The Presentations Japan Series

"Urgent – we need help" is the type of text message you love as a training company. It means the "why now?", part of the question has a train wreck answer that you can fix. In this case and in many similar cases, it is not the big bosses getting difficult or disgruntled clients acting up. It is a grass roots rebellion against colleagues who are clueless when presenting. At a certain point, the lack of professionalism becomes a restraint on the forward momentum of the organisation.

The road is rocky though for the presenter. There may be resistance from guerrilla groups who feel threatened if others start to make progress leaving them forlorn and exposed. I remember going on stage after one of my colleagues, who had given his presentation to the entire firm. It was a dud and he knew it. There was no excitement and his messaging fell on stony ground. I was an experienced speaker and presenter by that stage and I knew how to rock an audience. I heard later that my persuasion free zone colleague was telling anyone who would listen after my presentation, that I was "all style and no substance". It was a clever putdown, because it sort of sounds smart. This is the type of nonsense you may have to put up with from nobodies who are threatened by your professionalism. It is better to suffer this invective though, than to stay hopeless and be just like them - a dud when it comes to persuasion power.

The message I received was a case of rebellion. With many retail operations there are seasonal changes of the product line-up and the marketing department have to infect the salespeople with passion for the brand's latest offerings. When the marketing department presentations are as a dull as dishwater and are failing in the persuasion stakes, then sales suffer. The salespeople go on silent strike. They are not motivated to move sales, because they don't believe in the selections. The marketing department presenters didn't engage their internal audience. They didn't use storytelling to fire up content for the salespeople to use with buyer. They didn't persuade their listeners to trust their marketing expertise.

Bosses have an uncanny ability to spot trouble early and realise that the next season's results are not going to make the targets, because the enthusiasm for the seasonal selections isn't inspiring much confidence in those who have to move the merchandise. Hence the panic message to come and fix this issue.

Marketing departments, R&D centers, and middle management are the groups most often required to have persuasion power. When they are not trained they are under powered for the task. This has a flow on effect and the full potentiality of the organisation's messaging capability isn't being maximised.

When presentation training is invested in, it has the immediate impact of fixing the problem at hand, but it has other effects as well. If we are all watching skilled presentations by our internal colleagues, it says a lot about the professionism of the organisation, boosts our esprit de corps and builds our pride in ourselves, to belong to such an organisation. These skills spill outside the firm and show up when we meet clients and give them presentations which persuade and lead to increased sales. When we representing the organisation in a public setting at say an industry event, other groups note that we are doing a professional job and then they extend kudos to the rest of the entire organisation. If we see you are a dud, we assume everyone is a dud. If you are a star, we think they are all stars over there.

Salespeople are like water – they are always looking for the path of least resistance. If the firm relies on them to sell the range of goods selected by someone else, then that internal presentation has to be professional and convincing. In the case of this client, we have known them for a number of years and could have done the training much earlier, but there was no appetite for it. Often the time and money combination conspire to stop bosses taking action until it is almost too late. This is the tension between the "urgent and important" time management quadrant and the "not urgent, but important" quadrant.

These types of fundamental skills are not urgent but important and need to be raised up the hierarchy of priorities for the firm in order to head off trouble before it can ever arise. Who wouldn't want to work in an organisation where everyone was professional and persuasive when making their report or recommendations.

As speakers we have a tremendous amount of things to concentrate on when presenting. Is my speaking speed at the right cadence? Am I being clear with what I am saying? Are the audience able to follow the navigation of my slide deck? Am I losing attention to the wiles of the mobile phone, as people escape from me to the internet? We can all have a lot of considerations buzzing around inside our brains. These considerations are all directed to ourselves. Our delivery of the message to the audience can get lost in all of this mental effort and consideration.

Let's assume the fundamentals have been completed. The audience analysis has clarified at what complexity level we should deliver our talk. We have planned a blockbuster opening to seize the audience's attention away from all of the competing distractions for our message. We are providing evidence and proof to back up what we are saying, in this disgruntled, newly cynical world of "fake news" phobia. We have cleverly designed two closes, one for after the main body of the talk and the other for after the last of the enquiries in the Q&A. We want to dominate proceedings and ensure we control the last thing the audience hears, rather than the content of some random offering which was totally off topic. Most importantly, we have not spent the majority of our preparation time jostling one slide with another to build the deck. Rather we have been rehearsing our talk to ensure we have it within the time limit and that we have the right structure and flow for the presentation. We have pre-prepared possible answers for the most likely questions we can anticipate, so that we are never caught off guard.

With all of this in the bag we are ready to rumble with the delivery. Many technically oriented speakers believe that the delivery is trumped by the high value of their content. They have written themselves a "Get Out Of Jail" card for this component, to excuse their lack of skills in this area. Delusion reigns. If you are droning on in a monotone, saying "um" and "ah" every five seconds and generally demonstrating no enthusiasm whatsoever for your topic, then no matter how brilliant the content, many in the audience will simply escape to the internet to get away from you.

Here are six points of persuasion for your delivery, which will ensure the audience stay their hands and don't lunge for their phones as soon as you start speaking. To help us recall all of them, we will move from head to toe as a simple memory trick, so that we don't forget them.

Eyes

Eye contact is powerful and totally underused by most speakers. If you fear your audience, making eye contact with them is terrifying. If you have followed the fundamentals outlined earlier, your fear will diminish and you can get on with the business of engaging your listeners. Our rule is 6x6. We want to look deep into the eyes of our audience members one by one and hold their direct gaze for around six seconds. Less than that and there is little engagement. More than that and it becomes intrusive. Here is a little trick. In a big audience, when you select one person in the crowd to engage with, at a certain distance the twenty people sitting around them all believe you are looking at them. It is also hard to look at two objects simultaneously, so focus on just one eye of the audience member and talk directly to them for six seconds. Mentally divide the audience into a baseball diamond, so that you have the inner and outer fields, left, center and right fields. This gives us six sectors to engage with at random, to make sure we are covering the entire venue and not favouring those closest to us rather than those at the rear or those on our left side over those on the right.

Face

The slide deck mustn't dominate that most powerful illuminator of ideas – our facial expressions. However, many speakers have one facial expression throughout, regardless of the content of what they are saying. We want to perfectly match what we are saying with how we are saying it. If it is good news look happy, if it is bad news look serious, if it is puzzling, look curious, etc. Professor Albert Mehrabian's research showed that when we are incongruent between content and delivery, our audience becomes distracted from our message.

Voice

Voice modulation provides contrast and variety, which are important elements to keep our listeners with us until the very end. An audible, conspiratorial whisper is just as powerful a message communicator as a stentorian outburst. All loud or all soft are the attention decimators we need to avoid. Mix it up and go for variety.

Gestures

Holding the same hand position for longer than 15 seconds, saps all the power from it and it just becomes annoying. The faucet idea of "turn it on, turn it off", is the right metaphor for how we should be thinking about gestures. Combining gestures with our eye contact, facial expression and voice power can really project our words and phrases into the minds of our audience.

Pauses

We need small breaks to allow our audience to digest what we have said, rather than snowballing them with the next offering, until they cannot remember what we said five minutes ago. Pauses help us to control our delivery speed too, so that we are not rushing through the content.

Stance

Standing with our weight split 50/50 across our legs always looks professional. Don't slouch, stand up tall and straight.

These six delivery reminders will ensure your message is received clearly. We go to so much effort to prepare our talks and so much stress to deliver it, then it will be a total waste if our message is not getting through.

The Japanese idea of Shu-Ha-Ri is a combination of three characters – 守破離. I first came across this concept when I was living in Australia and studying karate there. It is a very typical concept in all traditional arts in Japan. Each character has a separate meaning, so they don't make up a compound word, as is often common with Japanese phrases. The idea represents a learning journey. Shu is to protect the traditional techniques, the basics, the fundamentals. Ha is to detach and break away from the tradition, to innovate and depart from our attachments to what we are doing. Ri is to transcend to a level where there is no self-consciousness of what we are doing, we make it our own, because we have absorbed it all and it is now part of us.

This is very much the journey of the presenter. I was reminded of this the other day when I was giving a talk to a Tokyo American Club audience. I was the guest speaker and I chose as my topic the Six Impact Points Of Persuasion. One of those six points was on the use of gestures. In the Q&A, one of the audience members asked me if I was using gestures during my talk with conscious thought or whether they were just happening naturally. Actually, I had never thought about that and I realised these were unconscious acts driven by the content of what I was saying and by my delivery skills as a presenter. I was in a mental state of Ri, in the Shu-Ha-Ri format.

For most businesspeople this is a very hard stage to reach. They often get only a few opportunities a year to speak. Unfortunately, they usually do no rehearsal and only deliver that talk once in their lives. Also, they get no coaching on how to make their next talk even better. Even if there are only a few chances to stand up in front of an audience, we can get to work improving trying to move to the next stage. It may be that stage one – Shu – could occupy us for a number of years, but as we say, the best time to start becoming excellent at presenting was yesterday and the second best time is today.

In this first stage of Shu, we need to consciously remind ourselves what we are supposed to be doing. We need to make sure we get our feet in the right position to make sure our body posture doesn't start excluding audience members, because we are only facing half the hall. We need to remember to look people in the eye when we speak, as opposed to letting our gaze wander aimlessly like a cloud over the whole audience and find we are paying no attention to anyone. We need to engage the audience and using direct eye contact is the best way to do that. We need to manufacture our gestures to match the content of our message and to hold them for no longer than 15 seconds so that the power doesn't disappear from the gesture. We have to get our face involved rather than letting it become wooded and that is actually a pretty hard habit to break. We have to remind ourselves not to slip into a monotone voice when presenting and make sure we have vocal variety and that we are not getting too fast.

As we get more chances to speak, we keep concentrating on these points, so that we make sure we are covering all the bases. At a certain point we start to internalise what we should be doing and have to expend less energy to keep checking what we are doing. We are getting into the Ha stage. We start to think of new things we could be doing. Perhaps we will move around the stage a bit and try and get closer to the audience. If it is a big stage, we want to move to the left and right extremes and try and connect with the members of our audience there. We are no longer worried about out foot position, because we are capable of re-setting our body so that we never eliminate half the audience from our gaze by looking off to only one direction. We become more comfortable with our gestures and they are not needing to be forced anymore and are occurring naturally. In fact, we might be getting more flamboyant and larger with our gestures to reap a bigger impact on the audience. We are getting better at being more focused on the audience, than on what we are doing.

In the final stage of Ri, we are not even conscious of all of these little building bricks we need to make the presentation a success. We are not even conscious of ourselves because we are now totally focused on the reaction of the audience and reading their thoughts about what we are saying, to see where we need to make some adjustments. We are now focused on what they like and what interests them. We start to get into a close embrace with our audience as we move them around, dancing to our tune. We are in sync with them and they with us, as we become one unit.

Next time you present, make a mental note about which stage you feel you are in. Start thinking about what you need to be doing to move along the journey to the next stage. When you break the process up, like this, it provides good insight into our progress and helps us to move forward.

Contemplating this title you may be thinking "I am not boring". You would be a rarity in business then, because think about how many interesting business presentations you have heard in your life to date. I would reckon you would have trouble counting them on one hand. If you believe you are not boring, then you are one of the elite amongst business presenters. Is that the case?

Why are so many businesspeople such duds as presenters? The answers are not hard to find. There is a basic miscalculation going on about content and delivery capabilities. The underlying mistake is thinking that if my content is really good, I don't have to be really good in delivering it. Once upon a time, information was hard to find and speakers could bring something fresh to their audience. Search engines have ended that monopoly on insights and data.

The other issue is audiences today are tough, tough, tough. Steve Jobs has ruined it for all of us. In 2007 he introduced a weapon of audience mass distraction called the iPhone. If we sound even vaguely boring, audiences abscond to their conduits to the internet and leave us behind, no longer listening to what we have to say. The Jobs era has overtaken the Mehrabian era.

Professor Albert Mehrabian did some research in the 1960s and found some disturbing trends regarding audience attention deficits. His research however has become some of the most misquoted and poorly understood in the modern era. His numbers are heralded and trumpeted far and wide, but usually totally out of context. He found three statistics which help us to identify the issues we face as presenters. If you ever hear any guru or pseudo guru telling you that presentations are broken up into brackets of 55%, 38% and 7% run for the hills yelling "fake news". They will explain that 55% of a presentation's messaging success is made up of how we are dressed and our appearance, 38% based on how we sound and 7% on what we have to say for ourselves.

What Mehrabian actually found was that these statistics only become relevant when what we are saying is incongruent with how we are saying it. What does that mean? I am sure you have seen this – the president is reporting the excellent results in a monotone voice, with a wooden face devoid of any expression, with zero body language. The delivery doesn't match the message and we get easily distracted. In the Mehrabian era, that meant getting focused on what the speaker was wearing or how their voice sounded and audiences were missing the messaging.

Today they are lunging for their app encrusted mobile phones to get to TikTok or their email or one of their other favourite social media platforms. Our message is out the window, often even if we are a highly polished, professional and engaging speaker. We have to do our best to reel the audience in to hear our message and we need to use some key leverage points to achieve that.

A monotone voice is guaranteed to have the audience flee from us, so we need to use voice modulation to create the variety we need to retain attention. We can elevate key words for the audience with either power or softness, using a type of conspiratorial whisper to grab attention. The key is in the variation and the link to volume control to raise the attention given to certain key phrases or words. Pauses are another voice control aspect which makes a big difference to how easy we make it for our listeners to follow what we are saying and for them to navigate our presentation.

To voice we add gestures to dramatize what we are saying. The coordination of strong gestures and sets of key phrases really lifts the message in the minds of our audience. The gestures tap into our body language and we can accentuate good and bad news accordingly. If we also add in direct eye contact with members of our audience, the effect is mesmerising and will stop them from reaching for Steve Job's speaker tool of attention destruction. They will stick with us right to the end and absorb the messages we are promoting and that is why we are giving these talks in the first place isn't it?

It seems ridiculous that such simple tools can lift us from speaker Death Valley oblivion to being listened to without distraction. Mehrabian gave us hints on Stage One of the Death Valley escape routes, but Steve Jobs threw down a much more formidable challenge as speakers. The numbers are more like 99% mobile phone competition and 1% message success today.

Being boring and incongruent isn't even the divide anymore. Interest isn't enough to escape the gravitational pull of the mobile phone. We have to be very effective, engaging and professional, in full command of all the tools at our disposal to vanquish the siren calls of the internet for our listeners. And you think your quality of information will restrain them from escaping? That is a massive delusion. Even worse, for the rest of our working lives, the situation will never improve for us as speakers. Time to face the reality.

As a presentations trainer, I can appreciate the difference between class participants when they cross that bridge and begin to display confidence when they are presenting. Nerves and fear drive most people when it comes to giving presentations and just telling them to "be confident" is actually ridiculous. If they could do it, they would, but basically they have no idea how to project confidence, when they are imploding through stress and fear. The focus is all on them and not on the audience and that is a big mistake.

Here are four building blocks to improve our confidence when speaking in public.

1. Self-Acceptance

The survival of the human species has in no small part been due to fear and hence taking necessary precautions. When our brain comprehends a dangerous or stressful situation about to occur, we don't wait around for that to unfold. Instead, we start pumping chemicals into our body, particularly adrenaline, to get ready for fighting our way out of trouble or for flight, as we take off and distance ourselves from the danger. We need to accept that this is entirely normal and that the flow of chemicals into the body is not controllable.

We also face mindset issues around whether I can do this successfully or not. Again, this is natural. If you said, "I am going to go out there and be a total train wreck", then there would be no fear, because we have set such a low marker for ourselves. Rather, we set a very high bar and sometimes that bar is set way too high. We need to be calibrating what we are doing here. If we say to ourselves that this is a journey as a presenter and today I am going to work on three things in my talk and not worry about trying to be perfect, then the pressure is rapidly reduced.

1. Self-Respect

When we see people highly skilled in a profession or activity, we respect them for their abilities and accomplishments. It is the same when we see a great speaker. What we can't see is their first presentation or their early days as a speaker, when they weren't so skilful. Our mindset shift has to be from lack to capability.

We have skills in many areas, but we conveniently forget that we built those skills up over time and we weren't complete at the start. We can go into our memory banks and draw on our history of achievement in various areas in our lives and assure ourselves that we can become skilled in this presenting arena too, just as we have done in other areas of our lives to date.

1. Take Risks

If we keep doing the same things, in the same way, we will keep getting the same old results. If we want to see some growth, some advance, then we need to make some changes. Einstein is credited with saying that doing the same things over and over again in the same way and expecting a different result is basically crazy. There will be one of two changes required. Either we tweak something that we have already been doing or we bring in something new. These both have risks attached to them.

To progress, we need to add new skills and abilities to our repertoire and this is what we have been doing our whole lives, so the idea is not strange. We don't have to start with something massively risky though. We can start small and build from there, as we become more comfortable with our presentations. Pick something which is a small risk and try it. Next analyse how that went and adjust for the next speaking chance. If we keep doing this, we grow our range of possibilities rapidly and dramatically.

1. Self-Talk

We have mentioned mindset and a great function of how we think is what we think about. In the early 20thCentury, psychologists discovered that we could change our situations in life by changing how we thought about them. Until then it was fate, luck, God's will, etc,. and we had no control over any of that. The idea that changing your thinking could change your life is a well accepted concept today and so we spend a lot of attention on our mindset.

What are we shovelling into our mind though? The media is a full of bad news, fake news, conspiracy theories, etc. We need to apply some strong filters to what we allow into our mind, if we want to become more confident and successful. Our own media – our self-talk - also must be harnessed and controlled.

"I can't" language needs to be switched to "I can". Just swapping the words though won't get us very far. We need to add some evidence. For example, "Because I have done the preparation I can do it", or " because I have done this before at a smaller scale, I can use that base to go bigger this time", are better approaches.

Confidence is a project for all of us. We can be super confident in some things and terrified in others. The focus on building our confidence in new areas like presenting are key and these four tools will definitely assist in that effort.

We have been asked to speak or we have punted a chance to speak to an audience. We will have a message in mind for the talk and we begin the process of constructing the talk. Unfortunately we are now in the era of short attention spans, "fake news", massive cynicism and intolerance. Contending philosophies and diverse experience has been tossed out the window in favour of tribal agreement and solidarity of interpretation. Cancel culture started on US varsity campuses as students began aggressively confronting Professors during lectures, if the students didn't agree with the content or view. As American politics has collapsed into a bi-modal equation of "us" versus "them", bi-partisanship has been quietly taken out the back and garrotted.

"A hundred flowers blooming and a thousand schools contending" isn't fashionable anymore, as foxholes are dug deeper and the sniping has become continuous. Where does this leave us as speakers? It is difficult enough to be a speaker today, without another layer of complexity. Every time we get on our feet to speak, we are putting ourselves up as targets and are exposing our personal and professional brands.

Business topics generally are pretty boring, so the degree of angst being generated isn't usually substantial. Nevertheless, there are land mine fields a plenty for us to stray into. Diversity, equity and inclusion generates attention around the configurations of the upper echelons of companies. Plastic waste entering the food chain demands changes in the amount of plastic being used and how it is disposed of. Floods alternating with droughts around the world and the disappearance of ice sheets at the poles, has attention focused on what companies are doing to battle climate change. Online hacking and broadcast of personal information and internet security in general, are urgent issues without solutions in sight. I could go on, but let me stop here to make the point that while most of what we say, we may think is harmless, we may be overly optimistic.

Captains of industry and the sub-captains are being scrutinised to an extent not seen before. Audiences are sensitised to their preferred expectations and requirements about how they think the world should be and how companies should conduct themselves. Next thing we pop up to give our talk and walk into any number of potential maelstroms. Are we skill set ready? Are we mentally prepared?

When presenting in business, unlike at some Universities, it is unlikely the audience will try to shout us down and deny us the opportunity to speak and be heard. Generally, hostilities and gun play are reserved for the Q&A. Once we open up for questions, we are now in a street fight, the defining aspect of which is that there are no rules. Audience members can say whatever they like, however unrelated or off-topic to what we were speaking about. They can be rude, arrogant, bullying, condescending and aggressive and there isn't anything we speakers can do about that.

If we are smart, we will have set the frame of the questions by delineating the time period for the Q&A. This is a critical move because if you ever have to get out of Dodge in a hurry, you can always say, "we have reached the end of our allotted time for today's talk and let me make some concluding remarks". We insert this little time control timebomb at the start to enable us to have a dignified exit if we are being bombarded with nasty questions and swept up in oceans of invective.

We can disarm a heat seeking missile thinly disguised as a question by paraphrasing what was asked. With any question time, it is a good practice to repeat the question so that those down the back can hear it. Well that is except for the attack question and we definitely do not want to repeat it. Instead, we paraphrase it to take the heat out of it. For example, if someone asked, "Isn't it true that you are going to fire 30% of the workforce in the next few weeks?", we can paraphrase this as "the question was about staffing". We still have to answer the question though, but we have successfully reduced some of the tension in the room and we come across as cool, calm and collected in the face of incoming hot rounds of fire.

The best plan is to give our answer and smoothly and swiftly move on to the next question by saying, "Who has the next questions?". Do not ask the hostile interlocutor if they are satisfied with your answer by saying, "does that satisfy your question?", because if it doesn't the brawl continues. If your antagonist won't be brushed off so easily and interjects during a follow-up question, denouncing you as a fraud and a charlatan for not properly answering their question the way they wanted it, we need to be careful what we say next.

We need to remember that we cannot win in a street fight with no rules, so we are better to break off hostilities with that person and just move on. We should say, "I appreciate you have strong views on this subject, so rather than occupy everyone's time right now, let's you and I get together after the talk and continue our debate". At which point we again say, "Who has the next question?" and keep moving forward.

If things don't get this fraught, but we still have a sizeable gap in views on a subject with one of our audience, we need to just acknowledge that and not try to "win the argument" because that is just not possible when we deal with zealots who are locked into their world view on a subject. We can say, "thank you for sharing your thoughts on this subject and I see we are a fair way apart on this topic, so let's just agree to disagree. Who has the next question?".

We cannot win in a public verbal brawl, so we are better to avoid it at all costs. The audience expects us to be professional all of the time and many of them will view the antagonist's activities as ridiculous. We cannot bring ourselves down to that level and so we must stay above the mud and the blood they want to embroil us in.

The date has been set for our presentation. Naturally, we are pretty busy with work, so we borrow that Toyota production line mantra of "Just In Time:" and leave it all to the last moment to cobble together our presentation. We rifle through our previous presentations, looking for slides we can repurpose for this topic, which of course is an excellent time saver. We just manage to get the deck together in time and off we go to the venue. Here we give the only rendition of this talk to our live audience. This is such a high risk high wire act, threatening both personal and professional brands, you shake your head as to why on earth someone would choose to do it this way.

Toyota makes great cars and they have pioneered many innovations in car production, but they are not the model we need for giving presentations. We need Aesop's fable here about the hare and the tortoise. The hare is so much faster than the tortoise, but in this fable the hare loses the race, because although the tortoise was slower they were more consistent and steady in making progress.

"We don't plan to fail, but we fail to plan" is an old saw we have all heard before and which we ignore at our peril in any aspect of life. Regarding presentations, restrain your hand for from firing up the laptop to start searching for slide decks and instead spend some time tortoising. Who is my audience going to be? What level of expertise will they have on this subject? What are their seniority, age and gender splits? What are they most interested in? Can I get enough information from the organisers to enable me to start the planning? Slide deck amalgamation is like firing blindly into the dark, because we don't know what our target is for this talk.

Once we have decided who we are going to be targeting for this talk, what is the purpose of the exercise? There are generally four purposes from which we can choose: persuade, motivate, inform or entertain. Most public business talks are usually focused on the first three. The entertain one is the classic "filler" role for the speaker. You are the light variety show before or after the main event. It might be the luncheon or dinner spot at the convention or conference. I hate this one. You need serious, real talent to be entertaining, which is why, in a business context, we should leave this to the professionals. If you are a great raconteur, bully for you, but for most of us, this is a step way too far.

Once we know what our purpose is, we can fix on some key messages. These will depend to a great extent on how much time we have been allotted. There are only so many things we can cover in-depth in a thirty or forty minute talk. Having our central thesis determined is fine, but so what? We need to think about the evidence we will marshal to make our point stick and for us to be convincing for the audience. This might include data, statistics, expert testimonials, evidence, examples, storytelling, etc. If we find ourselves making a bold statement, then we need to pause and say the words "fake news" out aloud to ourselves, because that is exactly what the audience will be thinking, unless we can prove what we are saying.

We need a blockbuster opening to break through all the mental clutter immobilising our audience and blocking our messaging from getting through. We need to design two closes, one for at the end of the talk and a second one for after the Q&A. Recency is a powerful thing with human beings, so we have to go with that flow and make sure the last thing they hear is what we want them to hear. Now we are ready to consider what visuals we need to help the audience and ourselves with the navigation of this talk. There will be a burning temptation to load the slide deck to the gunwales with content both on each screen and with too many screens. Go totally Zen here. Be minimalist, stripped down to the bare essentials. We don't want the slides to upstage us – we must remain the main act and the slides are our servant, not the other way around.

Once we are ready, we start the hard work and that is the practice, the rehearsal of the talk. Doing a full thirty minute talk at full power, over and over again in rehearsal is seriously exhausting, but necessary. We need to know the content, the cadence and whether we can fit it into the time constraints we are facing. By the time we get in front of our audience we are a very polished presenter on this topic, fully tooled up to impress everyone with our professionalism.

In Part One, we explored the mental barriers around linguistic perfection which are holding Japanese businesspeople back and denying them the chance to have "executive presence". Once we have cleared that hurdle, then we can start to work on the other key elements for achieving "executive presence". Appearing confident is not a plus in Japan. Here, being unsure, timid, shy, unprepossessing, modest, bashful are all signs of good citizenship, by fitting in with the majority and avoiding standing out. Having "executive presence" is the exact opposite of this cultural preference, so it takes quite a lot of work to convince Japanese executives they have to stand out and be heard.

The obvious differentiators are eye contact, voice amplification, gesture usage and posture. Looking someone straight in the eye is a western concept emphasising credibility and trust. In Japan, it is rude, so everyone is taught to look at the forehead or the throat instead. When coaching these executives, I have to make the point that their role is different when presenting, to other aspects of their work. They are not having a chat with their mates now. They are on stage presenting or in the meeting room commenting. Six seconds of eye contact is about the right length to engage someone in the room without it becoming too intrusive. We have some proprietary "secret" techniques for helping with this eye contact fear and we change the dynamic for these executives and they realise they can do it. They could always do it in fact, but mentally they were not ready to do it and that is where we apply the magic.

Engaging the audience, especially an international audience, makes a huge difference to the credibility of the Japanese executive. They come across as supremely confidence and sure of what they are saying. Let's face it, we are all suckers for buying the confidence of others and by extension, what they are saying. The voice has to back it up though. A tiny little voice gets lost very quickly and audience attention drifts away. Speaking with a loud voice is not polite in Japan, so we run into another cultural barrier.

We use a lot of video in our coaching and while the Japanese executive may feel they are screaming out their words, under our coaching direction for them to go louder, when they see the replay, they realise it just looked extremely confident. "Seeing is believing" is definitely a necessity here to overcome the mindset that loud is bad. Amplifying the message really makes such a difference to be taken seriously and for people to dwell upon what you are saying. Again, it is adding that patina of confidence to the message and our own credibility standing behind the message. It sounds simple – when appropriate, speak louder. However these executives are not even close to the loudness required, so they need a lot of support to help them through this barrier. We also have to keep pushing them to go bigger with their voice modulation, to have more vocal range, to project more power.

Holding their hands behind their back is a favourite of Japanese executives when speaking, usually because they are not sure what to do with their hands. They feel this anchors them and provides stability when they speak. That may be true, but it negates a lot of the power available to us as speakers, especially when we can employ our gestures to really emphasise a point we want to make. Combining eye contact and voice modulation with our gestures is a dynamite combination. It creates so much power and credibility for the message. Hiding our hands behind our back or locking our hands together in front of our body are denying us access to this tremendous tool.

Gestures have a very short use by date though. Holding the same gesture beyond around fifteen seconds just sees the power of that tool evaporate and the residue is just an annoying distraction. We have to turn the gestures on and off. Gestures also have to be congruent with what we are saying. We can show something large by extending the width between our hands or we can use one hand as a measure and show something tall or short. The words have to match up with what we are indicating or it looks strange and is an unnecessary distraction from our message.

Posture is another indicator of confidence. Slouching, leaning on something, shifting our weight continuously, wandering around the stage, walking too briskly to and fro, only engaging half of the audience are all competition with what is coming out of our mouth. We want to appear professional and that means standing straight and tall like a professional. It means commanding the whole room with our body language. There is a Japanese word "ki" (気), which is describing our vital life force and we want to employ that when speaking. We want to be projecting our energy into the audience and across the room, we want to fill up the entire space with our energy.

Using correct eye contact, voice modulation, gestures and posture together creates an impression of solidity and gravitas. This adds up to creating a sense of "executive presence" when we are speaking. For Japanese executives, the hardest parts for them are straying from the cultural confines of their upbringing, to become a force in public. Naturally, we teach them how to secure all of the attributes needed to have executive presence, but the key is how we teach them the necessary mindset shift, to bring it all together.

As a training company we are often asked to assist with helping Japanese executives to have "executive presence". This term is a broad descriptor, but essentially we all understand what they are talking about. They want their Japanese executives to be seen as professionals and to have them listened to and taken seriously. Japan is the third largest economy in the world, but its star is fading. In my observation, on the world stage of conventions and conferences, APAC executives from China, India and Korea are having greater impact. One of the issues is linguistic expertise imbalance, with Japan usually at the back of the bus. This is a self-induced limitation though, which doesn't have to be such a negative factor.

The Japanese mindset is one about perfection. There should be no defects, no mistakes and having set the bar so high, they have made it extremely difficult for themselves to deliver when speaking in English. Chinese speakers have an advantage because the grammar is similar to English with a subject-verb-object configuration. International Indian executives are educated in English and the main barrier for them is the degree to which their strong accent plays a role in making communication difficult, combined with the rapid speed with which they speak. When we get to the Koreans though, the comparisons become a bit harsher, because Korean language has the same grammatical structure as Japanese – subject-object-verb. So, why are the Japanese not doing a better job speaking the international language of business – English?

Actually they can do it, but they have talked themselves out of it and as a consequence they hesitate to speak up in English, which of course means yielding zero "executive presence" in the global arena. This is one of the reasons they love to use slides when presenting and pack those slides with massive amounts of text, which they then insist on reading to us. Given we can all read, this is very boring and we switch off and escape from their talk. They are also allowing the screen to dominate the proceedings and their potential executive presence has now been surrendered to the slideshow. Remember, we want all of the attention on us and we want to dominate the slides, not the other way around.

When we are coaching Japanese executives to have more presence, we have to deal with this linguistic issue head on. They have made a fundamental assumption that linguistic perfection is needed to be effective in communication. Therefore, they fear failure and embarrassing themselves by speaking less than perfect English. The best way not to fail is not to speak at all or to speak as little as possible.

This fear of failure runs through the society. Karl Hahne, who runs Hafael here in Japan, was a recent guest of mine on my Japan's Top Business Interviews podcast. He made an interesting observation, which hadn't occurred to me about failure and how it permeates itself in Japan. He noted that in ancient times, if a samurai failed his lord, he was expected to commit seppuku or ritual suicide. In the modern business world, we sometimes see executives committing suicide to take responsibility for mistakes. In some cases, they even kill themselves to take responsibility for their superior's mistakes. The aversion to making mistakes runs deep in Japanese society and as coaches, we have to work with that fact in mind.

We work on switching their mindset to encompass the idea that you can still have effective communication, even if there are errors or imperfections. I demonstrate this by mangling the Japanese language, using an English grammatical structure with Japanese vocabulary. I say, "watashi Tokyo eki ikimasu" and then ask them what I said? They tell me, "you said you were going to Tokyo Station". I get a bit melodramatic about this stage and feign shock and ask them how they could have possibly understood what I said, when it was imperfect Japanese. The point I make to them is that just as they adjusted what I said into correct Japanese in their mind, we do the same thing. They don't need to limit themselves by fearing mistakes, because this hesitancy in speaking up is guaranteed to erode their presence in a meeting or when making a presentation.

To get attention we need to be confident when we speak. All of us buy the confidence generated by others and we receive the message they bear as a result. If we fear mistakes, then we just don't speak up and even if we do, it usually isn't convincing, so it is ineffective. Getting over this mental barrier is hard for Japanese executives and this is where they need a lot of coaching. In my own experience, they certainly have enough grammatical knowledge and enough vocabulary, so that is not the real barrier. Their perfectionism has to be replaced with confidence that their message is getting through, even if there are mistakes.

In Part Two, we will look at some of the tools available to these executives, to have greater executive presence.

As Covid slowly declines here in Japan, things are slowly getting back to a semblance of normality. Imagine my surprise, to be asked to apply for a spot in a Chamber of Commerce pitch contest, with actual people in the room. Actually, I was a ring-in, because originally they told me I would have to join the pitch contest later in the year because this one was already full of contenders. Covid took care of that little glitch and eliminated some of the pitch contestants who became infected, so I was shuffled into the pack at the last minute.

I asked the organisers where in the batting order I would get my chance. I was in the middle, which isn't a great spot. I prefer and recommend you go first or last. If first, the idea is to blitz it so that the first impression is owned by you. Also all the other contestants are being measured against you and they are not going to measure up at all. The end spot is the most preferred because this is the final impression and the one that lingers longest in the mind before the voting process starts.

Ten minutes is long enough if you know what you are doing. The other contestants who went for a slide show made some basic errors. You only have ten minutes, so the point is to build a strong impression for your company. If you choose to use slides, then make them super interesting. The other contestants didn't go for that idea and decided to just boor everyone with lines of text and more text and some more text, for good measure. In the case of one of them, their profession was a people business, but there were no people in the slides. If it had been me, I would have had tons of photos of customers enjoying their service, lots of shots of happy families, some shots of the behind the scenes preparation for delivering the service. Something visual so we could identify with the service they provided. Text means your brain has to think whereas images tell you all the information you need to know immediately.

In my case, I decided to take a leaf out of the content marketing handbook. Content marketing means you provide some examples of your service to show your credibility. It might be white papers, testimonials, videos, podcasts, books – all manner of things which underline you are a legitimate expert in your field. We have produced a handy little card to fit into your wallet called 6 Impact Points For Persuasive Power. Before the talk, I distributed these to everyone in the room.

When it was my turn to talk, I explained that persuasion power is needed by everyone in business, be they leaders, salespeople, colleagues and anyone who would like others to cooperate with them. Now I have cast a wide net, to make the topic relevant to all gathered to hear this pitch. I didn't say much about Dale Carnegie, except that we will celebrate 60 years in Japan next year. That is sufficient credibility by itself. I mentioned the five core areas we cover, to give people some idea of the scope of the business and that was about the sum of the propaganda. It is supposed to be a pitch contest, but actually waxing lyrical over the virtues of your company is pretty dull for everyone else, so it doesn't really get very far.

I went through the six points explaining how they work and how anyone can incorporate these into their presenting skill set. The audience feels they are getting some value for their time rather than being forced to listen to irrelevant details about another company they have zero interest in. People are primarily interested in themselves, so by focusing on how these 6 persuasion points can help them, they feel some benefit from attending and listening to me. The other key thing with this choice of content was that I have to be able to walk the talk. If I am going to run around telling others how to present, then I have to be able to be the role model myself. This is a chance to add credibility, when you can do what you recommend to others. The speakers before me felt the gap in presenting expertise and it was also obvious to the audience. The speaker after me publicly said that I would be hard to follow and she was right, because her presentation unfortunately was not benefiting from the points I had just been making.

The pitch contest was no contest, because I planned it that way. No powerpoint in sight so that all the focus was on me. I also chose a subject of universal applicability and interest. I demonstrated what I was talking about, so that people could leave the affair thinking they learnt something from an expert and that card is for sure safely ensconced in their wallets. One of the earlier speakers mentioned he had spare copies of the powerpoint, if people wished to have them and naturally no one was interested in the slightest. Their carry home item was A4 size, not attractive and also not particularly useful in information terms. A robust business card sized summary of the 6 points on the other hand was kept. That was no accident.

So when we are presenting with other speakers, lets always assume we are competing with the other presenters and lets approach it like a contest, making sure we emerge the winner.