The Presentations Japan Series

Successful Presentations Need Good Structure

It is a bad sign when a presentation makes me sleepy, especially if it is at lunch time. It is very common to have speakers address a topic over a lunch to a group of attendees. After lunch, you might explain away a bit of the drowsiness, but during the lunch is a warning sign. The speaker had good voice strength, so nobody was struggling to hear him. He was knowledgeable on his subject having worked in this area for a number of years. He was speaking about what his firm does everyday, so he is living the topic. So what went wrong?

Thinking back to the talk, I wondered whether his structure was the issue? When a speech doesn't flow well, the audience has to work hard. Actually, they choose not to work hard and instead just drop out and escape from you. This was one of those cases.

If we think about giving a speech, we have to plan it well. In his case, he had prepared slides, but the style of the lunch and the venue meant it was a no slide deck presentation. He had some side notes written down on his laptop screen to follow. That is fine for the speaker, because it aids navigation through the topics. The problem was that the points were not ordered or structured well. This made it hard to follow, as it tended to jump around, rather than flow.

We design our talks from the idea spark. In one sentence, we need to isolate out what is the key point we want to make to our audience. This is not easy, but the act of refining the topic gives us clarity. We create the opening last, because its role is to break into the brains of the audience and capture their full attention for what is coming.

The middle bits between opening and closing is where the design part comes in. Think of the sections like chapters in a book. The chapters need to be in a logical order that is easy to follow. They need to link to each other so that the whole thing flows. To create the chapters we take our central conclusion and ask why is that true? The answers will come from the points of evidence or our experiences. We need to get these down and then get them in order.

It might be a simple structure like " this is what happened in the past, this is where we are today and this is where we are going in the future". We could use a macro-micro split. This is the big picture and here are the details of the components. It could be advantage-disadvantage. We investigate the plusses and minuses of what we are proposing. It could be taking the key points of evidence and breaking them down to make each a chapter in its own right.

The key is in the sequencing. What is the logical flow here to move from one chapter to the next? We need a bridge between chapters to set up what is coming next and to tell our audience we are changing the focus. We need to constantly loop each chapter back to what is the central point. We can't just put out evidence and leave it there, expecting the listener to work it out themselves. We have to tell them why this is important, what it means for them and how they can use it.

Visuals on screen do assist in this process. It does make it easier to follow because we are hitting more points of stimulus with our audience. When we don't have slides, we need to use word pictures to draw the audience into our topic. I am struggling to recall any stories he told about the topic, which is the best place to create those word pictures.

So break the talk up before you go anywhere near the slide construction. What is the point you want to make? What are the reasons for that and turn them into chapter headings. Check that the flow of the chapters is logical and easy to follow. Then create a blockbuster opening to grab attention. If our speaker had spent more time on the design then the talk would have been more accessible to the audience. Get that wrong in this Age Of Distraction and you have lost them immediately.

Tech Presenters Please Stop Making Stupid Errors

I am sitting there with a crowd of people attending a presentation on blockchain technology. Some are very technical people active in the crypto currency area, some run their own tech businesses. Our presenter has amazing experience in this area, having worked for some very big names in the industry. He also has his own company to promote as well as himself as a leader in this field. He has some recommendations for us based on where he sees the industry moving over the next couple of years.

The coverage of his subject was logical and easy to follow. It was clear he really knew what he was talking about. The slides by the way, overall, were excellent. Very professionally done by a designer and they reinforced the credibility of his company. Very clear, for the most part, with not too much information on each slide and plenty of white space. Some fonts were a bit smallish and if you were seated at a distance, probably rather impenetrable. Apart from that quibble though, they were well done.

I was astounded though, by the way he presented his material. I calculated that during the entire presentation, including both the Q&A as well as the main body of the talk, he had eye contact with his audience for about 1% of the time. Where was he looking? He interspersed his eye contact between looking at the floor and the monitor he was using to show the slides. In fact, it was almost like some extremely primitive tribe living in the remote mountains of Papua New Guinea, encountering a high spec, large form monitor, showing amazing scenes for the first time. They would be amazed by what they were seeing and their eyes would be glued to the screen. This describes our modern, urban, high tech presenter to a tee. He seemed hypnotised by the screen and just kept looking at what was on it the whole time.

Mercifully, he wasn't reading the content to us, line by line, like some other dim presenters I have had the misfortune to encounter. He was transfixed though on the screen and just totally ignored his audience. Occasionally he would break free from the siren call of the monitor and amble around the front of the room, wandering to and fro, staring down at the carpet tiles.

He did have good energy, was obviously expert in this area and had some passion for his subject. He did prefer to speak in a monotone, where every single word gets the exact some strength treatment and there was no vocal variety. I liked his gestures, although they tended to be held a bit low. It would have been better to get his hands up higher, so they would be more visible.

He didn't seem to be lacking in confidence. I spoke with him briefly before we started when I exchanged business cards. He didn't come across as some nerdy, painfully shy techie, who wants to avoid contact with human kind as much as possible.

I put this dismal display down to a lack of knowledge. He knows a lot about the tech but knows close to zero about how to explain it to an audience. He didn't seem to understand that to convince an audience of your point of view you need to work on them. Like a lot of technical people, he must have believed that by just putting the data and information up on the screen, the goodness and sanctity of the content would carry the day. He must have imagined that his part in the process was not relevant. Even during the Q&A, he completely ignored the source of the questions – the rows of people seated in front of him. He just continued to stare at the screen. The words up on the screen at that point were "Thank You", so not a lot to look at.

The basic rule of presenting is to use all the tools at your disposal. Eye contact with your audience is so powerful as a persuader. We wrap that up with our vocal variety, pauses, gestures and body language.

Hold the gaze of one individual in your audience for six seconds. Longer than that it becomes too intrusive. Speak to one person, on a point while holding their gaze, then switch your gaze to another person. Don't do it in order, because people will predict what you are doing and switch off , because they know their turn is not coming yet.

Rather divide the room up into six sections. Front to the left, middle and right and the same for the rear half of the room. Then at random move your gaze around picking up people, making eye contact with them and converting them to your point of view on the subject.

Our presenter missed a big opportunity to persuade his audience to use his firm. He failed to sway us with his point of view, because he under powered the persuasion bit. The quality of your content may be the best on the planet but that does not remove your role in explaining it. Back up what you are saying with knowledge of presenting as well and unlike our speaker, become the total package.

How To Be An Inspiring Presenter

At the start of our class on High Impact Presentations, we ask the participants to think about what type of impression they would like to have linger with their audience, after their presentation has been completed. How about you? When people are filing out of the hall, what things would you like to hear about your presentation, if your were able to eavesdrop on their conversation? Being clear is always a favourite and please listen to Episode 144 "How To Be More Concise, Clear and Persuasive When Presenting", where I go into more detail on how to do that. Another high ranking popular desire is to be more inspiring.

Now "inspiring" can be defined in many ways, but for the purposes of giving presentations, we can think of it as lifting people up, getting them to take action, to challenge new things, to push themselves harder than before. Actually that is a pretty tall order in a forty minute talk. Unless we are a professional motivational speaker, the majority of our talks will probably be focused on dispensing information and offering advice on how to solve business problems.

What would a business audience find inspiring? It could be a tale of daring do, where great adversity had been overcome through the human will. Conquering dangerous elements of nature, one's circumstances or fellow man, often come up in this regard. The problem is business people's activities usually are far removed from conquering the poles, vertiginous mountain ascents or vast ocean crossing exploits. These are very specialist pursuits, which are out of our purview.

The arc of the story of rags to riches is a popular trope. This works in business, because we are looking for hope in the face of tough odds. When we hear that others made it despite all the trials and tribulations, we take it that maybe we can do it too. It can be a personal story or it can the saga of a firm or a division and its imminent elimination, coming from back from the cusp of destruction to rise again and prosper. We are magnets to lessons on survival. We prefer to learn through the near death experience and ultimate triumph of others, than try it on ourselves.

You might be thinking your life is rather dull, your industry absolutely dull and your firm perpetually dull. How could you liven up a talk with stories than were inspiring to others? Maybe you can't. Perhaps you have to draw lessons from other industries or personalities and weave these into the point you are making in your talk.

I like to read biographies and autobiographies for this reason. I enjoy interviews with outstanding people, telling how they climbed the greasy pole and got to the top. Strangely, obituaries are also a good source for this type of information. They are usually brief summaries of a person's life. They often contain snippets of great hardship or success and frequently both. Don't just skim over these heroes tales, instead collect these rich stories. These can be your go to files for greatness, when you want to introduce an idea that needs some evidence.

There may be legendary figures in your industry or your firm. These are stories you can retell for effect, to drive home the insights you want illuminate. Okay it wasn't you, but the audience doesn't care that much. They like to learn and they love hearing about disasters, so the mess doesn't have to be your personal catastrophe.

Usually the founders of your firm went through tough times. There are bound to be tales in there you can use. Or you can draw on recent recessions, the Lehman Shock, the 2011 triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant meltdown to find episodes where all looked grim, but a legendary team battled on and survived, while many businesses around them disappeared.

You may have some personal experiences that are also relevant. This can be quite hard, because you are sharing something quite personal with the world. As an introvert, it took me a long time before I was comfortable to talk about my own experiences. When I did though, the impact on the audience was immediate. I could sense the feeling of closeness with strangers, as they listened to my tales of error, overreach, miscalculation etc. I still have trouble with this, so I do prefer the woes of others to my own, but definitely my own stories are always so much more powerful. I just need the temerity to tell more of them.

So pepper your talk with uplifting examples from others or from your own experiences, that justify the action you want them to take or boost the feeling of confidence you want to instil in your audience. The raw material is all around you. Just start looking for it and begin compiling it. When you hear something you can use, capture it immediately for later employ. Dig into the vaults of your own experiences and draw out examples that will make you magnetic for your audience. Telling these types of stories is how speakers have inspired audiences down through the ages. The reason we still do it today is because it works a charm.

Aya McCrindle recently graduated from our High Impact Presentations Course and did her first TED talk. She was well and truly ready for it, because of the training preparation she received. Aya has her own company, Aya Jean Style Coach, where she helps people with mastering first impressions. In her area of expertise, she is the brand. She runs her classes as the leader and that means being credible with her students. All leaders need excellent persuasion skills and this is where the High Impact Presentations Course comes in. If you need to be able to communicate at a high level, if you need to be persuasive, if you need to be able to motivate people, then don't waste your time trying to work it out by yourself. Do the course. It has a proven track record of over 100 years. It is taught in over 100 countries in thirty five languages. It is the Rolls Royce of presentation training. Don't you deserve the Roller?

I Hate Sitting Through Underperforming Presentations

This global company is a household name in Japan. They have spent a fortune getting the brand name known here. They had some tough times early on too and got a hammering from the media about aspects of their business model. A lot of negative publicity was generated, so the name is well known, but not in a helpful way. The President is giving his talk about the company and the industry to a mixed audience here in Tokyo. It was sadly underwhelming. Sitting there was a form of torture for me, who teaches this stuff. Well what made this an under performing presentation and what can we learn from it?

The meltdown in the media from a few years ago is a common memory. But what a great "return from the dead story" lies therein. There must have been amazing characters involved. Even the foreign head office President had to get involved and apologise. There was drama aplenty and lessons numerous falling out from the catastrophe. We all love to learn by hearing about the errors of others. We gobble that stuff right up, because we have that Schadenfreude thing going in the background.

Instead, we got a very one dimensional, flat talk about the business model and not much on the lessons learnt. It was delivered with a very passionless effort, that failed to ignite anyone in the audience. The speaker looked tired and sounded only slightly interested to be there talking to us. His facial expression was single throughout. There were no highs and lows of the journey reflected in his expression. He seemed to make sure to match his voice to his wooden face and spoke throughout in a deathly, dull monotone. This means he gave up the chance to punch out specific words for emphasis, to bring phrases to life by turbo injecting them with power or alternatively, dropping the strength out for contrast. It was bland.

In fact, this was a major brand damaging exercise from go to woe. By that, I count both his personal, professional brand and also the corporate brand. He mentioned that he had given a couple of these talks to various audiences already and I was thinking that is pretty sad. Why sad?

I was reminded of that story about Campbell's tomato soup. I can't remember who was the ad guy in charge of the advertising account for Campbells, but the owner complained that the advertising agency was promoting all of the other soups, except tomato. The ad guy's reply is very informative for speakers. He said the reason was that their tomato soup was orange in colour and not all that good. If he promoted it vigorously, more people would try it, become unimpressed and Campbells would suffer severe brand damage.

This is what happens to speakers like this one. They nefariously roam around destroying their personal and company brands, by exposing more and more people to their zombie presentation performance. He needed to be a lot more energised in his talk. This was potential high drama, full of powerful stories that would stick with us, long after the talk was over. Here we had a great redemption story of how they came back from the brink of expiration in Japan, to recover, regroup and re-conquer the market.

The delivery had one gear and that unfortunately was stuck in low gear. We never had spurts of speed or energy. We just dawdled along at three kilometres an hour until it ended. We all need to become passionate about our story, telling it with a lot of voice strength and using our body language to good effect.

We take the audience with us on a trip to Space Mountain at Disneyland. We are strapped in, and then we whiz into the blackness of their downfall, curving at high speed around the media assault, dropping precipitously into a deep dive of lost business from which it looked there was no return. Next, we soar skyward as we get over the disaster and rebound the company, people and the brand.

We needed that passionate retelling of the journey, the highs and lows, the lessons, the characters involved. All we got was a slide deck with lots of data on it. What a lost opportunity. We all have many stories, good, bad and educational. We need to use these to engage our audience, so that they feel like they have been with us through that hair raising ride and have touched back down with us, exhausted but elated at having survived the ride.

Remember, people won't recall the detail of your talk. They will forget all the statistics. Even if they wrote them down, they won't consult them ever again. They will not remember all those groovy slides you crafted and assembled so meticulously. They will remember the stories though. They will remember you and how you came across. They won't forget how much you excited them or didn't excite them. Treat every chance to talk as a great brand building or exploding opportunity. As the speaker definitely be passionate, tell energising stories and be memorable in a good way. This is how you build both your personal and company brands to good effect. The negative alternative is not a very pleasant contemplation.

How To More Concise, Clear and Persuasive When Presenting

We run training on presentations and public speaking continuously. These three requests to be more concise, clear and persuasive, often come up from the participants, regarding the nominated areas where they want to improve. In this Age of Distraction, if you miss the first two, you can kiss goodbye to number three. As soon as an audience hears you rambling, they are scrambling for the mobile phones to exit your talk. When you are mystifying your audience, they bolt for digital device safety.

I am the only English native speaker in my team here in Tokyo. My staff all have very fluent English and are skilled communicators. One of them however, as much as I love her to death, drives me nuts. When her brain has fixed on a topic she launches straight into the main body of what she wants to tell me. It has become a bit of a running joke in the office, because I will stop her and ask "what is the subject of this wonderful exposition?".

We can do the same things when we are speaking. We are so deep into our subject, we forget that the people listening are unable to follow our thread, because we haven't set up the topic properly. We have phases of our talk. The opening is the dynamite, the nitro. We light the fuse and blow everyone out of their complacency, sloth and slumber in order to get them to pay attention to us.

In the main body of our talk we need to be thinking in terms of five minute blocks. At around this frequency, we need to be switching it up, to keep our audience attached to what we are saying. We might do this through a powerful story, an impactful slide, an insightful quotation, or a killer question. When we make a statement in the main body, we need to make sure we are bolting on some evidence to prove what we are saying. Data, statistics, survey results, testimonials are all excellent sources of credibility for our provocative claims.

The arrangement of the blocks needs to have a logical flow. It might be by theme, chronological, micro to macro, problem-solution-result or any number of easy to follow formulas. The point is to choose one and use it, rather than allowing the muse to take you on a journey without direction.

Bridges between the sections are useful guideposts too. For example, "We have covered XYZ, now let me explore ABC", or "In a moment let's investigate the influence the economy may have on our projections", or "There are three key things we must be vigilant for, the first is….". These are threads to stitch the whole presentation together into a format the listener can follow without having to work hard at all. If we make our audience work hard, we often find they are all lazy escape artists and we have lost them.

Time is the weapon of choice for the speaker when it comes to learning to shave words, hone sentences and trim excess. Rehearsal is absolutely key to getting the timing correct. On how many occasions have we all had to sit there and listen to an unprofessional speaker tell us they are "running out of time" and they will have to "whip" through the last slides? How do we feel? Cheated, big time! We came to get some key information from the talk and skipping over key slides to satisfy some arbitrary time constraints has us worried we are not getting full value from the time we are allocating.

When the stop watch is running, you learn to sharpen up the prose, glean the essentials and focus on the most important things only. Rambling away soon trips you up and you realise you need to cut the excess and stick to the most powerful points only.

When we get to the end, we wrap it up with two closes, one for the pre-Q&A and one for the very end. These are our opportunities to underscore our punch lines, hammer our main conclusion, reinforce the ideas we are promulgating and leave the audience with a thought pounding so loudly in their ears that it won't get easily displaced by something else. The close puts a nice bow on the whole enterprise, wrapping things up sweetly.

Action Steps

1. Plot the talk in five minute brackets
2. Create bridges to lead the audience into the next section
3. Get out the stopwatch to tighten up the delivery
4. Spend time designing the opening and closes to properly marshal the talk

Man, Your Monotone Is Killing Me

Normally we expect Japanese speakers to be boring, because their language is a monotone and so they apply the same formula when speaking in either Japanese or English. That is okay in a way, because it is a cultural thing. However, for foreigners there is no excuse. If you are giving your talk in a monotone, expect to lose your audience. Forty minutes of listening to some speaker's monotone delivery is enough to make most people suicidal. Regardless of how gripping the topic, the grip of slumber proves more powerful and relentless.

This was me recently. I turned up at the appointed time for the talk, all full of vim and vigour, eagerly awaiting the unveiling of this troubling topic. The speaker came with a grand resume, a prince among princes on this topic. It wasn't princely. He wasn't even the jester. It was more like a lecture from the hooded hangman or the grim executioner.

My eye lids grew heavy as he droned on and on. Seated unwisely toward the front, I struggled to observe the common courtesies, as my eyes willed to close. It was excruciating. I was sitting there thinking, why is such a vital topic being garrotted here in full view of everyone, by the way he delivering this talk? What is it about this delivery that is driving me to sleep?

I think there were three factors at play in particular. The monotone itself is a noise we often refer to as white noise. Your refrigerator often gives off this low hum. It is there all the time. Well not your Japanese refrigerator, because the living spaces are are too small here to put up with that, so Japanese technology ensures they are a silent as the tomb. I mean your big western model, in your big kitchen, in your big house. The speaker's monotone mimics this white noise that has no highs and lows to keep us interested. I don't recommend you telling any speakers soon that their talk was as exciting as the white noise of your refrigerator, but you are certainly allowed to think that.

The refrigerator monotone also has the feature of being continuous. This was our speaker too. He just warbled away for the entire time with almost no pauses. Pattern interrupters like pauses are good for the brain, to keep audience attention on what you are talking about. They are like little warning buzzes that something has changed and we should pay attention to the speaker. Pauses are translators for us. We can take a moment to translate what was said into our own understanding. Continuous talking ensures each idea is drowned by the succeeding wave of the next idea.

There are no key words in a monotone. Every sentence has equal value and every word in a sentence is tremendously democratic and the same as every other word. I like democracy in political systems but not so keen on this in speeches. I want key words highlighted by voice modulation. I have just finished narrating the audio version of my next book Japan Business Mastery. I don't have a great DJ style baritone voice. In fact, after 48 years of doing all that yelling, the kiai, in karate training, people tell me I have a rather husky voice. Sadly no one says "sexy husky voice", they just nominate it is husky. Nevertheless, I don't ask better qualified professionals to do it, because they won't know which are the key words I want to hit harder than others. This isolating out particular words for attention, is what makes the talk more interesting. We are guiding the listener along a path we have predetermined about how they should think about what we are saying.

It was painful. Talks shouldn't be painful should they. We go to be informed or persuaded or motivated or entertained and possibly all four if the speaker is really good. Check yourself by taping your delivery. Are you using voice modulation, pauses and punching out key words for emphasis? If you are not, then bring some pillows for the audience members, because that will wind up being your most valuable contribution to the proceedings.

Action Steps

1. Add voice modulation to your delivery.If you are Japanese, then add in strength or take it out or add speed or slow it down, for variety in your delivery.
2. Use pauses to help your audience process what you have said.
3. Hit key words you want to emphasise for your listeners, to draw them into your way of thinking

Visual Elements In Presentations

There is no question visuals are super powerful in presentations. This can range from your eye contact, body language, gestures all the way up to actual live fireworks. Think about sporting presentations where they make heavy use of visuals to stir emotions. The half time show is full of music, fireworks, action. The team scores a goal and the big screens are zeroing in on the action that just occurred. The boxers are introduced as they enter the arena and fireworks are exploding behind them, like they are modern messiahs here to save the masses. You might not think of it this way, but this is what you are competing with today, as the lines get blurred between how events are presented.

There you stand, with just your slide deck advancer in your hand. You are facing an audience fully tooled up on the most realistic computer games, viral videos, light show events and quick cut video action. You are thinking your information quality will carry the day, because you speak in a monotone, are deadly boring most of the time and embolden us with the passion of road kill. Sad to say, but none of this ever worked well and it certainly doesn't work today.

The quality of your information has zero significance if no one is paying attention to what you are saying. In this Age of Distraction, audiences are leaping on to their phones at the first sign of tedium. Even when binge watching their favourite television series, they have the implement of destruction - their phone - at the ready to take up and multi task.

The question today is how to integrate all of this cool stuff into our presentations without it overwhelming us, the presenter. Slide shows are an ever present danger, as the audience loses their connection with us and are absorbed by what is up on the screen. The worst thing you can do is hand out the slide deck beforehand, because you are on slide two and they are on page eighteen. The disconnect with what you are saying becomes close to total at this point.

Videos can be very good for presenting things in an attractive manner. I was watching a video at a presentation recently and the supporting video was very slick. It managed to capture the action, the drama, the excitement in a way that formed a positive impression. This is the key word though – impression. It doesn't last. We have our attention monopolised for a short period of time and then we are back to distraction HQ.

What I notice with most presenters who are using video is they let the video run wild and they don't attempt to control it. By this I mean, they just play the video. We should have an intro for the video and an outro for after. We shouldn't just let our audience watch the video as if every aspect has the same value. We want to be hitting key messages in that video, in the same way that we hit key words in our sentences to create greater emphasis for our messages.

The video will have one scene or a couple of scenes which help us with our messaging and rather than just running the video, we want to focus our audience's attention right there. We need to set that up. For example, "In this video please look for the scene with the interview with our Chief Scientist. What she has to say is fascinating and may change your perspective entirely". When we hear a set up like that, we are now in a heightened state of anticipation. We are wondering what is she going to say that will change my perspective?

Once the video is over, we need to wrap a bow around the key messages and refer back to the evidence we presented in the video to back up our point of view on the subject. For example, "What I like about the message in that video is that we can control our future, if we choose to take that route". This sentence would be referring back to your key message from your talk, so that the whole thing is congruent. This is how we control the video, rather than what has become the norm – the video controls the speaker or it is just fluff, that has no lasting impact and everyone has forgotten it within the next thirty seconds.

As presenters, we have to ensure the focus is fully on us and that the audience is completely riveted to what we are saying. The Age of Distraction is also the Age of Destruction for Presenters. We need to control the visual elements, so that they are always our servant and never our master.

The Power Of Conversational Style When Presenting

We often see presenters elevated up on stage or positioned at the front of the room, flanked by or under a screen, and protected from the audience by a rostrum. In Japan standing above your seated audience requires an apology for doing so at the start of the speech. This is a very hierarchy conscious society, so implying your superiority to your audience, through your physical positioning has to be wound back immediately. We add to this feeling by driving the slide deck, playing around with the lighting, using a microphone and speaking in a knowledgeable, commanding voice. All of these devices place a barrier between the speaker and the attendees of the talk.

Is that what we want though – a barrier to our audience? If we want the audience to buy what we are selling we want to have total access to the participants. Believe my statistics, follow my suggestions, take action on my ideas are typical outcomes we want to achieve. Getting people to come with us necessitates persuasion and having appeal. The less barriers between us and them, the better.

A useful approach is to speak conversationally with our audience, as if we were all intimates of long standing, where the trust had been built up over the years and where the simpatico is flowing. It also lends itself to sharing information like confidences, that only the specially initiated and conspiratorial are made privy to. We are letting you into special data and insights, that only those in the room can know.

This requires a switch from speaking at an audience to speaking with an audience. We call out the names of audience members we know or have just met, to build that feeling of connection between speaker and participants. "Suzuki san and I were chatting a moment ago and she made an interesting observation on the subject", "I am glad my old friend Tanaka san is with us today, because I consider him a great model for what I am proposing", "Obayashi san and I were speaking during the networking before lunch and she mentioned that there was some new data on this topic". As soon as we do this, the people we are referring to feel three meters tall, because their name was mentioned in a positive, supporting way. We also break through the mental barrier between speaker and audience by including the audience members into our speech.

The tone we apply moves from oratory to more of a chatting over the backyard fence style. It is much more inclusive, convivial, endearing and conversational. We still pick out key words for emphasis by either putting the power in or pulling it out, we use pattern interrupters like speeding up or slowing down our speaking speed. A conversational monotone is still a sleep inducer. We need to avoid that. We still use gestures and we will increase the frequency of inclusive gestures. What would be an inclusive gesture? The stylised wrapping your arms around your collective audience is a good one, as if you were drawing them in toward you. Pointing to the audience with your arm outstretched and the palm up is a non-threating way of engaging your audience. Our eye contact at six seconds for each person, has enough balance to make it inclusive without it becoming invasive.

Talking about ourselves, sometimes in a self disparaging manner, reduces the hierarchy feeling between us and them. Boris Johnson is master of this. He has a very elite background, but makes fun of himself in his public speeches. Depending on the audience, he sometimes makes a show of being flustered and disorganised for effect. This positions him better as an "everyman" with his audience, rather than a distant upper class elitist. Not taking yourself too seriously is always good advice, if you want to connect with your audience no matter how brainy, powerful, superior you may see yourself relative to the assembled punters. Just don't overdo it, because then it becomes sensed as manipulative and fake. A little humour at your own expense goes a long way.

Action Steps

1. Mentally switch the scene to a chat over the backyard fence, rather than in a big five star hotel's ballroom

1. Where possible integrate some of the audience members into your speech to strike that personal connection

1. Make the speaking tone, gestures and eye contact conspiratorial

1. Don't be afraid to make fun of yourself

Remember, if you would like any questions you have, answered live by me, then just put in the email header "I am based in…and am interested in joining your live Presentations Q&A" and send that email to me at [email protected]. I am planning to do a Zoom meeting with everyone and we will record it for those who can't make it. Tell me your location because I may do a couple of versions, to best suit your time zone.

Avoiding Flat Presentations

"The good is the enemy of the great" is a clever saying and very true. In presenting terms we can have people who are competent but not even close to maximising their potential. They are sitting there in the lukewarm bath, never experiencing or understanding the joys of an extra ten degrees of heat. In presenting terms, turning your inner thermometer up ten degrees when facing an audience has a tremendous impact.

Our presenter was intelligent, well read, well researched and had good content. The presentation was workman like. It got done. The content was covered. The points were made, the slides were run through, the questions got handled. And then….

This is the point. There was nothing. It wasn't retained in the audience's mind. There wasn't that feeling of WOW. It just dribbled out and ended, disappearing into the void with all of mankind's other mediocre speeches. What was missing? Where was that ten degrees of heat which was never applied?

The opening was flat. It just started. The level of voice strength of the speaker, chatting with the attendees before the talk and the start of their actual talk, was at the same strength. The body language was at the same calibration for before and after the start. It was if the speech was just a continuation of the dialogue that had been going on prior to the kick off.

Everyone has a full brain when they walk in to hear us talk. We have to get out the crow bar and jemmy our way in there to be heard. That means the first words out of our mouth have to signal the talk has now begun, pay attention, listen up, cease and desist what you have been doing prior. We have to clearly draw a line for the audience to get them to concentrate on what we are saying. We only have a few seconds to capture their attention so they will grant us their permission allow us to hold their attention.

We cannot leave such a vital intervention to chance. We must design it carefully. The words have to be laden with hooks to keep them interested and with us. We might lure the audience into our story, using word pictures to capture their imagination. We want them to mentally see the scene we are painting. We could hit them with a stunning statistic that baffles the brain and make it sit up and take note. It might be a quotation from a famous person to add credibility to the point we are making. We need to plan for cut through.

Part of that planning needs to involve how we are going to marshal our physical resources particularly our eyes, voice, gestures, posture and positioning. Voice is where we start, because that is a powerful tool to break into the consciousness of the audience. By lifting the volume up, we force people to stop whatever it is they are doing and listen to us. When we add in a gesture to back up the voice the overall impact is strong. We cannot use eye power with the whole audience at the same time and have any impact so we select one person around the middle, then we give them both barrels of eye contact, for around six seconds. We just keep repeating this as we work our way through the whole audience. If it is a huge crowd we keep doing the same thing and at a certain distance, everyone sitting around the intended recipient of our eye power thinks we are looking at them anyway. We can physically move closer to our audience. When we do that, we use our standing height above a seated audience, to tower over them and add more power to our physical presence.

If we can get the start going well, then all we have to do is maintain that throughout the talk. We will add in vocal range when we are talking, to keep our audience in Japan from going to sleep. We can uses pauses for emphasis and to build anticipation. The key is to get a good start and then maintain the energy. Our speaker started small, stayed small and finished small. The whole thing was muted, flat, unremarkable and infinitely forgettable. Don't be one of those speakers.

Action Steps

1. Understand that the audience is almost comatose when you get up to speak
2. Remember we are competing with miniscule attention spans and lots of distraction today
3. Look for a WOW opening to grab the attention of the audience
4. Marshall all our weapons – eyes, voice, body language, gestures, posture, positioning
5. A good start is easier to continue than trying to build up the power gradually