The Presentations Japan Series

English versus mathematics? Easy choice for budding engineers at High School and for when they get to University. Science is logical, knowable, understandable. Presenting seems to have little in the way of science and more art involved, so best avoided. Actually they do a pretty good job of avoiding it, until a certain stage in their careers. These days clients want to talk to the engineers, so they have to front up and visit the buyer with the salesperson. If the counterparty is another engineer, then the code is in place and everyone is fine. Line managers, decision makers, CFOs are different beasts and more difficult. Even more annoying is the client conducts beauty parades to decide which company's engineers they are going to select.

This is where the skilled engineer who can present in a skilled way eats everyone's lunch. One engineer mumbles, rambles, doesn't look confident and is struggling with basic coherence. The other is clear, concise, in command of the material and making the key points like a legend. Well, the choice for the buyer is made pretty easy.

In other cases, the engineers get promoted and have to represent their section to the senior leaders in the company. This is often when we get a call. "Can you help us please. We have a great engineer leading the team but his communication skills and presentation skills are dismal and the senior leadership have tasked HR to fix the problem, by finding a training company who can help".

This sounds good but it is often a difficult task. The major issue tends to be a lack of awareness around the importance and value of presenting. These skills are soft skills rather than the hard skills, which their profession demands. They can see them as a bit "fluffy". Presentation skills are very much in the eye of the beholder too, so opinions can vary regarding what is a good presentation. This lack of agreed, concrete measurable aspects can be an anathema to engineers.

Fluffy or otherwise, persuasion power is a real thing. This requires good skills in the design of the talk, the gathering of evidence and in the delivery. Design here means does the talk flow logically resulting in a clear conclusion, that is credible, because of the evidence assembled to support the main argument.

Ace engineer or not, if we start the presentation with a lot of fiddling around with the tech, there is a strong chance our audience is distracted and reaching for their phones to find something more interesting to do. We have to know that this is the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism and attention spans are functioning at microscopic levels. No matter how brilliant our evidence is, we will have lost many in our audience in those first few vital seconds, as we establish that first impression between speaker and listener. Online is even worse because now everyone is granted a free license to multi-task in the background and ignore the speaker.

Our opening has to be a gripper, such that the audience want to hear more, they want to know where you are going with this presentation. We must speak clearly and confidently. Easier said than done for laconic engineers, who are not prone to speaking a lot. Also, not doing a lot of presentations or probably, avoiding to do presentations, has left a confidence vacuum that is filled with nervousness. Sounding confident to an audience when you are not requires a level of thespian ability, which is usually beyond the grasp of hard skill trained engineers.

Rehearsal is the saviour here and lots of it is required. We don't want to spend all of our time building the slide deck. The delivery is what sells the message and that relates straight back to the fact we have to buy what we are saying first and then communicate that belief to the audience. If we don't understand the power of persuasion, we are likely to fluff off the rehearsal component of making the speech professional.

I have never been able to trace this supposed Japanese saying but it does sound good, "more sweat in training, less blood in battle". Let's make our mistakes in practice, get the talk timing right, work on the cadence, the order and the delivery. If we have the right mindset, then good things will happen and all of these other pieces of the puzzle will fit into place nicely.

Everyone is getting very swish with the tech these days, as we spend more and more hours in online meetings. Consequently, we are more and more likely to find ourselves in a breakout room to discuss a topic. When we first started doing this March 2020, as we ran our first LIVE On Line training, we discovered some disconcerting things about the medium. In many cases they were disparate individuals from different companies and also sometimes disparate individuals from different sections of the same firm. Initially, we found sending people who didn't already know each other into breakout rooms perplexed them. For the breakout room captives, there was no hierarchy, no psychological safety and no trust. Many times, three people in a breakout room would just sit there for three minutes and say absolutely nothing to each other.

We learnt we had to set up some social order and ground rules for them. We needed to tell them that a certain person will be in charge of the reporting for the group. That person will keep a record of the points raised and we also nominated another person to lead the discussion to create the points. This left everyone else to be a contributor, with the expectation they would do just that and respond to the leader's request for their opinion.

We also found that groups were unclear about the exact point they were discussing. We may have believed we explained it perfectly well, but often they were not sure what to talk about. Part of the reason was that when they heard they were going into a breakout room with strangers, their minds stopped listening to the instructions. Now they were focused on who would be in the group, how would they be perceived by strangers and how would they be judged for what they said in a public arena. With all of this front and center in their minds, the details of the question had receded into the background.

So we asked for a green check or a show of hands, around who understood what was happening. We would then call on some of those people to tell us the protocol for the breakout room and repeat back the question or issue they were going to discuss.

The third thing we found was that we had to enter each room and just check that there were no questions. If there were none, then we would leave them to it and move to the next room to check. Surprisingly, even with all of this formatting going on, we would still enter a room to hear stone cold silence, with no one playing their designated leader role. If this was the case, we would become the leader and get the conversation going amongst the participants.

I thought this was just Japan, but lately I have joined a study programme run by a global online education organisation. We were sent off to breakout rooms and it became obvious that most of the people participating from all around the world, really hadn't a clue how to interact in that situation. Part of it is language, as English was not the mother tongue FOR some of the participants. However, many of the factors which applied in Japan were also in evidence around shyness, lack of hierarchy, being judged and trust.

So, if you are sent off to virtual oblivion in a breakout room, here are some tips on how to get the most out of the situation. Seize that initial shy silence and be the one to introduce yourself and say where you are from. Next, talk about how much you are looking forward to learning from the other members of the group. " I am not an expert in this area and so please give me feedback, if what I am saying makes no sense. Also, let's all take full advantage of this chance to help each other grow. So, who would like to get us going and give a comment on the question?". That takes about thirty seconds to explain. If nobody feels sufficiently comfortable yet to kick things off, then you lead with your prepared comment. I say "prepared comment", because before this session you have gathered your ideas into a series of bullet points, which you can easily to talk to. You are not trying to wing it and make stuff up on the fly. Being prepared is much better than trying to be a spontaneous genius. And the rest of us can tell the difference.

By being active and asking questions of others in the group, people start to feel more comfortable and free to express their ideas. It is a good idea to praise people's contributions, by saying, "Great insight there, referring to XYZ. Could you go a bit deeper on that point please, I am keen to hear more".

When you speak, be concise, clear and please don't try to hog the airwaves. Say your piece and then ask others for their ideas and comments. In this way, your reputation as a person of value goes up and your humility is noted and appreciated. No one enjoys the blowhard who wants to spend the majority of the time making sure everyone else has to listen to their voice.

"That has to come out". "Why?". "It might offend women in the audience". "But this example is totally in context with what I am saying". And so it went on. This was my first bruising encounter with cancel culture. Living in Japan this third time since 1992, I have been outside the cancel culture debates sweeping America. Until now. The speech I was going to give would be videoed and go global, including to America. Perplexed, confused, insulted – these were the emotions I was confronting upon hearing I had to make that specific change to my speech. It got me wondering about our ability as presenters to present our thoughts in public. What does this mean for the future of public speaking?

Living in Japan, I had vaguely heard of cancel culture. I understood it to be mainly centered on Universities where students were confronting their Professor's ideas and comments they disagreed with. I had read in the media about youthful tweets and social media postings coming back to haunt the authors many years later. I cannot say I ever expected to be cancelled.

The offending item was an image objectifying women in Japan. A photo of a maid café young lady done up in a frilly miniskirt in fact. At her request, I took my anime besotted teenage daughter to visit a maid café in Akihabara when she was visiting from Australia a number of years ago. The image in the photo corresponded with the outfits I saw being worn by the staff, so the image in question was congruent with the maid café experience. That is to say it reflected a reality, a truth, we can see any day of the week in Akihabara. Apparently, such a confronting picture would be too much for women located outside Japan and in particular those living in the USA.

The speech topic was on Diversity and Inclusion in Japan. The main issue here is gender inequality, although sexual orientation has become more prominent lately. The context of this speech was that the comment by ex- Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori about women on boards talking too much, can be traced back to the Confucian idea of a woman's place in society being there to serve men, throughout all stages of their lives. The maid café photograph was an example of how these women are being objectified to serve male fantasies in the modern era and therefore, there is still a long way to go for women in business to achieve gender equity here in Japan. The photograph was totally in context with the text and was not supporting the objectification of women, in fact the precise opposite.

So, being told it had to be removed was incomprehensible to me. I argued about the photograph being in the context of the text and that the central argument I was making made it all congruent. This next pushback was the snapper for me: "Women seeing the photo alone would be offended. There was the danger they would not pick up on what you were saying in the video and may misinterpret your meaning".

"Wait a moment. You are saying they are not smart enough, intelligent enough to discern the context of what I am saying and therefore the photograph and that paragraph have to be cut?". That struck me as being totally chauvinistic and condescending to women. By now you will have worked out I was having this conversation with another man. He reported back to me that he had discussed it with some female leaders in that organisation and the consensus was that I couldn't include it.

Here is the dilemma we are going to face – do we agree with this cancel culture putsch or do we stand our ground. I felt this was a matter of free speech, free expression and I really struggled with whether I should buckle under this request for removal pressure or should I fight.

If I remove it unintelligent people win. If I refuse to go ahead and recuse myself on the basis of the principle of free speech, unintelligent people win. If I fight, then I create powerful enemies and get bogged down in the cancel culture wars. Where is the line regarding what is acceptable and what is not? Who is the arbiter of the line location? How do we deal with committees making these decisions? Are they representative of the masses or are they wannabe oligarchs calling the shots?

I removed it. But I have been feeling very uneasy about that decision ever since. I have so many thoughts flying around in my brain about this cancel culture issue and I cannot get them to fly in formation as yet. This was an eye opener for me. I often make the point that we speakers and presenters live in the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism. It would appear we are also living in the Epoch of Cancel Culture. What do we do? Pick our fights? Assemble the barricades on principle on every occasion? Fight or fold? I folded, but I regretted it.

What about you? When the cancel culture brown shirts turn up, what is your plan? "What is that you say, no plan". Time for all of us who speak and present to make a plan, I would suggest. If you have any bright ideas on resolving this enigma, please let me know!

Our event speaker was a well-coiffed and well appointed senior executive in one of the world's biggest corporations. The topic was on building your personal brand. It was a good crowd. Anticipation gradually turned to disappointment though, as the talk unfolded. The talk was on how to project your brand "within" this gargantuan monster. How to climb their thousand foot greasy pole. Before we started, I had "worked the room" pretty thoroughly, combing the ranks of the assembled professionals for any potential clients. None of them worked for this type of colossus, so the speaker's sage advice missed the mark entirely. How could that be, I thought to myself?

Who Is In The Room?

One of the big mistakes for a presenter is not understanding who is going to be in the room. At what level should you pitch your content? Are they experts, amateurs, dilettantes? At the least, ask the organisers for the attendees company name and their positions. If our speaker had done that, it could have become more relevant to those who took the trouble to attend.

Our Purpose Is?

We need to make a decision about what is the purpose of our talk. Are we here to inform, entertain, inspire or persuade? The hosts give us the overall theme. We now analyse our audience, so that we know what angle we should select. In this previous case, it would have been to "inform" and in that sense the speaker got it right. An inspire speech will be totally different to a persuade or entertain speech. Think back to the presentations you have attended. What was the speaker's approach? Was it just a jumble, a catch all effort? I am putting my money on "jumble".

First Three Seconds

We have three seconds to grab our audiences' attention and create a positive first impression. It has to be powerful enough that they don't seize their phones and escape from us to the siren calls of the internet. Why three seconds? Over the last five years I have been asking class participants, how long does it take you to form a first impression of someone new. The answers used to range from five minutes to thirty minutes. Today, they tell me three seconds, five seconds, fifteen seconds. It is shocking how little time we actually have, so our opening has to be well planned or we will have lost the room.

The Age of Distraction and The Era of Cynicism.

Audiences are quick to judge, slow to trust and fast to flee from our presentation. We need to have a blockbuster opening. Something that will stop them in their tracks. However, what do we see presenters doing with those first few vital moments? They are not actively engaging their audience because they are head down, hunched over their laptop, fumbling with their slide deck to get it up on screen. At the next presentation you attend, count the number of first impression killers the presenter is exhibiting. Have they managed to capture your total attention from the very first few seconds or are you reaching for your phone?

How To Begin

Rehearsal is such an obvious point, but it almost never happens with business presenters. This one thing will change everything about how the talk is received and how you will be perceived. Get there early and check all the equipment. Also have someone else load your slide deck for you, if it can't be primed ready to go. We need to be 100% present with our audience, so reduce all friction impeding that result.

Begin by picking out someone in your audience half way back and around the middle of the venue. Make direct eye contact with that person and for the next six seconds speak to them, as if you were the only two people in the room. Then at random, move to the next person and just keep repeating this six second process for the entire presentation. Why six seconds? Anything less and it doesn't give you enough time to engage that person one on one. However, continuously staring at someone burns into their retina and becomes too intrusive. We want to directly engage as many people as possible in the time we have, so our engagement time split is important.

Wrap Your Information In Stories

We want our message to be fondly recalled, savoured like a fine wine and fully imbibed by our audience. Many speakers, particularly technical presenters, have deluded themselves into thinking the data is all. They believe they get a free pass on needing to be a proficient and professional presenter, because the quality of their information trumps everything else. Not true. The audience will remember two things – you and the stories you told. Sadly none of that cool data you have cavalierly tossed up on screen is retained.

They will remember you as someone they would like to hear from again or not. The data wrapped up in stories is the way to make sure your key points are heard and remembered. Even if they are enjoying your talk, some in the audience have no shame about brandishing their phones to do some multi-tasking and surfing the internet. Stories stop them in their tracks and they will switch back to us. Here is the snapper though, how many speakers have you heard use stories well or at all? If it is so effective, why are speakers just droning on about the details? They just don't know and it shows.

The good news is that the speaker proficiency bar is so low, we can easily shine by just avoiding some of these simple mistakes. We make it hard for ourselves unnecessarily. We want to be a gold medal winner, but finish up being a prize dud. The choice is yours, so which will you choose for your next presentation? Why not go for being a winner, a presentations Olympian, every time you speak.

This is horrible. Man, this is so bad, what were they thinking? I am watching a video of a leader asking for some major changes to the organisation's finances and he is doing a woeful job of it. They have a dedicated Coms team, there are talented people in the leadership group, so I am asking myself how could this train wreck come to pass? I was also thinking, "you should have called me, I could have saved you a lot of wasted opportunity with your messaging". Too late now, the video is out there for all to ignore. This is a classic case of people who don't spend any time appreciating the importance of communication and presentation skills, suddenly going for the big ask and then falling flat on their face.

It was serious subject, a heavy subject and the background chosen for the video was given zero thought. When you are asking for a truckload of dough for a project, you want the background oozing with solid credibility. You need to look Presidential, capable, considered and trustworthy. That lightweight scene setting wasn't given much thought but the talking head only occupies a small part of the screen. Having people moving around in the background distracts us from the key message. No one thought about that either. They should have told those people to buzz off for ten minutes, so the video could get done.

The camera saps twenty percent of our energy. If you are a low energy leader, you can come across as cadaverous. You need to ramp up the speaking power. If the message requires convincing people about spending more money, then you really need to amp it up, to come across as confident, considered and competent. The body language, gestures and voice modulation need to be on point. Hitting key words is a must, as are carefully thought through pauses. We need these to allow the audience to absorb what we have just said. Rolling thoughts over the top of each other leaves the viewers lost.

The camera is also unforgiving. If you can't hold its gaze, then you look like a shifty Souk merchant trying to sell us some dodgy, dud stuff. You have to look straight into the camera barrel and keep looking at it the whole time. You don't want to be sitting too close to the camera when you are doing this though. A massive close up of your dial isn't going to work for most people, so better to back up a bit. It also allows for gestures to be used and more importantly, to be seen.

Looking away, looking down and looking at your notes are a no no. If it is an important occasion, a key topic, the big ask, then do what the world's leaders have learnt – use the teleprompter. You need to refine the script and then read it, word perfect, while looking straight into the camera lens the whole time. This takes some practice, some effort in the preparation, rather than just pulling up a chair and free styling in front of the camera for a "once over lightly" approach to a serious subject.

I will never forget a gorgeous young American woman I saw on YouTube. She was the complete package. She was teaching people how to use the teleprompter. However her eyes were obviously reading across the screen left to right following the text. You don't want that. You need to be able to zero in on the lens and read the text at the same time. That takes some time to get right. You also have to play around with the teleprompter speed setting as well, to find the right cadence for your talk.

There were no gripping stories to give us hope. Just a dry rendition of what he wanted to tell us. The visuals were not clever. Cherry picking the minimum damage case smacks of the carnival barker and snake oil salesman. Show us the real numbers, so there is more honesty about the proposition here for us to consider. He was trying to be too clever by half and failing miserably.

Our errant, non-persuading persuader really murdered the message. Once it is done, it is out there. His personal and professional brands both took a massive hit thanks to that video. His messaging missed the mark and I doubt people will be persuaded to join him on his programme.

I am not super opposed to his offering, I get it, but I am vaguely insulted by the lack of professionalism. If he can't get this right, how can I expect he can get anything else right. It is the remaining coffee stain on the pull down tray in the aircraft when you board, that gets you worrying about whether they can actually do a professional job on engine maintenance if they can't get this simple thing right, why should I trust them with complex things?

There is no excuse for this exercise in bungled communications. In this day and age there is so much information available on presenting skills, it is staggering. For example, in my own case, I have broadcast over two hundred and twenty pieces on the subject, for free, over the last four years. Don't allow yourself to become part of the casualty ward of failed suicidal persuaders and communicators inflicting mortal harm to their brand, through lack of awareness and preparation. Get the training now, so that when it is time to step up and be counted, you can carry it off with aplomb.

There are 13 common mistakes which prevent presenters from owning the room. Here they are - don't do these things!

1. Thump the microphone and ask if people can hear you down the back - get there early and check the tech

1. Have no idea who is in the audience. Find out the experience and expertise level of the audience, so you are not pitching too high or too low with your content

1. Plan the presentation properly. Don't spend all of your time assembling the slides. Design from the close - get it down to one sentence, then think about how you are going to prove it and assemble the evidence. Finally, design the opening - it has to blast through everyone's distractions, so that people can concentrate on your key points.

1. Don't rehearse at all or not enough. Spending all your time on slide production isn't the priority. Practice the speech, check the length, work on the cadence and phrasings.

1. Don't connect presenting to personal brand. Every time we present people are judging us and our firms. If we are good, they think highly of the whole organisation. If we are a dud, they doubt the whole organisation.

1. Don't convert data into relevant stories. Recalling data is hard, but we are genius at recalling stories - ergo, turn your data into a narrative.

1. Not enough power when presenting. Speaking to someone sitting next to you requires a certain level of volume and energy. Speaking to a large audience requires a much higher level of volume and power output. Don't let your sentences trail off and die. Finish with power.

1. Know how to dress for the presentation. Your face has to be the central piece of the presentation - not the slides and not your tie or scarf or pocket chief. If it is a more casual environment, then dress down appropriately. If it is more formal, then full business battle dress is the way to go.

1. Don't nail the first impression. Today, you only have two seconds to form that first impression. Pay very careful attention to how you start. Get straight into it and then thank the organisers after that introductory piece.

1. How to handle Q&A. Understand that Q&A is a street fight - that means there are no rules. If you get a tough or hostile question, then don't answer it immediately. Pause, paraphrase the question, taking the heat out of it, pause again and then respond. You will have bought yourself around 10 seconds of thinking time this way. Your first idea straight out of your head will be relatively poor, but your considered response will be much better.

1. Don't know how to use slides correctly. One colour is preferable with a maximum of two. Use one font. Whatever is presented on screen has to be understood in two seconds. If it is too complex, then strip out the data and put that on a different slide.

1. Can't control nerves. The brain senses fear, it starts pumping adrenalin into your body. Your pulse goes up, you start to feel hot, your palms start to sweat, your knees start to quiver and your stomach feels queasy. You cannot control the release of the adrenalin, but you can control the reaction. Out of sight, do some vigorous pacing to burn off the nervous energy, then sit down and do some deep, slow diaphragm breathing. This lowers your pulse rate and you start to cool down.

1. Don't know how to keep audiences engaged. This is the Age of Distraction, so we presenters have never faced such difficult challenges as we do today. Use silence as a pattern interrupt for those who have escaped us. They will think the talk is over and return their focus to us. Ask people to raise their hand to get them interacting, but don't over do it. Ask questions, which are in fact rhetorical, although the audience won't be sure, so they are mental concentration answering your question.

Succeeding Shintaro Abe as Prime Minister, Yoshihide Suga has now been thrust into the public arena in a new dimension. When he was the Cabinet spokesman, he made a valiant effort to say as little as possible at press briefings, be defensive and always treat journalists with complete disdain and disregard. He didn't need to be appealing or a good speaker, because his job was to look down the whole time read from the prepared script in a monotone and obfuscate at all turns. Actually, he was the "black hole" of public speaking, drawing all of the press energy into the void and just extinguishing it. Maybe you will replace your boss one day and have to take over the role of representing the organization to the wider world. Can you do a better job than Suga?

Keiko Ishikawa, a public relations consultant, was quoted in the media noting Suga's choice of vocabulary is "not that bad". Rather it is "how he attempts to convey the words that is the problem". The role of second fiddle mouthpiece for the Abe Cabinet and being the Prime Minister in your own right, require substantially different skills. Actually, there are few skilled public speakers in business, government and politics in Japan, so Suga blends in nicely with the ineptitude and many failings of his peers and colleagues. The problem is that being hopeless like everyone else does not help you to be persuasive.

Ishikawa noted, "As his facial expressions and words and phrasings almost never vary, there's no strength in his eyes. We can't understand what he wants to emphasis and where his heart is". Robotic would be a good descriptor of his approach to public speaking. Yes, I appreciate that Japanese is a monotone language but that is no excuse, although many will volunteer it to justify their personal lack of ability. Even in Japanese, we can pull the twin levers of speed and strength to gain vocal variation and this is open to Suga too, but he chooses to drone on instead. We know he is bad, but how about you? If we recorded your talk, would it be a deadly monotone, driving everyone deep into slumberland?

Professor Mehrabian's research in the 1960s flagged the issue of the way we speak not matching the content of the words being a problem. When we are not congruent, only 7% of our message is getting through to the audience. As a speaker, achieving only a 7% success rate of verbal message transmission should get you fired from your job! With Suga and many other leaders in Japan, facial expressions are wooden from start to finish. If it is bad news, then look worried and if it is good news, then look happy. Those reactions would be congruent. Suga is not doing that, so he is giving up a tremendous persuasion tool – his facial expressions. Our face is a million watts more powerful than any slide deck on screen.

Ishikawa also complained, "His articulation is bad and could be improved by practicing moving his mouth, speaking clearly and changing the tempo of his speech". The fundamental issue here is there is no interest or will to be a clear communicator. He was the master of obfuscation in his former job and he has carried that like a badge of honour into his new role. The Liberal Democratic Party has a very comfortable majority and no real challenge from the opposition parties, so a sense of entitlement is strong in their ranks. "Who cares about being a good public speaker, because the punters are going to have to vote us back in anyway, so whats the problem?".

The will to persuade listeners is a fundamental professional skill requirement. We see so many Japanese business executives, just like Suga, pathetically going through the motions reading their speeches, with no passion for their talk. In some cases, they may want to do a better job, but they worry if they slip out of lockstep with the rest of their hopeless colleagues and do a professional job, they will draw negative comments. I was coaching a new President to give his first key speech to the company's stakeholders. The content was terrible. Dry, boring and devoid of any life or interest. He rejected the proposed changes to improve it, because he didn't think his audience would accept a professional version of his talk. He was limiting himself in order to blend in with everyone's zero level expectations of a professional speech. In Japan, this becomes a self-perpetuating nightmare, where the entire country's leadership remain duds when it comes to public speaking.

There may be hope with the next generation. The much younger Environment Minister Shinjiro Koizumi was not very good at public speaking at the start of his political career. The difference was he became serious about his communication skills. He studied rakugo (traditional storytelling) and listened to recordings of his own talk and speeches. He made an effort to improve his presentations. Today he is a million times better than his boss and is talked of as a future Prime Minister.

Japan's politicians, bureaucrats and business executives are not your role models. The lesson is that in the Kingdom of the Blind, the one eyed man is King. When you see everyone is aping Suga and his ilk, when it comes to professional presentation skills, run a mile in the opposite direction. Rather, become professional, persuasive, gain self confidence and have presence when you speak. How do you do that? Like the rest of us, get trained!.

It makes sense to be authentic when presenting, because this is the easiest state to maintain. As someone wise once noted, "if you are going to be a liar you need a stupendous memory to keep up with who you told what". Presenting is something similar. Maintaining a fiction in front of an audience takes a lot of skill. In fact, if you have that much skill, why worry about faking it in the first place? Well, there is a place for fakery when presenting, but we need to know when is appropriate.

We know that the way we think about things influences how we well we do. Imposter syndrome is a common state of mind though amongst people, across a broad range of situations. You might write a blog and put it up on your website, or waffle away on Clubhouse or pontificate to an audience, live or online. But who are you to talk about this subject? Are you saying anything worthwhile or just regurgitating what far cleverer people have already said? Do you really know this subject? Is your experience valuable or even relevant to others? Are you really qualified to give advice to people running far bigger organisations that your own?

Looking over that list, it can be enough to scare you off emerging from the deep depths of your comfy comfort zone ever again. So, we have to create a positive mindset that "yes", we have every right to address this subject area, even if we feel a fake when compared to other more famous or clever people. The funny thing is they suffer the same imposter syndrome too, relative to their illustrious peers. Academics, for example, are generally a put upon group, because they have to publish their research to get ahead in their careers. When they publish it, they are now exposing the weaknesses of their intellectual process, their inadequate research ability or their dubious writing skills, to the entire expert community in their area of defined speciality.

Confidence warrants confidence. If we sound and look confident, most people are likely to ignore the emperor has no clothes and is not perfect. They will be carried away with our enthusiasm for our subject, with our passionate belief in our findings and our commitment to share the knowledge. The problems crop up when we become nervous speaking in front of others. Normally, we are quite even keeled and confident, but with all of those beady sets of eyes drilling holes into us, we start to wobble. Suddenly, our imposter syndrome fears come flooding forth and soon our usual cool, calm, collected façade is torn to shreds, as we are exposed as a self doubting, insecure, fake.

Now how would the audience know we are a fake? Well, we very helpfully tell them, by saying daft things like, "I am rather nervous today". Or "I am not very good at presenting". Or "I didn't have much time to put this presentation together and I am afraid it won't be very good" and any other of the motley collection of dubious, sympathy seeking, self-serving, cop out proclamations. Do us all a favour and keep all of this imposter syndrome stuff to yourself. Here is a secret - we all want you to succeed.

If you are nervous presenting then fake it, such that you appear at least "normal", rather than being reduced to a quivering tower of jelly on stage. If your knees are knocking from the nerves, then stand behind the podium until you feel more comfortable to walk around. If your hands are shaking and you have to hold a microphone, use both hands and draw it on to your chest, so that your body secures the erratically jiggling instrument. If your throat is parched, then have warm, room temperature rather than iced water, close by and drink it when you need it. The iced water constricts your throat and you don't want that, so forgo the usual venue offered beverage and request the no ice alternative. If you begin to speak and instead of a mellifluent note, out pops a constrained, awkward, embarrassing squeak, then clear your throat and try again. If you stumble on the pronunciation of a word, try again. If you get the speech points order mixed up or miss one, then fake it and keep going, offering not a hint of anything untoward occurring.

If you act enthusiastically, you will become enthusiastic. If you act confidently, you will become confident. Yes you might be nervous, but as Winston Churchill said, "if you are going through hell, keep going". That is the point. No matter what happens, the show must go on and that means you must keep going. If it is a disaster, then dust yourself off and climb back in saddle. As the Japanese saying goes, nana korobi ya oki (七転び八起き) - "fall down seven times, get up eight times".

I was watching an "expert" giving a series of video instruction modules on leading dispersed teams, now that many of us are working from home. I thought this will be useful and maybe I can pick up a few ideas for myself. It was a rather pedestrian affair I have to say and in one part, dangerously incorrect. The instructor claims to have a Ph.D., so presumably has done some major original research to warrant that degree. Shoveling misinterpretations of research done by other academics into the public domain about first impressions is quite shocking. It is even more jarring when that instructional course commands a payment of our hard won cash.

We have many opportunities to create a first impression. Meeting someone for the first time at a networking event is a mini-presentation of your personal and professional brand. Talking to people at the venue, before you go up to the podium to give your talk after the luncheon is another example. Appearing on audio or video live stream and in recorded content are also in that same category. Obviously presenting on stage or virtually are the arenas given the most attention for building first impressions. Let's take a look at all of these in turn and also put our "expert's" fake news to the sword.

Meeting someone in a crowded noisy networking environment is a tough one. Fortunately in Japan, we exchange our meishi or business cards, so that we have the name and details about what they do. Counterintuitively, in these situations we should say little. Many thrusters imagine they need to dominate the air, hog the conversation and talk continuously about themselves. To build a solid first impression, start with a smile when you meet the person as you shake hands or bow and keep smiling as you hand over the meishi. Smiling implies warmth, friendliness and confidence. We like all of those in strangers.

Next ask them about what they do, why they do it, how long they have done it, where are they from etc. Why? We want to hear about them. In this process they feel good to talk about themselves and to respond to our questions about their glorious past, present or future. As they speak, we can often find commonalities that make it easier for us to connect as strangers. Also, as we learn more about them, we are in a better position to appreciate who they are.

When it is our turn, we should be brief and try to draw out our shared experiences if we have found any. We should also get back to getting them to talk about themselves as soon as possible. Their first impression about us will be someone who is considerate, polite, interested in them and a "good conversationalist".

When we are on Clubhouse we are live, so there can be no Take Two. This is a one shot chance to speak to the whole world during that session. Again, smile when you are speaking. The audience cannot see the smile, but they can feel it. Don't go on Clubhouse without a plan. Talking about the first thing that pops into your head is why most of the conversation on Clubhouse is rubbish. Have a small number of bullet points you will discuss so that you can navigate the audience through your content. Rehearse the points beforehand so you eliminate ums and ahs, hesitations, monotone delivery and a thousand other horrible deviations from a good talk. Start with confidence and speak more loudly than normal to overcome the limitations of the platform. Get a timer and set it to three minutes maximum, so you are forced to be clear and concise.

Live in person requires us to carefully choreograph the first few minutes of the talk. Get there early and check all of the tech. Have someone else load your slide deck or fire it up for you at the start of the talk. You want to be standing in the middle of the stage away from the laptop, engaging your audience from the beginning of your impressive introduction by the MC. Start with a teaser opening. Some comment which will break into the already packed minds and attention spans of the audience and have them sit up and listen carefully to what you have to say. Next, introduce yourself and thank the organisers, before you get into the speech proper.

Recorded podcasts and videos can be edited, so our first impression sins can be washed away in the editing suite. Live streaming though is a different story. The start of these live video sessions is always a nightmare. When you are doing it all solo, it is very hard to time the start properly and so it is easy to appear awkward and clunky. Some systems are live as soon as you hit the record button and others have a brief count down until they start. Having you all set up ready to go by having someone else hit the start button is best. With Zoom calls etc., you can keep the audience in the waiting room until you are ready to go, so that is more easily controlled.

The fake news of the instructor mentioned earlier is that our first impression is formed 55% from dress, 38% from voice tone and 7% from what we say. You may have heard these dubious numbers bandied about before. Professor Albert Mehrabian, who published this research in the 1960s, added an important caveat to those numbers. This important qualification was entirely missing from the content the supposed "expert" was touting. Mehrabian said these numbers apply only when what we say is incongruent with how we say it. Our facial expression and body language have to match up with the content of what we are saying. If it doesn't, our audience gets distracted and do not focus on the message anymore. They are more consumed by how we dress and how we sound.

First impressions in any context should be planned rather than left to random happenstance. This is your personal and professional brand we are talking about here and they are much too important to treat lightly or be compromised. Beware of non-expert "experts". The barrier to entry for offering online learning coursesis zero and often that is the value of the content too.

When I read this quote from Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon from 1971 that " a wealth of information would create a poverty of attention" I thought about its ramifications for presenters. Today, we are firmly swimming against a King tide of information overload, so Simon's dystopian prophecy has come to fruition. This is the Age of Distraction for audiences. They are gold medal winning poor listeners and yet we have to present to them. We know that storytelling is one sure fire way to snaffle their attention and yet that path is littered with landmines.

Very few business presenters tell stories at all in their talks. They are enamoured with their high quality content. Which usually means the results of surveys, research or data collation. Data is rarely strong enough to linger long in our memories. This is because usually there is a ton of data, each morsel, each three decimal tidbit vanquishing the one before and so on and so on, until we recall nothing, as Simon predicted.

Business presenters imagining their data is enough are fooling themselves, because their messages are not breaking through that wall of distraction and that poverty of attention. For the few who do tell stories they are freelancing, going free style with no structure. They just relate what happened. What is the point of the story? Is the delivery getting the key messages in front of the audience in a way that they will remember it? Are the listeners seeing any relevance for themselves in this story?

Where do we start with the story? Do we get straight to the point, do we go to the key take away? "Hey, get to the point". We often hear this from bosses and we mistakenly follow that direction with our storytelling. Why is it a mistake? We have to grasp the fundamental difference between writing a report, where we start with the conclusion we have reached from our analysis, otherwise known as the "Executive Summary" and giving an oral presentation. When we launch forth with our recommendation, we open up the flood gates of rampant critique.

Many who are listening start thinking that we are wrong, have misfired with our analytical findings and have failed to account for important alternate considerations. Why do they react like that? We have put forth our main point completely naked and unprotected, so that is all they have to go on. In the sequence, our explanation of how we came to this conclusion follows next. Critically, the critics are not really listening now because they are consumed by what they think is wrong with it, so the justification portion gets lost for them.

We should instead begin with our context, the background which has informed our conclusion, based on the data and experiences we analysed. We need to populate this context with people they know, places they can see in their mind's eye and lodge it in a temporal frame which the audience can process.

The genius of this approach is that while sitting there listening to us warble on, the audience are racing ahead and reaching their own conclusions about the insights to be gained from this context. Given a certain set of circumstances, there are a limited number of conclusions to be drawn and the chances are very high, that they will have reached the same one you did. When you announce it, the listeners mentally say to themselves "that's right". Bingo!

Now instead of facing an audience of doubters, one uppers and thrusters, you are dealing with fans of your work. The key is to make the insight download very concise. When we teach this formula, invariably people want to jumble a number of insights together and run through them. Each additional insight dilutes the power of the one before it and so on. It is critical to select the strongest, best insight and only pull the velvet curtain back to reveal that one.

The final step is to take the context and the insight and then package it up and place it on a silver tray for the audience to take home with them, when we outline the relevance to them. Although we have produced an insight, it is an inert outcome. What does that insight do for us, how can we use it, where will this be valuable for us, when can we apply it? When we receive the insight wisdom with that relevancy formula attached, it makes sense. We feel attending the speaker's presentation today was time well spent. We got something worthwhile which will help us navigate the future that little bit better and more easily. Again, this has to be done very concisely, for the same reasons discussed about explaining the insight.

So the formula is context, insight and then explain the relevance. If we mix it up we are making things hard for ourselves, so resist any calls to get to the point, by being forced to put up the insight like a sacrificial lamb about to be slaughtered. Hold it in reserve until the scene has been set. Sherlock Holmes and Poirot, great fictional detectives always revealed the baddie's name after giving the background of the crime. It is a well tested, tried and true formula for storytelling, so try it.