The Presentations Japan Series

Engaging Covid-19 Isolated Audiences

Once upon a time, isolation from our audience meant we were not getting our message through to them. We were a poor presenter or the quality of the message was sub-par, so the audience wasn't buying into it. Today, our audiences are in isolation at home, either through Government mandated lockdown or company designated instructions. Our communication patterns have been totally displaced.

In many cases, the equipment solution has been to have people use their phones or their tablets, rather than laptops. That choice really limits the communication tools which are available and reduces messaging to very simple interactions. The danger here is that communication becomes one way and rather limited. Sharing data, especially visual data, becomes tricky depending on what hardware you are using.

Today's technology is amazing, but still audio connections can be fragile and internet overload can make connecting to on-line meetings a challenge. This is all a new experience for us, so we are often losing communication opportunities because we are in the midst of scarcity thinking. We see the problems, the difficulties and we are locked into our normal ways of interacting, so we not seeing the opportunities.

There are technical limitations, but where possible, have some degree of visual communication with people sitting in isolation. Just seeing other people's faces for a few minutes is enough to re-establish the personal connection. If you have the bandwidth to sustain that throughout the meeting, that is best, but if not, then at least have some visual exchange, before moving to voice only. Remember to look at the tiny, little camera itself and not the big screen in front of you. The location of the camera is usually set well above the screen, so we are in fact making eye contact with the screen, rather than our audience.

Our strong voice tone and speaking speed become very important. We need to be really clear, because often the audio connections can be rocky and people can miss part of what is being said. Sometimes the way people uses microphones is not very effective, so if you can't hear people, ask them to get closer to microphone and to speak more loudly. This is why checking for understanding on a regular basis is important. We need to be much more conscious of this, because there may be little actual understanding and we are just waxing lyrically to ourselves and no one else, but we don't have any way of knowing that.

Also tell people that if they missed something, to let you know, because you will repeat it. Normally, we wouldn't make that request because we are all expected to be paying attention. In an on-line environment, the tech may be the issue, so we have to accept that communication cannot continue as business as usual. Assume people are not following you, rather than the reverse.

It also means that we have to be agile, to keep our place when we get interrupted. It is a bit like consecutive translation. You say something, the interpreter conveys that and in the meantime you have forgotten where you were with what you wanted to say, because your concentration and flow were interrupted. When we are making an on-line presentation, we need to be making notes of what comes next if we get interrupted, so that we don't lose our flow and can pick up where we left off.

Normally, we speak, then we take questions at the end. In the on-line world, we need to build in opportunities for discussion at certain points in our talk. This is the best way to engage the audience throughout the talk. We just stop talking and invite comment from the listeners. Now they feel part of the proceedings and can have a sense of ownership of the discussion. We then pick up the threads of the talk and move in until the next scheduled interaction. Some technology handles this interaction live and in other cases, we are relegated to the dreaded chat box.

I don't like the chat box all that much, because we are now focused on the typing of the messages which means a time delay. It is much better to have live comments, in real time, if possible. If you have to use the chat box, then slow down and adjust the time for the talk or the content quantity, because you will need more time for the delivery and response.

We need to switch the way we plan our talks, the amount of content for the talk and the way we deliver them, to cope with a different receiving environment compared to all being in the same physical room.

Free Live On Line Stress Management Sessions

On a separate note, we are running public Live On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English). We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered Live On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients. This allows us to help our clients and our community.

The registration process for these free stress management sessions is being offered on our website, so please go to this specific page: http://bit.ly/dale_stress_e

Screen Based Strong Messaging Techniques

Most people have trouble getting their message across when they are in front of others and doing it in person. Being on screen while everyone is working at home, makes the whole proposition so much more difficult. A mediocre presenter becomes a shambles in this new medium. There is the tendency to imagine that the screen based delivery medium makes lousy messaging and amateur presentations acceptable. Well they aren't, if you have a message to deliver, in fact you have to do a lot better in this case, than you normally would.

Get the logistics sorted. Dress for success, so don't beam in wearing your pyjamas, Aloha shirt or your favourite deathmetal band T-shirt or anything other than full business battle attire. Go for power colours rather than pastels. Avoid narrow stripes because sometimes there can problems with the video technology not handling stripes all that well. Looking professional adds to the credibility of your message. A business suit looks a lot more powerful on screen than casual clothes, if that is the normal attire at the office.

Get yourself a mouse to whiz around the screen with, rather than using the trackpad on your laptop. Get a webcam camera if your laptop or home computer isn't up to snuff. The audio when connecting remotely can be a problem if your internet connection at home isn't all that robust. Headphones with a microphone attachment makes communication so much easier and clearer. Also, most technologies allow you to record the session, so certainly make good use of this opportunity so that you can see how you come across to others using this medium.

Eye contact is really important in this screen based world, but so often we have nostril focus, because the laptop camera is shooting straight up the speaker's nose. This is distracting us from what the speaker is saying. The screen is confusing too, because the camera is above the screen and we all tend to talk to the screen rather than our audience. We have to get used to speaking to camera and ignore the screen. We can look at the screen, in the same way we would look at notes in front of us. The key point though is focus on spending as much face to camera time as possible. This is how technically difficult this is – raise the laptop height so the camera is at eye level. I think we can all manage that.

Make sure there is some decent lighting in the room. Often we don't think about this and we and the room can be gloomy. Arrange extra lights to be focused on you as the centerpiece so we can see you clearly. We are used to close up shots in movies and television and this is the same thing with us when we are the focus. When you are speaking during an on line broadcast, most of the technology transfers your face to the full screen for the audience and you are now a massive close up.

You may or not be able to control the background but we should try, so we don't have competition for our message. Some broadcast technologies offer virtual backgrounds, if you have the bandwidth, so your humble abode is not front and center of the broadcast. If you can't manage that, then try to eliminate things which might be distracting from you when you are speaking. You may be able to drop the background behind you into darkness by turning off some lights and only have light on you.

Everyone is feeling tense and uncertain about where we are going with the Covid-19 virus and attached business meltdown. Without knowing it your face could be reflecting these worries, so don't forget to smile on camera. You may not have a killer smile, but do the best with what you have. You can simply put a smiley face or the instruction SMILE above the camera to remind you to smile and that actually works quite well. Smiling shows confidence and friendliness. It also helps to build confidence in your audience that you know what you are doing, because you look relaxed and in control. Frowning, creasing your eyes, stiffening your facial muscles all do the opposite, so avoid these simple mistakes.

Don't forget your body language is a powerful communicator. The screen can diminish you, if you allow it to. Instead try to own the screen and use your gestures and posture to your advantage. Sit up straight and forward and get your hand gestures to sync with what you are saying, to underscore the message. Don't be afraid to stand up and present standing, because the camera just moves to a wide shot. Don't stand too far back though, because the audio might not pick you up as well as you need it to. Also be animated and speak with passion, rather than droning on as a talking head on screen.

In the room, on screen, on video, it makes no substantial difference. The basics of presenting apply everywhere, although we do have to make a bigger effort when broadcasting remotely. Awareness is the key and repetition and practice assist us to become more professional in this screen environment.

Free LIVE On Line Stress Management Sessions

On a separate note, we are running public LIVE On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English). We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered LIVE On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients. This allows us to help our clients and our community.

The registration process for these free stress management sessions is being offered on our website, so please go to this specific page: http://bit.ly/dale_stress_e

Covid 19 And On-Line Presentation Skills

GIGO is a useful acronym from the past, which we can employ for the current problem we have conducting business meetings and presentations on-line. Garbage In Garbage Out on-line interactions is not what we want to be promoting in this current Covid-19 driven business and health crisis. Note that I put business ahead of health in this discussion. This is not to ignore or belittle the consequences for the health of those over 70 or with an existing health condition, who we know suffer the highest mortality rates. I just want to make the point that the business impact of the current crisis affects billions of people, while the virus affects hundreds of thousands. Businesses locate people in their homes rather than offices, to try and contain the contagion of the virus, yet companies are ill prepared for the human dimension of conducting business remotely.

There are tech issues around on-line meetings, which impact how many people can be on-line together and the stability of the streaming systems. There are also audio issues depending on whether you are using a headset with mic or just your computer mic. Many home offices in Japan are the dining room table or whatever can be rigged to set up the computer and not so many have a printer at home. Given the strong culture of working long hours at the office, the home office concept is relatively underdeveloped here. In fact, not so many Japanese companies issue laptops to staff, because everyone normally spends their entire time in the office using desktops.

There are also cultural issues around appearing on-line. Japanese homes were designated "rabbit hutches" back in the day, because of their small dimensions and crowded nature. Not much has changed, as most people live in small apartments. Turning on your camera to appear on-line, means you are now showcasing the family abode to everyone else. I do a lot of video conferences with Dale Carnegie in the US. One of the American meeting participants from Dakota, the land of endless vistas and big skies, noticed my camera background and asked me if I was doing the meeting in my closet. How could I explain Japan to her, so I just said "yes!".

The upshot is that many participants joining the on-line meeting won't want to show themselves and their homes to the other company members, so the ability to connect individually with everyone becomes more difficult. All you see is their name on screen and no face. Also, when you have many participants on-line, even if they leave their cameras on, the sheer weight of numbers reduces the individual on-screen boxes to a very small size. That means it is okay when you are talking, because your face is full screen, but everyone else looks like they are beaming in from Lilliput, where the people are six inches high. It is very hard to get any visual feedback to what you are saying, as the screens are too small and there are too many tiny faces to be able to focus.

We are now talking to nobody and everyone at the same time. We are speaking into a void, which can be very disconcerting. Usually people taking part in meetings when they are face to face, are underwhelming as presenters, but now the problem is amplified. They are dead dogs in person and become world champions at boring when they go on-line. The meetings become lifeless, mundane and rarely satisfactory or motivating. Your business communication becomes as dull as dishwater. Hardly a recipe for great work to be produced at home.

When we are on-line, we need to really power up our voice, use big gestures, bring energy to the screen and project our message with authority. Actually, all the things we should be doing in a face to face presentation. We have to go a bit harder than in person though, because we are reduced to a small screen version and that can minimise our messaging if we allow it. Don't allow it. So go big, certainly much bigger than normal.

It is hard to see audience reactions, so ask for feedback. Most on-line systems have a chat box, so get people to write their feedback or questions there. Some systems allow checkmarks or icons such as smiley faces or raising hands. Get the audience to tell you when they have a question by raising a hand or that they are good to go with your message, with a reassuring check mark or a smiley face. Make the most of the tech available to you. As the presenter, you must remain the central focus though, just as you would in person. Keep people honed in on your message, by ramping up your presentation energy.

Free Live On Line Stress Management Sessions

On a separate note, we are running public Live On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on March 19 (English) and 24th (Japanese) and April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English). We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered Live On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients. This allows us to help our clients and our community.

The registration process for these free stress management sessions is being offered on our website, so please go to this specific page: http://bit.ly/dale_stress_e

Covid-19 Challenges Leaders' Communication Skills

Most leaders tend to underestimate the importance of communicating with their teams even in normal times. We are now definitely far removed from "normal times". Panic buying, lockdowns, quarantine isolation, working from home are just some of the features of the response to the virus. The health issue gets most of the focus, but the real dangers lurking in the shadows are economic. People are not yet connecting what all this dislocation will mean for business. An economic downturn can get sparked by the stock market crashing, a major collapse in consumer sending, rising unemployment rates, trade restrictions, and supply chains grinding to a halt. Actually, we are facing all of these right now.

The virus is global and so are the effects on business. It won't be one country or a couple of countries being impacted. The interlocking of business means we face an escalation of economic effects across the world. The virus will mainly kill those already in poor health or over the age of seventy, but the economic disruption will hit billions of people and kill off millions of businesses. As the leader, what are the messages we need to be presenting to our team and what are the mediums we should be using?

Japan is the most experienced capitalist country dealing with the virus. We are six weeks ahead of everyone else, so we can see the business impact of the virus, as it drives down the basis of commerce – the free exchange of goods and services. This exchange is grinding much more slowly than before and that has ramifications for small medium enterprises' survival.

PM Abe suddenly closes all schools elementary level and above and this immediately hits the school lunch suppliers, the part time workers at the schools, and this impact is transferred down the food chain. Events are not held, tourists both internal and external stop travelling, restaurants are emptying as people stay at home, Hotels lose bookings etc., etc., and everyone expecting related revenue gets nothing now. They in turn stop spending too, because they are in a tough cash flow situation.

The initial leader communication efforts were focused on avoiding the virus and the health issues involved but things are moving much faster now and business bankruptcy is a prospect which must be faced. The economy was already slowing down, because of the trade friction between the US and China and the additional two percent increase in the consumption tax. The virus economy impact is already pushing Japan further into recession and the possibility of no Olympics being held will just add to the damage to business sector. The danger is that the virus dissipates, as the temperatures climb, only to return again in Autumn. Things may start to improve, only to fall back in a few months time and we go through all of this disruption again.

The time for a leader in Japan, to gather the troops together for a town hall has passed. No one wants to get together in a big group, because of the risk of contagion from people who may not even be aware they are infected. That means we are down to video calls and emails. People are increasingly working at home or are at work, but avoiding human contact as much as possible.

The messaging needs to be transparent, factual and realistic. Papering over the economic ramifications of the approaching recession won't fly with a sceptical workforce, who have already seen the blunt incompetence of Japan's political leadership. Trying to pretty up the money situation is pointless. You tell everyone that "we are fine" financially and then a few weeks later, you may be telling people they need to take a pay cut or take unpaid leave. It doesn't take long for small companies to burn through their cash reserves.

The leader needs to communicate the real situation and get everyone's support to weather the storm together. The danger is people will lose faith in you, and faith in the company. If you survive the economic impact of the virus, you may find your best people will leave when the opportunity presents itself, as things stabilise. They will look to go to a bigger, more robust company that provides a safer financial situation for them. You come out of this crisis substantially weakened and then it gets worse again.

Being honest, transparent and flagging what may need to be done to survive can have the effect of rallying everyone together to fight. This effort needs constant communication with the whole team, a good chunk of whom may be sitting at home with lots of time on their hands, just worrying about their future. In this situation you cannot over-communicate what is happening. Constant updating should be the norm. Communicating your confidence that the company will make it through this and come out stronger must be the message. People need repeated reassurances from the leader. Are you ready?

Free Live On Line Stress Management Sessions

On a separate note, we are running public Live On Line Stress Management classes, which will be free to all attendees on March 19 (English) and 24th (Japanese) and April 16th (Japanese) and 17th (English). We are also offering the same thing as an in-house programme, delivered Live On Line for our existing clients and for prospective clients. This allows us to help our clients and our community.

The registration process for these free stress management sessions is being offered on our website, so please go to this specific page: http://bit.ly/dale_stress_e

Should I Recycle My Content Between Presentations?

We go to a lot of effort to prepare for our presentations. We find the best quality information, assemble the slides to showcase that data and we make big efforts for the successful delivery of the talk. Once it is over, then that is the end of it. It was a lot of effort for a one time event. It reminds me of that esoteric Japanese art Sunae, where you craft sand into artistic landscapes and designs and then discard the artwork thereafter. We craft our artistic efforts and then as the presentation comes to an end we discard the work. Isn't this a waste? Or should each presentation stand alone, representing a point in time in our speaker journey?

For me, I try to create the opportunity to give the same presentation a number of times. Obviously, repetition helps to improve the presentation. We learn so much from the first time we gave it, that it seems motainai or a complete waste not to be able to use those insights and try again. The problem is how to create the opportunity to repeat the presentation? Various host organisations have some degree of requirement for exclusivity and they want their members to have the virgin roll out and not the recycled rendition. They resist allowing you the opportunity to offer them the new and improved version because they want to differentiate themselves from other organisations.

I understand the point but in fact no two presentations are ever the same anyway. The speech is not being read out aloud (if you are doing that please contact me immediately!), so we are usually talking to the points we bring up. What we say in the moment may be phrased an entirely different way to last time. In fact one would hope that was the case, because the idea is we learnt something from last time and now we can offer a better version.

We may have supplemented the slide deck or thinned it down based on our last experience with the limits of the time, for the quantity material we prepared. Hopefully these were not too far apart, because we should have been rehearsing before we gave it, so we should know the time required for the delivery. After we gave it the first time we realised that now there may be some slides which no longer fit, given the time interregnum between presentations or we may have found something better since the last time.

We may have left bits out the first time, in our fevered efforts to get through the presentation and this second time we want to make sure they are not missed. The audience questions may have raised issues we hadn't considered when framing the presentation and now we can incorporate the answers to those issues this time around. Or we may have been given constructive feedback and have now been able to incorporate that into this delivery.

We might worry we will be flat the second time around, as it has become a bit ho-hum for us. That is rarely the case though, unless you are doing the exact same presentation every week for months, which for most businesspeople is highly unlikely. Even stage actors, who have their shows run for weeks, always manage to freshen up their performance. If you see the same show twice, you will notice that the two performances are slightly different.

If we can, we should try to convince the good burghers in our towns, to have us present the same topic to different groups, within a reasonably close span of time, to reap the benefits of what we learn from actually doing the presentation in front of an audience. I remember when I gave a talk to a 5000 person audience. I found the scale of the venue was so different from normal, that I had to change how I presented. I instinctively knew that in order to master that environment and that situation, I would need to repeat that experience at least five times a row in order to master it.

Keep all of your presentation materials and notes and plunder the past for the keys to future glory. Practice makes perfect, so manufacture lots of opportunities to speak. Don't wait for the phone to ring, instead get on the phone and get the next gig. That is how the pros did it and why wouldn't we do the same.

Owning Your Material When You Didn't Create It

The minions are swarming around the venue. There are people setting up cameras, sound equipment, teleprompter invisible screens, and additional hangers on and assorted riff raff just standing around watching the chaos. In swans the big shot to rehearse the delivery and the tension in the room rises. This is Japan, a no defect, no mistake, no error society where big occasions scare the hell out of everyone. The pointless game of panic induced "what if" now gets going, as various nobodies try to run the speaking coach ragged, in their efforts to head off the thousand things which could possibly go wrong.

The speaker has not had much time to even look at the content and the time allowed for the rehearsal is zen like minimalist. Someone in the marketing department or the PR department has prepared the material or maybe it came from the big name PR company. The speaker certainly had very little chance to even look at it, let alone rework it. To reduce the amount of speaking time, the geniuses organising the speech have stitched videos into the proceedings, unknowingly sacrificing valuable face time for the speaker, who is now relegated to the second string, behind the video images.

This is what it is like being the speaking coach to big shot executives in Japan. In one case, the speaker was thrashing around trying to fit into the straight jacket his staff had created for him and the speech rehearsal was going nowhere. The teleprompter set up had just one screen, so the speaker was very efficiently speaking to only the left side of the room. The rest of the audience were being blanked by the speaker and that is not a good look.

When I looked at the material, I wondered why does the President of this company have to read his speech at all. Doesn't he have some personal knowledge of the business? Can't he just throw out the prepared script and speak to a number of pertinent points, following the theme of the talk? He could tell this set up wasn't going to deliver him the best opportunity to get his message across. In the end he tossed out the teleprompters and came up with his own speaking points and used those at the international event. It was so much better.

Another senior Japanese executive from the automotive sector was due to speak overseas in English, even though his English wasn't strong. The slide deck from the PR company had speaking notes for every page, written in perfect English. The speech was short, only seven minutes, but even so memorising the entire speech was folly. I assured the executive that speaking English perfectly was unimportant, because communication goes beyond words. Mimes discovered that centuries ago and there was an entire silent movie industry that thrived for decades without any words ever being spoken, until the "Talkies" arrived.

Next the slide deck presented a problem. How was he supposed to follow the script? He could spend his time with his head down, reading the words in English for each slide. If this is all that was required, we could keep him at home and just show a video of him doing just that and have almost the same lack of impact as having him do it in person. Instead, I asked him to distil the essence of what each slide meant to him, down into one single sentence and then one single word. That word was placed on each slide in Japanese kanji, like a secret code, and all he had to do was speak to that word. By telling the audience what that slide meant to him he was authentic. His English may have been garbled and the grammar mixed up, but it didn't matter. He was communicating from his heart what the slide content meant to him and that message registered with his audience, in a way a speech just read out loud to the audience could never do.

No matter how busy we are, we take a big personal brand risk of allowing others who know nothing about presenting, to decide how we will appear as a speaker. Get an expert to help, if the stakes are high or work out a way to own the material. Make it yours and the speech will go more smoothly and easily. The impact on the audience will be significant and the key messages will get through. That is what we want isn't it.

How Much Selling Should You Do During Your Presentation?

The organisers of public presentations are usually not very happy for the presenter to start flogging their company's products to the audience. They are looking for good information for the assembled masses and no propaganda. This makes sense because if you are sitting in the audience and you start to hear what sounds like a commercial for the speaker's products or services you feel offended and belittled by the presenter.

I was in such a gathering when the host of the Chamber of Commerce event introduced himself as an "expert", in his particular line of work, when kicking off proceedings. It had a bad smell about it. If you have to go around telling everyone you are an expert, then we will question just how much of an expert you really are. Participants will also complain to the organisers about you and your blatant self promotion and you may not be invited back to speak.

Obviously we give these public presentations to promote our personal brands and our companies. Where is the tipping point when you have pushed it too far? Subtletly is always the best policy. I still remember visiting the German Pavilion in the Tsukuba Expo in 1985. There was a long, winding staircase to the second floor and all along the wall were framed photographs of all the German Nobel Prize winners. There was no banner announcing "we Germans are smart", but the huge number of faces peering down, as we wound our way up the stairs was a subtle tour de force of German intellectual power.

We should rely on some key elements when selling ourselves when presenting. Bald faced telling people you are an "expert" is completely up for debate, but showing through the quality of what you present that you really know your stuff, is very convincing and makes you highly credible. There needs to be some fresh data or perspective to cut through all the competing messages floating around the internet and media.

I like Jesper Kohl's presentations. He is a perennial favourite of different Chamber events here in Tokyo. He is a leading economist in Japan and I have probably seen Jesper present twenty times or more over the years. Every time he is super engaging as a presenter and always has new and high quality information on the Japanese economy. He is the master of the pregnant pause when asking his audience members questions. Just as the victim is ready to bumble out their answer, Jesper slips in the answer, revealing that was a rhetorical question after all and not requiring an answer. As an audience member it certainly keeps you on the your toes! He doesn't have run around telling us he is an "expert". His content and delivery tell us that.

Delivery is the other indicator of expertise and professionalism. You can be beautifully attired, shoes with a mirror shine, hair perfect like looking like a Hollywood idol and still be a dud if the presentation isn't done correctly. I was watching a VIP visitor to Tokyo, representing a huge multinational energy company, who gave a very dull presentation. The information was fine, because some minions in the marketing department had cobbled it together in a workman like fashion. The perfectly coiffed, suited and booted presenter delivered the whole thing slowly, clearly and completely devoid of passion. It was painful and decimated his personal brand.

To be credible and prove you are the goods, have first class content and deliver it in a completely professional manner. Blatant self promotion is self defeating and your speaking career will be short lived, as the invitations dry up. Please never allow the claim that you are an "expert" leave your lips. We are not that dumb.

Advice For Your First Major Presentation

At different stages in our careers we are asked to give a presentation. It may be a simple reporting on progress on a project or the state of play with the current results. The audience usually starts with our colleagues and bosses. Over time, as we rise through the ranks, the scope of the presentations we have to give increase in complexity and the audience size also increases. It might be at a whole firm kick off event, an offsite with senior management or a public presentation representing the firm or the industry. The leap from talking in front of colleagues to the company Board or to a public gathering is quite steep. The nervous tension is also profoundly different.

We can feel quite confident in front of colleagues but presenting to the members of the Board raises the stakes completely. Consequently we become a lot more tense and nervous. When we are in the spotlight it can often feel more like an interrogation lamp. Our pulse rate climbs alarmingly, we start perspiring more than normal, our palms become sticky, our throat is parched and our stomach feels a bit queasy.

This is the fight or flight adrenalin rush kicking in. The blood is directed to the larger muscle groups like the arms, shoulders and thighs, away from the internal organs, which is why our stomach feels a bit strange. The pulse rate quickens due to the chemical cocktail floating around our system, as we prepare for action. Logically, we are not about to sprint out of the venue or engage in hand to hand to combat with the members of the audience, but that doesn't matter because our brain's instructions to the body has overridden that logic and is prepared to just such occurrences.

Deep breathing to slow down the pulse rate or purposely striding around in some private space, away from prying eyes, helps to burn off some of that nervous energy. There is only so much you can do to calm down the chemical reaction. It also doesn't necessarily matter how many times you may have presented either, because the nature of the event, the composition of the audience and the scale of the occasion can make us nervous. I read once that even such a regular performer as famous singer Frank Sinatra, was always nervous about getting that first note correct.

The other antidote to nervousness is good preparation. You would think this was the most obvious and logical thing in the world, but an amazingly high proportion of people spend all of their preparation time on the wrong things. The slide deck gets all the love and attention and rehearsals are totally neglected. This is lunacy but also reality.

A competent presentation needs a couple of elements. Understanding who is in your audience and what they want to hear is very basic but often overlooked. I attended a senior executive's talk on personal brand building. It was odd, because it was basically aimed at people who work for similar major companies. The audience was 99% small and medium enterprise staff. The speaker had not considered her audience at all when she developed her talk.

A clear point of the talk boiled down into one sentence, brings clarity about how to structure the talk. What evidence can we gather to support this central point of our talk. How will we wrap the talk up both before and after the Q&A. What is a grabber opening which will draw the audience in to want to hear what we have to say.

We also have to be clear who is the boss on stage – the slide deck or us? So many presenters become slaves to their slides and that content becomes the main event not the presenter. I am about to coach a senior Japanese car company executive on a speech at an international car show to be held shortly. The PR company has prepared the slides and the draft English content for each slide. They asked me if the content was suitable. Well it is great, except that he will never be able to use it. There is no way he could memorise that amount of content in English for that length of speech and still put in a good delivery as a presenter.

My suggestion is for him to think what does each slide means to him, boil that down to one word and let's put that word on the slide and he can elaborate on that word during his talk. No memorisation needed and he will speak in his authentic voice about what that image says.

Get the basics right, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse and once you start the nerves will calm down. You will be able to switch your focus from you and everything that is a problem, to your audience and trying to get them to buy your message. Keep doing that and presentations will lose their scariness.

Who Are You Presenting For?

My regular Rotary meeting held every week at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo has a featured speaker. Our speaker this time was a celebrity in his eighties and very well known to the audience. Rotary runs like clockwork and every section of the hourly meeting is choreographed and the meetings always finish on time. Not this time though. Our speaker gave a rambling talk, which seemed to lack any direction or point. For no good reason he also managed to go way over his allotted speaking time, so the meeting finished late. This Rotary audience is full of the captains of industry in Japan and so they are busy executives, for whom time is their most valuable resource. I was sitting there thinking what have we go there with this speaker?

My conclusion was that this speech was for his pleasure. He wanted to ramble around and across a number of unrelated subjects. He clearly liked the sound of his own voice and was happy to have a big audience in front of him. The fact that he managed to go over the time was amazing given there was almost no structure to his talk and he could have ended anywhere really. Japan loves its celebrities, so they get cut a lot of slack and are indulged. This has probably been the speaker's experience for decades and today he is quite indulgent with himself, because there are no boundaries.

It reminded me though of the importance of focusing on our audience. The danger can be we become wrapped up in our subject or in this case, wrapped up in our own importance. This happens in business too. High powered CEOs jet in to give a speech, they have people fawning all over them and are treated like rock stars. A few years of that and their sense of proportion starts to drift. The issue, as speakers, is they represent the brand. If they are too impressed with themselves and their superior expertise and ability, the audience can feel it. They are focused on themselves and not the message or the audience. This is not a brand plus.

It can happen with passionate speakers too. They may be legitimate experts in their field and are fully sold on the merits of what they Are doing or offering. All great, but this can lead to a shift in focus away from the audience on to the details of the subject and their glorious part in it all. In many ways this talk is all about them and their love for the subject. We don't want that.

From start to finish the focus has to be on getting the key messages into the brains of the audience and selling them on why those messages are important. We the speaker are the vehicle not the main act. As we get more confident speaking in front of audiences and as we start to enjoy holding sway over crowds, the danger arises that this becomes an extension of our egos about how great we are. Anytime we switch focus off our audience, be it to the details of the technology or to our glorious selves, then we are going in the wrong direction.

The design and execution of the talk should be solely focused on the audience and giving them what they want. We know this by our prior research into who is coming - gender, age, job titles, company name - and by mingling with the early arrivals, to get a sense of what brought them here etc. We know that the Q&A section will help us address specific interest points for individuals in the audience, which may not have been fully covered in the maIn body of the speech.

The starting point of why we are doing this talk should be clear. It is not about us, but about those who have taken the time and made the effort to listen to us. If we start the design phase from that perspective we will be well down the track to get the talk right for that audience.

The Big Idea When Presenting

The podium is a powerful place for powerful ideas. The audience has no idea what you are going to say and where you are going to take them during your presentation. In Japan, at least, they will politely hear you out until the end and then perhaps offer up a question oR two. For the thirty or forty minutes allotted to you, you are the master of the universe, omnipotent over all seated before you. And what have you done with this remarkable opportunity so far? Not that much I would reckon.

In business we are very pragmatic, practical, down to earth, focused. No one expects a businessperson to be giving a fiery, impassioned call to storm the Bastille and put the heads of useless politicians and leaders on pikes to be paraded through the town square. In fact, we bend over backward to be apolitical on the basis that we have customers of various allegiances and beliefs and we don't want to upset our revenues or hurt our brand.

This tends to breed a focus on the details of elements of our business when we speak. We might be doling out useful advice based on our own experiences to date. It is all kept pretty locked down, neutral and safe. We don't challenge ourselves and so don't challenge our audience either. This is not varsity, where a lot of airy fairy stuff can be debated for intellectual stimulation. This is the real world.

The only issue with this "steady as she goes" model is we don't push ourselves to go higher. We focus on what we know and have seen, instead on what could be imagined. We don't try to think about issues at a more holistic level, to take a local company issue and elevate it to a conundrum facing the industry. We don't try to project our intellects to a higher plane of thinking because we are caught up in the weeds of the detail of our speech. We spend vastly more time deciding the order of our sides than on any big idea.

This doesn't mean our business speech has to whir off on a philosophical tangent far removed from the reality we all face. It does mean though that at a couple of points in our talk we can try to go higher than our own self interest and look at the bigger picture at the industry, country and international level. It may just to be offering up issues for consideration or to project different angles to a problem. To push ourselves to see something in a new light and from a bigger perspective.

The dealing with everyday problems can bury us in the everyday, every day of our working lives and that is a limiting factor in our own intellectual development in business. By taking the opportunity of the podium presented to us, we can challenge ourselves to see what we can say on a bigger topic. One or two big insights per speech is probably enough though, otherwise it sounds like we are on our soapbox, indulging our egos. This should not dissuade us though from thinking "what bigger points can I make about the world of business in my speech? Where do I see future danger points for the industry, the society, the country etc?".

So when we are next preparing our talk, let's ask ourselves "what can I say on this topic that will elevate some issues beyond today and my small part of it?". That act alone elevates our own thinking and vision. Our job in the actual presentation is to do the same for the members of the audience. To challenge them to think more deeply and think differently.