The Presentations Japan Series

Small Target Tactics For Hostile Audiences

Presenting isn't always adoration, adulation, regard and agreement. Sometimes, we have to go into hostile territory with a message that is not welcomed, appreciated or believed. Think meetings with the Board, the unions, angry consumers and when you have sharp elbowed rivals in the room. It is rare to be ambushed at a presentation and suddenly find yourself confronting a hostile version of the Mexican wave, as the assembled disgruntled take turns to lay into you. Usually, we know in advance this is going to get hot and uncomfortable.

We still have our message to get across but we have to make some adjustments to head off trouble. The essence of the issue is disbelief. The audience, for whatever reasons, simply don't believe what you are telling them or they just don't trust you, regardless of what you tell them. The first casualty of this type of speaking engagement has to be big, bold statements. In less tense situations we might be throwing these types of statement around with gay abandon and not face much resistance from the audience. If what we have said gets brought up in the Q&A we bat it away without breaking into a sweat. No problem, we have this one!

In more fraught circumstances, those big statements will get us hammered, maybe even as soon as they are issued, with no regard for waiting for the Q&A, as the interrogation gets underway immediately. By the way, if there is an intervention by someone in the audience, we should redirect them to ask that question in the Q&A, which is where we will handle all questions. This stops your flow being interrupted and the proceedings being hijacked.

We need to be more circumspect about claims we make. We need to introduce ideas surrounded and buffered by evidence. Instead of saying, "this is how it is", we need to say, "according to the research, this is how it is" or "according to the experts, this is how it is". We swiftly and subtly slip off to the side of the attack and let the third party reference take it between the eyes, rather than ourselves.

We need to wrap up our statements in cotton wool and preface them with comments like, "as far as we know…", "according to the latest information…", "to the best of our knowledge…". In this way, we are not holding ourselves up as the oracle, the all knowing, all seeing sage, unburdened by limitations of self awareness. We are making ourselves a small target, harder to attack and providing many loopholes to leap though, should we need to.

We need to lead with context and background. Making statements, drawing conclusions, before we get to the evidence part, is ritualistic suicide as a speaker facing a hostile crowd. We need to take a note from the pages of the Japanese language grammatical structure. Unlike English and most European languages, in Japanese the verb comes at the very end of the sentence. This is a great metaphor for dolling out the evidence.

In Japanese, we don't know if the sentence is past, present or future oriented, if it is negative or positive until we get to the end of the sentence. That means we have to sit there and absorb all of the context, background and evidence before we can make a judgment about whether we agree with what is being said or not. This is what we should do with a hostile audience – load them up on the details, the data, the evidence, the testimonials, the expert statements, before we venture forth with what we believe to be true.

We deliver this this deluge of facts piecemeal, so that the audience is taking the information, processing it in their own minds and jumping to conclusions about what they have just heard. Our object is that the conclusion they have jumped to is the same one that we have reached, based on the same information. It is almost impossible to disagree with our context. They may not agree with our conclusions from our understanding of the context, but the context itself is usually inviolable.

Before we go into Q&A we must publically announce the amount of time available for questions. It is going to get heated and we don't want to appear like a cowardly scoundrel beating a hasty retreat, because we can't take the rigour of investigation of what we are saying. By having stated the time available at the start, we can simply refer to it later and say, "we have now reached the end of the fifteen minutes for question time" and go into wrapping up the evening with our final close.

Hostilities will commence immediately we begin to speak, so we have to be mentally ready for that. We also need to switch our presenting tactics to account for the pushback which will come. By making ourselves as small a target as possible, it becomes much harder for any enemies in the audience to successfully attack us. If they are going after you, they are definitely not your friend, so keep that in mind when your are preparing.

Dress For Success When Presenting

How should we dress when presenting and does it actually matter? It matters - particularly in Japan. Japan is a very formal country, in love with ceremony, pomp and circumstance. Always up your formality level in dress terms in Japan, compared to how formal you think will be enough. This was a big shock for this Aussie boy from Brisbane, who spent a good chunk of his life wearing shorts and T-shirts or blue jeans and T-shirts. Tokyo is not Silicon Valley, where dress down is de rigueur and where suits have gone the way of the Dodo. This is a very well dressed, sophisticated capital city where serious money is spent on quality clothing.

Business suits are a given when presenting. Not even coat and slacks in the Italian style, but business suits. The colour should be on the dark spectrum to fit in with the solemnity of your "aura and presence" as an expert, about to pontificate on your subject. A serious speaker in a light coloured suit is an oxymoron in Japan. Go dark . The suits don't have to be the deepest black in colour, because darker greys and blues will work. Now the odd thing is this applies in summer too. The summer speech outfit will be a little lighter in colour than the winter suit, but not as light as the very light colours in summer suits. It doesn't matter if they are three piece, double-breasted, or have one, two or three buttons.

Needless to say the suit should fit well. I have a very old and dear friend who has, like me, been in constant battle with his weight. We take it off and then we put it all and more, back on again. Very frustrating of course, but a painful reality. The sight one day, of him giving a major speech, while only able to close the bottom suit button, rather than the top, was very sad. It said to the audience, "I am fat, in denial and have not bothered to adjust my suits to match this fact". We all have our "fat suits" of course, for those occasions when we are losing the struggle against our expanding waistband, so that would be a good choice if you are carrying a few too many kilos. However, if even the "fat suit" is now too tight, then go to the tailor and get it adjusted. Better to be paying a small amount of money for that, then telling the world you are a loser in the battle of the bulge.

The shoes will be formal, brogues are good, shined within an inch of their lives and never "down at heel". It would be rare to wear any other colour than black, because the suits are going to be dark. The belt obviously must match the colour of the shoes and be in good condition, not looking like you have worn it to death. I don't even know why I mention this, except that I often see some Japanese gentlemen messing it up getting the colour coordination wrong and displaying a belt clearly on its last legs.

The socks should match with the colour of the slacks and avoid fascinating contrast colours that herald your rebellious and exciting individuality. Save that funky revolution for the weekend. They should be knee rather than ankle length. When seated on stage, for say a panel discussion, there is nothing more alarming than the sight of a very hairy shin protruding from underneath the suit pants.

The shirt should be white, never coloured. I know this seems very limiting and lacking in imagination but there is a biological reason for it. When we are on stage we can become nervous or the lighting on stage can heat us up. The consequence is we begin to perspire and the neck area is one location where this happens very quickly. That gorgeous Egyptian Giza 45 cotton shirt, in light blue, becomes a two tone job, as soon as the sweat envelopes your collar and makes it turn dark blue. Now the audience is losing touch with what you are saying and are fascinated by your unfolding two tone colour arrangement of your shirt.

For the same reason NEVER take off your suit jacket. I am soaked under my jacket, by the end of a 40 minute talk, because I am pumping out so much energy and heat. If I had my jacket off, there would be a much darker colour running down the side of my body. By the way, there is nothing more unpleasant than seeing someone in a shirt, sporting a saturated armpit, raise their arm so the soaked armpit becomes visible to the audience.

Your tie collection may have some daring beauties, but leave them at home. At one stage, I was sporting some very ferocious Versace ties, with very vibrant colour combinations and adventurous patterns. I never wore them for speeches though, because they were competing with my face, for the attention of the audience. Also, forget the power colours. You don't need them, because your speech delivery should have power and authority to command the obedience of the assembled masses.

The same daring do logic applies to pocket squares. Especially fluffy, elaborate and exuberant little darlings grab the gaze of the crowd and they take their eyes off your face. We don't want that. The plastic name badges you are given by the organisers are another trap. Don't wear them when you get up to speak. They reflect the lights and your body movement can set them off on a navy signal lamp training session. We don't want anything competing with us when we are speaking.

I am highly reticent to speak about ladies fashion, because I have so little knowledge of this subject. My wife tries to encourage me to become more expert, but there has been no great progress to date. My only advice would be basically adopt the same ideas – dark suits, white blouses, black shoes, no scarves, modest earrings and broaches and basic hair and makeup approaches. This is not a runway extravaganza, but a chance to drive home your message. By the way, if it is a panel discussion, where you would be seated on stage, then a trouser suit may be easier. Always make your face the centrepiece, so the audience is firmly focused there. Our faces can transmit so much power to drive our messages, so we can't let anything compete with this awesome weapon.

Using Micro Stories When Presenting

Storytelling is one of those things that we all know about, but where we could do a much better job of utilising this facility in business. It allows us to engage the audience in a way that makes our message more accessible. In any presentation there may be some key information or messages we wish to relay and yet we rarely wrap this information up in a story. As an audience we are more open to stories than bold statements or dry facts. The presenter's opinion is always going to trigger some debate or doubt in the minds of the audience. The same detail enmeshed in a story though and the point goes straight into the minds of the crowd and is more likely to be bought as is.

When we are planning our talk, we think about what is the key message. We should get this into one sentence, able to written on a grain of rice. Okay, you are not likely to be able to achieve that any time soon, but the keys are brevity, clarity, focus, conciseness, and paring the message down to its most powerful essence. We build the argument to support our key message, broken up into chapters throughout the talk. We design our two closes, one for before Q&A and one to wrap up the whole talk at the very end. We design our blockbuster opening to pry the phones out of the hands of the audience, to get them to listen to what we are saying and going to say.

We can inject micro stories, by which I simply mean short stories, into every part of this design. The opening could be a short story which grabs the attention of the listeners and primes the room for our dissertation. It might be focused on an incident which relates to the key message of the talk or about an episode from a famous historical figure or about someone in the firm or a client that drives home the message.

Each of the chapters of the talk can rely on micro stories to back up the evidence being presented to justify the conclusion we have come to and the point we are making. These stories bring flesh and blood to the dry facts and details. They can enliven the point we are driving hard on, by making it something the audience can relate to. These facts don't just appear. They are there because of a reason and there are bound to be stories aplenty attached to them.

Both of the closes can be separate stories that enhance the final messages we are delivering to the room. We keep them short, bountiful, memorable and attractive, such that they linger long in the minds of the audience members. We want our story attached to the inside of the brains of the listeners, so that they remember it long after the event has passed by.

A thirty minute talk would probably have five chapters, an opening and two closes, so at least room there for eight stories. These stories can be our own, garnered from our experiences or they could be folkloric stories from the firm's rich history or we could be borrowing other people's stories to make our point.

We all have products and solutions. Where did these come from? How were they created and who created them? What about the firm's founders' stories? Why does this company exist and how has it manage to stay in business for so long? Taking the key chapter content, we can inject some life into the data points by looking for creation stories or application tales of high deeds and gloried achievements. Other client's stories can be some our stories too, as we relate how our solution changed their world. These stories lend themselves for inclusion in the "about us" component of the firm's website and for placement in the corporate brochure.

The point is we have so many stories to choose from, we have a surfeit of content lapping all around us. All we have to do is collect it. So from now on build a library of stories about the firm, the personalities, the products, the client successes etc. When you are reading about other companies look for their stories that you can borrow to make a point about your own business. Add them to the library so that you don't have to go scrambling about trying to think of stories. You have them there, ready to go whenever you need them.

2020 Here We Go – Let's Build Our Personal Brand As A Presente

The New Year's resolutions concept is ridiculous, but only because we are weak, lazy, inconsistent and lacking in discipline. Apart from those small barriers to execution of desires, the concept works a treat. The idea of a new start is not bad in itself and we can use the Gregorian calendar fantasy, to mark a change in the year where new things are possible. So as a presenter what would be possible?

There are around 800,000 podcasts in the US and many millions in China. Blogs are in the billions now, video content is going crazy, live streaming is rampant. Every single which way, we are under assault from competitor content marketing on steroids. In addition, there is all of the advertising content coming at us through every medium. Will it diminish? No. What does it mean for us in business?

Personal reputation will be built through our efforts to cut through all of the clatter competing with us. People are consuming information on small screens and are deluged with competing content. The experience is transitory, because the next deluge is coming down the pike. How do we linger long in people's memories? Well we don't. Even the few who see our content soon move on. In offices, people sitting next to each other send emails rather than talk. Phone calls put a dread fear into those younger colleagues entering the workplace. The anonymity of the texting facility is preferred to human contact. We are becoming increasingly impersonal, as we are fixated with our internet connected devices.

In business though we need the human touch. We want to do business with people we can judge are a safe option as a business partner. We can check out their social media to get a sense of what they are about. We can watch their videos to get a better idea of who they are and what they know. This is all still rather remote and at arms length. We don't do business that way. We want to look them in the eye, to read their body language, to gauge their voice tone, to judge their intelligence through their mastery of the spoken word. Other can write your posts for you, but when presenting on stage it is just you baby and you had better have the goods. We want to see what we are getting.

To get cut through, we need to be standing in front of as many audiences as possible. Yes, we can attend networking events as a participant and we should, but we should be striving to do better than that. We should be hogging the limelight, a titan astride the stage, commanding attention and delivering powerful messages. That means seeking every opportunity to speak we can possibly manufacture, being proactive in promoting ourselves, unabashed about pushing our personal brand.

Yes, there will be haters. Two of my staff attended an American Chamber function recently and some helpful fellow attendee started laying into me. They being very loyal staff were really upset about this, told me about it and were obviously frustrated regarding what to do about it. I asked them a couple of clarifying questions. Was the individual or their company a client? No. Were they ever likely to become a client? No. Did they have a personal brand of their own? No.

I didn't bother asking who it was, because they are obviously a know nothing, do nothing, become nothing nobody. If you want to promote yourself you have to pop your head above the parapet. Expect there will be someone who will want to kick it. That doesn't mean we should self-censor ourselves, because some nobody is jealous about what we are doing. Grasp on to the bigger picture here, have courage and go for it. Those who get it will respect you, haters will hate you, no matter what you do.

Public speaking is the last bastion for those who want to take their personal presence to the top. We are being flooded by information around us, so we need to look for chances to break free from the crowd and establish ourselves as the expert in our field. It means putting ourselves out there to be judged, but we are going to be judged anyway, so let's control our own destiny. In 2020, resolve to do as much speaking as you possibly can and create as many opportunities as possible to promote your personal brand.

Reflecting On Your Past Presentations

As the calendar year slowly winds down, now is a good time to review and reflect upon the presentations you have given this year in over the past few years. What have you learnt not to do and what have you learnt to keep doing? Those who don't study their own presentations history are bound to repeat the errors of the past. Sounds reasonable doesn't it. We are all mentally geared up for improvements over time. The only issue is that these improvements are not ordained and we have to create our own futures.

Do you have a good record keeping system? When I got back to Japan in 1992 I was the Australian Consul and Trade Commissioner in Nagoya. As far as the locals were concerned, I was the Australian Ambassador to the Chubu Region. I am sure the parade of the various Ambassadors in the Tokyo Embassy never saw it that way, but that is how the locals viewed my vice-regal presence. One consequence was you were regularly asked to give long speeches. I say long because a one hour speech would be a dawdle, compared to the two hour monstrosities you were expected to fill.

I started writing down the speech number, the title, who it was for, what language was I speaking and how long was the speech. I did this because Japan loves the devil they know and you would be asked back to speak again and it is embarrassing if you don't recall the first talk. I am now over 535 speeches on my list. Without knowing it I was compiling a body of work as a speaker. The list noted the topics I covered, which was a useful reservoir of things I could speak about if asked to venture forth a topic for the nominated speaking spot.

I would often use visuals. When I started we were back in the dark ages and were using overhead projectors (OHPs) and breakthrough innovations like colour OHPs instead of just black and white images. For photographs, we used a slide carousel and a slide projector. At some point we moved to powerpoint and life got a whole lot easier, when it came to preparing presentations. Somewhere I probably still have those OHP presentations stored away somewhere, except today you would struggle to find an overhead projector to show them with. We can much more easily store our presentation materials today, so there is no excuse about not doing that.

I keep my presentations in digital files stored by the year in which they were delivered. This is very handy because you can go back and see what you covered when you gave that talk. Some of the images may be plundered for a current presentation, if they are relevant, so it is a nice resource to draw on. You can also see how much you have grown in sophistication as a presenter, by looking at the quality of what you have been presenting. This is a step we shouldn't miss because we are often so caught up in our everyday, we lose sense of the time progression in our presenter lives.

A more difficult task is to grab the points that are additional to the slides. These may be kept as notes on the print out of the slide deck or in a notes format for the talk. If I have notes, which these days is pretty rare, then they will be very brief. They are flags for me to expand upon when I am delivering my talk. More frequently I will print out two or four slides per page and then write on those pages. I will note some key points I want to make when we get to that slide. If I am not using slides then the notes format plays the same prompt role.

Things occur to me during a talk, which were not planned. Maybe I got a light bulb type of idea or a question exposed an answer and brought some additional information to the forefront. One thing I strongly recommend is immediately after the speech, carve out thirty minutes for quiet reflection on the talk and think about what things you would change in order to make it better next time. The tendency is to rush back to work, which usually means either meetings or catching up on email. They can wait. Don't schedule back to back activities after the talk – give yourself a little time to think.

What I find hard to do is to store the notes hand written on the pages and the notes on the ideas which occurred to me after the talk. Paper tends to get lost and you throw it out in a bug of spring cleaning and lose it. Either take photos of the notes on your phone or scan the pages and then file them together with the electronic slide deck in the file for that year of talks. This way you never lose the inspiration and record of your thinking about this topic.

Time will pass. You will deliver talks, will get ideas both before and after. Capture them and learn from what went well and how you can improve on it for next time. You need a system and if you don't have one today, then now is a good time to think about creating one.

Leading An Intentional Presenter Life In 2020

Are we going slowly glide in 2020 carrying all the bad habits and bad baggage from everything we have thought, done and procrastinated on up until now? Or are we going to seize the opportunity of a man made temporal illusion to divest ourselves of the sins and misdeeds of the past and strike out anew? The change of the calendar for some signals a new financial year, when new budget numbers and plans are fixed. For others it has already passed or is soon to fall upon us. Regardless, this opportunity should be seized to review and plan for the next calendar cycle. Rarely though is presenting skill part of that process. Let's change that this time.

Here are seven things to commit to in 2020 as a presenter.

1. Look for every opportunity to present

"Practice makes perfect" may or may not be true for you, but the more we do presentations the more chance we have to become better. Don't hide from or refuse occasions where you can get up in front of people and talk. Even better, list up organisations who need speakers and make contact. Give them a range of topics you can speak on and see if there is a match of interests. What have you got to lose? Nothing, so go for it.

1. Swear a blood oath to rehearse before you give a talk.Rule number one in presenting is "never practice on the audience". Rehearsing gives us time to work on our timing, to make sure we are congruent with our planned content and the time allotted within which to deliver it. It helps with controlling our nervousness and builds our confidence.

1. Decide you are the boss of this presentation.Don't yield power to your notes, from which you will read the presentation. Don't be overshadowed by the slick corporate video. Forbid the slide deck from out muscling you on stage. Make your face, voice and gestures the center piece of the delivery, such that all eyes and ears are encompassing you because your grip on the audience is so intense.

1. Banish the internet.Start your talk with a gripping opening that so immobilises your audience that they release their desperate grip on their phones. Ensure they cannot abandon you and escape to the titillation of the internet and assorted apps that are the siren's call competing for your spot in the limelight.

1. Always wrap your statements up in the cotton wool of context to protect them.Every time you stray into statement land, that charming, well behaved audience mutates into a howling pack of ferocious critics, disagreeing with your ideas and conclusion. This reaction is usually based on nothing more than ignorance and prejudice, because they don't have the proof, the evidence, the background. All they hear a bald faced statement, of which they are doubtful. Instead tell them a story which is deep with context, evidence, data, testimonials, a tsunami of proof, from which they cannot escape.

1. Prepare two closes for before and after the Q&A.Smoothly wrap up your talk and then call for questions. Answer the questions and then seize control back from the random direction the questions have taken. Remember the final questions are often the worst, because all the better questions have already been asked. The worst questions are those which having little If nothing to do with the topic and these will come up. Your second close gets the whole show back on track and allows you to issue you main message again, such that it is all that is ringing in the ears of your listeners, as they depart the venue.

1. Video your presentation for review and/ or ask trusted friends of colleagues to give you feedback.Make sure that it is structured feedback because you want to ask about specific things, rather than "how was it?" This type of broad based feedback isn't so helpful. Also make sure you instruct them to tell what you did that was good and how you can make it better next time. Never allow critique to raise its ugly head. If it comes up, stop them right there and redirect them to good/better feedback.

Let's change up our professional game as presenters in 2020 and go back to the basics. None of this is complex or difficult. It just requires the time allocation and the mental attitude of wanting to master the art of presenting, rather than being a second rate show for the rest of your life. Turn that around with these seven points. You will become a person of influence and persuasion with those around you and 2020 will be a much better year because of that.

How To Use Video In Your Presentation

Video is the refuge of rascals when presenting. The unskilled Japanese President tries to shift the attention off his miserable presentation skills, by diverting the focus of the audience to the video. Actually, it is a mighty relief in many ways from his dirge like, monotone, monochrome delivery. He was killing us slowly with his lifeless words. The idea is that the video will compensate for the presenter. It also takes up time, so the presenter can whip through the morass of their presentation and get out of there quicker. The scoundrel's respite.

I personally try to avoid using video because it competes with my face. I want the full power of my expressions to be brought to bear, to convey the key messages I have for my audience. I want to monopolise the flow of the proceedings, so that it moves along with me in charge. There is a place for video though, when it makes sense and when it is reined in and kept under control.

Video is very versatile, as it can combine movement, music, images and still photographs very effectively. It can tell a short story very powerfully. It can bend time to its will. Emotions can be appealed to, physical dimensions made more impressive, speed made real and other people's expressions and faces conscripted to serve the presenter's messaging. It can bring both fantasy and reality to us in a powerful way. We are all used to watching video and movies on our phones, DVDs, etc., so we are open to the medium.

In certain industries and businesses, the visual aspect of their branding, packaging, design etc., really lends itself to employing a full video arsenal. Fast motion, slow motion, music combinations entertain the mind and stretch the imagination. Brands do this well, but corporate PR videos usually do it less well. In Japan, the latter is more often than not what we are subjected to, by the boring wannabe corporate Titan trying to command the stage.

Like anything, if it is done well it works. This is the issue though, do you have a great video to show or are you just showing a video for the sake of it? It is rare that a video would be specifically produced for a particular presentation. This normally means we are drawing on the video library of the firm and it would be a rare piece of luck to get the video content available, to chime with the speech you are giving. The planets rarely align so helpfully in real life and what we wind up doing is trying to slam the square peg into the round hole with what we have.

The reprobate presenter just picks up the whole video, as is, and plunks it down in the beginning of their talk. This means that we haven't really connected with the audience as yet and we are distracting them from focusing on us, by breaking their concentration to look at a video. They usually have trouble actually showing the video because the loading process doesn't work well on the laptop. They were in a slide deck, had to go out of that and then bring up the video. There may even be a link in the slide deck to the video, but it is hit and miss as to how often that works on the day. You become frustrated because the damm thing worked fine in the rehearsal and now for some mysterious reason, it refuses to work when the punters are assembled.

All of this fiddling about means you have now lost your connection with your audience, who are whipping out their phones to escape to the internet, because you are boring them with the tech. Once the video is over, we have to reconnect with the audience. If the video had a lot of excitement and energy and you present like a beached mullet, the contrast is mega. Everyone hopes you will disappear and more video will be rolled out instead, because it was a lot more interesting than you.

So we need to design the bridge into the video and the one out at the end. I have no memory of anyone doing this well by the way. Probably because the thought it was actually necessary, never occurred to them. We have to make sure the video is kept short and adds value to our message. We must dominate it, not the other way around.

The Winning Formula When Speaking

I was invited to an English Speech contest for Middle School students. The students must have home grown skills and are not eligible to compete if they have spent more than six months abroad, in an English speaking environment. This was pretty grand affair. The organisation running it is run by students at university, who took part in the contest themselves when they were in Middle School. Many of the graduates become business patrons and supporters as they work their way up in their business careers. It a perfect Japanese storm. Japan loves uniforms and the organising body had that covered and Japan loves formality and there was plenty of that on display too. There were some significant lessons on offer for presenters as well.

One of the sponsoring countries had their Ambassador there to present a prize and give a speech. Extolling the virtues of his country and its educational opportunities for these keen students of English is a natural fit. What wasn't so natural was that he had to read his speech. I have been a diplomat, yet I see this time and time again - Ambassadors who are poor public speakers. Anyone in that position, for that type of occasion who has to read his speech, qualifies as a poor pubic speaker in my book.

By contrast Her Imperial Highness Princess Takamado gave a splendid speech, alternating between English and Japanese. She wasn't reading it, the content was relevant and interesting. When you are a member of the Imperial family there is tremendous expectation on you and she could have chosen the safe route and have read her speech. Yet, she gave her remarks without notes and spoke freely. It was so much more powerful and connected with her audience. The toast was given by a senior Government official, who did so in excellent English and without any notes either. The only one who couldn't give his speech without reading it, was the one native speaker involved. Rather ironic I thought.

Then we had the three finalists give their talks. Of course they had memorised their speeches. As Middle School students living in Japan it would be unlikely they would be able to do anything less. A five minute speech is a long time to memorise a speech, but they all did it brilliantly. If the Japanese education system does one thing well, it is rote memorisation. The final speech was given by the winner and it was very surprising. Also surprisingly, the three finalists were all boys, where normally this in area of education where girls usually do better.

The English pronunciation of the finalist was certainly not as good as the second and third place winners. You would think that would disqualify him for winning but it didn't for a number of very important reasons. When he started speaking I was thinking that his pronunciation wasn't so good, so how did he manage to win? What followed was a winning combination of factors. We can learn a lot from a fifteen year old Middle School student from the backblocks of Wakayama Prefecture.

His theme was about him trying to improve his poor pronunciation which was congruent with who he was. In other words he was being authentic and appropriate in the eyes of his audience and so he could connect with them. The other boys told stories too but this boy included dialogue with his grandmother in his recounting of his story and this added that additional element of drawing us into the action. When he spoke he did something more than the other contestants.

He spoke with his whole being. The other two finalists with better English pronunciation used their voices, some small gestures and some facial expressions in their talks. The winner however was speaking with his whole body language lined up behind his words. He was moving in a relaxed way that was congruent with his message. He sounded more natural, even though it was a totally canned speech. He wasn't the best English speaker in the contest, but he was the best communicator in English. That difference is huge. I found the same thing with my Japanese. I started by worrying about linguistic perfection but discovered it didn't matter. Even if my vocabulary was limited, my pronunciation unreliable and my grammar garbled, the audience came with me into my story, when I delivered it the right way.

As adults, in business, we can decide to avoid reading our speeches at all costs. Thinking about our audience when we craft our talk is critical. In the delivery, we should be authentic. That means we don't worry about occasionally mispronouncing words or stumbling over phrases. We are focused in our delivery on bringing our total body language, our passion, to the subject. We don't get hung up on perfection, because we are focused on communication. If we do that, then we will be successful in getting our messages across.

How To Review Your Presentation

Athletes and coaches spend a lot of time watching their team's performance. Strengths and weaknesses are sought in order to amplify the former and eliminate the latter. Close scrutiny is applied to key moments, crucial transitions and pivotal points. Presenting should be no different. Cast your mind back though, to the last twenty presentations you have attended and ask yourself how many speakers were recording themselves for later analysis? I would assert that the answer would be either zero or very close to zero. Why would that be? High performance athletes are constantly using video to check on what they are doing. Why don't high performance leaders, experts, executives, industry influencers, and assorted gurus do the same thing?

These days the technology is very good. A simple video camera and tripod investment is a minor affair. The camera microphone itself at a certain distance is fine or you can add a shotgun microphone if needed. You just set it up turn it on and forget about it until the end. You may have to be careful with the arrangements such that no one in the audience will be in the shot and you need to tell everyone that is the case in order to remove privacy concerns. Well if it is all this easy why aren't more speakers doing this?

The smarter ones are. I often coach speakers before major presentations and we always use video. I can tell them what they are doing that needs improvement, but there is nothing more powerful than having that information pointed out to you and seeing it at the same time. If it is just you shooting the video yourself and there is no coach review possibility, there is still enough material on the video for you to make improvements in your presentation.

How do you review the presentation? Look at four possibilities for the next time. What can you delete, add, reduce or amplify? There may be habits you have that detract from the persuasion power of the message. Perhaps you are mumbling or umming and ahing. Confidence sells and to sound confident you must be clear and consistent in your delivery. Look for tell taLe body language tics that have a negative connotation. You might be swaying around in a distracting way that competes with what you are saying. Or you maybe be fidgeting, or striding around the stage showing off to everyone how nervous you are. All of these habits weaken your message with your audience.

Are you engaging the audience with your eye contact? My Japanese history professor at university would deliver every lecture staring at the very top of the back wall and never engage in any eye contact with the students. Don't be like that. Use every second of the presentation to lock eyes with members of your audience for about six seconds, one at a time and in random order. Are you using congruent gestures during you explanation or no gestures or too many gestures or permanent gestures? Gestures are there to be points of emphasis, so hold for a maximum of fifteen seconds and then turn them off.

Video is also excellent for considering what you might have done, looking for things you could have added to the presentation. Maybe there was a chance to use a prop or introduce a slide to support a point or call for more audience participation by getting them to raise their hands in response to a question. I was giving a talk recently on "AI in the Workplace" and I showed two paintings labelled A and B and asked the audience which one was painted by AI. They had to raise their hands to vote. This was more interesting than just showing them a slide with a painting done by AI. Roughly half of the audience went for either A or B. In fact they were both done by A1 so it was a bit of ruse, but very effective to drive home the point I was making.

If you cannot organise a video or if the hosts are not cooperative, then have someone you trust give you feedback. Don't ask them a broad question such as "how was it?'. We need to be more specific. "Did my opening grab the attention of the audience?", "Were my main points clear and supported with credible evidence", "Was I engaging my audience with good quality eye contact throughout?", etc. Give them a checklist before you start so you can guide them in what to look for. Unless they are a public speaking expert themselves, they won't know how to help you best.

In a year, most people don't get that much opportunity to speak in public, so it very hard to get the right frequency to enable improvement. If you could do the same presentation five times in a row, by the last one you would be on fire, but that hardly ever happens. This is why the video or expert feedback becomes so useful. You can review the presentation at your leisure and improve on your professional public speaking capabilities for the next outing.

How To Give A Motivational Speech

I was attending a Convention in Phuket and the finale was the closing inspirational speech for the week of events. I had to deliver the same speech myself at the Ho Chi Minh Convention a few years ago. This is a daunting task. Actually, when your audience is chock full of presentation's training experts from Dale Carnegie, it is simply terrifying. The length of the speech is usually around ten minutes, which though it seems shortish, can feel quite long and challenging to design. Being an inspirational speech, it adds that extra degree of difficulty. It comes up though. The organisers ask you to deliver the closing, rousing call to action to fire the troops up for another year. Are you ready to meet the challenge?

There are some key components we must assemble. There must be one clear and compelling message. In a speech like this, we can't rattle off the twenty things everyone should be doing. They can never remember them all and the whole effort becomes too diffused. It is a single call to action, so what is the action or idea we want to propose. We might use slides or we may not, it will really depend on what we want to say. Often in these cases, we can use images very effectively without any words and we supply the narrative during our comments. Photos and images are powerful for capturing attention and people's emotions.

A call to action is an emotional commitment that goes beyond logic. We need to hit the bulls eye of what grabs people's hearts. This is delivered through stories. We take people on a journey of our construction. We plan it such that it leads them to feel what we want them to feel and to think what we want them to think. This planning creates a funnel effect where we keep pulling people back to our central message.

Storytelling technique is a terrific vehicle for the speaker to lead people's hearts and minds. We populate the story with people who are familiar to the audience. Ideally they can see these people in their mind's eye. They might be people they have actually met or have heard of. They may be historical events, figures, VIPS, celebrities or people of note who are familiar to our audience.

In Ho Chi Minh for my closing speech at Convention, the timing was such that we had previously suffered from the triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear reactor meltdown in Japan. I spoke with emotion about that event. About having a nuclear cloud pass over your head polluting all the drinking water. Of having massive aftershocks every day for weeks, of the relentless black churning oily water engulfing communities, of the chaos and destruction. I brought that experience alive to drive home my central point.

We flesh out the surroundings of the story to make it real. We are all used to watching visual storytelling on television or in movies, so we are easily transported to a scene of the author's creation, if the words create pictures. We describe the room or location in some detail in order to transfer minds to that place.

We place the event into a time sequence with a peg for the audience to grab hold of, to make the story come alive. We might do this by nominating the date or we might specify the season or the time of day or night. This type of context is important because it takes the listener down more layers of the story to make it more relevant. They can draw on their memory of similar occasions to approximate this story.

The delivery is where all of this comes together. It is a call to action so the speaker needs to get into high gear to make that happen. There will be an element of theatrics involved for effect. This is not some dubious trick or variant on a parlour game to distract the punters. No, it is taking the key message and driving it hard through exaggeration. Our speaker in Phuket toward the end of his talk dropped down to the push up position and pumped out twenty rapid fire pushups on his fingertips. I don't know if you have ever tried this fingertip version, but it was pretty impressive for a man of his age group and was totally congruent with his key point about stress equals strength. It was dramatic, it was daring, but it also added that X factor to his talk.

There must be vocal modulation too, from conspiratorial whispers to hitting key words or phrases with tremendous intensity. Gestures will be larger than normal and more dramatic. The speaker will be eyeing the audience with great intensity, with a fire burning in their pupils of complete certainty of the veracity of the key message. There will be a level of super engagement with the audience, to the point they are cheering and responding throughout the talk rather than consolidated clapping only at the end.

Crafting a key message, a powerful call to action for an end worth pursuing and then wrapping it up in storytelling, delivered with energy and flair, is the formula for success when delivering the closing inspirational speech at your conference. Make it memorable and don't hesitate about going BIG.