The Presentations Japan Series

Is How I am Dressed Important When Presenting?

There is an old saying about lies, damn lies and statistics. An often misquoted statistic in the presenting world is that 55% of your impression on an audience is based on how you are dressed. Some coaches are advising on this basis and it is only partially true. Professor Mehrabian's research at UCLA did nominate that particular percentage, but he did so with an important caveat. When what we are saying is not congruent or matching with the way we are saying it, then the audience gets distracted and starts focusing on how you are dressed 55% of the time. When he published that research there were no uber powerful thermonuclear distractors like we have today, in the form of smart phones. These instruments of presenter attention destruction are rapidly connecting us with the internet and whisking us away from the speaker.

If we are doing our job properly as speakers we will not be losing our audience. One of my team attended a presentation I gave recently and she reported to me that the audience members were listening to me all the way through. That is what I thought too, because the entire speech had me focused like a hawk on my audience, to make sure I was holding their attention. I don't mention this to say what a smarty pants I am, but just to highlight how difficult it has become for all of us to hold an audience today.

My style of presenting is extremely high energy. My karate training background has taught me how to harness my "ki" or "chi" and channel it to the audience. I still have pretty good tonal variety so I can really work on keeping the audience with me. The downside of all of this is that I generate a lot of heat. Often when we are presenting on stage there will be spotlights trained on us and these can make us feel very hot as well. When I am getting dressed that day,

I always make sure of a couple of things for my presentation. A white shirt is an absolute must. I love my blue business shirts, but what I found was the heat generates sweat around the neck area, especially when wearing a tie. That lovely light blue shirt can become two tone. The collar becomes wet and changes to a darker blue. This is distracting for the audience who are sitting there saying to themselves, "Oh look at that, he has a two tone shirt now!".

The other thing I pay careful attention to is never doing any presenting unless I am wearing a jacket. There are probably few things as unattractive as a speaker wearing only a shirt, lifting up their arm to reveal a very sweaty armpit area, that runs right down the side of their body. Most unappealing and again very distracting to an audience. I keep my jacket on, buttoned up, the whole time like a suit of armour. I know that my shirt is soaked during the speech, because of all the heat I am generating. It goes without saying, that an ill fitting suit creates a poor impression. The way the collar of the jacket sits on the neck tells you everything. If there is a wide gap between the two, this creates a sense of pattern interrupt and your audience gets distracted by it. Also save your bright coloured jackets for a party. A bright red jacket works well for a magician, but not so great for a speaker. Always look for ways to make your words conspicuous, rather than what you are wearing.

Sometimes we are asked to be a speaker on a panel. This can be tricky. We are usually seated up on stage in front of the audience, so there is nothing separating us from the viewers. When men cross their legs, if they don't know what they are doing, we get a very unfortunate close up of their hairy ankles, shins and calf muscles. Short socks work when you are standing, but are a danger when you sit. I always wear long socks right up to the knee, to spare my audience the brutality of my hairy legs.

I am quite daring when it comes to wearing bright ties. I leave them at home though when I am presenting and select something a bit more muted. Such a bright colour sitting right next to your face is bound to be an unwanted competitor for the attention of your audience. I do like pocket squares, but I make sure they are also very discreet. A puffed up large pocket square may be a dandy's delight, but like a bright tie, it sets up competition for the attention of the audience. Be careful with cufflinks too. I have some very bright colours in my line up, but I go for the less flagrant when I am presenting.

One of my pet peeves in Japan are the number of guys here who wear their tie, such that there is a gap between the top of the knot and the top button of the shirt collar. They allow it to loosen off and the gap appears without their knowledge and again this is distracting for the viewers. You also come across looking like a kid, who can't dress himself properly.

I also purposely shorten the length of my ties when I am presenting. Men's dress rules say the tie should only extend to a point midway down your pant's belt. What I find though is that the closed button of a single breasted suit always has an opening between that button and the bottom of the front of the jacket. The consequence is a tie worn at the correct length, will actually be peaking out from under the jacket, again distracting my audience. By making it a bit too short the protrusion problem is lessened. Again, I never take off my jacket, so my major tie length faux pas is hidden away.

The shine on my shoes should be mirror like. Standing up on stage everyone can see your scuffed, down at heel, miserable excuse for shoes. This says "slob", "poor quality control" or "poor self awareness" pretty clearly. It is not helpful for supporting a professional image. The belt should match the shoes so brown for brown and black for black. Pretty simple right, so how could you mess that up? Yet, I see guys with a brown belt and black shoes. This says you are "clueless" to your audience, so if you even can't get this right, why should we believe anything else you have to say.

I always place the nametag holder I am given by the organisers on the table where I am sitting or on the lectern. I don't wear them because they are usually plastic and as I move, they catch the lights focused on stage. Without knowing it, you are sending out Morse Code signals every time you move, as the plastic flashes the audience.

I have only referred to men in this piece on dressing for presenting, but many of the same things, for the most apart, apply for ladies too. I don't have the guts to do a specific commentary on how ladies should dress when presenting. My only hint would be don't confuse fashion outcomes with presenting outcomes. Make the focus your face, rather than the clothes. Don't dress in any way which draws the audience away from looking at your face. Our face is the most powerful tool we have. It is much stronger than whatever is on the screen and our voice. Don't allow anything to compete with it.

Senior Executives In A Public Speaking Competition Was So Revealing

Speech contests and debating contests are usually for younger people at school or university. It is not often you see the most senior people from major corporations going head to head in a public setting. I was at an event where there was a vote to take place for some prestigious seats on the board of a non-profit. If the number of applicants equals the number of seats, then it is a perfunctory competition where the winner's names are just announced. In the case of more hopefuls than places, then things hot up.

Each person had two minutes to make their pitch. Now remember, these are very experienced and senior people, in some cases heading vast organisations. I was fascinated to see how they would fare. With one exception, English was not their native language. However, they have been in international business their whole lives and many have lived in numerous foreign countries running the local business for the multinational parent company. Language skill wasn't even a factor.

As you might expect, some were better presenters than others. However, overall they were pretty underwhelming, given the types of big jobs they were holding. They knew they would have to speak and compete for places with each other and that they only had two minutes. They had the opportunity to prepare, to rehearse what they would say. This was not a spontaneous idea on the part of the organisers. The first thing I noticed was how poorly they had all prepared. Talking about your resume and how big your big corporate is, is fine but there was no thought given to what the audience wanted to hear. Everything was presented from their own point of view.

A few minutes spent planning and preparing would have come up with a fine list of audience expectations of this board. They would have found which hot buttons they needed to push. This is not hard stuff. They will represent our interests on the Board and so what would our member interests be? Having divined that, we should then craft our message to present around how our experience, organisational muscle and personal attributes will deliver for the members. We only have two minutes so we have to prune hard to fix upon the most high impact points that will resonate with the audience. We then need to rehearse to make sure we can get this inside the strict two minute limit. We don't want to be rushing it or confusing our audience with too many varied points. If we do that they have no hope of keeping track of what we are on about.

Now when we deliver our talk we have to engage with our audience. We will be going one after another, so we have to break through and override the message of whoever preceded us and implant our message, such that the successor speaker cannot root it out. Sadly, none of this was happening and they were not engaging their audience at all. What are they like when addressing the troops back at the office I was wondering? Going by this effort not much chop!

The common thing I noticed that was missing from all the speakers was eye contact. They were not using their two minutes to physically engage with enough people. Using six seconds of one on one eye contact, we can directly engage with at least twenty people in the audience. Toward the rear, because of the distance, the people sitting around the target person also believe the speaker is talking directly to them as well, so we can increase that twenty number quite substantially.

Delivering your resume in a monotone means you are missing the opportunity to hit key words for greater effect. Now when I say hit, I mean that in the sense that you can choose whether to add voice strength or withdraw voice strength to gain variety in your delivery. Our gestures are another way to bring power to what we are saying. Some of the speakers chose to speak while holding their hands behind their backs, denying themselves the opportunity to use gestures. When we don't show our hands, we are triggering a deep mistrust in the audience. This is because since we lived in caves, we have learnt not to trust people whose hands we cannot see.

It was all pretty bad. Corporate leaders need to be excellent communicators and that includes giving professional presentations. This is not something we are born with. We learn it and we further develop it, over the course of our careers. There was a lot of personal, professional and company brand damage done the other day, at the face off for the Board seats. When It is your turn to speak, be ready and blow your competitors out of the water.

Facial Animation Needed For Presenting Success

We have all seen it. The presenters face is expressionless, wooden, devoid of emotion or life. It is usually well paired with a horrific monotone delivery, to really kill off the audience. Presenting is a serious business, so these presenters present a very serious physiognomy. Scowling is thought to be good too, to show the gravitas they bring to the occasion. These are powerful people, who by definition, must look powerful. Technical people in particular love this no frills approach and smiling is definitely off their list of possibilities.

To be fair, there are presentations where levity, smiling, frivolity are inappropriate. A remembrance ceremony for the fallen heroes and heroines in battle, would be an occasion for an austere face. Losing all the shareholder's value through some idiocy would be another. A serious face however, doesn't have to be an expressionless face. Recalling lost loved ones in a heartbroken community, can see the presenter's face stricken and tortured with pent up emotions. When I read the eulogy for my mother at her funeral, my face was ashen and pained.

In business though, for most cases we can use our faces as an additional communication tool with our audience. We are using tonal variety in our voices, our hands for gestures, our eyes for audience engagement. We should also be using our faces too. A raised eyebrow can speak volumes. It can indicate curiosity, incredulousness or doubt. Turning our face to the side and tilting our head to go with it, can show scepticism or cynicism. Pursing our lips together then pushing them forward in a pout shows disagreement or disapproval. Pulling our head back from the neck shows shock or surprise.

When you think about it we are incredibly active using our face in normal conversation. If we filmed you speaking and played it back you would be amazed at how much facial expression you are employing. Stand you behind a podium or put you on stage in front of an audience though and maybe all that natural communication ability sails out the window and is replaced by wooden you instead.

When we look at theatre performances, television, movies, comedic acts we can see facial tools being well employed to drive home messages. I enjoy the popular drama from Italy, Inspector Montalbano and the Italian culture really makes great use of the face to communicate emotions. They are just talking, but it looks like they are arguing and of course the gesturing is on fire. We should stop watching these shows just for the entertainment value and start re-watching them for what we can learn about how to employ our face when presenting.

In the same way when we are speaking we hit key words with a louder or softer volume for effect, we should start employing our face to do the very same thing. When you want to raise doubt about some proposition someone else is putting forward, look for a suitable facial expression to back up that message. When you want to appear sceptical of some idea, then bring your best sceptic face to the fore.

This is very hard to coordinate when you are starting out. These days I have so much going on with my voice, eyes, gestures, body language I am not even aware of it. Watching myself on video with the sound turned off, I can see how much natural variety I am bringing to the talk. It wasn't like that at the start. My very first public presentation in my life was in Japanese to the Sundai Yobiko cram school students, where I managed to finish a 25 minute speech in 8 minutes. I am sure my face was not only wooden but also bright red from all the stress I was feeling.

Like anything to do with public speaking this facial involvement takes practice. Presenting in front of a mirror is a good chance to see how animated you are. Video is better though and these days everyone has a smart phone with a very good quality camera lens included. Try doing the same piece with repetition to see if you are bringing your face into the communication. Also check you are doing it congruently with the content you are addressing. Over time, you will start creating appropriate facial expressions for that piece of the content without even noticing it. To be a more effective public speaker, get your face more involved!

Why Japanese Presenters Fear Q&A

Obviously we all have some trepidation when it comes to Q&A, but Japan is quite far behind the rest of the advanced countries when it comes to public speaking. The level of presentations here is abysmally low and excuses abound. People here talk about a "Japanese style" of doing public talks. What they actually mean is they speak in a monotone, with a wooden face, use no gestures, make no eye contact, employ no pauses, Um and Ah with gay abandon and are supremely boring. They kill everyone with 8 point sized font, four different font types and five garish colours, turning their slides into a psychological weapon of war aimed at decimating their audience. Because everyone is so bad, this is thought to be a "style", obviously different from "Western" presentations. It isn't a style. It is just bad.

Not being properly educated in how to give professional presentations, the trickier bits like Q&A are even scarier territory. For any speaker, once the bell sounds for Q&A, the struggle is on. As the great American philosopher Mike Tyson once said, "everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face". Relatively speaking, Japan is a kindergarten for Q&A compared to Western audiences. The ferocity of questions here is kids stuff. So you would think that everyone would be very chipper about handling the Q&A, but that is not the case. Here are some areas of the concern we found, when we polled our Japanese students of presenting.

1. If the audience is not familiar to us we get nervous

The chances of having a lifetime of speaking to familiar audiences would be statistically impossible, I would say. The inference here is that it is less daunting to speak to a "tame" audience who, because they know us, won't unleash fury upon our heads during the questions component of the talk.

Unfamiliar audiences should be the considered the norm. The way to deal with that is to be well prepared and to have rehearsed beforehand. I would guess 0.001% of Japanese presenters have rehearsed their talk.

1. Not sure if I understand the question properly and also not sure if it is okay to ask them to repeat the question

Japanese society is very polite, so that is why until recently, you would be lucky to get any questions at your talk at all. The thinking has been that it is impolite. The nuance is you are saying the speaker wasn't clear enough in their oration. Also I don't think any Western audiences would even consider the possibility that it isn't allowable to ask the questioner to repeat their question. In Japan, that request implies the questioner wasn't clear enough and is a veiled criticism, repeated in public, so there is a possibility that the questioner will lose face.

Definitely and politely ask the questioner for clarification on their impenetrable question. Japan is a polite place, so ask politely and put yourself at fault and not the speaker. You might say, "Thank you for your question. I really want to answer it correctly, so would you mind repeating it once more for me?".

1. Not clear on how to answer the question

This will happen to all of us. I do a lot of public speaking here in Japanese and I always find the Q&A the most difficult. This is not for the ferocity of the questions, but because of the fog of the language. Japanese is a highly circuitous language and vagary is a prized achievement. Sometimes, I have no clue what they are asking me.

If we can't answer the question then we are human. We cannot always be the font of all knowledge and there will always be occasions where we just don't have an answer for that question. We should apologise and fess up straight away. "Thank you for your question. I am afraid I don't know the answer to it at this point. After the talk let's exchange business cards and I will do my best to come back to you with an answer after I do more research on that topic".

1. No questions emerge because the audience weren't paying any attention to the speaker

Most talks in Japan are supremely dull, so naturally the audience escapes to a more interesting place like their smart phone. Suddenly the Q&A springs up and as they haven't being paying attention, they have no idea what to ask about. The call for questions goes unanswered, so there springs forth this painful, embarrassing silence, as everyone carefully scrutinises their shoes, ensuring zero eye contact with anyone. The speaker is left high and dry and the talk finishes on a low note of disinterest. It feels like all of the oxygen has been sucked out of the room and the speaker deflates and then in short order, departs.

If no questions are forthcoming, ask your own question: "A question I am often asked is….". This will often break the ice for someone else to muscle up the courage to ask their own question. If nothing is still forthcoming, then repeat this once more, call for more questions. If none emerge then give your final close and finish the proceedings.

Here are two basic rules for answering any question. Always repeat the question if it is neutral, to make sure everyone in the audience heard it and to give yourself valuable thinking time before attempting to answer it. If it is a hostile question, then paraphrase it by stripping out all the emotion and invective and make it sound neutral. For example, "Is it true you are losing money and that ten percent of the staff are going to be fired before Christmas?". "Thank you, the question was about current business performance" and then you answer it.

We will face Q&A when giving our talks. Changing our mindset about welcoming the opportunity is a good place to start. We can add more information, we couldn't squeeze into the talk. We can elaborate on a theme. We get a chance to engage more deeply with our audience. When we shoot down a vicious, brutish, hostile question and destroy it, this makes us a legend of pubic speaking and adds serious lustre to our personal brand. Bring on the questions!

Why Do You Need To Bother With Presenting

As usual I got the venue early. I was doing what I teach others in sales to do, get to the venue early, check the nametags of who are attending. This way you can put faces to names of people you know and you can see if there is a potential client in the room who you would like to meet. The speaker was also there nice and early setting up. This is a very good practice and allows you to fix any technical issues which arise. Sure enough the stand microphone was not working properly and she could not be heard at the back of the room. So a pin microphone was called for. While waiting, I was chatting about whether she did much public speaking. I was a little bit astonished by her answer.

She said she did not and that this would be the last one she would do. She mentioned she got a lot of invitations but declined them. Now as a strong advocate and preacher of doing public speaking to grow your company and professional brands, I was aghast to hear this sacrilegious viewpoint. She dug the knife in deeper and twisted it when she asked me how many of her competitor CEOs in her industry I had heard talk. Actually, she was right. I could only think of one and that was a long, long time ago.

Now I would have thought that this was a tremendous advantage and would be praying that my competitors stayed as silent as the tomb, so I could go around shooting my mouth off at every opportunity. Interestingly, in her industry the herd instinct seems to prevail over differentiation. If they don't do it then I shouldn't do it either.

That seems totally crazy to me. She could use these speaking spots to build up a positive image of her company. She could make sure her firm was top of mind in that competitive high end of the market. Even if we didn't all become consumers of the brand, we would become fans of the brand and would recommend it to everyone over her rival's alternatives. She has risen to a position of consequence in her job. She is the first female CEO in Tokyo in that industry. What a fantastic chance to grow her personal brand as well. I can't imagine her current employer or any future employer would look askance at her efforts to promote herself as the face of the brand.

I asked her why she was reluctant to speak and again her answer floored me. She said she didn't think there was any point running around telling people how great XYZ company was. She believed they needed to experience the quality of the service to appreciate it and her telling people about it wasn't effective. I must be too deep in the public speaking world to have these types of thoughts.

I said to her, "Nobody is here to hear about XYZ company. They don't care one iota about XYZ company. They are here to learn what you are doing, your successes and failures, so that they can apply those in their own businesses". This would have seemed obvious to me, because I do a lot of speaking, but I could see this struck her as an entirely new idea. I explained that in providing value to her audience, her worth and her company's worth become further enhanced.

So it would seem she didn't understand her audience and what they wanted. I had read all the name badges, so I knew exactly who was in the room and what companies they came from. This was a gathering of people hungry to learn something new. She could just as easily have asked the organisers who was attending, so that she could tailor her remarks accordingly. She was accompanied by her head of PR, who should have done that for her, but sadly the PR person though charming, appeared clueless about using pubic talks to grow the brand.

One thing I will praise our speaker for was flexibility. After listening to me giving her my mini Master Class in speaking, she did switch gears during her delivery and try and give more audience perspective to what they are doing. It could have been so much better though, if she had planned the talk with that at the forefront of her mind, when she and her team started work on the talk.

The realisation of things I take for granted, not being the common perception, was a good wake up call for me. They say a fish is the last thing to discover water. I will make a bigger effort to promote the idea of public speaking as an absolutely indispensible arrow in the quiver of business and we must learn to become master archers in our field of endeavour.

Dealing With Questions When Presenting

Japan is quite interesting in the sense that you often don't get any questions after your presentation. Screaming silence at the end. Before the presentation, we often spend our time thinking what would happen if I can't answer the question or what will I do if I get a tough question? Japan has the opposite issue where the talk falls flat on its face, because there are zero questions for the speaker. The whole construct collapses into anti climax. Having no questions has the inference that the topic wasn't interesting or that the speaker was a boor, rather than it was a brilliant presentation, which answered everything perfectly and comprehensively. After calling for questions and then being left stranded high and dry, it feels quite embarrassing. On the other hand, getting questions you can't deal with is also tricky. This is either because you have no idea how to answer them and look a fool or because the question feels more like someone is trying to inflict grievous bodily harm upon you.

The no questions outcome is in fact, a result of lack of planning from the outset. The speaker has prepared a talk where they are focused on transmitting information to the audience. The crowd received it and that was that, game over. We need a different approach. In the planning stage, break your talk up into brackets of around five minutes. At each five minute point, we need to liven things up a bit. We should anticipate our audience might start flagging. We know their attention spans are increasingly microscopic and audiences are so easily distracted today.

Asking a rhetorical question is a good way of dragging everyone back into the room with you. This works because they are not sure if they have to actually answer it or not. Normally we allow the tension to build a little, before we spring the trap and answer it. Sometimes we can just leave it there, hanging and not answer it at all. If you are worried about facing a sea of blank, silent faces at the end of your talk, this is a good seed to plant, to inspire the audience to ask you later about the answer. You have tempted them with your question. However you didn't sate them with the answer. They are vaguely dissatisfied as a result and may raise it in the question time, because you have sufficiently piqued their curiosity.

We can also pose a straight question to the audience and ask them to consider their thoughts on the subject. We don't answer it ourselves and we don't extract any answers from them at that moment either. This is another seed planting expedition to inspire them to ask their questions or make a comment. Or we can invite them to go deeper on a topic or specify we can have more clarification during question time, if there is an interest.

Being the first to do anything in Japan or to volunteer, pushing yourself forward is frowned upon. That is why deathly silence sweeps the room when we get to the Q&A. Therefore as the speaker, we have to create some momentum ourselves. After seeing there are no hands going up, we pose our own question and then we answer it. We can say, "A question I am often asked is...." Having answered our own question, we may find the coast is clear enough for one of the members of the audience to ask their own question. We can also use a sakura or a plant in the audience, to ask the first question, if we worry the atmosphere will collapse when no one puts their hand up. I am sometimes asked by event organisers to ask the first question, if they think the crowd is a bit shy. My job is to get the ball rolling and in all instances it has worked.

In some cases, the question will be outside your scope of understanding or knowledge. Don't try and bluff your way through it or give some half baked answer to make it seem as if you know the answer. Just say you don't know and if the questioner will exchange business cards with you later, you will do your best to get the answer. Move on quickly and smoothly, by saying, "who has the next question?".

Now nasty, hostile, angry, smarty pants questions are a different matter. Either the audience member thinks you are full of crap or grossly mistaken. They think you need correcting and they are just the person to do it. They want to draw your attention to all the other possibilities you have neglected. Sometimes in internal meetings, they may be an ambitious, competitive colleague who wants to take you down. Their aim is to make you look like a numbskull in front of everyone. Or they may be trying to take the whole conversation off piste, on to a mad tangent. They try to highjack the proceedings.

What do we do about that?

We need to understand that the distance between our ear and our mouth is too close. We need a circuit breaker, an injection of rational thought to ward off the default emotional reaction. This is almost impossible to do once the chemicals in the body kick into gear. So we have to get in early to regain control of our brain and mouth. We will usually have some words already formed in our mouths, poised for release. We need to stop that process and switch to another tack. We want to make an initial quite bland, vanilla, neutral statement, which neither extinguishes nor encourages the incendiary question. In the few seconds time it takes for us to make that short filler statement, we can mentally regroup. This allows us to move on to our second or third possible reply. These will always be better thought through than the first one that just bolted out of our mouth.

One little bonus tip.

When you do get around to answering the hostile questioner, maintain direct eye contact with the instigator for six seconds and smile. Then continue with your answer while make eye contact with everyone else in the audience, one person at a time for six seconds each. Never ever give the nasty question originator any more eye contact after that point. Ignore them completely from then on. They were smug, arrogant, narcistic. They were secretly saying to everyone, "look at me, look at me. I asked a zinger question because I am so tough and smart". They want everyone's attention, to be the star of the show, to eclipse the speaker, to trample over your presentation. We can't have that. After that first six seconds of direct eye contact with them to face them down and show you are not scared of them or their zinger question, you simply blank them. Take all the air out of their sails by not giving them any more attention whatsoever, throughout the remainder of the Q&A session.

Action Steps

1. Plan the speech content for the possibility of no questions
2. Organise your sakura in the audience to ask the first question
3. Say, "A question I am often asked is…."
4. When facing a hostile question, use a buffer sentence to allow the brain to select a better answer
5. Eyeball your torturer for the first six seconds of your answer then ignore them completely

How Do You Follow On From Really Bad or Really Great Presenters

One of the most painful experiences as a presenter is watching the speaker before you put the entire crowd to sleep with their dull, monotonous monotone delivery. I don't know which is worse, but the opposite problem is when the speaker was legendary and you hear your name being called because you are up next. Either way, what is your plan? Oh, I see, no plan! Maybe that is not a very good approach.

Often when you are invited to speak at certain events, there are a bevy of presenters and you are one of them. You might be in the Green Room watching on monitors or hidden back stage, waiting to come on. If the current speaker is just droning on, you can literally see the audience wilting. In Japan the wilt factor is high and the wilt speed is quick. There is no social remonstration here about sleeping while the speaker is on stage.

In 1979, when I first arrived in Japan, I was amazed, well actually shocked, to see how Japanese university students felt no compunction about sleeping right in front of the Professor. The good Prof would be warbling away and those in the back rows just checked out. They would fold their arms on the desk, rest their head on their arms and then off to sleepy byes. In Australia, that would have been unthinkable, considered the height of rudeness and you would have been called out for it during the class.

Having attended a huge number of speeches and given hundreds here myself to Japanese audiences, in Japanese, I have seen this time after time. The fatal error is to dim the lights for the slide show and bingo, a good chunk of the audience has just fallen asleep. There are no digs in the ribs with a sharp elbow by neighbours to prod some semblance of respect for the presenter. Everyone just carries on regardless.

I have also been in the nasty position of having to follow on from a speaker who has murdered the audience. By the time I turn up for my talk they are all certifiably brain dead. What can you do to retrieve the situation? Well the concept of this being a distinct possibility in Japan needs to be established in the planning phase. Most people neglect to consider this untoward turn of events if they are one of a number of speakers.

The easiest thing is to pause and not start immediately. The hum of the previous speaker is like a sleeping draft for many in the audience, a bit like white noise in the background. Their brain has adjusted to that low hum and off they go, dropping into blissful slumber. By injecting silence into the room, you break the pattern and pattern interrupt is a key to grabbing attention. The silence also builds anticipation on the part of those still compos mentis. Thirty seconds of silence seems like an eternity and those imagining it is all over now, will emerge from their little nap, to discover you are there on stage ready to go.

This is when you hit it hard with that first sentence. Crank up the volume and be loud without being a screamer. Again, add a slight pause after the first outbreak of hostilities to create more pattern interrupt. Now you have restored everyone's attention to the speaker, give a truly professional talk, engaging your audience with tonal variety, eye contact, gestures, pauses and great content. Trying to get an audience in Japan to engage with the speaker through raising their hand in response to a question, often generates zero reaction because nobody wants to stand out in the crowd. "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down" in Japan, so forget any physical refreshment for your audience through speaker nominated actions. Stick to engaging the audience through photographs, especially featuring people. Use storytelling to draw them into your message.

What about the opposite issue when the current speaker is really rocking it? The audience are laughing, clearly enjoying themselves and hanging on their every word. They depart the stage to a rousing ovation with a clearly satisfied reaction. Now they are calling you up. Fortunately you have a plan for such an occasion. You start by turning to face the direction the previous speaker took when they departed the field of battle and you compliment them to your audience. "Wasn't that a fabulous talk. Thank you very much Suzuki san, that was really great".

You have now joined the team compact between that star speaker and the audience. You have identified with the audience and they like you, because they agree with you. There is no shame or loss in credibility to praise the other speaker. In fact, it shows just the opposite. You display what a broad mind you have and that you are totally comfortable in your own skin. Not intimidated in the least and simply oozing confidence.

Do not open with an apology ever. Don't talk about you won't be as good or tell them you feel really insecure after listening to that speaker. That screams out "loser". After a slight pause between bonding with the audience as part of previous presenter fan club, you launch right into your talk with a really good question. You know it is a really good question, because you have designed it to be that way. Or you might hit them with a famous quote they all know, from some worthy they all respect.

What you are doing is another version of pattern interrupt. They were tuned into the previous topic and now you need to redirect their minds away from what they have just heard, to listen to what you are going to say. Be professional in your delivery, be valuable in your content and be the best you can be. You may not overpower the impression of the star speaker, you may not vanquish their memory, but you will have shown you are a serious, competent person too.

The key is to have two plans. One for the audience decimator and one for the superstar. No matter what happens you are ready. That will show in your presentation and so your personal and company brand will be enhanced.

Subtly Selling Yourself When Presenting

We have all been there. The speaker gets up to speak after they have had their resume read out by the MC or they do it themselves once they get started. Sometimes the MC makes a mess of it and other times they read out the content without any enthusiasm whatsoever. This is mainly because they are poor public speakers themselves. We should always supply our introduction to the event organisers. This is our personal brand here and we need to make sure we are being represented properly. It doesn't always go according to plan though.

I hate it when the MC can't be bothered reading out my carefully crafted, deeply thought through introduction for this audience, on this topic. They decide to abbreviate it or summarise it or wing it in their own words. Invariably this is a substandard product and does nothing to build the brand. I would rather they were incompetent speakers and read it exactly as I wrote it, than if they were extraordinary presenters who just ad-libbed their way through it. We want 100% control of how we are presented to the audience. The MC has zero idea of what we are trying to achieve in our personal branding efforts, so we cannot leave it to their whim on the day.

As the speaker, we should insist that the MC follow our script to the letter. We should instruct the organisers that this is a requirement, because often the organisers and the MC are not the same person. Their job is to tell the MC to toe the line and not stray from the script. In this regard, the organisers will have more influence over the MC than we will have. Nevertheless, we should not rely on the relay of instructions logistics between the organisers and the MC. On the day, we need to speak to the MC directly. Have no hesitation in telling them, "Please read my introduction precisely as I have crafted it, as this is how I wish to represent my personal brand". This may seem a bit presumptuous, bolshie and pushy but this is your brand. You need to protect it from anarchists, idiots, dilettantes and do gooders.

In the vast majority of cases for business presentations, the organisers have invited us to be fonts of wisdom and impart pertinent insights, deep analysis, and sterling advice to the audience. What they don't want is blatant self promotion and selling our stuff from the platform. If we break this rule, we won't be invited back and our reputation will suffer. We also look crass, grasping and opportunist to the audience.

So how do we sell ourselves, when we have that captive audience of possible prospects right there in front of us? Obviously, we are not going to run through the typical laundry list of when our firm started, what our company does, with the usual boring facts, that are immediately forgotten by everyone. Our first step is to get there early, check the venue, the equipment, the arrangements and stiff the MC on their role in contributing to our glorious career. We make sure they know they need to follow the script on introducing us and that they can forget any independent adventurism. As the audience wanders in we start working the room. "Thank you for coming. I am today's speaker. May I ask what attracted your attention about this topic?". We engage in some small talk, exchange business cards for follow up later and filter and fillet the participants, to see if there are any potential buyers in the room. If you have other team members with you, they can do the same with the people you may not be able to meet. This way, you have the followup option in play for after the presentation. We need to do this because these days, the organisers are reluctant to share the list of participants, because they are worried about privacy issues.

The second step is to position what you say in a way that represents value to the audience. It gives them useful information on the "what" and the "why" but not too much detail on the "how". The how bit is what they need to pay you for, once they engage your company. This is a tricky balance between providing substantial value, without providing too many tools for the audience to do it by themselves without you.

We can use a case study formula of (1) client problem, (2) solution and (3) result to show what we do works. In the problem and result part, we can be quite detailed. We are looking for people to identify with the issue, because they have the same one and to impress them with the result, because they want that too. The how part can be described in less detail. For example, "We worked with ABC company to uncover the changes which needed to be made. We did this through using our brainstorming methodology. The beauty of this method is that it works really well in Japan. It eliminates all hierarchy of age, stage, position, rank and delves deep by engaging the quick thinkers, as well as the deeper thinkers. It produces practical, implementable ideas very fast". In this example, we have outlined how great the method is, without revealing the mechanics of how it works in practice.

The third area for emphasis is when we have done original research. Our global CEO Joe Hart visited Japan in 2018 for the 55thAnniversary celebrations of Dale Carnegie Training in Japan. For his speech to the American Chamber of Commerce he was using original research created for that speech on "AI in the Workplace". This is a good way of demonstrating that your firm is at the cutting edge and can provide relevant insight into key issues affecting companies in target industries. If you cannot produce original research, then curate the latest and greatest findings which may not be know to the audience. You didn't make it, but it shows you are well informed and up to date on that subject.

The fourth option is referring to items which are highly complex or involved and mention you can't go into details right now, but explain that you are happy to speak off line with anyone who has an issue or an interest. This is the lure in the water, set to make the fish bite. You show this shiny object and then take it away, so that the audience want to follow it. This gives you the chance to have people line up after the talk and exchange business cards to get more information. The real object of the speech is to be sitting in their office a few days later, talking in depth about their problems, to see if you have the solution.

We provide value first and foremost. This adds to our personal and company brand. We tease and tantalize the audience, rather than sate them with too much detail. The What and the Why are covered completely, but the How is kept in reserve for a conversation in their office after the event.

Hey, Stop Fidgeting When Presenting

It has never been tougher to be a speaker. We live in the age of hyper distraction, with instant gratification felt to be too slow. In fact, "slow phobia" is rampant everywhere and hand held digital device escape hatches abound. Migrating away from all that distraction, to get people focused on your presentation is hard enough. Things become more desperate though, when our nervousness starts the chemical adrenaline pumping through our veins. We feel the elevation of our breathing rate and we notice our hands starting to shake.

One of the nasty byproducts of all of this internal pressure and nervousness, is we begin to distract our audience by fidgeting. Professor Albert Mehrabian's famous and usually misquoted research, says that we run into problems when what we are saying and how we are saying it don't match up. The "how we are saying it" bit is broken into three distinct parts. The actual words, which Mehrabian depressingly found only accounted for seven percent of our communication success. Body language contributed to thirty eight percent of the messaging and finally how we were dressed and how we looked made up the other fifty-five percent. Often these numbers are misquoted. Mehrabian's important caveat about incongruity is not mentioned. That is to say, when what we say doesn't match with how we say it, the audience is easily distracted away from the message.

Our words may be painstakingly composed, delivered in a well paced, clear tone. We may be magnificently turned out for the occasion, just dressed to kill. Our fidgeting however, is overwhelming everything else. The message radiating out through the fidgeting body language is contradicting the words coming out of our mouth or at least distracting from them.

One of the main culprits in the fidget field are our legs. We shuffle about aimlessly on the spot. Or we start striding around the stage looking highly strained and nervous. We might well remain anchored to the spot, but we are not content with that. We feel the need to sway our hips about like a mad captain on a rolling pirate ship. We are rocking and rolling from side to side, all the while drawing attention away from our messages.

In the same vein, we also fail in the "looking confident" arena. All of this movement is competing with the words and we don't want that. That swaying itself is telling the audience "I am not rock solid about what I am saying, I am unsure, I am nervous about it". Rather, the legs should be kept straight, with just a slight relaxation behind the knees to unlock the joints. Feel like you want the top of your head to push up into the ceiling. This will make you taller, straighter and give you more physical gravitas.

Another favourite of the failing presenters is to shuffle the direction of their feet around. When they want to look at the left side of the audience, they shuffle their feet around in that direction. When they want to look at the right side, they shuffle their feet all the way across to the right. Again, all of this fidgeting, this moving around, is distracting to the audience. Why do it that way? If we want to look left or right, we should keep our feet anchored and just swivel our neck. If we felt the need to go for more engagement, we could turn from the hips and have the upper body facing to the left or right, without moving our feet at all.

When we do move our feet, it should be for a clearly defined purpose. When we are on stage, we can move to the very apron of the stage, closest to the audience. We do this to get physically closer to the front row, to add to our voice and gesture strength with our physical body presence, to underline a point we are making. Now, we shouldn't stay there too long though, because the proximity will become too intimidating to the person closest to us. They are thinking "psycho axe murderer" as we tower over them. Also, the power of our physical presence starts to dilute very quickly, if it is just held in that same position. So there is no point holding it there for too long.

We should retreat to a more centered, neutral position. From here we can step back and make a more macro point. We do this to engage the entire audience, if the point we want to make is an expansive one. Now that we are standing more toward the rear of the stage, we need to use our arms in a bigger fashion than normal, to signal we are making a macro point. Again we can't stay there too long because the power wanes. We need to move back to the middle, to the more neutral position. None of this is random or fuelled by nervousness. It is thought through and planned, with the impact on the audience in mind. We are not shuffling about through neglect, nervousness or negligence.

Our hands are another trap. We might be holding them in front of our body, twisting them together because we want to form a protective barrier between us and the audience. We might be tapping our thigh with our hand or even worse slapping it, making a noise. This competes with what we are saying, for the attention of the audience.

Another favourite is using one hand to squeeze the fingers of the other hand, as if we were ringing out a towel. Playing with our tie knot trying to loosen the compression, because we are feeling hot under the lights or to lessen the intrusive gaze of our listeners is another tick.

Thrusting hands in and out of trouser pockets, highlights the conundrum we are facing about what to do with our hands when presenting. Because of the adrenaline, we are unable to even keep them there, so we fidget, thrusting and withdrawing, thrusting and withdrawing, driving our audience crazy.

Shuffling papers on the lectern is a break from our usual rigid gripping of the edges of the furniture. We align the sheets together left and right. We then push the bottom of the pages together, banging them on the lectern, to get them into a more disciplined state. All the while, this is competing with what we are saying and how we are saying it.

Video yourself and you will be shocked by how much you are fidgeting. Instead, choreograph your movements carefully so that nothing is haphazard. You move because that will add to the strength of your message. Your hands are monopolised by considered gestures, to add weight to what you want to say. You stand straight and tall, engaging your audience left and right with minimum distraction. Remember, we want the audience focused solely on our face and our words. These are powerful communication tools to help us isolate out our message. That is the only place we want the attention to be directed.

The Presenting Persona

Be authentic, be yourself, be conversational - all good advice, except the presenter does have a distinct role to play though. When we are speaking in front of others, it is no longer an intimate one on one conversation. The talk has a purpose, there is an audience, there are expectations, time limits apply. We have to rise to the occasion.

Telling ourselves that the people are gathered here for the information and not all that fluffy stuff that goes with presenting is self-delusion. Today, everywhere you turn people are hammering you with video of themselves presenting something or other. The technology is such that you don't even have to click anything yet the video is off and it has subtitles, so you don't even need the sound. Live video on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram etc., is another no safety net new innovation that is merciless. Social media has unleashed a monster of constant content deluge and high wire danger.

Once upon a time, you didn't have to concern yourself much with self promotion, but in this day and age of endless outmuscling the competition, everyone is a self proclaimed expert. The flood of exposure makes it hard to remain relevant. Your competitors are perpetually pumping out an array of content to reinforce their personal branding, to make sure they, and not you, are top of mind. Imagining that your inherent wonderfulness and righteousness will be discovered is wishful thinking.

When we get up to speak in front of others we are being judged. The audience is questioning whether we have the goods or not? Do we know what we are talking about and are we bringing value to them? Most of us spend 99.9% of our time speaking with others at a distance of under a meter apart (unless you are in the countryside, in which case I will be two meters!). This is a case of using everyday conversation where we don't need to project our voice or body language.

When we are on stage as a presenter, we have a different role. We need to radiate credibility at distance and a big part of it is the amount of energy we pump out into the audience. This is known askior chi- the intrinsic energy we possess. I have studied Tai Chi for ten years and Karate for 47 years, so I have seen and experienced it. I know it is a fact. People who are low energy, quiet, softly spoken types struggle with this projection piece. They are fortunate though, that the microphone technology today is so very good, that you can project quite well, without having to have a big voice or shout yourself hoarse.

The energy projection to the audience part however, is a bit harder because there is no technology to help with that. Strong and big gestures though can accentuate a vocal point we are making. The tendency with a lot of speakers who are untrained, is to use no gestures or to use them quite low, around waist or hip height. Holding your hands protectively in front of your groin or clasped behind your back, kills the opportunity to add gestures to the mix of your communication catalogue. Using gestures held too low means, they are hard to see, invariably small in scale, not very dynamic and totally fail to engage the audience.

Get them up and around shoulder level and make them larger than you think they should be. From our point of view, as the speaker, it seems we are getting wild with our gestures, but from the onlookers viewpoint, it looks congruent with what we are saying.

The voice strength is the same concept. We need to hit the words that bit harder than normal. The power we put into the words translates to the audience as credibility and trust. We sound like we are convinced and the audience wants to see that from us. We don't want to be hitting all the words at the same power.

We need a solid stream of strong vocal delivery, from which we vary our strength, either up or down, for variety. A monotone

puts people to sleep, so we need vocal change to break through and grab attention. Counter intuitively, an audible whisper is very effective to draw attention to the point we are making. This works particularly well when we combine it with the body language of whispering a secret, something just between the audience and ourselves.

Mentally we need to get into a different space when we are presenting. Our persona needs to switch up from normal everyday interactions. We are now in the realms of showbiz and we have to exaggerate things a bit more than normal. Pausing for effect is more powerful than just delivering a constant stream of words. We need to give the audience thinking time so that the ideas don't just crash over the top of each like a succession of wild waves in the surf.

Using our facial expressions, in combination with our words, is more theatrical than normal conversation, but it is very effective. A quizzical expression when we mention something we doubt, just adds to the power of doubt we want to foster in the mind of the audience. If we watch plays, then we see this usage all the time, because the actors are restricted to face, voice and body to get their message across. We don't have to be manically melodramatic but we can up the tempo quite a bit by using the same techniques when we are presenting.

Part of the problem is self constraint on our willingness to do this. We mistake normal conversation as the base of reference when we are a presenter. Our starting point should be the stage and what actors are doing. It is also too much. We need to wind it back from that, because that is too exaggerated for business. Having said that, we do need to lean in a bit harder in that direction, more so than in the direction of a corridor conversation.

Mentally, we need to see we are now in a different role. We are there to perform for the audience, to lift them up through our information, our passion, our belief, our commitment. The delivery of the information is critical and there is no escaping that some things work better than others. Speak in a tiny little voice and you will rapidly become totally invisible to your audience. Start striding. around the stage like a berserker, left to right, left to right and you will distract the listeners entirely from what you are talking about. The bigger the audience, the bigger the venue and the larger the persona you need. We have to step out of our everyday selves, to step up. We need to project if we are going to get cut through. Shrinking violets have no place on stage.