if it was all part of the grand plan and there was nothing amiss, nothing to see here. Only I knew I had mixed up the order and that is the important part. If things awry, keep it to yourself, because there is a microscopically slim chance the audience will ever notice.

Once we can get over our self-focus, we can really start working on our audience. We bring the big three to bear in them – our voice, eyes and gestures. Voice modulation keeps people with us. It also allows us to select certain key words for more emphasis, by either adding or subtracting volume – both work. A secret whisper is just as effective as a stentorian outburst.

When we add to the voice with our eye contact with members of the audience, that makes the message so much more individual and powerful. I don't mean trying to take in the whole audience at one time with eye contact. I mean to zoom in on one person at a time, for about six seconds. They idea is to use both of our eyes to focus on just one point of concentration and that is only one of the eyes of that audience member. If we keep this single gaze for too long, the pressure is too great, so after around six seconds we need to move our eye contact to another audience member. Here is a funny thing. In a big crowd, the twenty people down the back sitting around that one person we have selected, will all feel we are talking directly to them.

So we are using our voice and eye contact for bolstering our message and then we add in gestures. We don't point our finger at people, as that is too aggressive and seems almost accusatory. We open the hand up and turn the palm upward, as we indicate to that person sitting there in the audience quietly minding their own business. Why palm up? This is an indicator from prehistoric days of "I come bearing no hidden weapons. I come in peace and you can relax". When we hit them with voice, eye contact and a gesture like this we have their undivided attention for our message.

We have moved the focus off ourselves and how nervous we are feeling, to actively engage with the whole audience – one person at a time. We transport ourselves from a focus on "me" to "you" and we will be so much more effective as a communicator when we make that transition.

What do we bring to our presentations? Usually we have two things – information and a point of view. For a lot of presentations, the information element becomes a data dump. This is very boring and tedious for the most part. The issue should always be "okay, what does this information mean and what does it mean for the audience?". We should always try and break numbers down to word pictures because once we get into big numbers the level of abstraction goes through the roof. For example, for you, what exactly is a billion or a trillion of anything? It is very hard to understand that many zeros. This requires some level of interpretation and once we get into interpretation, we get into debate.

Having a point of view is the other pillar of talks. We want our audience to do something, think something or feel something. We believe something to be true and we want to alert our audience to this valuable morsel of wisdom. As soon as we start venturing down this path, we trigger a degree of debate in the minds of the listeners. Their experience may be different or missing. They may even have different information, data or "alternate facts", the latter otherwise known as errors and falsehoods.

Whether we are pouring on the data and then adding an interpretation or elucidating our point of view, there is a good chance that when we get to the Q&A component of the talk, we will flag some opposition to what we have said. I am often surprised, listening to the Q&A for my own talks or those for others, how often the questioner has missed the point or misinterpreted what was just said by the speaker. Obviously if they have misunderstood what we are saying we have to correct them. This is where we can bridge into argument with some members of our audience. How should we approach this?

If you are strong in your advice and opinion and then just roll over at the first whiff of opposition to what you say, the listeners conclude you are a flake and don't believe what you are promulgating. So you cannot ignore or agree with what was said, if it contradicts your line of argument. You have to stand your ground and back up your assertions. The problem becomes where is the line between an assertion and an attack on the questioner.

There are two levels here. What we say and how we say it. The worst outcome is when we become spontaneous and engage our mouth, before we turn on the brain completely. Blurting out a response, especially an emotional response, to someone questioning what we have said is bound to end in a trainwreck of our reputation. This is easier than you think. You are isolated, standing on stage and everyone is looking at you and you hear the sound of that incoming heat seeking missile aimed at you and what you have said. We can take the comments personally and feel we have defend our good name and off we go on the counterattack. This is definitely one approach to avoid.

Instead, we should use a trigger in the form of a cushion, to break the mouth-brain cycle and reverse the order. A cushion is an anodyne statement which will not prove or disprove what they said and being rather neutral, won't inflame the situation. An example would be, "That is a point we should explore a bit further". In the few seconds we take to make that statement we switch gears to engage the brain about how best to answer the question/attack from the listener. A considered answer is always the preferred methodology for speakers and sometimes we just need to buy some time to move from our emotional state to a more logical construct.

Now we are better armed to answer the point. The key is to not debate them. We do not want the proceedings to derail into a dialogue between the speaker and one member of the audience and allow everyone else to leap for their phones, during this boring, self-indulgent interlude in the talk. There are other people waiting with their own questions and we have a hard stop for the talk. We must keep within that time frame or we risk upsetting everyone in the audience, if we make them late by going over our allotted time. They don't blame the questioner – they blame us.

We should answer their question or complaint to the best of our ability and then seamlessly and velvet like, glide into the next question by saying, "who has the next question?". In my view, we should never ask the person with an opposing opinion, "Does that answer your question?". Some people who teach presentations skills disagree and believe we should take this high road to show how balanced we are. I wonder how many public talks they have given, rather than just teaching presentations skills? In my experience, all you are doing is opening a can of worms and the debate rapidly spins out of control into an argument.

If we have a questioner with an agenda, they won't let go so easily and may try to chime in before we move to another question. They will demand we debate them on their enquiry. This is bad form, cringe worthy and drives up the tension gauge in the room, but that doesn't stop some people. This is when we hit them with "Thank you. I see you are passionate about this topic and in order to give others a chance to ask their questions, shall we continue this discussion together after the talk? I am happy to stay on after the event has finished". They have nowhere to go with this clever volley return.

We should back up what we are saying and try to defend our point of view, but not let the presentation slip into a slugfest of contrasting opinions. We are the speaker, so it is up to us to control the flow and the architecture of the talk. Audience members are under no such restrictions and can do whatever they like. We can debate the point, but we should always avoid lapsing into argument. This is the sign of the amateur when presenting, because they don't know how to control the street fight, which can be thinly disguised as the Q&A.

Normally a talk for a business audience will be around 40 minutes long. That seems a lot until you start putting the talk together and you always feel you don't have enough time to include all of the cool information and stories you have at your disposal. The absolutely wrong way to start is to harvest slides from previous presentations and then start cobbling together all of the visual pieces and make that the talk. Why? The format for a presentation has various cadences and we need to master each stage. That requires planning and rehearsal. I would guess 99% of business talks are given once - on that day, to that live audience. What that means is that the talk wasn't refined through rehearsal to make it sparkle and for it to fit perfectly into the time allowed. Businesspeople buy bespoke clothing and shoes, because they want these items to fit perfectly and we should apply the same logic to making our talk fit perfectly for our audience.

The start and end are two specific cadences with clear purposes and so are easy to understand. ADD or Attention Deficit Disorder is now a global pandemic infecting all of our business audiences. That is why the opening has to break through that attention deficit problem and grab everyone's attention. The process starts from the moment we arrive before the audience, to check all the tech is working and to start engaging with the listeners as they enter the room. We want to build a personal connection, which will make it more likely they will actually pay attention to us when we start.

It also continues the moment we are being introduced. Often there is a lunch before our talk and we are placed on the table with all of the big shots. I don't recommend getting up from the table and walking to the stage. As soon as the MC begins our introduction, we should stand up and off to the side, so that we are clearly visible to everyone right from the start. This gives the audience the chance to look us up and down and get through that initial judgement they make on how we are dressed and how professional we look. It also makes it smoother and quicker to mount the stage when it is time to start.

We get straight into the opening, using our blockbuster statement to grab attention, to tantalise the listeners with what is to come and then we can introduce ourselves and thank the organisers. Preferably someone else is switching the slide decks over or getting ours slides up. We don't want be distracted from focusing on our audience, especially at the start, when all of those first impressions are being created. This standing up, getting on stage and getting started takes around five minutes and we try and break the forty minutes into eight five minute blocks. Our talk has been rehearsed, so we know exactly how long each section takes.

We are doing all of the talking and that can be tiring for an audience to sit there and listen to us blabbing away. We need to have it planned such that we switch up the action roughly every five minutes. This is using what is called a "pattern interrupt", so that the listeners are not getting what they expected. Expectation in audiences can lead to them day dreaming and leaving us, as their thoughts take over. They stop taking in what we are saying or even worse, they are now looking at their phones. We might use a great visual we have selected or we might change our energy during the delivery. Classical music has it cadences from highs to lows to highs, to make sure we don't get bored listening to it. Our talk can copy this idea. Maybe we drop our voice down to a conspiratorial whisper or we raise it to stentorian heights – it doesn't matter, because the point is to use our energy to create a change, which adds interest to what is going on. We don't want to be predictable, because this is when attention will stray on the part of the audience.

The end cadence is actually split into two parts – before the Q&A and after the Q&A. We can use a summary of our key points or a call to take action and man the barricades. We need to put a bow on this talk and draw the whole apparatus together so that the main message remains the message the audience retains. We switch over to Q&A, which invariably will take the whole talk off track and there is no way of controlling that. What we need to do though is to repeat our summary or call to action. We must monopolise the messaging after the Q&A, for that audience and make sure they get what we want them to get.

Naturally the talk won't fit into precise five minute segments, but the key is regularly change the content, the energy, the delivery, the flow so that we keep a stranglehold on the attention of the audience and no phones are being surreptitiously engaged instead concentrating of us. There is no doubt that this outbreak of ADD, combined with the mobile phone, has made our task as speakers, so much more complex and fraught. We can rage against the inequities, or we can adjust what we are doing to overcome these challenges.

We have a talk coming up which we have to give to a business audience and we work hard on the preparation. We make sure that we don't suck up all of the time though, with preparing the slide deck and forget to do our rehearsal. This run through of the talk before we give it live, is a key component of getting our timing right and our cadence flowing. This makes us easy to follow for the listeners and allows the talk to move seamlessly through the different chapters of the content.

We arrive early to the venue and start interacting with our audience as they arrive. We try and meet as many people as possible and build that powerful personal connection. We ask them why they chose to attend, what are they doing at the moment, what are they interested in, etc. As the speaker we want to try and demolish that invisible wall separating us from the attendees. We are trying to form a collective, where we are all members together, trying to locate pertinent answers to business conundrums we are all facing. Their feedback is also useful for us to further refine the delivery of the talk to include some issues they have raised.

Everyone is naturally totally preoccupied with themselves and their problems, so we need a blockbuster opening to grab everyone's attention from the start. At the end, we wrap it up with a sharp summary or a call to action, such that our words are still ringing in their ears, as they wind their way out of the venue. All the technical aspects of the talk need to be in place.

We can't be satisfied with this though. We need to be aiming to strongly engage our audience during our talk. Sounds easy. However, think back and consider how many speakers you have sat through, who managed to really engage their audiences? I am guessing very few or certainly not enough. Why is that the case? We would expect that this engagement process would be a big part of the speaker's efforts to sell their message.

We want to get the audience on our side and we want to establish rapport and build trust, so they buy what we are saying. The problem is often the speaker has a misconception of their role. They think they are there to pile on the information, data, statistics, evidence, etc., and if they do that, then they will be successful as a presenter.

The problem with this approach is it can be very dry, boring and painful to sit through. Reeling off numbers is a favourite but often it is an abstraction. We leave the listeners to do all of the hard work to connect these numbers to their individual realities. For example, I could note that Government figures talk about the number of Japanese aged 15-34 having halved over the last twenty years and that they will halve again by 2060. Now this is a very abstract idea and useful to a point, but what are the audience members supposed to do with those numbers?

Instead, I could reference those same numbers and then add, "So what does this mean for all of us in this room?" This is a nice framing exercise to stimulate everyone to start thinking about how to connect the data to their own situation. We could then go on to add, "basically the data shows we are running out of young Japanese to hire for our firms and we are heading into a zero sum game headwind of winners and losers in recruiting staff. Which one are you planning for, to be a winner or a loser, in this war for talent?". Now I have successfully connected the numbers with a real business problem, they are all either facing now or will face in the future, regardless of their industry or the age and stage of their business.

I could take it even further and start adding in a story from my own experience to really drive home the point and make a common cause with my audience. After telling them the numbers and asking about whether they will be winner or losers, I could relate a relevant anecdote.

I could say, "As I stand here, I reflect on this for myself. Ten years ago, I would have a nice thick pile of resumes on my desk to sort through and plenty of options about who to choose for my new staff. Each year however, I started to notice that the size of that pile of resumes was getting smaller and smaller and so were my options. I also noticed that the candidates seem to be gaining a lot more choices about accepting offers. They were becoming pickier and pickier about who they would choose to join. It has become harder than ever to actually recruit staff. I am sure I am not the only one here to have this experience, which just underlines that we have to switch our thinking about recruiting and retaining staff".

Even if they hadn't personally been in a position of responsibility to recruit staff, everyone in the room can get the point. It makes the statistics come alive as a real business problem we are all facing, as the Japanese population continues its unstoppable decline. They are going to be sitting there contemplating the ramifications for their own firm.

We can use a combination of pointed questions to drive the audience to react to a problem or a topic and also add in stories, which further highlight the issues. Questions are powerful, particularly rhetorical questions, for which we don't expect an answer. They are useful in order to direct the listener's attention to a problem we want to highlight and engage their problem-solving thought processes.

When using storytelling, personal stories are best. Within the personal story group, disaster stories are the top of the tree for effectiveness. If I said, "let me tell you how we increased our revenues by 300%", that will not be as interesting to an audience as if I said, "let me tell you why we saw revenues drop by 300%". We are geared up for lessons to avoid mistakes and we love a good train wreck story, so that we don't repeat that same misfortune ourselves.

Ideally, we would have a train wreck story and a salvation story of how we turned things around. That makes for a brilliant combination and the audience will be all ears to discover the solution, so that they can learn from it too. The key is to translate the data into issues they will be facing and to make our story delivery as personal as possible. If that isn't necessarily available, then referencing third party examples and what happened will also work.

By doing some simple adjustments to our talk, we can elevate if from a remote topic, which is pretty boring, to a theme of hot interest and relevance. The key is to start from a point of view of how can I find a connector to my audience's interest, which will engage them, such that they want to hear more from me. In this way, we can become very effective in building up our personal and professional brands.

The beauty of being the presenter is that for the majority of the time we are dominant, the lord or mistress of all we survey, we are the big shot. We can craft the speech anyway we wish and deliver it as we see fit. We control the content, the pacing, the delivery, the engagement with the audience. Things can a sudden turn for the worse though, when we utter these fateful words, "We have 20 minutes for Q&A and who has the first question?". Suddenly we have entered the world of the bare-knuckle street fight, with no rules and no quarter given. The audience members can say whatever they like and we cannot control them.

Knowing that we can go from hero to zero in record time if we make a mess of the Q&A, are we taking it seriously enough? I was reminded of the importance of preparation recently. My son had a job interview to complete and the amount of preparation he did was impressive. He did a thorough analysis of what he would bring to the firm and he came up with about twenty questions he anticipated they would ask him. He enlisted me to be his training partner on numerous occasions and ask the questions and then pass on my feedback. By the time he got to the interview he was fully prepared and even then they asked him questions he wasn't anticipating and had to deal with them on the fly.

I was reflecting on this and comparing with what I usually do when I prepare my talks. I plan the talks very thoroughly and I do rehearse them, but I realised I was a bit light on my preparation for the Q&A. "Once over lightly" would be a good descriptor. This is a bit curious though because in a public talk we are launching forth with our personal and professional brands and putting our goods out there for all to see. Normally I do list up what I think will be the most likely questions and then that is it. I don't spend any time constructing my answers, as I rely on my knowledge of the subject and my presentation skills to enable me to handle whatever comes at me. I have fallen into the Comfort Zone trap of making "being good" the enemy of "being great".

I have seen speakers destroyed by questions they couldn't handle. They were doing so well up until the Q&A exposed a weakness in their professional capability and it shone a light on their credibility, bringing it into question. I haven't suffered that ignominy as yet, but maybe that has just been a lucky run? When we do practice our question handling with a partner we have to be very careful how we do that. Most people are not very skilled at this stuff and their advice can sometimes be harmful or demotivating. We need to project confidence and being fully prepared for the main talk and the Q&A will help with that aim. We also need to prepare our partner by asking them to give us very specific feedback. We want to know (a) what we did well and (b) how could we make it even better.

As much as we may do this, the first response of most people is to start weighing in with their critique of what we didn't do well. This is where we need to introduce some discipline. The moment they start to criticise you, politely stop them and then redirect them to follow your original guidelines and tell you the good/better answer you are seeking. Looking backwards is no help and we need to project forward and determine our future state, rather than having someone drag us backwards to a place we cannot change.

The other issue with preparation is to not sound robotic or too prepared. Our delivery should be conversational and seemingly spontaneous. It isn't spontaneous in the least because we have drilled the answers thoroughly but we don't want to come across like that. When we are asked the question, do not nod your head as if you are agreeing with the speaker. We can do this unconsciously, trying to be affable. We don't know what they will ask, so we don't want to be seen nodding to a very combustible question, as if we agree with it, so let's have no head nodding while we listen carefully to what they are saying.

Many speakers then give the entire answer to the questioner and keep their focus on the one person. Instead, we spend the first six seconds of our answer giving them eye contact and then we switch our gaze and start giving six seconds of eye contact to others in the audience. We want to be inclusive so let's use the baseball diamond method of six pockets - left, center and right field, as well as inner field and outer field. Naturally we don't spread our eye contact around in a geometric pattern which is predictable. We mix it up and we catch people unawares as we address the answer to as many members of the audience as we can. In this way we can engage the entire audience with our answer and we try to deliver it in a casual, relaxed "good bedside manner".