The Presentations Japan Series

Presenter Survival Tips For A Tech Meltdown

When the tech crashes, you shouldn't crash and burn with it when presenting. Absolutely ALWAYS get to the venue early and check the equipment. Remember, you are in an alien environment, being served by people you have never met before. Who knows how old the technology they have is or of what quality level is the equipment. The people setting up the talk never give presentations. They don't understand that if the tech goes horribly wrong, the audience will blame the speaker, not the hosts. They also don't understand that public presentations are the arena in which reputations are built or destroyed. They are just there to open the room up and move the chairs around. We should never rely on anyone else when we are the presenter.

I find that bringing my own laptop and a backup USB tends to eliminate a few of the technical problems which can occur. I also bring hardcopies of the slide deck, which I can refer to before the talk, if the projector, monitor, USB or computer isn't working. I can reduce my stress, because I know what I want to cover. I have rehearsed the presentation, so I know the cadence I want to achieve and the order of the unveiling of the talk.

Now, importantly, in that room, I am the only one who has a clue what I am going to say and the order in which I am going to say it. If it happens that my point 6 actually followed point three rather than point five, then only I know the order was incorrect. I certainly won't be sharing that little morsel with the audience. I will brazenly charge on, as if it were all part of the bigger plan. And that is what every presenter must remember – don't flag problems the audience doesn't need to know.

I am highly perturbed that top level CEOs of big corporations can't give a speech to a business audience without reading the whole thing. The content is usually put together by people in the Marketing or PR departments and maybe the CEO worked on it before delivering the talk. Great, but why do they have to read it? Don't they know their industry, their sector, their own business? It is pathetic in my view, to see a top business leader reading line by line from the speech script. Some can at least glance at the audience as they read it, so that is less pathetic, but still not good enough.

Now if it super technical and no brain could retain the content, then reading it makes sense, but how many of those business presentations have you ever attended. In my case - none. If you are in the scientific community or some field so complex, that there is no possibility of remembering it all in your speech, then you are forced to read it. But we are in business and there are few super highly technical presentations that we will ever need to attend. They are usually more standard affairs where they talk about what is happening in their industry, the marketplace and what their firm is doing about it.

I saw a terrific example of no notes, but keeping the presentation going for three hours. Think about that - three hours and no notes. He had no visible notes, as far as we in the audience were concerned. This was a professor at Harvard Business School when I was attending a week long Executive Education course. Now this was an impressive feat and the first time I had seen such a thing.

At the end of it, as we were filing out of the lecture theatre, I happened to notice that on the back wall behind us was a large sheet of paper with ten words written on it. I realised that this was the speech right there. The professor had his order on the sheet and he just talked to each of the ten prompt code words that were on that sheet.

If we get to the venue and the tech is not working, we can do the same thing. Just jot down some prompt words, in the order you need and elaborate on those for your talk. We don't need the tech to give a presentation. Now we can't describe what a graph shows or a diagram demonstrates as well as the original slide deck, but we can paint word pictures and describe trends to illuminate the point we are making. We can also be telling stories that draw out the key differences, the reasons for the changes or the new insights from the data, rather than having to actually show the data.

So in your planning phase, always be prepared for a meltdown of the tech and be flexible about crafting your talk from the ashes. Always get there early without exception. Remember, only you know what is going to be covered in your talk and in what order you will roll it out. Keep that secret information to yourself. No matter what happens, carry on and the audience will probably never know there was a problem.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to dalecarnegie.comand check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

Author of Japan Sales Mastery, the Amazon #1 Bestseller on selling in Japan and the first book on the subject in the last thirty years.

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts "THE Leadership Japan Series", "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

How To Murder Your Personal Brand In Business In Japan

When you get up and speak in front of an audience, you are putting your professional and personal brand on the line. The event is advertised, people are alerted to the fact you are speaking and a proportion will bother to turn up to hear what you have to say. They may be drawn in by the fact you work for a famous or powerful company, so their expectations are high. What we often forget is that unconsciously, they are also turning up to hear how you say it. Everyone is an armchair critic on oration and usually the level of intensity is diametrically opposite to their own level of speaking ability.

When you get up to speak, it doesn't matter which prestigious University you graduated from or which mega corporate you work for. When you are on stage, your degree doesn't help you nor does your job title - you are on your own and you sink or swim accordingly. Our speaker on this occasion sank.

The sad part is there was no reason for that to happen. Our speaker made three key errors. Firstly, they did zero research on who was in the audience. The point of the talk may have resonated with someone working in another similar mega corporate, but there were few of those characters in the room that day. I know, because I was exchanging business cards and didn't run across too many brand name employer companies represented at the speaking venue. The degree of difficulty on checking on who is going to be in your audience is this hard: call the organisers and ask who is in the room, who do they represent, what is the gender balance, age balance, and what are the position levels they hold within their companies.

I think anyone could manage to do that and the results would impact how you prepared your talk. Our speaker didn't bother to do that, so the talk failed to persuade.

Another error was the speaker had obviously done no practice on the presentation before delivering it to the audience. Here is a simple rule - "never practice on your audience." Sounds fairly straightforward, but few speakers run through any attempt at rehearsing their talk before they give it. They just turn up on the appointed day and hour and away they go. Fairly hard to work that thinking out, given the high level of attention which is about to be placed on your personal and professional brands. We should all be running through our full length presentation at least three times before giving it. We need to do that to work out the cadence of the speech and to check that we are on message. We know we have to be doing something to energise the audience every five minutes and we have to plan for that.

The speaker's delivery was distracting us from the key messages. The Ums...were coming thick and fast, the talk was low energy and the voice too soft, even with the microphone. They had obviously not checked the room or equipment before the talk started. They were not speaking in a monotone but it was a pretty close thing. This was a very unimpressive, totally forgettable effort and it didn't have to end like that.

The third error was this person had not been coached on public speaking. The irony was that their company policy was to do all of their staff development work in-house. I know the speaker wasn't a product of any internal coaching because there hadn't been any practice done in the first place. As a professional trainer for presentation skills, I doubt the managers in that company would be adding much value anyway, even if they had done some coaching. A case of the half-baked leading the half-baked.

Ironically, the speaker included the fatal words "Presentation Skills" in their LinkedIn profile, as one of the many skills they possess. That proved to be a very bold assertion. They were hopeless. Watching their performance and reading the profile now makes you doubt their level of expertise in the other areas they listed. Get the training and brush up your skills. It will just make such a tremendous difference.

Take every opportunity to speak in front of others because this is a brilliant way to promote your personal brand. But plan properly, practice privately and be ready to add to and build your personal brand in the business community. Getting training is a great idea because now you are lifted out of the limitations of your own organization. We all need to have the best practice, professional ruler run over our abilities and get the right level of coaching to improve.

Avoid these three errors and you will do a much better job than our speaker did. None of these ideas are rocket science, just common sense, yet supposedly "smart" people working for the megacorps get them wrong. Take some of these some ideas and apply them toward how to accentuate, rather than murder your personal brand.

What Is The One Key Thing When Presenting?

I was talking with a friend, while we were having lunch at this very nice Italian restaurant he frequents, near his office. Between dishes, we were talking about how he has to go to his US headquarters and join all the other representative Country Heads from around the world and give his report on how the business is going in Japan. I was thinking that that must be a very high profile and pressure presentation. So I mentioned how great our High Impact Presentations Course was. In my own case, I wish I had done it 20 years earlier, because it would have changed my career trajectory. Anyway, my friend was patiently listening to all of this and then asked me a very profound question, "What is the one key thing when presenting?".

What he was getting at was that if we had to boil it all down, what is the one most critical skill we need to be effective as a presenter. This is a major question in business. After all, this is our personal and professional brand we are putting out there on show for all the world to see. This is not something we want to get wrong. I had no hesitation in telling him "focus on your audience".

Great. What does that mean, because aren't we all focusing on our audience when we present? Definitely, yes, we should be focusing on our audience, but often we are deluding ourselves. If we break down the presentation and analyse it, we can see that focusing on your audience has major ramifications for your degree of success when talking in front of others.

We may have what we want to say in our mind when preparing the talk. We may be an expert in our field and have a whole bunch of stuff we want to share because we are excited by the content. However, we may have not taken the trouble to think about what the audience would be most interested in? Why would they turn up? What will they be expecting to hear? We may have not bothered to research who would be in the room. What would be the age range, the gender mix, the degrees of expertise on the subject. Did we do our research so we could focus the topic down to the slant most likely to impress our audience? Or did we just talk about what we were interested in?

Who were we thinking about when we got up to speak? We may have started our talk focused not on the audience but on ourselves. We were thinking how nervous we were feeling. We feel captured by our high pulse rate, our sweaty palms, our dry throat, our weakness in the knees. The focus is 100% inward not outward.

We may have been very deeply engrossed in the notes we were reading, such that we didn't even look up at the audience. Or if we did, we used one of those fake eye contact approaches, where our eyes look in the direction of the audience but we are not really looking at anyone. We may have decided to ignore half the crowd and only talk to one half of the room or maybe only the front row or maybe no one, because we are staring over all the seated heads at some spot on the back wall. Or we may be skimming across the room looking at everyone for one second and therefore looking at no one. We cannot engage anyone in the audience with a fleeting one second glimpse but we can try to give the impression of an attempt to engage with our audience. This is not a talk focused on the audience. Do the audience members sitting there feel that we are talking directly to them individually and not to an amorphous mass.

We may have decided that the audience was pretty dumb, so we need to read the text on the slides to them. We might even do that by turning our back on the audience and staring up at the text on the screen. We are so focused on the text and the content and not on those listening to us.

Just to drive home the lack of focus on the audience, we cram so much information on each slide, that they becomes impenetrable. Analytical types love jamming ten graphs on the one slide or throwing up the entire text document on screen. We may hit up the slide with five different colours in a florid mess. Or we may have gone crazy, like an example I saw recently, where the presenter used four or more different fonts in the text. This made it super hard to read for the audience members. Where was the focus? It was on the presenters "cleverness" to showcase so many fonts on each slide, even though it was a disaster. Not to really rub it in, but the Japanese presenter was delivering a two hour lecture to a local Chamber of Commerce on presenting skills.

We may be rambling, because we have a poor structure for the talk, so we are hard to follow. We may not have applied a logical flow to the talk to make it easy for the audience. "Don't make your talk hard to follow" is a fundamental rule. Or we may speak in a monotone to see how many people we can put to sleep. By hitting key words we can emphasise key messages we want the audience to take away with them. We may be umming ahhing like a legend, to really distract the audience from the message. We have not done any work on polishing our presenting skills, because we are not focused on the audience but selfishly on the most friction free, time efficient approach. That means no extra effort being made.

We may have spent a total time of zero minutes practicing the talk before we gave it. We may have spent our time instead working on the slide deck. It takes time to cram ten graphs on the one slide, with five different colours and four different fonts for the text. This major effort will just suck up any potential rehearsal time before the presentation. So where were we focused after all?

Even though we may imagine we are focused on the audience, we may in fact be missing the opportunity or actively working against that aim. Take another look at whether you are actually focused on your audience or whether you are just imagining it.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to dalecarnegie.comand check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts "THE Leadership Japan Series", "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

Don't Be Boring When Presenting

Every week I get to listen to speeches from some of the top people in their field. I belong to an elite Rotary Club here in Tokyo. That description in itself is a bit of a problem, given the philosophy of Rotary as a service organisation helping society and connecting business people together. When my fellow Rotarians from different parts of the world hear this term "elite", they will be puzzled, but hey, this is Japan and we do things differently here. My particular Rotary is brimming with the captains of industry, the commercial crème de la crème, the top shelf of corporate leadership. One of these titans was giving a presentation recently.

He runs a huge print media company with an eye popping daily circulation in the millions that is the envy of his Western compatriots. This is a man whose whole career has been devoted to communication, capturing stories and gaining influence. So my expectations were raised on a couple of fronts. I thought here is a speaker who will have a lot of interesting anecdotes, given his organization has a global footprint and the fact that they have been doing this the 1870s. I thought given all the changes going on in the media business, he will be able to provide insights into where the industry is going. What a disappointment.

The first red flag that the quality of this presentation was going to be less than expected, was when he started reading his speech. For someone in his position, with the many decades of experience he has, why on earth would he need to read his speech. Everyone in that audience reads his media product on a daily basis without fail. He is a fellow Rotarian so he is amongst friends. There is no question time in this format so there can be no concerns about being ambushed by a tough question. This would have to be one of the safest speaking environments on the planet. He could talk to his notes without having to read the whole thing word by word.

We all have some area of expertise otherwise we wouldn't be given the chance to speak. When we have experience with our area of knowledge we don't need to read the script. We can talk to the points and this allows us to engage with the audience in a more natural way. Unlike our speaker, we won't have our gaze transfixed on the sheet of paper sitting on the rostrum in front of us. This forces our eye line to be looking down on the page and not up at our audience. This creates a barrier with our audience and precludes the opportunity to engage with them. Our eyes are such powerful communication tools and we should be using them to look at individuals in the audience as we speak. We should be switching our gaze around the room, holding that person's attention for around 6 seconds before moving on to the next person.

The next red flag on the quality was his speaking speed. When we are reading we can tend to speed up. This gets worse when we get nervous. I don't know if he was nervous or not, but I do know he was whipping through his speech at a rate of knots. Another reason for the speed can be trying to squash as much content into the delivery as possible in the accorded time.

Slow down for clarity. I am a rapid speaker in both English and Japanese. I have to really work on myself to slow down so that the audience can follow what I am saying. This is especially the case when speaking in a foreign language. Slightly different accents and cadence can be hard for the listener to catch and when you speed things up the degree of difficulty rapidly accelerates. When we are flying along at speed we tend to lose the pauses.

Instead it becomes a machine gun delivery that just runs one set of thoughts right over the top of the preceding ideas, making it very hard for the audience to keep up. We need to give our listeners some little time to catch their breath mentally and digest what we have just said. As he was speaking in Japanese, I would have appreciated a few pauses so I could process what he was saying more easily.

Were there interesting stories and anecdotes from his star studded career covering the major events of the last 40 years? Nope. Were there interesting trends being revealed about the future of media in Japan. No. It was boring and uninteresting and it didn't need to be like that. Tell stories from your own experiences – we have a strong interest in that type of content. Lots of things happen in business and in life and we all have terrific episodes and examples we can weave into our talk to support the point we are making.

Think about your audience and what would be of interest to them about trends in your industry that will impact their business, the market or create future societal trends. Something that the broadest base of listeners can relate to.

We didn't have any of that on this particular day but we should have. It was boring.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to dalecarnegie.comand check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts "THE Leadership Japan Series", "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

How To Facilitate When Presenting

Many presentations are one dimensional. The speaker speaks and we just listen, maybe getting a chance to lob in the odd question at the end. In many cases, with internal presentations, there will be a role for the presenter as a facilitator as well, to get the discussion going or to drive the decision making process. Very few speakers are trained to facilitate and so we more or less bumble our way through.

One of the first things we have to learn in our facilitator role, is to shut up and listen. When we gave our presentation, we had the limelight. As a facilitator, though, we want as many others as possible to share that limelight, which means we have to get out of talk mode and go into listen mode. Sounds easy, but it isn't.

When we are revved up in presentation mode, it is hard to change direction and just stop making our points. When someone says something, our brain lights up with something clever we would like to say. In fact, we get the inspiration pretty quickly, so we tend to switch off the person who is speaking and what they have to say. We just concentrate on what we want to say. Effectively, that means we have now stopped listening. We might be better than that, but we may instead be doing selective listening. Only honing in on the points we like and ignoring the rest of what the speaker had to say. We need to really work on our listening skills as a speaker and allow others our full attention when they are contributing. If you find yourself cutting others off before they finish, then you know you need to ease off and just listen more.

Silence for a speaker can be a struggle. Japan has no problem with silence so there is no social pressure here to fill the airwaves with continuous talk. We should take a leaf out of their book and use silence more when facilitating. Ask a question and then become quiet, even when we get into that uncomfortable silence period. Some are shy to speak up, others are deep processors going down many layers of thought on what they want to say. We need to give them time to contribute, we may even need to ask the more boisterous types to hold their comment and allow others to talk for a change.

We need nerves of steel when we do this, because in Western culture, silence is seen as uncomfortable, an indication of the breakdown of communication, that something has gone wrong because people are not participating. No one in Japan particularly feels any of that, by the way, so it is all in our heads.

Also avoid rephrasing a question or comment, unless it is really necessary. People have their own styles of speech and we need to make them feel welcome to contribute. If we become "correctors" of other people's comments, they get the message that they are not skilled enough in communication to be able to lodge their own original effort. From this point on they will simply stop contributing. We should also be careful about changing the subject, until everyone has had a chance to comment. As mentioned, some are shy, some are deep thinkers and just at that vital moment when they are about to launch forth with their carefully crafted contribution, we switch subjects and they are banished to silence.

We also need to have a poker face. If we hear something with which we very much disagree, our facial expression and our body language, can go into overdrive and convey our displeasure with other people's views. Again, this acts as an inhibitor of participation. Bosses do this all the time and then wonder why the number and quality of ideas are so poor.

We need to be aware of when to use closed questions to drive clarity and agreement and when to use open questions, to stimulate discussion. It can be a good practice to disassociate ourselves from the question and ask it as if a third party was involved. For example, "some commentators have the view that the new financial year is the best time for launching new projects. How has been your experiences with this type of thing?". By not attaching our name to the view, it makes it easier for others to put forward a contrary view.

When we are asking questions, there will be three common varieties. The fact-based questions are there to get out information and data and generally will have a specific, correct response. This type of question is better addressed to the whole group than an individual, to avoid the possibility of calling out someone who cannot answer and will be embarrassed.

Opinion-based questions help to get a sense of how people feel emotionally about a topic. It is important to assess the emotional climate in the room on some topics before we go any further with the discussions. When people are reluctant to offer their opinion, especially here in Japan, you need to use a different technique. Ask everyone to write down their thoughts, but don't ask, "What do you think?". In Japan, that is too confronting. Instead ask "What did you write down?" and people will speak up.

When we are speaking that is one role. When we move to facilitator mode we need to switch gears and make some adjustments to how we do things. Understanding the different requirements is key. As a facilitator, we want audience participation and their contributions. We need to set that up and make it happen.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts "THE Leadership Japan Series", "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

Great Voice As a Speaker?

Probably only a microscopic number of speakers have had any voice training. The vast majority of us are in business and get called on to speak. As we rise through the ranks we need to deliver reports internally, to speak to our project teams, to address the sales rally. We also get dragged outside the organisation to give speeches to industry groups or chambers of commerce etc. When we get up and speak we are just using an extension of our daily conversational speaking voice. This is where we get into trouble.

Speaking to a group can be done in a conversational way, but the voice needs to change. It needs a number if things to be happening at the same time. It needs to be a bit louder than normal, even when you are using a microphone. This relates to the power levels we need to be projecting to the audience and the way to regulate that is through the volume we apply.

We need to be using well placed pauses. Often we are nervous when we are to get up in front of others, so unknowingly we start to speed up and start running the sentences together. I was coaching an Indian businessmen once and he gave a two minute talk which was one single sentence without a pause anywhere. I was amazed. When we do this we are killing the message because the audience cannot easily follow what we are saying and also because our ideas crash over the top of each other like winter storm surf. We need the pauses so the ideas can be heard and can sink in and be processed by the audience.

Mumbling the words makes it hard to follow. Mumbling is usually a factor when we are speaking too quickly and not using enough pauses. Slow down for better effect. Now I am a fast speaker so slowing down just kills me and kills my flow. I have to do it though if I want to be heard. It becomes a particular problem when I speak in Japanese. Having an accent when I speak and doing it at speed makes it hard for the audience to follow. I need to slow down!

When you are a fast speaker you worry that the audience will think there is something unnatural with the way you are speaking, as if you are being disrespectful to them. I was using a teleprompter and the speed setting was rather slower than what I would normally use. I thought this is going to sound condescending to the audience. However, when I heard the speech later, it didn't sound like I was speaking down to my audience at all. In fact, it sounded clear and measured.

We need to start with a good strong voice and make sure we don't allow the ends of our sentences to trail off and just end in a whimper. We need to finish each sentence with some strength. We don't want the intonation rising at the end either because that implies lack of conviction about what we are saying. In the middle part we want voice modulation. That comes in three varieties: tonal range, that is to say the up and down of speech tone; the degree of strength we are using – soft and strong; and the speed – sometimes we slow it right down and other times we speed it up again.

Filler words like Um and Ah have to be reduced or preferably removed altogether. They are a distraction when they have high frequency. It annoys the listener and competes for the attention of our message. The audience starts concentrating on the speech hesitations rather than the key points we are trying to convey. I was at a speech recently and the frequency of "ums" was every sentence. There weren't even any "ahs" to break up the monotony! It was a negative for the speaker and it diminished an impressive resume.

We don't need to have a deep DJ voice but if you have one, great for you. For the rest of us, we can only go with what we have and we can use our voice range to go a bit deeper on certain key words we want to emphasise. The words in a sentence are not all equal. This is not a lexicon democracy. It is a dictatorship of the important and we should be stressing the words which are key to the message. Don't hit too many words in the one sentence, because we detract from the impact of our careful selection. Going soft on words works just as well as going hard by the way. A conspirator flavor is introduced when we do that. It is as if we are inviting the audience into our closed circle and we are sharing a secret with them and them alone.

When we hear our own voice played back it sounds strange because it is not how we hear it inside our own head. I remember that John Lennon was very self conscious about how his voice sounded on his records. Despite that he managed to sell millions of records anyway. This difference of how we sound is a physical thing to do with the bones in the ear, making sure we hear it one way and our audience is hearing it another.

Forget about the way you sound. Speak with control, with clarity, with pauses, with key word emphasis, with tonal variety. When we do that, the audience will be attracted to our message and that is all that we need. Think about all of the actors you see in movies and on television – they don't all have just one voice style. They are successful because they are great communicators with the voice they have. We need to be the same.

The Power Of Belief When Presenting

Watching a grey haired, grizzled veteran of the media making his award acceptance speech talking about the importance of the pursuit of the truth in the media and a High School Senior speaking out about gun control, I was struck by how powerful both speeches were. Many award speeches we see are either hopeless or perfunctory. This one was different. No notes, coherent, well delivered, confident and with a strong message. The High School boy also spoke without notes, in front of a big audience, yet with so much confidence and clarity. The common factor for both was the amount of belief they were communicating in their message.

Now in business, we might be thinking that is all very well for a media representative trying to fight back against a President who lambasts journalists about fake news and disparages their profession. We might think that this young man has survived a life and death experience and so he has that special degree of super commitment. We in business are quite different aren't we?

Getting fired up over spreadsheets, or quarterly results, or the PR department's corporate messaging isn't all that life changing, powerful or exciting.

This is a cop out. If we are delivering a presentation in business, we have a message we wish to convey and the delivery of that message can make or break the success of what we are doing. If we are just reporting numbers, we can see that as a routine function, isolated and puny in impact.

What if we saw our activity against the WHY of what we are doing and connected the numbers back to that. What if we connected it to the lofty goals we have set for ourselves and how these numbers fit into that effort. What if we connected it to the competition out there and how we were doing against them in the market place. We can all take something that seems mundane and find a greater sense of purpose.

If we are presenting on behalf of our firm, we are usually trying to convey a positive message about the company and what we are doing. If we analyze our audience well, we can know how to connect what we want to say with issues that they are interested in and will value. There is no shortage of ways to make a presentation relevant to our audience. The secret is in the planning.

The delivery is the hard part though. Seeing yourself as a soldier on the media front lines, fighting back against the evil afoot is a much more uplifting topic than talking about the firm's annual marketing plan. The delivery can have the transfer of belief though. Yes, the scope and scale of the drama is different. However, we can seize on the central point we want to get across to our audience and talk about that in a way that resonates we totally believe what we are saying is the best advice for them.

Counter intuitively, start the planning with the talk's final punch line. What is it you really, earnestly want to communicate, what is your key point? Once you have divined that essence, build the talk around it by offering evidence, examples, vignettes, stories, proof, case studies that back it up.

If you believe what you are saying, then be supremely confident when communicating these points. Send out waves of desire to help your audience do better through what you are conveying. The feeling is totally different to doing a download of data to an audience. This is the mental provision of the buffet and then the audience are on their own to take what they like and have an interest in, with no central compelling narrative, idea, point or message. We don't want that.

Even if the object of the talk is to inform, the desire should be to provide the most up to date, highest value information and insight about what it means to our audience. If the object is to impress the audience about our company, then the desire is to convert as many of the people in the crowd to become fans, so that we can help them with our solutions. We don't just want them to like our firm, we want them to buy our wares, speak highly of us and recommends us to all and sundry.

Belief is the most powerful engine with which to power a presentation. Find where you can inject belief into your talk. It must be relevant to the audience, genuine, authentic and heart felt. When you speak with belief you speak with a different voice. Something magical happens to you as a communicator and you and your message will be remembered. And that is what we want isn't it.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts "THE Leadership Japan Series", "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

Experts Not Very Expert At Presenting

Five star luxury is always appreciated and the hotel setting for this presentation was clearly appropriate given this elite event. The speaker's contribution to business acumen was being highly anticipated, judged by the number of people in the room. Numerous round tables with white tablecloths, mainly men in dark suits, reserved tables for the more important, Western breakfast buffet at the back – the usual setting. We are all gathered for the information we are about to receive because there may be some insights presented which may help our businesses. We are also all armed with our mental review sheet of the presenter's competence and by extension his organization. We want to know how much we can trust what we are being told.

Experts are a problem when they come to presenting their knowledge because they don't value the process. The data, the graphs, the trend lines, the insights, the market intelligence all have value, so a first rate treasure trove can be delivered in a second or third rate manner. This is their excuse at any rate, "I don't have to be a good presenter, because everyone is assembled to hear my genius content", they plead.

Usually economic and market related expert presenters are carrying around big brains which are highly analytical. They rely on the inherent quality of their information to carry the day. Worryingly, they are in the persuasion business without realising it. Despite what they imagine, the data doesn't sell itself. There is a line of reasoning, some thesis, a discourse that is near and dear to the heart of the presenter. They are here because they want people to buy their analysis, to think highly of them and their company and purchase their firm's widget or whatever

The buying process though hinges on trust and credibility. Experts need to show two things – that they know what they are talking about and that what they are saying is true. The "true" bit can be gauged by the quality of their sources of the data, plus the veracity of their analysis and argument made on that basis. The trust part though is a lot more personal exercise. Is the expert able to articulate the thesis in a way that the audience can agree? Is the presentation easy to follow? Is the data being presented easily digestible, so that we buy what they are selling?

This is where the problems start. The speaker is a poor speaker. We are now getting sidetracked by their inability to strings two sentences together. We have lost focus on the content and are now diverted by their delivery. Their monotone delivery is making us sleepy. The lack of tonal variety means that each word is assigned exactly the same value, so the gems, the pearls, the brilliant diamonds are not standing out as they should.

They are wooden in their body language, so the face is the same mask throughout, like one of those Japanese Noh masks. They are not lifting our belief in what is being said by getting their facial expression behind the words to drive home the point. They are not using much in the way of gestures, because when their hands are not holding the podium down with a vice like grip, they are flourishing the clicker around to advance the slide deck. Gestures can be very powerful to draw attention to key points and to engage the audience, but none of that is on display today.

The visual aids are not really helping all that much. There is too much information on each slide, so our attention is being dispersed across too many data points. Analytical types think that if one graph per slide is good them three must be a lot better. It isn't!

Adding lots of text must be a good idea they think because it adds greater value. The concept that the presenter could speak to a key word hasn't filtered in yet. They see the screen as an extension of their writing pad and so let's pile on the words, to get everyone understanding the point. Whole sentences are more attractive than single words from their point of view.

Looking fixedly at the screen information is a favourite. It is as if they are totally mesmerized, captured by the data and can't help looking at it, so they ignore their audience. This a big thing to give up, if your are in the persuasion business and trust me we are all in that business.

Being able to drive home your key points, while eyeballing the audience is a powerful weapon. We can engage our audience and draw them into us and what we are saying. We have had thousands of years of refining this in the Western world and we know the power of persuasion through the spoken word. The experts though, ignore history to their peril. By watching our audience, we can also keep a hawk like view of how our audience is reacting to what we are saying and showing them. The reactions are very helpful to where we need to place the emphasis of the talk and give us a heads up, on what questions we are likely to get in Q&A.

It was obvious that no thought had been put into how to open the presentation and how to close it. We went through the slides, went straight into the questions and then moved on to the coffee break before the next speaker. When we are presenting, the first words out of our mouth had better be pretty good. We need to tempt the audience to want to stay riveted to the presentation, because the content is valuable, the presenter is valuable and the presenter's organisation is valuable. We need to hammer our prime message twice at the end, once before we go to Q&A and then again as we wrap it all up and head for coffee.

I heard from one of the organisers that this was this expert's first foray into presenting the latest global research findings of this venerable organisation. It became obvious they hadn't bothered to provide any training before his first outing and also that he wouldn't be getting any after the tour either. It is a "work it out yourself" approach to harming one's personal and professional brands.

Crazy stuff you might ponder, but this scenario is all too common. Don't put people representing your organisation out there on public display, until they have had some training. We don't want them to underwhelm or even worse screw it up. These are all own goals easily avoided, yet we see the same mistakes time after time, often from the same company! Don't be one of them.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts "THE Leadership Japan Series", "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

Watch Others To Learn Presenting

When we are the thick of things we have trouble observing ourselves. Public speaking is really pushing many people right out of their comfort zone, so the stress levels are massive. They feel they are heating up, their breath is getting shorter, their tummy feels rather bad and their throat is parched. It is very hard to be an objective observer of your own performance when you are mainly preoccupied with survival. This is where being an observer of others is very handy.

Our High Impact Presentations Course uses this technique in depth. While we are up there presenting our classmates are watching us like a hawk for two things. One is to discover what we are doing that is good. The second is looking for areas where we could do better. You will notice I didn't introduce any ideas about things they could critique about our performance. This is looking into the past, it degrades everyone's confidence and creates a negative relationship between the participants.

When we are not in class though there are many chances for us to observe how others present. Obviously when we attend events with a speaker we can take the opportunity to hone our observation skills. The vast majority of attendees are there just to hear the speaker and learn something from the content. They are not mentally pulling the whole operation apart and analysing it. Well that is precisely what we should be doing.

Did the speaker attempt to connect with the audience before the event? Did they reference something said by one of the attendees to build a bond with the audience and break down the barriers? How was the introduction? Usually this is done by the hosting organization's person. Was it obviously something that person put together and therefore was a pretty half baked affair or was it an all dancing, all singing warm up for the main act?

When you are presenting always prepare your own introduction. Don't make it an essay, keep it brief and focused on the high points. Don't allow anyone else to represent you during the talk. Send it before you speak or hand it to them on the day. Either way, try to get them to stick to the script. What you have written will always be a lot better than anything they come up with.

How was the speaker's opening of the talk? Were they fiddling around with the tech and discussing it with the audience before they got going? Did they say stupid things like "can you hear me?" as they are tapping the microphone, because they hadn't bothered to check earlier when they arrived.

Was the first sentence something which grabbed our attention and made sure we kept our hands off our mobile devices? Could they break through all the clutter in our minds as we worry about yesterday, what happened today and what we need to do tomorrow? How did they open? Was it straight into an interesting story? Did they say something surprising or informative? Did they open with a question which got us engaged in the theme of the talk? Look for these techniques and then consider what you need to do to grab audience mind share when you are a speaker. Today, there is so much more distraction and competition for limited time, miniscule concentration spans that we have to really be on our game, in that environment.

Once they got going was it easy to follow where they were going with this presentation? Did it hang together? Was it logically well constructed so we were brought along with their argument and we were persuaded? Did they shift gears every five minutes or so to maintain our interest? Were they using their eyes to engage us one by one, their voice to have modulation to maintain our interest? Were they using their body language to add strength to their argument?

How did they wrap it up? Did they loop back to something they said at the start? Did they use a quotation from an authority figure? Did they summarise the key points?

Did they handle the Q&A like a pro? Were they paraphrasing what had been said so everyone could hear it. Were they using cushions to buy themselves thinking time. Did they have a second close ready to go so that they could make sure their key message was the last thing the audience heard and remembered, regardless of what came up during the Q&A?

So as you see, we are going to be kept pretty busy when we attend someone else's talk. By checking for these things we are programming into our minds the importance of being properly prepared before we get up and talk. Don't let the chance slip by to work over someone else's efforts to insulate ourselves from the typical errors and to make our talk a triumph, based on learning from the foibles of others.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts "THE Leadership Japan Series", "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.

How To Be Confident When Presenting

The Mochizuki Room of the High Performance Center Akasaka opens up and today's class members gradually file in, finding a seat, hanging up their winter coats. They mostly don't know each other, so there is a little bit of nervousness in the room, as they start meeting their classmates and their instructors. At the outset, we ask them to set a vision for the training. It is written in the present tense, but the timing is set 6 months in the future. This requires a bit of mental gymnastics. That means it is not written as, "I will do something or other" but "I am", as a form of expression. It assumes they have achieved some outcome and that is was a big success.

They have to project forward to a point where they will be giving a future presentation and they have to describe how successful it was, as if it really happened already, even though it is in the future. Next we ask them to imagine after that successful presentation, that they are the last to leave the room. As they are walking out of the building following the crowd, they can hear some of the attendees of their talk discussing their presentation. We ask them to nominate what are the three attributes they want to hear used to describe their presentation, from those who have just heard them speak.

When we ask our class participants for High Impact Presentations Course what are some of the attributes they want to have referenced as presenters, the word "confidence" comes up in almost 99% of cases. Other attributes include: clear, interesting, professional, fun, motivating, impactful, logical, valuable, passionate, interesting etc. Why is confidence the most widely sought after attribute?

We know that confidence sells the message. Someone who doesn't look confident about what they are suggesting is rejected right then and there. If you can't believe it yourself, then why should we believe what you are saying. This reaction makes sense doesn't it.

Confidence also presumes a positive mental state. Speaking in front of others can be contemplated as a negative. Perhaps at school they gave a report and classmates laughed at them, crushing their confidence forever. Maybe they presented their tutorial paper at University and they were diced up by their classmates. Somewhere in their past there may be a recollection of the intense shame, humiliation and despair they felt when they have to present in front of others.

Usually a lack of confidence is associated with nervousness. Being nervous is one thing and putting yourself in that state is another. We are all trained to avoid pain and unpleasantness. Knowing you will become very nervous if you have to present in front of others, automatically has us looking for the escape route to avoid that situation. We know what is coming and we don't like the look of it. Having the adrenalin coursing through our veins, our breathing feeling constrained, the blood draining away from our major organs releasing a queasy feeling in the pit of our stomach is not a state we want to enter into if we can avoid it.

That was me too. I avoided public speaking for decades, because of my lack of confidence. Was I half smart enough to go and get some training to overcome these fears? No. I did nothing but sweat and tremble in trepidation that I would have to speak in front of others. I passed up on opportunities to build my personal and professional brand and to promote my organisation.

This is the point – we are not confident because we don't know what we are doing. Any task we have never done before or which is technical and requires some degree of training is going to make us nervous about doing it. Public speaking is no different.

Like these attendees of the High Impact Presentations Course in the Mochizuki Room, we can all overcome these fears of insufficiency to the task, by getting the training. They learn how to deal with fear, with the fight or flight syndrome all speakers have to face. They learn speaking structures that will enable them to prepare any presentation format. When you can just pour the content into the right format, life gets a lot easier. Understanding the point of the talk is another simple but key element. Am I here to get action, to entertain, to inform or to impress? Learning how to design the start and finish of the talk, how to properly design the slides for the talk, how to analyse the audience to know how to present the talk are all the basics we need to know.

When you add in the personal coaching from the instructors it all starts to improve. You only get positive feedback, so your delicate nervous state is not totally upended. You get specific things to work on and lots and lots of practice. You hit the magic marker. This is when you learn how to switch the focus from yourself and move to focusing on your audience. It doesn't happen immediately but it does happen. Once you do that, all the fears about speaking in front of others, which is all about you by the way, disappear.

This is when you can start to notice the impact of what you are saying is having on your audience. You can see the impact because you are watching them like a hawk, never taking your eyes off the audience and you are using your eye power to engage them one by one, throughout the presentation. People nodding approvingly really boosts your confidence and you start to enjoy the process.

With training, you never fear the Q&A. This is when the event potentially becomes a street fight with no rules. When we are speaking we have control of the time, the agenda and the content. Q&A can see questions which have nothing to do with the topic, severe critiques of what you have just said and someone's own diatribe on a subject they hold near and dear. You cannot control this but you can control your response. When you have been trained you can weather any storm and can become bulletproof against any attack. Trust me, this knowledge makes you very confident when presenting.

So get trained and increase your confidence when presenting. It is that simple. Once you have done it, you will kick yourself as to why you didn't get the training earlier. It makes you happy to get the skills but sad to think of how much time and opportunity you have lost for no good reason. Better late than never though, so let's get going!

Engaged employees are self-motivated. The self-motivated are inspired. Inspired staff grow your business but are you inspiring them? We teach leaders and organisations how to inspire their people. Want to know how we do that? Contact me at [email protected]

If you enjoy these articles, then head over to www.japan.dalecarnegie.com and check out our "Free Stuff" offerings - whitepapers, guidebooks, training videos, podcasts, blogs. Take a look at our Japanese and English seminars, workshops, course information and schedules.

About The Author

Dr. Greg Story: President, Dale Carnegie Training Japan

In the course of his career Dr. Greg Story has moved from the academic world, to consulting, investments, trade representation, international diplomacy, retail banking and people development. Growing up in Brisbane, Australia he never imagined he would have a Ph.D. in Japanese decision-making and become a 30 year veteran of Japan.

A committed lifelong learner, through his published articles in the American, British and European Chamber journals, his videos and podcasts "THE Leadership Japan Series", "THE Sales Japan series", THE Presentations Japan Series", he is a thought leader in the four critical areas for business people: leadership, communication, sales and presentations. Dr. Story is a popular keynote speaker, executive coach and trainer.

Since 1971, he has been a disciple of traditional Shitoryu Karate and is currently a 6th Dan. Bunbu Ryodo (文武両道-both pen & sword) is his mantra and he applies martial art philosophies and strategies to business.