The Presentations Japan Series

Today we are going to look at motivating others to action. Actually, this is a devilishly difficult task. Getting anyone to change what they have been doing and take a new action is extremely complex.  We all talk up a storm about this or that should change, but we are not keen about changing ourselves. In fact, we expect everyone else make the necessary changes and we want to stay exactly the sam...

So how have your New Year resolutions been unfolding?  Change is tough, as is forming new habits by adding in new concepts and at the same time removing old negative habits.  Resolve requires consistency, patience, perseverance and application – all of which need extra energy on top of what we are already doing.  As presenters we have time, talent and treasure at our disposal to take ourselves up...

Today we are going to look at communicating with greater impact.  So the first question is what do we mean when we say "impact"?  Most talks are totally forgettable.  Test this hypothesis yourself – how many of the many talks you have listened to, can you remember either the speaker, the topic or both?  Generally, we struggle to remember either, because there was no impact for us.  We were not tou...

The Q&A is a great chance to clarify any points which were not clear to the audience.  This is an opportunity to really reinforce some points we made in the talk, to make them even more impactful with the audience. We can also draw on our reserve power and add extra content which we couldn't include in the speech.  Apart from when we were mingling with our audience before the talk starts, this is...

What is a complex subject?  That really depends on the audience.  If they are all experts in that subject area, then the presentation can and must be done at the same high level.  If they are not knowledgeable on the subject, we need to avoid assuming too much prior exposure to related information and not use jargon and acronyms. There are varying levels of difficult themes when presenting.  It is...

Persuasion Power Eats Everything For Breakfast Intuitively, we know that people who can command an audience, energise teams, excite customers and secure decisions through their persuasion power are successful individuals.  Did they gain persuasion power because they were successful or did they become successful through their persuasion power.  We know it is the latter.  Given we all know this, the...

The prediction business is always fun.  We nominate our plans so that God can laugh, according to the old Yiddish proverb.  Nevertheless, we need to make some plans don't we.  The Gregorian calendar beginning of the year is as good a time as any to think "start".  The last two years has seen the entire speaking business metamorphise into an online venture for the most part.  Standing in front of a...

What is our presenter vision for 2022?  If it has any element of success involved (and it would be a pretty rare resolution that didn't have that), then being persuasive is going to be integral to the success of realising that vision.  If you are trying to climb the corporate ladder, then getting your thoughts sorted and have others listen and agree is persuasion power.  If you are the boss and yo...

Let's look at the designing the closes.  Notice this is plural, not singular. There are two closes required when we are speaking.  Usually there will be Q&A at the end and we have to account for that.  We design our first close to wrap up our talk.  We open for Q&A and then we have lost control of proceedings.  Make no mistake.  Question time can become a street fight with no rules. Anyone can ask...

We flagged this point last episode and today we are going to look at the use of evidence when giving presentations.  I often mention the two modern dilemmas of being a presenter.  We now live in the Age of Distraction where audiences will rapidly escape from us to the internet, if we haven't sufficiently captured their attention.  Sometimes, even when they are interested, they are still multi-task...

In some recent episodes we looked at how to open the presentation. Today we are going to look at designing the main body of our talk. The design process of our talks is counterintuitive.  We always start with the end, then do the main body and then the opening last. The close defines the key message we want to impart to the audience.  The opening breaks through all the competition for our audience...

This speaker has it all.  You are sitting down the back of the room, yet you can sense their inner energy, confidence, surety of what they are saying.  You feel they have charisma, that compelling attractiveness as a presenter.  You want to be like that too, but how?  Let's see how you can increase your presence and appeal as a speaker.    What the audience won't see you doing is rehearsing on the...

Reading this headline you might be thinking, "Oh yeah, this guy says he is an expert?  Is that really true?".  In this fake news world, that is an entirely reasonable caution.  Would the following qualify me:  this TEDx talk was my 546th public speech, I am a Master Trainer for Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan and I am a certified High Impact Presentations Instructor having taught thousands of p...

Today we are going to look at Part Two of Opening our speech.  In the last episode we used an analogy, the startling statement and starting with some good news.  We also covered the dos and don'ts of how to use questions with the audience.  Here are two more openings we can apply to our talks - storytelling and using compliments.   Start with an incident   Storytelling is one of the most powerful...

First impressions are now down to seven seconds or less.  Our opening begins from the moment we are introduced, even before we get up on stage or move to the center of the stage.  We must walk briskly, confidently and elegantly to our speaking position.  I remember seeing US President Biden on television, walking very swiftly to convey he was still dynamic, despite the years and the grey hair.  He...

Every time we speak, we are representing our professional and personal brands.   People judge us and then they project that same judgment on to our organization.  If we are very professional, then they see everyone in our organisation in a positive light. If we are bumbling and disorganised, then they see our whole organisation the same way.  If we want the audience to believe our message, then th...

Are we clear enough about our message? There are some common problems around getting the messaging right. We have no clear message and the audience don't quite know what to make of the talk. Or we have so many messages, the audience are confused and cannot attach to any of the messages. This is an exaggeration, but we should be able to write our one key message on a grain of rice.  The point is to...

Before we tackle the purpose of our presentation we need to understand who is our audience. We covered this in Episode #260, so please go back and review that episode if you haven't already heard it. Basically, don't put pen to paper or start assembling a slide deck, until you are crystal clear on who is going to be in the audience.  Once we know what level to frame the content, we can get started...

Before we do anything, we need to ask just who is going to be in our audience?  If we don't know that information, then we are thrashing around in the dark, trying to find the light switch. It may be an internal group we are speaking to, so we will have a pretty clear idea who will be in the room.  It might be an industry association talk, so we can expect there will be people similar to us in the...

They are usually a bunch of strangers attending out talk.  We may know one or two people in the audience, but generally we have no clue about most of them.  The feeling is likewise.  They may have perfunctorily glanced at our introduction in the blurb advertising the event but who are we as a person?  How smart are we, how useful is this time allocation going to be, can we speak well, are we addin...

We all stumble into public speaking in business.  We don't start our first job with a grand plan for our future public speaking career.  We just work as hard as we can.  If we knew at the start how important this facility was, we would definitely plot out the path forward, corresponding to each stage in our careers.  However, we are left to our own devices and we have no guidelines for presenting....

Usually for most businesspeople we don't really know what we are doing when it comes to presentations.  We grow up in business concentrating on our tasks and getting the work done.  As we rise through the ranks, we start to give updates on the results or project progress reports.  As we rise a bit further we may start reporting what our Section or Division has been doing, or introducing the busine...

The idea of having enthusiasm would seem to be pretty obvious for someone presenting.  In some cases, though we are just presenting information and getting massively enthusiastic about a bunch of not particularly illuminating numbers would be difficult. Often internal meetings are like this.  We have to give our report on the revenue and client numbers or the trend with visitors to our stores or w...

The news cycle is awash with Prime Minister Suga's shock announcement that he will not continue as Japan's leader.  His predecessor Shinzo Abe quit on health concerns and handed over the Covid crisis to Suga.  Here we are twelve months later and Suga is gone.  His inability to communicate as a leader has been seized upon as one of the key reasons for his failure.  In Episode #233, I focused on Sug...

Have you heard of XiaoIce?  According to the media it is a "cutting edge artificial intelligence system designed to create emotional bonds with its six hundred and sixty million users worldwide".  It already accounts for sixty percent of all global human-AI interactions, making it the largest. Here is the terrifying punchline, "It was designed to hook users through life-like, empathetic conversati...