The Presentations Japan Series

Once upon a time, we taught public speaking and presentation skills in a class room, with tons of people all seated together, right next to each other.  We moved to teaching everything LIVE On Line since February 2020, so what has been the difference?  Surprisingly, not as much as we expected.  The one big difference is the lack of opportunity to employ full body emphasis when presenting, because...

Video is tricky. However, it looks so simple.  You just stand in front of the camera and give your talk.  I don't know why video saps twenty percent of our energy when it is actually broadcast, but that seems to be the accepted wisdom.  That means that just speaking normally into camera will now look a lot less energetic.  Getting the delivery to be fluent is also a challenge.  Either we do it fre...

Too smooth politicians, silky salespeople, urbane company thrusters all set off alarm bells.  We can meet impressive people and we can meet impressive looking people.  Over time we have learnt how to plumb the difference.  The world of presenting is made up of the top 1% who know what they are doing and the 99% who have no real clue.  The 99% group are often card carrying sceptics, who have finely...

English versus mathematics?  Easy choice for budding engineers at High School and for when they get to University.  Science is logical, knowable, understandable.  Presenting seems to have little in the way of science and more art involved, so best avoided.  Actually they do a pretty good job of avoiding it, until a certain stage in their careers.  These days clients want to talk to the engineers,...

Everyone is getting very swish with the tech these days, as we spend more and more hours in online meetings.  Consequently, we are more and more likely to find ourselves in a breakout room to discuss a topic.  When we first started doing this March 2020, as we ran our first LIVE On Line training, we discovered some disconcerting things about the medium.  In many cases they were disparate individua...

"That has to come out".  "Why?".  "It might offend women in the audience".  "But this example is totally in context with what I am saying".  And so it went on.  This was my first bruising encounter with cancel culture.  Living in Japan this third time since 1992, I have been outside the cancel culture debates sweeping America.  Until now.  The speech I was going to give would be videoed and go glo...

Our event speaker was a well-coiffed and well appointed senior executive in one of the world's biggest corporations.  The topic was on building your personal brand. A good crowd had turned out to pick up some pointers.  Anticipation gradually turned to disappointment though, as the talk unfolded.  The slant taken was how to project your brand "within" this gargantuan monster. How to climb their th...

This is horrible.  Man, this is so bad, what were they thinking?  I am watching a video of a leader asking for some major changes to the organisation's finances and he is doing a woeful job of it.  They have a dedicated Coms team, there are talented people in the leadership group, so I am asking myself how could this train wreck come to pass?  I was also thinking, "you should have called me, I cou...

It makes sense to be authentic when presenting, because this is the easiest state to maintain.  As someone wise once noted, "if you are going to be a liar you need a stupendous memory to keep up with who you told what".  Presenting is something similar.  Maintaining a fiction in front of an audience takes a lot of skill.  In fact, if you have that much skill, why worry about faking it in the first...

When I read this quote from Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon from 1971 that " a wealth of information would create a poverty of attention" I thought about its ramifications for presenters.  Today, we are firmly swimming against a King tide of information overload, so Simon's dystopian prophecy has come to fruition.  This is the Age of Distraction for audiences.  They are gold medal winning poor listen...

The largest meeting venue in the office complex was big enough to handle hundreds of people and it was packed. This presentation involved all the senior heads of the Department going through their strategies for the coming year. One after another, we took to the stage and spoke about our areas of responsibility. I was one of the five who spoke. My turn came after a particular colleague who was a n...

I listen to some podcasts on writing, trying to better educate myself on the craft.  I was hopeless at English at school, so the rest of my life has been a remedial fix in that department. Fundamentally, these podcast authors are aimed at fiction writers, rather than non-fiction scribblers like me.  A lot of what we do in business on our dog down days may seem like we are living a fiction, when th...

Presentations have become tediously monochrome.  The speaker speaks, the audience sit there passively taking it all in.  After the speaker's peroration, they get to offer up a few questions for about 10 to 15 minutes or so and then that is the end of it. With the pivot to online presentations, the fabric of the presentation methodology hasn't changed much.  We sit there peering at the little boxes...

Many people break the rules of presenting, usually unknowingly.  They have Johari Window style blind spots, where others know they are making mistakes, but they themselves are oblivious and just don't know.  This is extremely dangerous, because when you don't know, you keep hardening the arteries of your habit formation. It is diabolically difficult to break out of those habit patterns once formed...

Bonseki is a Japanese art creating miniature landscapes, on a black tray using white sand, pebbles and small rocks.  They are exquisite but temporary.  The bonseki can't be preserved and are an original, throw away art form. Speaking to audiences is like that, temporary.  Once we down tools and go home, that is the end of it.  Our reach can be transient like the bonseki art piece, that gets tossed...

In Part One, we looked at the ideas of primacy (the first thing we remember) and recency (the last thing we remember) and what this means for speakers. Now in Part Two we will go deeper with our entry and exit points of the chapters within the talk and how to choreograph the big crescendo for our polemic's sparkling conclusion. We naturally have to pump a lot of energy into designing the opening s...

Primacy refers to the beginning of something, as it enters our brain. This new entity has a powerful impact on our memory and our concentration.  To muscle itself into our existing brain thought stream, takes a lot of mental energy. If successful, the new direction grabs us more powerfully than continuing with the same existing thought pattern.  Recency is focused on the last thing we have heard. ...

Bruce Springsteen's song Glory Days lyric, "Boring stories of Glory days yeah, they'll pass you by" pops into my head sometimes, when I hear a speaker reminiscing about their glorious past.  I was sitting there at a chamber function when the speaker began to talk at length about his start in sales and his experiences.  It was fascinating for him no doubt, but it made him sound dated. He seemed to...

For many people it may seem we are getting into oxymoron territory here.  "Public speaking…enjoyable?  You must be kidding mate".  Many are called upon to speak and reluctantly they give their talk without talent, enthusiasm or particular motivation.  A duty, an unavoidable pain, like going back to the dentist for that root canal. As we rise in our careers, the necessity to speak in public goes ri...

Experts, pseudo experts, amateurs, believers, sceptics, supporters, enemies make up that sea of faces in front of us when we get up to speak.  We can get some basic data from the organisers about who is in the room.  What industries, companies, gender, age configurations are arrayed in those venue seats.  What we can't tell are the information assimilation biases of our audience members.  This mea...

In our High Impact Presentations (HIP) course, we do a number of presentations over two days of training.  What I love about teaching this programme is that you see the results immediately.  If we are teaching leadership or sales, it is very hard to see immediate results and those programmes are multi-week efforts.  Day One we have the first presentation which forms the marker for the programme. ...

Sometimes the organisers of the presentation event ask us if they can distribute our slides before the speech.  They are thinking that this will help the audience to follow what we are saying.  Especially in Japan, audience members are probably better at reading than hearing the content.  So having the slides at hand to refer to during the talk makes a lot of sense.  Never do this!  Ignore the sup...

Donald Trump has made this technique of "many people say…." famous for dealing with opposing views.  This is not an exercise for or against Trump. Rather, it is just looking at different ways we can head off opposition to what we are saying.  We should have a point of view when we speak and therefore we should also be prepared for opposing points of view.  Getting to the Q&A to deal with pushback...

Whether we asking to give a talk or asked to present, we need an audience.  The onus is on the meeting hosts to take care of the logistics of the venue and the associated tech needed to carry out the presentation.  We cannot leave everything to them though, because our personal brand is tied up with the success of the event.  Now "success" can be defined in many ways, but having a venue space for...

A request came to me recently asking me to speak to an audience.  So my first question was, "what would you like me to speak about?".   The answer was fairly broad.  Actually, that is good and bad.  Good, because there is plenty of scope to tackle various subjects, but bad because it is rather vague and obtuse.  Where to start?  I absolutely won't be searching for previous slide decks on related s...