The Presentations Japan Series

Remembering Ex-PM Shinzo Abe As A Communicator

Like everyone, I was so shocked that Japan has lost such a prominent, global representative of the country to assassination. I wrote this original article back in 2016 and I thought to rework it and release it again in memory of Shinzo Abe. Over many years I have seen him improve as a public speaker and that always encourages me to think that other prominent Japanese leaders can also break out of their self-imposed restrictions and do a professional job too.

October 2016

Japanese politicians have to do a lot of public speaking, but they are rarely engaging. They are generally speaking at their audiences rather than to them. I attended the Japan Summit at the Okura Hotel Ball Room run by the Economist. Sitting there listening to three leading Japanese politicians, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Shigeru Ishiba (then Minister for National Strategic Zones) and Akira Amari (then Minister for Economic and Fiscal Policy), I was struck by the lack of picture painting and storytelling in their presentations.

By the way, if you have seen Prime Minister Abe of late, he has improved quite a lot. Previously, his presentations were terribly wooden, lacking animation and any attempt at connection with his audience. In this sense, he was firmly situated in the mainstream, because these are the typical attributes of business and political leaders when speaking in public in Japan.

I sometimes get pushback from some Japanese class participants that this is okay, because this is the "Japanese way" of giving presentations. Total nonsense. Being effective as a presenter or public speaker has some universal elements which cannot be neglected. One aspect is as a successful speaker or presenter you have to push yourself forward. Yes, it is true that this is not usually seen as a cultural positive in Japan.

Being low key, humble, even subdued and apologetic is preferred in normal social and business life here. This doesn't apply though when we are speaking in public. We now have an entirely different role and we have to be more loud, more animated, more confident, more engaging and more enthusiastic in this particular role. When we coach softly spoken people to increase their volume when speaking, they often say they feel like they are screaming. When we ask the audience listening during the class if they feel that is the case, the answer is always "no". Instead, the speaker comes across as more confident, capable and credible. We have to understand the role is different and we have to adjust to suit that role.

Those who are failed presenters embrace the excuse of the "Japanese way" as an escape route from professional accountability, but it doesn't work. Good is good and we can see the difference when people speak in pubic. They either engage us or they don't and there is not a "Japanese way" of public speaking which can avoid that necessity.

Whether it was some coaching before the successful Olympic bid or thereafter, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is much better. More animated, using bigger gestures, more eye contact, using those see through teleprompters to help engage the audience, rather than looking down at a page of notes. He had humour, pauses for clarity and some voice modulation. Hey corporate Japan, take note, it is possible to become better at public speaking!

Everyone, please take note – don't bore us with your data. Tell us a story, pleeease! Bring the points being made to life by connecting them to some people and events you have encountered. Our minds are well trained to absorb stories, because they are the first educational structure we encounter as young children. The story should start with taking us to the place of the story, the location, the room, nominate the day, month or the season and introduce the people there, preferably people we already know, to make it real for us.

By getting straight into the story we can draw our audience in. We can now intertwine the context behind the point we want our audience to agree with. By providing the background logic, cloaked in a story which is vivid, we can see it in our mind's eye. We will have more success convincing others to follow us. Having set the scene, we finish by outlining our proposition or proposal and tie the ribbon on top, by pin pointing the major benefit of doing what we suggest. This is elegant and powerful.

In business, we should use storytelling appropriately but powerfully. Less is more, but none is particularly bad. Unite our disparate audience from multiple backgrounds by wrapping our key message in a story and if you do, what you say will be remembered, unlike almost all messages from Japanese politicians. Let the story create your context, evidence and sizzle for your key message

Action Steps

1. Stop believing the quality or quantity of your information is enough
2. Don't try and pack too many stories into your presentation
3. Start the story by creating a vivid mind picture of the scene

Vale Shinzo Abe, Japan's longest serving Prime Minister

Imagine an experienced, senior executive from a name brand major company giving a one minute introduction of the company, while holding a piece of paper, reading the introduction to the audience. What would be your impression of that executive and by extension the professionalism of that company? I am sure it would be highly negative. If a senior person can't manage a one minute talk without reading it, we will be wondering what sort of people are working there?

The problem today is we are awash in high levels of professionalism around presenting from the professionals. Netflix, Disney, Hulu, HBO etc., are pumping huge budgets into streaming content with unbelievably high production values and oozing with high levels of script quality and professional actor delivery. We become accustomed to these images of professional presenters and then a lame amateur turns up, holding their piece of A4 paper and just destroys their reputation on the spot.

Business seems to be the last refuge of scoundrels who cannot present in a professional way, but that is not an acceptable situation. The audience today are heavily armed with mobile phones which can connect them to the internet in seconds. The delights of social media can quickly outweigh the appeal of the speaker and their topic, if the delivery isn't professional. Even when the content is good and the delivery is okay, it doesn't hold the audience's attention as it once did.

I was at a presentation recently and the speaker was doing an okay job – not great but not horrendous either. That didn't stop the gentlemen sitting next to me at my table from getting out his phone, then his iPad and later his laptop during the presentation. He was checking and answering emails, scrolling around social media and generally "multi-tasking". This is the nadir for the speaker – to be reduced to competing for audience attention when they are half listening and are simultaneously busy doing something else.

The paper reading speaker I mentioned earlier puzzled me, so I approached him and asked him why he had to read a one minute speech. He told me he was afraid of his English ability. This was an interesting comment, because we were famously chatting away in English for about five minutes before we go to this gritty subject. I said to him that was a surprising comment given his English was absolutely fine.

Actually he didn't need the piece of paper, but his fear of linguistic imperfection was driving his behaviour. He had been focused on the wrong thing. Perfection is not required in communication. I know this because my Japanese is certainly not "perfect" but I can communicate freely in Japanese and listeners can follow what I am saying.

This is the same for English, a language mainly spoken by non-native speakers in fact, if you add up the population numbers. That means that a good portion of the time, native speakers are listening to a variety of accents in English with some exciting departures from grammatical norms. No problem though, because we can connect the dots and work out what it is they are trying to say and without missing a beat, give them a response which matches the flow of the conversation.

Fear was his impediment, but a false fear, a self-induced and self-limiting fear. This happens in our presentation classes too. The participants start totally consumed by their concerns and worries and are relatively oblivious to the audience, because they are totally focused on themselves. After a few hours of practice with coaching, they, without knowing it, have now switched their focus from themselves to trying to engage with their audience.

If our speaker had thrown away the A4 paper and instead used his minute to engage his audience, he would have rescued the brand. If he had done all of that and spoken with great energy and enthusiasm he would have actually accentuated the brand. If he had a few grammatical errors or pronunciation slip ups, no one would have cared, because they would have been tuned into his communication, not to the actual degree of linguistic perfection of his delivery.

Interestingly, he was not Japanese and yet the majority of the audience were Japanese speakers. When we speak a foreign language, it is often the case that we can be more easily able to understand non-native speakers because they have very simple vocabularies. He didn't take this factor into consideration when thinking about who would be in his audience. That was another error on his part – his preparation didn't factor in who would be the audience for this one minute promotion of his company. This has to be the first thing we do, every time!

Don't let the fear of speaking hold you back. Prepare thoroughly, understand who is going to be in your audience, spend your delivery time focused on engaging your audience, bring your enthusiasm and passion and forget about linguistic perfection. If he had done that, then his personal brand and his company's brand wouldn't have been shredded on the spot, as actually happened. Today, the risk is simply too high to let people who have no clue what they are doing, to go around representing the brand in public. Why do it that way? Give them training and then let them go forth and become a terrific brand ambassador for the organisation.

Recently I have been coaching people on their presentation skills. It is always amazing to me how some small changes can balloon into major improvements. If these things are so simple, then why aren't they making the changes themselves? Why do they need coaching? Basically, we all wander through life with a minimum level of self-awareness about anything, let alone how we appear when we present. The other problem is the zone of vision when we are presenting is in an arc in front of us. It takes some organising to be able to see how we are doing in the eyes of the audience. Most of us are just not that well organised. So we wind up giving the presentations into the void and are not really sure what needs improving. Enter the coach.

I found I was focusing on a few items to help the participants in my class improve their persuasion power. The six elements were eyes, hands, face, voice, toes and energy. Let's dig in a bit deeper with each of them.

1. Looking at your audience and engaging your audience are not the same thing. You often see politicians in Japan scanning their eyes across a crowd, trying to give off the vibe that they are connecting with the punters. However, it is a fake construct, because the length of time allocated is only around two seconds per person. We need around six seconds of one-on-one sustained eye contact, before we can create a sense of "the speaker is talking directly to me" in the audience member's mind. If we just keep staring at them, they start to think "axe murderer", because it is too intrusive. Six seconds seems to strike the right balance of being personable without becoming threatening.

1. This is a perennial problem people have of what to do with their hands. Holding them behind the back is a favourite of many, simply because they don't know what to do with them and this pose seems to anchor their upper body for them. Holding them crossed in front of our body, where all the soft organs are located, creates a barrier with audience which we don't need. Thrusting them into pockets gets them conveniently out of the way, but it also gets them out of the way, which is no particular help to us.

As a presenter, our hands have only one purpose – to strengthen the verbal point we are making. To find where your hands should be held, just hold your arms out about a shoulder height, then drop them – where they land is where you should keep them until you need to bring them up to bolster some thesis you are promoting.

1. Dr. Albert Mehrabian's research at UCLA found that we get the maximum concentration from our audience on the words we are saying, when what we say is matched by how we say it. This sounds simple enough, but what I found when coaching the class was that they tended to have one expression on their face throughout the talk, regardless of the content of the message. People put a lot of attention into the visuals for their presentation, slaving over the slide deck preparation, but forget the most powerful visual medium they have, which is their face. If it is good news, then smile when you tell us. If it is bad news, then look serious. If it is exciting news then look excited. I think you get the idea.

1. Having a deep DJ style voice is definitely an advantage. I remember when I met fellow Aussie Chris Glenn in Nagoya. He was a local DJ there and out of this tall, slender frame came this astonishingly deep voice. I didn't get issued with one of those and have probably fried my vocal cords, with a million karate kiai over my career, so I have a rather husky number. Folks, we go with what we have.

We do our best though, to make the most of it by having a good vocal range around tone, speed and strength. The monotone delivery is the killer of audience attention. Side note: Japanese is a monotone language! Uh oh. Does that mean Japanese speakers are forever doomed to be the denizens of the boredom zone? Not all. Japanese speakers can create variety through speed and strength changes, which will be enough to keep the attention on them when presenting.

1. What on earth is he doing talking about toes when presenting? More correctly, I am talking about the angle you are pointing your toes. Without thinking about it, I noticed a number of presenters would stand with their toes pointing off at an angle, rather than at ninety degrees to the front. This alters the body mechanics making it difficult to turn in the other direction. The result is we don't turn, so effectively we are now speaking with only one half of our audience.

1. Passion, commitment, belief, enthusiasm for our subject are all communicated by the amount of energy we pump out. We cannot turn the throttle up to maximum output for the whole talk though. We have to release it in bursts, so that we don't wear out our audience. On the other hand, if we turn that throttle right down, we will not be projecting enough energy to grab attention and the entire audience will be leaping onto their phones to find something more interesting happening on the internet at that moment. The key is the energy output has to match the content of what we are saying.

Think of the key points in the talk where you want to place emphasis and then marshal your energy to help you highlight that part of the talk. A very common error is that speakers allow their energy to drop right off at the end of their talk. Don't fade out. Finish with a bang – remember final impressions are the lasting impressions and we want to be recalled in the right way.

These six points are so simple, but when corrected each of them made a significant impact on the quality of the talk. I would make the correction and then ask the audience to compare with what the speaker had been doing. When you see this before and after it is convincing.

I am just back from a highly pointless presentation. The bureaucrats who run the Tokyo Metro subway system and the Tokyo Government Planning Division were presenting on their plan for a new subway line to be constructed in my neighbourhood. This is my second occasion to attend one of these types of presentations. The previous one was about changing the direction of aircraft landing at Haneda and for planes to fly low over our neighbourhoods, which unfortunately are in the new direct flight path. These "explanation sessions" are pointless for many reasons, including the way they are conducted.

There is no real appetite to entertain the viewpoint of the assembled residents and so the design is to obscure, divert and suck up as much time as possible with administrative aspects of the meeting, in order to limit the question time.

Interestingly they had a slide show, which had an announcer read the whole content to us. Why was that required, when everyone can read what is on screen? To use up the question time of course. Question time itself was interesting in the way they handled it. Somewhat surprisingly, they do what we teach regarding hostile questions. They had a navigator take the hot question, then paraphrase it, removing all the venom and spiky bits, before handing it over to the supposed experts.

You might be thinking, "well these are government bureaucrats, so there is no relation to the world of commerce". Often we can see the flaws in others, but ignore those same flaws in ourselves. Japanese business presentations are very formal. There will be a navigator to tell us things, like where the exits are located and to turn off our phones. The President giving the talk will often not be highly familiar with the slides prepared by the underlings and will read the whole thing to us.

Sometimes, if there is a screen located behind the podium, they will unhelpfully turn their back to us and their head toward the screen and then read the whole content to us. Often, there will be a slick corporate video shown, the main purpose of which is to reduce the President's speaking time burden and which adds very little value to the presentation.

Taking the sting out of questions is a legitimate technique, but you still have to handle the questions. Today there was a lot of dissembling of answers and that is never satisfactory. The same things happen in business. You can see the speaker is flustered by the question and doesn't know how to handle it. The first problem is they go directly to answer mode, instead of creating a little brain space to think about the answer. Invariably, we have all had the experience of coming up with the killer answer about two hours too late, for when we needed it. What came out of our mouth though was the first thing which popped into our mind and obviously that will never be as good as a more considered answer. Our mouth was too close to our ear and our brain wasn't engaged fast enough, before we blurted out our response. We can wind up sprouting nonsense in reply to the question.

Just adding a little cushion makes a world of difference. The cushion is that space between the question ending and the answer proper beginning. You might ask them to repeat the question or you can paraphrase what they said or you can make a neutral comment such as, "that is a very important consideration" or all three, to gain thinking time. Five seconds does a wonder of good when it comes to contemplating how to handle tough questions. Naturally, our answers won't always be satisfying for certain members of the audience, but we need to explain the logic of our approach, decisions or our actions.

If we don't know the answer, then trying to snow the audience, instead of admitting the truth is a guaranteed way to destroy our reputation. Audiences will accept it if you say to the questioner, "I don't have an answer for that point at the moment, but let's exchange business cards after my talk and I will find the answer for you. Who has the next question?".

Now this only works when the question is very specific and the answer is not something that you would be expected to necessarily have at your fingertips. If it is within the scope of your subject and you don't know the answer, then that is a black mark on your professionalism. You see this sometimes from jet setting VIPs who swoop in to give their talk, before they head off to their next engagement. It is a PR exercise which can go wrong very quickly. Their presentation was prepared for them and they think their job is to just read it out to us. Again, it is better to be honest and admit you should know that answer, apologise that you don't and promise to get the answer to the questioner. None of us are perfect, so we will accept your odd flaw and imperfection.

We should always keep in mind that every time we get up to speak, we are punting our personal and professional brands out there for all to see. Prepare thoroughly and rehearse, rehearse, rehearse is the right formula. If we do that, people will come away impressed with us and feel the time spent was worthwhile and they will be looking forward to hearing from us again in the future.

The request has been made to give a talk on a certain subject. The date and time are fixed and now the work begins on the preparation. Here is how not to do it! Start with plundering previous slide decks for re-usable content and create new original content for this particular presentation. Fuss mightily over which slides go in and which go out. Discover even after that Herculean effort to pare down the beast, that it still needs bits to be lopped off. Does this sound tremendously familiar to you when getting ready to give a presentation? Well if this is what not to do, then exactly what are we supposed to be doing?

The warm embrace of an existing tried and true slide deck and the excitement of grabbing new materials and wrangling it into a slide, can be intoxicating I know, however we have to consider what is the point here. A collage of slides is not a central message and there lies the problem. Before we even think of any cool visuals, we need to plumb the depths of our brain for what it is we want our audience to know and believe. We need to boil all the possibilities down to a single, crystal clear and pungent message.

This is harder than it seems, because there are a number of attractive messages we could be focusing on. So which is the right one? This is where we discover we have to take one step back and understand better, who is going to be in our audience. The topic will give us a hint of prospective acolytes, we can urge to join our cause. The organisers will have a good idea of who normally turns out for this topic. As they get the registrations, we can know precisely who will be our listeners, presuming the hosts will share that information. Even if they don't pony up the info, they will usually tell us which companies are going to be attending. Once we get some indication of who will be our audience, we can start to think about which message is most likely to hit the bullseye the best.

Having done this part of the preparation, the temptation is to now plunge into the slides and start arranging them accordingly, simultaneously working out which new slides are needed. We have to switch the mindset from slide equals important to story equals important. The dilemma with data and information is that it is raw and inert. When we can wrap that information up in a story, we are really starting to motor along. The reason is simple. Data by itself lacks context and colour. Also a lot of data is hard to visualise or comprehend. Rattling off some statistics may have our audience's eyes glazing over. If we convert those numbers into something they can understand, then it has potency. A classic example is numbers of football fields to represent the area's size. If we can tie that data to a person and what it meant for them, then we bring the whole point alive.

It is almost impossible to relate to measurements, but we can easily relate to someone else's experiences. Hopefully, it is no longer the case, but beer has been an arbiter of distance in Australia. I remember meeting a fellow student at University and when he told me his home town, I asked him how far away it was from Brisbane. His answer was a classic. In true laconic fashion, he casually replied, "about six stubbies", meaning the time it would take you to drink six small bottles of beer, while driving the distance. Jail time today, but this was back in the day.

The beauty of telling stories is it forces the focus to be on us, the speaker, rather than the screen. Today's video meetings make this even more pressing. I was coaching a senior executive regarding a talk she had to make to senior management. In the process, it became obvious to me that she should either scrap the slides altogether or just use a very small number. Her objective was to have impact, to propel her personal brand forward and position herself for a major global position. If she used a lot of slides in the limited time she had for their attention, on video, she would be captured in a tiny little box on the top right of the screen monitor, while the slides monopolised most of the screen real estate. By dispensing with or paring back the screen "share" function, she would have the chance to look straight into the green dot, where the camera is, on the top of her laptop and be seen by the viewers in full and seen looking straight at them.

Without visuals she now has to paint a picture for the audience. She can tell a story about when this incident took place. For example, she can create the temporal indications by referring to the season, "it was three years ago and heavy snow fell in New York that day". Now we know when it was, where it was and have a mental image of snowy New York streets. Next, we need some people in this story, preferably people the audience will know.

"I bumped into Warren Buffett who was wearing a thick coat and a long scarf, as he was leaving the Rockefeller Center and I asked him…."

Most people know of the Rockefeller Center and Warren Buffett, so they can imagine the snowy scene in their minds. Do we need a slide with a photograph of a snowy New York street or one with Warren Buffett in it? Probably not, if we are telling the story well and it keeps all the attention on us and not letting it leach out to our tough competitor - the slide deck.

Slides have their place. I do Iike photographs with no words on the slide and then I tell the story, explaining the symbolism of the image. Unlike text, detailed spreadsheets, graphs or tables of numbers up on screen, the slide with a photo takes about one second to process and then the listeners are open to my story. We don't have to make or recycle slides, if we change our mindset to storytelling and then plan the talk from there rather than the other way around. When it is your personal and professional brand out there on display, these choices make a big difference.

Self-awareness, self-belief, self-direction, self-discipline – there are a host of these "self" aspects to who we are and often related to who we are not. If you grew up with a silver spoon firmly in your mouth, went to expensive, exclusive private schools, extensively travelled abroad with your parents at a young age and enjoyed the summers at your Swiss Boarding school in your youth, that is terrific. The chances are strong that your self-belief is strong and your expectations even higher. A lot of things have coalesced to help you be successful in life and along the way, you have been in an environment where being able to speak in front of others has been as natural as learning how to swim well.

Probably for most of us, me included, this sounds like exceptional skill in parent selection. If the path in life has been rocky or even just "ordinary", none of these advantages have been a factor in your life and career progression. Maybe you were able to pull yourself up by your own efforts and have achieved some success, to the degree that you are now someone who is asked to speak in front of others. Or maybe, you are an ordinary mortal, but through some strange fate, the firm wants you to speak to your team or the broader organisation or even in public, to industry groups.

I now own my own company outright, have a Ph.D. in political science and international relations, am a 6th Dan in traditional karate and so you might be tempted to think, "naw, he wouldn't be someone who suffers from imposter syndrome". I wish that was true. You may know this saying, "You can take the boy out of Brisbane, but you can't take the Brisbane out of the boy". I have spent over half my life living in Japan now, but I am still that boy from Brisbane, with the poor parent selection abilities.

In my case, I do a lot of public speaking. I also release six podcasts a week, of which five are what I write, based on my own experience and the curriculum from Dale Carnegie. I am constantly putting myself out there into the world, publicly exposing myself to judgement and critique. How do you go from where you came from, to now positioning yourself as an expert? This is where the imposter syndrome raises its ugly head. "Who do you think you are, to be putting all this stuff out into the ether?", says the voice of doubt deep inside your head.

Perfectionism is a big blocker for all of us. We feel because we are still incomplete, not perfect, we don't have the right to stand up in front of others and speak about our topic. We worry about being judged and found short. This is the highest hurdle to clear. Rather than perfectionism, we need to be thinking in terms of relativities. There is an old saying that "the one-eyed man is king, in the kingdom of the blind". That is us. We have some small extra degree of concrete knowledge or experience, which may be more than what most people have accumulated, but it is certainly not absolute. We don't claim to have absolute knowledge on any subject. We note that we are perpetual students of the subject and are treading the path still, on the learning journey.

This is very freeing. If we are speaking in front of others and we discover we have a bona fide expert on our subject in the audience, we shouldn't feel scared, diminished or that we need to become competitive with them. We should celebrate the fact they are attending and ask their views on some pertinent aspect of the subject, in particular an area where they may have substantially more knowledge or experience that we have. Here is the surprise. Your audience will appreciate their attendance and your ability to have them share. They will not stand up and start denouncing you as a charlatan, a fraud and someone who should be run out of town on a rail.

We all understand that none of us have perfect knowledge on any subject, that we are all in the process of progressing and when you freely admit this, there is no target to attack. In karate we call it taisabaki – a movement to the side, which robs the attacker of a hard target. All they wind up doing is striking thin air, because you are no longer there directly in front of their blow. When presenting we do the same. We slip off to the side and admit we don't have perfect knowledge, we acknowledge the expertise or experience of members of the audience and we keep out brand intact.

The golden rule is never argue with the members of the audience. Accept they may have a different view, allow them to express it and let the audience make up their own mind about the point at issue. If you become obstinate, then you are getting into the perfectionism zone and you will always be found wanting.

The hardest attack is when the person cherry picks something you said, takes it out of context or misrepresents it, trying to make you look stupid. This happened to me during a Clubhouse discussion on selling in Japan. I should have handled it better, but the sudden public opposition to my opinion released a fog in my brain, so it wasn't as sharp as it should have been. I did have the perfect rejoinder about an hour later, but it was way too late by then. I did beat myself up about that, but then I realised, "hey, I did have the rejoinder for the next time and I will be ready to go in the future".

If we have integrity and admit we don't have perfect knowledge or complete experience, we are in a good position to stand up in front of others and offer what we do know. If we have the humility to allow diverse views and opinions, we don't present any target for someone the hit.m If we honestly face out own limitations, then we will interact with others in a manner which invites trust and acceptance. If we are supremely nervous about giving this presentation, then we are never, ever going to betray any sign of that. "Keep it to yourself" is the best policy. No one will notice, because they want us to succeed and we will.

How good is your Mongolian? Well, I don't know even one word in Mongolian, but I learnt a powerful lesson about presenting and communicating, when grappling with this language recently. I am a Master Trainer for Dale Carnegie and most of my time is spent working here for Japanese clients. Occasionally, I am asked to work with Dale Carnegie colleagues from other parts of the world, usually in APAC, to help certify their new trainers. This is how I came to be working with ten budding trainers from Ulan Bator.

My instruction was given in English, but their own role plays and practice pieces, were done in Mongolian. I wondered at the start, how on earth can I coach these people, if I can't understand their language? I was surprised though by a number of things. We communicate with words, but we also communicate with structure, energy, passion, voice pacing and body language.

Listening to their role plays, I could tell if they were not following the structure they were supposed to be using, even though I couldn't understand one word of what they were saying. This just reinforced for me the importance of designing our presentations using a clear structure, such that one each section flows seamlessly into the next section. We will have a number of points and sub-points in our talks and we will have chapters in the talk as well, as we move from one subject to the next. We need to make sure the sub-points flow and are obviously relevant, regarding the main thesis we are making in our presentation.

We also need to make sure we have bridges to link the chapters together. If we just leap from one topic to the next, our audience may get lost and not make the connection. We know our subject intensively and extensively, so we have no problem juxtaposing the chapters together. However, someone hearing about content like this for the first time may struggle to follow the arc of the narrative we are explaining. The bridge doesn't have to be extensive or complicated, but it needs to be designed from the start.

I enjoyed the Chinese classic, The History of The Three Kingdoms. At the end of each chapter, the author would say something like, "if you want to know what happened to Li Xue, then read the next chapter". Such a primitive tool to link the story together, but it worked, because you were really wondering what was going to happen to Li Xue. We can do much better than that I am sure and we should. Let's work on our bridging technique to link the talk together using all the component parts.

The energy levels of the different trainers were also a good indicator for me of the attractiveness of the content. I had no idea what the exact content was in Mongolian, but the degree of energy each speaker employed, transposed to me the amount of interest I should have in what they were saying. I noticed that if they were not injecting enough energy, I didn't feel much resonance with them. Those who could operate at the higher energy levels kept my concentration, regardless of the 100% linguistic barrier separating us.

Training people and giving public talks, basically requires the same skill set in communication terms. Both need to be pumping out vast levels of energy throughout. Remember, the level of energy we employ for a chat over coffee is not what we need to be tapping into when we are on stage. Our role is now totally different and we have to move up some gears and adopt a much more powerful persona when we are on stage.

Vocal variety is so important. If we are too soft or too strong all the way through, as if the volume control was stuck on the one setting, then we will lose the attention of our audience. If the speaker is too low key in their delivery from start to finish, the audience quickly gets bored and they start daydreaming about something else or even more likely today, they are lunging for their phones to escape from us, to the lure of the internet.

If we are all relentless fire and brimstone, they get tired under the relentless bombardment from us. What I noticed from the class participants was the variation in their vocal delivery kept my attention, even though I was oblivious to the meaning of what they were saying. I thought, "Wow, if you can get this much impact in a foreign language, how much more potential is there when you are using your own native language when presenting". The issue is often we forget about this and we get stuck in the one groove throughout our talk.

None of the things I have mentioned here are new, complicated or difficult, but like a lot of things we know but don't do. Teaching the candidates from Mongolia was a good reminder for me of things I should be paying more attention to in my presentations. We all get into habits and lose some of the self-awareness we need to keep improving in our craft. Let's not do that!

The rule in business is to stay clear of religion and politics, because you risk alienating a chunk of your audience who hold different views to you. That is clear and sensible. What about other points of view (POV) however which are more related to business itself. This could be about government regulatory policy, industry trend predictions, marketing issues, quality control, your purported product benefits or any number of contentious items. When we are giving presentations, should we avoid stating our point of view or should we be open, even if it means being contentious? Is being contentious a strategy for gaining profile?

Our main objective in giving business related presentations is to gain a positive impression for our company and make ourselves top of mind and tip of tongue, when people are considering the need for our solutions. Most small to medium sized companies are basically invisible to their potential clients, because they don't have the advertising or marketing muscle of the large corporations. Giving presentations, getting quoted in the media, engaging in content marketing in social media are all typical ways of overcoming that problem.

How much profile do we want? If we want to fly under the radar, we are not going to be giving highly opiniated presentations, commenting on issues of the day. On the other hand, we might do just that, to seek some opportunity to be controversial, so that we get talked about. I see there are some local entrepreneurs here, who have taken a strategic decision to offer opinions and viewpoints, which are designed to counter conventional, accepted wisdom. This is clearly an attempt to breakthrough all the noise in the marketplace and to try and court the media, which as we know, loves controversy.

I do six podcasts a week, of which five are my opinion pieces on what I think about in regards to leadership, sales, communication and presenting. My other podcast conforms to the normal arrangement of the guest supplying all of the IP and the host is just there to extract it. Nevertheless, putting five opinion pieces a week, every week, into the ether could be considered risky.

When I look back on what I write for my podcasts, there is always a distinct point of view on these subjects. When I reflect on the public presentations I have given, there is always a strong point of view on these subjects. The 1000 plus videos on our website are all brimming with my point of view too. Also, the four books I have published are all full of my points of view. So where is the line when we are communicating our point of view, that we shouldn't cross.

I have written about Boris Johnson and Donald Trump in relation to their public speaking techniques. In both cases, I have sidestepped whether I agree or like what they are doing as elected officials of their countries and just focused on what we can learn from what they are doing as presenters. This was a conscious decision to avoid alienating my audience one way or the other. With politics and religion, it is easier to make these judgements I think, because you know the percentage split between their followers and opponents.

What have I done in regard to the Japanese Government's handing of Covid and the myriad regulations that it has spawned, including shutting the border? Nothing. This issue doesn't fit into the four areas I write about, even though the regulations have had a direct impact on my training business, as it has made face to face training extremely fraught. Whatever my personal views on Government policy may be, I have decided not to seek out advocating any positions at all because they are outside the scope of my area of coverage. Another factor is I am a migrant here and can have my visa not renewed and have to leave the country, so do I want to poke the beast which is the Japanese Government, specifically their Immigration Department? I judge that fight not to be worth it. I did cover ex-Prime Minister Suga's presentation abilities though in Episodes #233 and #255 and was quite tough in my evaluations. I didn't talk about his policies though, so there was a line there I thought I could walk without getting deported.

The point is to make a decision about how controversial you want to be, why you are deciding that calculation and what are the ramifications, both positive and negative for your positioning. You can have a clear point of view on subjects without upsetting your audience. Giving your viewpoint can be useful for your audience, as it helps them to think about their own position in the topic. As the President of Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan, which is a business built around how to be really good with people, probably avoiding controversy would be an obvious authentic positioning.

How about your business and your company, are there natural limitations which will apply to how stridently or controversially you can pursue your point of view? Have you thought about it and decided where the line is located? Have you set out some points of view on where you stand on relevant topics? Probably this would be a useful exercise before you promulgate your views into the ether or at public presentations to business audiences.

I sometimes read about certain celebrities, historical figures or leaders who are described as being better presenters with small groups or being better presenting to large groups. I wonder what they mean and why that would be? I presume the inference is the person is more impactful with one group rather than the other or feels more comfortable addressing one group rather than the other. Why would the size of the group make any difference?

Perhaps presenting to a tight circle of listeners makes the speaker feel more pressure because the audience is so physically close and immediate. Up on the stage there is a good distance between the speaker and the audience and maybe that provides less pressure. The stage is usually a raised platform or the speaker's position is at the front of the room, so there is more formality in those settings, which therefore provides more authority and credibility for the presenter.

On the other hand, being up on stage, with thousands of beady eyes boring into your skull can be a lot of pressure for some speakers. The sheer scale can be overwhelming and the serried ranks of listeners confronting. Looking down at that sea of scowling faces and crossed arms can be spine decalcifying. The small group on the other hand may feel more intimate and safe.

There are some things which work well for both groups, so let's take them separately. For small groups, the intimacy means our body language, pacing and volume has to be different than if we were up on a vast stage facing thousands. We will have a better chance of knowing more about a small audience than a mass audience. The organisers probably know everyone and can brief us about therm. This helps us in the planning stage to think about what will be of most value for the audience. Once we have prepared that talk, we will feel very confident we will get a good reception from the people assembled.

Even if it is a small group, we should stand when we present. The organisers may try to get us to sit down and present, but we should resist that idea. Standing is better for us to free up our body language and deal with any nerves we have. It also gives us elevation above the crowd, which also gives us more authority regarding what we are saying. We can easily see everyone and they can see us too. We want to be working our eye contact, such that we hold the gaze of each person for around six seconds. Less than that is not effective in creating a bond and if we go longer it becomes intrusive. When we get the eye contact balance right, the person on the receiving end feels as if we are speaking directly to them and no one else in the room. It feels like we are having a cosy chat. It is very powerful and attractive. Our gestures need to be smaller and less energetic or we can overpower our audience.

When we are facing those thousands of people up onstage in a big venue, there is a big difference between those in the audience, depending on where they are seated. We see them as an anonymous granite block but they are not. Those down the back, those up on the first tier and up on the second tier can feel remote. We are remote to them too. If you are ever speaking in a big venue, get there early and go and sit in the seats at the furthest extremes. This is when you realise you will appear like a peanut to these members of the audience.

In the same way, we had the small group earlier and we apply the same logic. We don't talk to thousands of people. We speak to one person at a time. We divide the venue up into six sectors, like the baseball diamond. We have the inner field and the outer field, the left, center and right field and this includes those seated in the second and third floors. When we are at distance from these people seated far from us and when we select one person to speak to, the thirty people seated around them, all think we are looking directly at them too. The effect is the same – they feel we are having an intimate conversation with them despite there being thousands of people in the hall. Don't look at the sectors in order though. Make it completely unpredictable and random, to keep people on their toes.

In the big venues, we need to use huge gestures. Because of the distance, we have to make a much bigger effort to project our energy all the way to the back wall. We have a microphone, so we are not yelling, but we are trying to drive our physical energy all the way to the rear of the venue. The people at the back will feel our energy and will be drawn toward us. We also have to make more use of the stage. Not running around on stage from left to right like a maniac, as you will have seen by some people, but purposely spending time on the left, center and right of the stage, trying to get as close to the audience as possible.

Regardless of the size of the venue, we have a plan and we know what to do. We can be effective regardless of the circumstances, because we decided to be in control and we are well organised.

We think of our presentations as something we give to an audience physically in the room with us or these days, maybe to an audience trapped in tiny little boxes on the computer screen. Media interviews come up rarely for most business people. This medium requires a very specialised skill set to do it properly. Amateur business leaders up against the pros from the ranks of journalists rarely goes well for the great unwashed. Yet many business people are getting interviewed by podcast hosts who are also not s. These are usually never "gotcha" style interviews, but they are still going to be shared with a global audience. Remember, every time we present we are putting our personal and professional brands on display. How can we approach these presentations we will give on podcast shows? Here are some ideas to think about.

Before The Podcast

1. Research the podcaster. Who are they, what have they done, why are they doing this podcast? The guest on the podcast supplies the IP for the podcast host most of the time. They may be knowledgeable about the area under discussion but usually we are on the show because we are the expert.
2. What is the configuration of the show?Is there only one host or are there multiple hosts. This will make the research component more important to know who you are dealing with.
3. What is the style of the show?We must listen to previous episodes to get some idea of how they approach their guests, what types of questions they ask and how they conduct the show. Are they a good listener? Do they constantly interrupt and re-direct the answers? I personally don't like watching Howard Stern's shows because he constantly interrupts his guests, which as the audience I find very annoying.
4. Is it audio only or video and audio?Increasingly, podcasts are using both mediums. Knowing this helps us to decide what image we want to project and how we should dress for the interview. If the host is always casually dressed, should we match them? I believe we need to decide what is our brand look and dress accordingly. In my case my brand is always professional which means suit, tie, French cuff shirts, cufflinks, wristwatch and pocket chief. I don't care how the host dresses because their brand is their decision.
5. Do they supply the list of questions beforehand?This is a good idea, although if they always ask the same questions, you can get the idea from watching their shows before you do the podcast,
6. How will they distribute the podcast?Do we have 100% editorial control over what goes out or not? Most podcasts are using some platform which will broadcast the interview globally, so we have to understand our brand will potentially be viewed by tens of thousands of people over time.

During The Interview

1. When we do media training, we are told to keep our answers brief, on the presumption we will get ourselves into less trouble by keeping it brief.Unethical journalists have a nasty preference for cutting up our comments and then rearranging them against pre-recorded questions. We can be taken out of context, and now we are sounding controversial. The media industry has learnt that controversial sells.

Podcasts however are a long form show that usually lasts around an hour. The temptation is to speak in long bursts, because you have the time. We can speak in long bursts, if what we are saying is high quality and we want to communicate a complex thought. If we are just rambling on because we can, then that is a brand value destroyer.

1. We shouldn't feel any pressure to answer the question immediately.Everything can be edited, so if you take a long pause then the editor will just cut that bit out because they won't like the long silence. Take your time and think about your answer. If you don't like your answer, then just say you don't like it and then do it again.
2. If the show is being videoed then avoid having to look at your notes for the interview if you can.It make us look less professional and not in command of our topic. If we want to consult our notes, then we can do that off-camera and make sure that bit will be edited out later.
3. Don't look at the camera, if it is video plus audio.Keep looking at the host and engage with them. We can look at the camera at the start and the finish when the host is engaging directly with the audience, but apart from that, keep you attention on the interviewer. Switching your gaze from the host to the camera and back to the host, breaks your connection with the audience and looks like you are nervous and not quite sure where you should be looking.

After The Interview

1. Get a copy of the interview, either audio or both video and audio and check the content to make sure you are happy with it.If you are umming and ahhing during the show, don't worry about that and expect all of these will be cut out. This is the natural you and the way you speak, so your audience will accept that. If it is a problem, then there is a hint for you to get some training to improve as a communicator.
2. A lot of shows are weekly which means they have to have a stock of shows up their sleeve, so that they are never running out of content. This means it could be some time before your shows airs. Find out roughly when it will be released, so you can coordinate your own promotion activities
3. Ask for the links to the show, so that you can blast it out to your own social media, website etc., when it is released.
4. If you have your own podcast, ask for the edited file and then add in your own introduction and release it as an episode for your own show.
5. Get a photograph with the host and pump this out into your social media etc., as a teaser for the coming release of the episode.

These fifteen points will be a good starting point to consider, before you accept any requests for podcast interviews. Podcasts are a good media to promote our personal and professional brands and we should always be looking for ways to do that.