The Presentations Japan Series

I am constantly amazed at the lack of thinking about seizing opportunities for storytelling to be more persuasive in business.  Most interactions are one dimensional.  We want to buy something and the seller supplies it and that is the end of the transaction.  This is particularly so in the retail environment.  What is ironic is that vast swathes of products have huge budgets devoted to creating t...

We love another acronym, not!  It is a handy memory jogger though, so let's persevere with yet another one.  Whenever you are in a situation where you need to get collaboration,  support, funding or agreement, then the EAR formula is a very effective tool for presenters.  It is simplicity itself in terms of understanding the formula.  The delivery though is the key and this will make all the diffe...

We all know that first impressions are critical, but what happens if you blow it?  There are a couple of typical ways we can hurt our credibility at the start.  Trying a joke that bombs is a very common credibility and personal and professional brand destroyer.  You think you are funny, when you aren't.  Or you think the joke is funny, but you are a crowd of one in agreement on that point.  Think...

As businesspeople, we don't get that many chances to face a public audience and give an actual talk.  The majority of the time, we are giving internal weekly reports on projects or revenues.  We feel constrained to deliver in the same way everyone else is delivering – monotone, lifeless, dull accounting of the progress or non-progress of our section.  We fear if we start ramping up we will be disp...

There are some fundamental mechanics of the presentation delivery.  I would call these hygiene factors for presenting.  Eye contact, facial expression, voice modulation, gesture usage, pause insertion and posture are the basics.  Unfortunately, in my observation, most business presenters have not mastered these core skills.  This despite all of the training available, all of the free information b...

There are some levels of presenter and so where do you fit in?  The scaredy-cat like I used to be, avoiding all opportunities to present.  The novice presenter trying to work it out by yourself through trial and error?  The student of presenting who has worked out the connection between persuasive ability and career and business success.  The semi-pro who holds down a full time job which does prov...

Chris Anderson is a curator for TED talks and so far there have been a billion views of TED talks since they started forty years ago. He wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review titled "How To Give A Killer Presentation" which was published back in June 2013 and it still stands up well today.  I have given a TED talk myself and so have had some exposure to the process and the rules they ha...

In the sales world, it is well known that as buyers the first purchase we make is the salesperson serving us.  We decide we like and trust this person and therefore allow them to extract our money in return for a service or product.  It is the same in the world of presenting.  We buy the presenter first and then we absorb their message.  Given this is fairly obvious, why aren't all presenters doin...

I attended an online presentation recently and the presenter was from one of the HUGE social media companies and the presentation was very different from the norm.  He was using his company's internal platform to deliver the presentation, rather than using standard tools like PowerPoint or its equivalent.  He could conduct comprehension tests of his content using a sophisticated timing mechanism,...

"Urgent – we need help" is the type of text message you love as a training company.  It means the "why now?", part of the question has a train wreck answer that you can fix.  In this case and in many similar cases, it is not the big bosses getting difficult or disgruntled clients acting up.  It is a grass roots rebellion against colleagues who are clueless when presenting.  At a certain point, the...

As speakers we have a tremendous amount of things to concentrate on when presenting.  Is my speaking speed at the right cadence?  Am I being clear with what I am saying?  Are the audience able to follow the navigation of my slide deck?  Am I losing attention to the wiles of the mobile phone, as people escape from me to the internet?  We can all have a lot of considerations buzzing around inside ou...

The Japanese idea of Shu-Ha-Ri is a combination of three characters – 守破離.  I first came across this concept when I was living in Australia and studying karate there. It is a very typical concept in all traditional arts in Japan.  Each character has a separate meaning, so they don't make up a compound word, as is often common with Japanese phrases.  The idea represents a learning journey.  Shu...

Contemplating this title you may be thinking "I am not boring".  You would be a rarity in business then, because think about how many interesting business presentations you have heard in your life to date.  I would reckon you would have trouble counting them on one hand.  If you believe you are not boring, then you are one of the elite amongst business presenters.  Is that the case? Why are so man...

As a presentations trainer, I can appreciate the difference between class participants when they cross that bridge and begin to display confidence when they are presenting.  Nerves and fear drive most people when it comes to giving presentations and just telling them to "be confident" is actually ridiculous.  If they could do it, they would, but basically they have no idea how to project confidenc...

We have been asked to speak or we have punted a chance to speak to an audience.  We will have a message in mind for the talk and we begin the process of constructing the talk.  Unfortunately we are now in the era of short attention spans, "fake news", massive cynicism and intolerance.  Contending philosophies and diverse experience has been tossed out the window in favour of tribal agreement and s...

The date has been set for our presentation.  Naturally, we are pretty busy with work, so we borrow that Toyota production line mantra of "Just In Time:" and leave it all to the last moment to cobble together our presentation.  We rifle through our previous presentations, looking for slides we can repurpose for this topic, which of course is an excellent time saver.  We just manage to get the deck...

In Part One, we explored the mental barriers around linguistic perfection which are holding Japanese businesspeople back and denying them the chance to have "executive presence".  Once we have cleared that hurdle, then we can start to work on the other key elements for achieving "executive presence".  Appearing confident is not a plus in Japan.  Here, being unsure, timid, shy, unprepossessing, mod...

As a training company we are often asked to assist with helping Japanese executives to have "executive presence".  This term is a broad descriptor, but essentially we all understand what they are talking about.  They want their Japanese executives to be seen as professionals and to have them listened to and taken seriously. Japan is the third largest economy in the world, but its star is fading. ...

As Covid slowly declines here in Japan, things are slowly getting back to a semblance of normality.  Imagine my surprise, to be asked to apply for a spot in a Chamber of Commerce pitch contest, with actual people in the room.  Actually, I was a ring-in, because originally they told me I would have to join the pitch contest later in the year because this one was already full of contenders.  Covid t...

Remote work is a sticky concept.  Bosses may prefer to have people under direct supervision in the office, but the masses have voted with their feet and headed home.  Tokyo commutes are a shocker.  Crowded trains, standing squashed up against total strangers for long hours is not something anyone looks forward to and being able to ditch all of that and stay home instead sounds much better. There i...

I teach presentation skills to businesspeople.  In the first class they do a simple self-introduction and this is where we instructors can tell the skill level of the people in the class.  A recent class had quite competent people and I am sure they would have been seen as already quite good by their peers and bosses.  At the end of the class on the next day, they were transformed into a completel...

This Japanese saying the "frog in the well doesn't know the ocean" is a favourite.  When I think about its application to presenting, one of the issues we face is we are all living in small wells.  We go the same conferences or events and the people presenting are rather homogeneous and so the bar gets set pretty low, because they usually are not very good.  Without understanding the process, our...

I am a hoarder.  I never throw anything out and this habit spills over into preparing for my presentations.  I always keep previous presentations and I plunder earlier slides for content I can use for the next one.  Topical content has a short shelf life but other content, particularly images, can be used for many years.  This is all well and good, however it does have one serious drawback and tha...

I was listening to a recent episode of Victor Antonio's Sales influence Podcast show and one of his guests was quoting some research which showed that assertive and arrogant salespeople did the best when it came to selling.  Their discussion pinned the key factor back to the seller's confidence and belief in what they were proposing.  Being an arrogant presenter isn't going to a formula for succes...

How do we want to be perceived when we give our talk?  What constitutes the personal and professional brand we are creating?  How can we master the first impression?  Often we are not thinking about these things at all.  We are too busy piecing together the slide deck puzzle we will use during the presentation.  Perception, personal brand, first impressions are a thousand miles away thoughts, as w...