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  • 385 Recruit Your Audience When Presenting In Japan

    385 Recruit Your Audience When Presenting In Japan
    2024/05/13
    Almost 100% of presentations that I see in Japan are one directional. The audience sits there passively and the speaker presents to them. There is no interaction with the audience. I was watching an interview with Clint Eastwood in his approach as a movie director. He was talking about his famous Western “The Unforgiven” and talking about how he shot some key scenes, such that the faces of the actors were in the shadows and not fully revealed. I can’t remember exactly how he expressed it, but he said you don’t have to show the whole face with full lighting, because the audience is intelligent. They can fill in the gaps. I thought that was a good metaphor for presenting. As the presenter we don’t have to show everything in full lighting from our side. We can create some gaps and allow the audience to fill in the blanks themselves from their imaginations and their viewpoint. We do this to some extent already when we use rhetorical questions. These are questions which we pose to the audience but we are not actually asking them for an answer – we provide that after a suitable hanging pause. What about if we actually make it a real question and source the answer from the audience? Now we cannot be doing this every five minutes, as that will be massive overkill, but we can drop some questions into our talk. We might plan to use these questions to overcome flagging energy and declining interest from the audience. This is why you never want to be lowering the lights when you are presenting. You want to be able to study the faces of the people arrayed in front of you for any signs of distraction, boredom, or tiredness. When I did my TED talk, the audience was in complete darkness because all the lights were blazoning away hitting me up on stage and making it impossible to read any reactions. It was very unnerving, especially when you are used to being able to study the audience reactions to what you are saying. Now when we ask a question to the audience here they are confused. Firstly, they are not trained for this and they are not sure if this is a rhetorical question, which we will answer or whether they actually have to answer. The next line of confusion is who amongst the audience should answer this question. In Japan, no one gets any prizes in life for going first, so it almost guarantees that everyone will be holding themselves back. The third line of confusion is fear. They worry if they get the answer wrong, they will look like a fool in front of everyone. They also fear that someone else will come up with a much more intelligent answer than theirs and they will look stupid. So casting a question before an audience here is bound to get no immediate answer. We have to help them by setting it up. Just blasting forth with a question is a bit shocking, as this is not how things are normally done. We need to say something like, “In a moment, I am going to pose a question, because I am very interested to get your experiences and ideas on the issue”. Now we have fired off a warning shot, so that when the question is unloaded, no one is surprised. We help them even further by using our eye contact and gestures to indicate to an individual or a group of individuals that we want to hear their answer. By holding out our hand gesture palm up, it is very unthreatening. If we used a pointed finger instead, that is very aggressive and will drive a shudder of fear into an audience with its power. We simultaneously use our eye contact and look at a member of the audience we are indicating to, thus requiring an answer. It is always good to pick those who were seated on the same table as you, if it were a luncheon or breakfast event, or someone you were chatting with at the start, as you will have established some rapport. Depending on the relationship, we can call out their name as we ask the question, “So Suzuki san what has been your experience with….”. We should immediately thank them for contributing and start applauding and inviting the rest of the audience to join us in recognising them. We might even say, “let’s thank Suzuki san for sharing her experience and let’s also recognize her professionalism to volunteer her answer”. This opens up the floor now to call on other people. We don’t do too many of these at the same time. It can become a distraction. It can also suck up a lot of time. Not everyone is able to be succinct and get to the point. You may also inadvertently discover some people who have a lot of pent up need to talk and they will hijack your presentation. Now you are on the back foot trying to regain control of proceedings, and that is not a good look for the presenter. At the very end wrap up of your talk you can again recognise those who contributed their ideas and get everyone to applaud and thank them. They leave feeling a mile high and the rest of the audience feels you did the right thing by ...
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    11 分
  • 384 Make The Most Of Your Body Language When Presenting In Japan

    384 Make The Most Of Your Body Language When Presenting In Japan
    2024/05/07
    TikTok, Reels, Shorts, etc., are video snippets training everyone to micro absorb information and stimuli. If it doesn’t grab our attention in three seconds, we are off that screen and scrolling forward to find something more interesting. The modern instrument of torture for the presenter is the mobile phone. It whips our audience away from our message and us, to the siren calls of the internet. Presenters must understand that how they start the presentation is that same three second space which will determine whether the audience pays any further attention to us or starts reaching for their phone. When we are called up to start speaking, the uber judgmental audience assesses us for reasons to flee. The worst mistake we can make is to dive straight into the laptop screen and get bogged down in the logistics of getting our slides up on screen. Either have your slides up ready to go or get the event hosts to remove their holding slide and replace it with your slide deck and your first slide. Do not become the mechanic and have your head down under the hood. Your body language is screaming “I am ignoring my audience”, while you tap away on the keyboard, looking totally absorbed by the screen. Instead, walk to the center of the stage facing your audience, command the room and add in a dramatic pause of ten seconds before you start speaking. You need guts to pull this off, because ten seconds of silence is long. Silence creates a vacuum, which confuses audiences used to feasting on constant stimulation. It creates a postive tension in the room which stops people chit chatting and being absorbed with each other. It forces everyone’s attention to the stage and they mentally begin asking “what is going on?”. This is good, because they are focused on us now and we can use our body language to project, “I am so confident, I can hold all of you in silence, before I choose to start”. This confidence is convincing and sets the right platform for us to launch forth from. There are physical and mental barriers separating the speaker from the audience. We must shatter that barrier. We do that with our stage positioning, body language, eye contact, gestures and how we direct our voice. Depending on the venue, the stage could be at a distance far from the audience or we could be able to walk inside the audience area. If we are far away, we need to work on projecting our ki – our intrinsic energy - to reach the farthest members of the crowd. We should be pushing our ki all the way to the back wall and sending our energy to the audience members in the cheap seats at the rear. We can also move to the apron of the stage and stand as close as possible to the audience, towering over them to bring more physical presence to our talk. People talk about having “Executive Presence” and this technique is that “Presence” on steroids. We can choose to move to the wings of the stage and standing on the apron, work on those members seated to the sides as well, to bring them into our web. When we are far away from the audience, we need to make the most of our gestures to bring energy to the point we are making. You cannot get this effect if you have your hands behind your back, in your pockets, arms folded across your chest or hands coyly protecting your groin from the audience. Open body language must communicate, “I am not afraid of you. I welcome you close to me to receive my message of hope. Come to me, come to me”. The gestures add to this openness by using inclusiveness through open hands and the wide spreading of the arms. Many speakers in our training are afraid to use big gestures, yet once they use them and review them on video, they realise it doesn’t look too much as they feared. In fact, they can see it makes for much better communication of the points of their message. We add to the power of the gestures by locking our eyes with each member of the audience, one by one, to drive in the message. The objective is the eye contact is so intense that they feel we are speaking exclusively to them and there are only the two of us in the whole room. An important point is to lock on to just one eye of the person you are looking at and not split the power of your gaze. By moving from one audience member to the next every six seconds, we use the power of our eye contact to fill the entire space in the venue. In one minute, we can make direct, intense eye contact with ten people and in ten minutes we have covered off one hundred audience members. If the talk is forty minutes long, we get to repeat this engagement intensity four times for each individual. We will fill the entire room with our presence when we do this. If we are at floor level amongst the crowd, we can use our physical proximity to connect with the people seated, by standing over them at close range, to drive home a key point. We can’t stay there though, because the pressure is too strong....
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    12 分
  • 383 Removing Distractions When We Are Presenting In Japan

    383 Removing Distractions When We Are Presenting In Japan
    2024/04/29
    Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is a bad idea and yet so many presenters do it. I was attending an Annual General Meeting event and the organisation President gave a short talk. The content was appropriate for the occasion. The length was good, not too long and not too short, the voice strength loud enough to be easily heard, and the cadence was easy to follow. Unfortunately, he managed to slip an “um” into just about every sentence. This is a filler word to allow the brain to assemble the next words, and it is always a catastrophe for presenters. He was a mature man, so presumably, he has always been peppering his sentences with this filler word and has now built it into a solid habit. I am not even sure he is aware he is doing it, but as the listener, it grates on you and grates every sentence. Effectively, he is opposing himself whenever he speaks. He has his message he wants to impart, and he defeats that message getting through, by creating an annoying distraction for his audience. There is a cure for this bad habit and it just talks time, patience and discipline to break it. Pursing our lips becomes the technological intervention we need to stop using filler words. When we start a sentence, hit the first word with a little more strength than the other words, so that no filler word can intervene. We now concentrate on speaking continuously and smoothly with no breaks – again we deny filler words any entry points. When we get to the end of the sentence, we purse our lips together, so no words can emerge and we get ready to hit the next first word in the sentence slightly harder than the other words. We just keep repeating this process. It won’t eliminate filler words automatically or immediately, but you will find you no longer start your sentence, as a lot of people do, with “um”. The flow continuity of the sentence is important. That doesn’t mean we cannot use pauses. The pauses need the same application I described we should use at the start of the sentence. When you get to a pause, you are effectively starting again, so purse the lips so no “ums’ can emerge and hit that next word a little harder, so no “ums” can intervene when you restart. Keep working on this pattern and eventually you will almost entirely eliminate filler words. I know this is true, because like everyone else, I was using “ums’ and “ahs” too. Once I worked on eliminating them using this technique, life got a lot better. It is a very rare occasion today that a filler word slips into my sentences. I do a lot of training and public speaking which is not me reading stuff but coming straight out of my brain. This means there is always the problems of trying to think what I want to say and having a filler word pop up. When I look at the videos of my presentations, I can see that there are almost no filler words, so the system is working. I was watching a video on how shoes are handmade and the cobbler had a habit of saying “you know” in almost every sentence. Technically, this is not a filler word, but it is a bad habit and again distracts the audience from our message. Not just humble cobblers get trapped with these junk expressions, which add no value to what we are saying. I was chatting with a high-powered lawyer here about how important presenting skills were for lawyers. He agreed, and he assured me he was always making an effort to speak well and differentiate himself from all the other hungry lawyers out there looking for new clients. Lo and behold, next minute he was up on stage in a panel discussion and there they were, a continuous string of “you know” combos distracting from what he was saying. Another one is “like” which gets thrown in for no reason. It gets quite sad, when the really challenged start linking them together, “Um, well you know, like.…”. This is a lifetime of habit formation with no conscious thought going into the process of presenting in front of others. As I said, video is such a great tool. Whenever I present, I always try to video myself. I do this to drive the content out through social media but also so that I can check myself to see if I have any bad habits creaping in. Just in case you get the impression I see myself perfect, I am working on my overuse of “so”. I have a habit of abusing this word as a bridge between chapters or sections of what I am going to say. I will finish one point then add “so” with a pause and move on to the next section. Once in a talk is okay, but more than that and it becomes a distraction I need to eliminate. I need to train myself to use a variety of expressions such as, “let’s move on”, “another key point is”, “next”, “let’s talk about”, etc. I realised I had developed this habit when I watched myself on video. I was not conscious I was using that bridge so often, so video review is always a good idea, no matter ...
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    11 分
  • 382 Double Trouble Speakers In Tokyo

    382 Double Trouble Speakers In Tokyo
    2024/04/22
    What a double act they were. Two economists giving us some insights into where the markets are going and making sense of the world we face. Anytime you see an event where there is going to be some crystal ball gazing going on about where we are headed in the global economy, you want to be there. We are all more risk averse than greedy, and we want to cocoon ourselves from trouble by getting some early warning of what to expect. This was a Chamber of Commerce event, so I knew a lot of the attendees and did my best to exchange business cards with those I didn’t already know. In the process of doing so, I gained a very clear idea of who was in the room, what industry sectors they were in, and the relative size of their companies. Neither of the double act speakers did that. They migrated straight to the VIP table and sat there waiting to go on. They were there to present, and that was it in their minds. For speakers, that is a basic error. In many cases these days, the event hosts won’t share the details of who is attending. We should always get there early and try to meet as many of the members of the audience as we can. This does a couple of things. It connects us with complete strangers and creates a level of rapport with the listeners, which translates into support for us as the presenter. It also enables us to gauge who is in the room, how senior they are, how big their operation is and how long they have been in Japan. This is important, because we can adjust the level we set for the presentation to make sure we are not speaking down to anyone or over their heads. Our speakers didn’t bother to analyse their audience before they launched forth with their canned presentation. I say “canned” because it was obvious they had been travelling around APAC giving this same presentation to various audiences. The first speaker was comfortable as a public speaker and had given many talks in his role as an economist. He did a couple of things I found annoying, as someone in my role who instructs people on how to present. He was good in many ways, but certainly not perfect. One thing I don’t recommend is wandering around the stage as you talk. He did this and really, the movement had no relevance to the talk. There should be some theory behind the movement rather than just sashaying around the stage to show you are a seasoned speaker. There are three distances we can use. If we want to make a macro point we can move to the back of the venue, away from the crowd. If we want to make a micro point, we can move very close to members of the audience and deliver our comments at a very close quarters. We shouldn’t stay in either position for too long and we should then move to a middle, more neutral position. When we move around, we create a distraction from our message. If we move, then we move with purpose and use those three distances, I noted, to our advantage. Otherwise, we anchor ourselves and use our neck to swivel around to make eye contact with members of the audience. As he was wandering around, he was looking in the general direction of his audience and successfully making no specific eye contact with anyone. That is a big opportunity lost to connect one on one with members of our audience. There was one more problem with his talk. The flair of public speaking was on display but the content was rather “so what”. I keep up to date with the media and probably so did everyone else in that audience, so there were no “oh wow” moments. I felt cheated that I had wasted my time and money listening to someone who didn’t deliver any value to my investment in attending the talk. His colleague had the same wanderlust, although a little more restrained. He also was someone who did these types of talks on a regular basis, so he was plainly comfortable to be standing up in front of a crowd and talking. The problem became obvious almost immediately when he started putting up his slides. They were very difficult to understand. For whatever reason there were a lot of acronyms in use and abbreviations. This made parsing the content on screen extremely difficult. His method of explaining it all was also complicated to a simple punter like me. People I spoke to afterward said they were also struggling to follow where he was going. This was an unforced error on his part. He didn’t research his audience to understand at what level he needed to pitch the talk. It was way over the heads of this audience, but he probably still has no idea of that, because he wasn’t engaging his listeners. When you single people out for six seconds of eye contact and you work the room using this technique, you can see in their eyes if they are following you or not and you can adjust. He was blind to the take up of the talk, because he wasn’t using any eye contact. As a double act, they were duds, for different reasons and they hurt their personal and...
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    12 分
  • 381 Always Provide Value When Presenting In Japan

    381 Always Provide Value When Presenting In Japan
    2024/04/15

    Value is a difficult thing to pin down. In any audience, there is bound to be a wide range of interests, needs, and wants. How do we decipher that array into a presentation which meets all expectations? Well, we can’t. There are too many variables at play, so we have to work on hitting the target for the majority of those who have assembled to hear us speak. There is a designated theme for the talk, hosted by an organisation whose members have aligned around a central set of interests. That is a good starting point to ascertain which angle of approach will be the best and most effective. Within that broad spectrum, we have our own areas of expertise and interest, and we seek the nexus of those two forces to find the right theme for the talk.

    Having worked out which theme and approach will meet the needs of most of the audience, we need to look for our value bombs. What do we know which they don’t? What valuable experiences have we had, which they won’t have had? What dead ends and failed missions have we experienced, which they won’t have had as yet and will want to avoid? The process of elimination is at work here as we dissect our own knowledge bank and our host of experiences, as we draw on the resources we have available to us for assembling the talk.

    There is a balance between talking about ourselves and making it relevant to the audience. Some speakers get that line of demarcation confused and spend too much time on their own glorious career. They forget the audience is not like us and have different drivers of importance to them. Our examples, from our own hard wrought experiences, are certainly powerful and appealing to an audience. However, we have to move from the specifics about us to the broader frame of reference to how the audience can apply the lessons we have learnt.

    This is where the value transition takes place. We need to craft that transition carefully. This is what happened to me – the incident; this is what I learnt as a result – the insight; and here is what you can learn and apply for yourself – the application. This incident-insight-application formula is a very handy frame of reference to throw over the talk we are designing, to make sure we can draw out the value for the listeners.

    Because it happened to us, it is true. Now what we deduce from the experience can be debated, but usually when everyone shares the same context, the chances are high that similar conclusions will be reached. This lessens the chances of an audience disagreeing with our findings. The application has to be broad enough to capture the various situations of those in the audience. There is usually a range of industry sectors, ages, genders and experience sets we have to appeal to.

    A good way to cover off this variety is to think about what would be the top five possible applications of our insight for this audience. Probably we won’t get everyone perfectly included, but the chances are high we will get the majority catered for. Even if we use the rule of three and say here are the three best applications of this idea, that will usually be enough if we think that five is stretching things too much.

    When we line up the experience, insight and application, the audience can all see that we are providing value, even if it happens that we are not hitting that particular person’s bullseye. That effort to make the talk relevant for the listeners will be appreciated and it shows we really know what we are talking about.

    Pontificating is great fun, but audiences usually want the lessons on what not to do and what to do in that order. The risk averse nature of people requires that we outline where we failed as a warning lesson to others, that they should avoid doing what we did and save themselves a lot of money and trouble in the process. Everyone loves a good train wreck story, and I am sure we all have plenty of them to share.

    The design stage of any talk is critical and so let’s make sure we are thinking value provision from the very start, as an overall guiding light before do anything else. What value do we have to offer and work from there to align that with the likely members of the audience for our talk. Include some “don’t do this folks” lessons and everyone will be happy.
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    11 分
  • The EAR Formula For Presenting

    The EAR Formula For Presenting
    2024/04/08
    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 difference. The Formula stands for E – Event, A – Action and R – Result. It is quite counterintuitive and therein lies a lot of its success. It is disarming and makes the presenter a small target for opposition to what they are recommending. Often, we have something we want and our first instinct is to just blurt it out. We have convinced ourselves that it is the best course of action, the most logical, high value approach and obviously the weight of all of these factors will automatically sway our listeners to adopt our recommendation. What is the reaction to all of this blurting though? Immediately the audience hears what we have to say, we are suddenly facing a crowd of card carrying sceptics. We shouldn’t be surprised but we usually are. What have we done? We have offered the flimsiest tissue of an idea to the listeners and expected them to extrapolate what they have heard to encompass the full weight of our argument. Of course we are intending to now launch into the detail of the idea, the rationale, the evidence etc. This makes sense. We are taught at business school to get the executive summary to the top of the report and then go into labyrinthine detail on why this idea makes a lot sense. When it is in document form, the audience do read the detail and do pay attention to the proof of our idea. Sadly, when we are live, they lose all senses and depart from the plan. They hear our raw unaided, unprotected, unabashed idea and they go into deafness. Their eyes are open but their mind has raced away to a distant place, where they are roiling through why this blurted idea makes little or no sense, or why it flies in the face of their experience or expectations, or a thousand other reasons why this simply won’t work. We have lost their attention. Instead we apply the EAR formula and we take them to a place in their mind’s eye. There must be a reason why we believe what we think and that must have come from a limited number of sources – what we heard, read or experienced. The Event piece is to reconstruct that moment when we had our epiphany, our realisation our breakthrough on this idea. We want to transport them to the spot too, so that they can reconstruct the roots of this idea. We don’t have unlimited time for this and we are telling a story, but it is a brief story. If we get tangled up in the intricacies of the story and are going on and on, then the listeners will become impatient and dissatisfied. If they are our bosses they will just tell us “to hurry up and get on with it”. The secret is to put in the season – a snowy day, a hot summers day, a fall day, a spring day. We can all imagine what that would look like, because it corresponds to our own experience and we can visualise it. We now locate the moment – a dark wood panelled boardroom, a meeting room at the headquarters, a Zoom call, on the factory or shop floor etc. Again we paint the picture of the scene. Not just a factory, but which factory, what type of factory, how did it look. People they know should be introduced into the story where possible. These actors may be known to them and this adds credibility to the story and the point. The bulk of the speaking time is given over to the telling of the background of how we got to this idea. An excellent outcome is upon hearing all of this background context, the listener is racing ahead of us and drawing their own conclusions on what needs to be done based on the evidence given. Given the same context, the chances are strong that they have reached the same conclusion we have, looking at the same evidence. After we tell the story we lower the boom and hit them with our call to action. This is A- Action we want them to take component. The big mistake a lot of people make at this point is to just keep adding a series of actions, rather than singling out one central action we want executed. We cannot distract them or nudge them away from considering one decision only. Take action or not. This part of the puzzle is about 5-10 seconds long. This forces us to be crystal clear on what is the one thing we want them to do. For example, “So based on the research, I recommend we begin a prototype and test our assumptions”. We cannot let that hang there alone. We need to back it up with one of the goodies that will come with it and we must settle on the most powerful “Result” we will enjoy if they take our advice. We do not keep adding benefits and dilute the core message. We go for the blockbuster...
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    13 分
  • 380 What If We Make Ourselves The Center Of Our Talk In Japan?

    380 What If We Make Ourselves The Center Of Our Talk In Japan?
    2024/04/01
    Where is the line between referencing our experiences and insights and just talking about ourselves? I attended a talk recently where the speaker had a perspective to share with the audience, to add value to their careers and businesses. What surprised me was how much of the talk was cantered on the speaker rather than the audience. I was thinking about this later and wondered what the better balance would be? When we go on about ourselves, we are getting further away from points of relevance for the listeners. We have to remember that people are unapologetically 100% focused on themselves and their own interests and don’t care all that much about our story. As the speaker, the closer we can align what we are saying to the listener’s interests, the greater the acceptance of what we are saying and the bigger the impact we will have as the presenter. That is fine in theory, but we can’t just make a series of pompous statements about how things should be and not back them up with evidence. Often that evidence is coming from our own experiences and that can be the most convincing variety. Unveiling a lot of sexy data during the talk is interesting, but a mud and blood rendition of what happened to us in the trenches, is always more gripping and compelling. This speaker, in my mind, strayed across the line and was wallowing in too much self-indulgence about what they had been doing. How do we balance our story with the audience's need for alignment with their benefit? What the speaker could have done was better draw out how to transfer their learnings into concrete examples, where the listeners could apply them to their own circumstances. Instead of just saying this is what I did, and this is how it worked for me, they could have gone a bit deeper on the application for others who are not them. When the example is too idiosyncratic, the agency for others becomes diminished or diluted. We could say, “I did this and got this result. Now here are three ways you could take this same idea and apply it to your situation”. We have now crossed over to the audience’s application of the knowledge. By giving more than one opportunity, we are more likely to hit on what the majority of audience members are looking for. Importantly, by prior analysis of who is showing up the talk, we can anticipate common needs and circumstances. This allows us to get closer to the mark of listener reality when we explain our examples. A simple rule of thumb should be 20% of what happened to us and 80% of the time on explaining why this will work for our audience. Our speaker, in this case, reversed those percentages and spent the majority of the time talking about what happened to them. The problem with this is we in the audience are not them and we have to parse out what we can apply from their story. It is much better of the speaker saves us that drama and they tell us what we can apply. We draw out the key points we want to make for the audience, align our war stories with the points and then add a significant section in the talk on explaining why doing this is a great idea and specifically why it is a great idea bolstered with concrete cases and options. This is an unbeatable combination. We demonstrate in words that because we did it, they can, too. We draw out how it will work for the audience and convince them that it has a broader application than just working for us alone. We have to marshal the benefits of taking our advice, and the more concretely we can do that, the better. Our speaker convinced us that it worked for them, but failed to make the case that it would work for us. They hinted at it, but statements are cheap and we sceptical folk want more evidence. We are all risk averse, so we want chapter and verse and solid provable details. When constructing the talk, keep that 20%-80% dichotomy in mind. Certainly use ourselves as proof, but don’t rely on it exclusively. If we can talk about others doing marvellous things with our advice, that is the icing on the cake. We love to hear case studies and then draw our own conclusions on how much we can take from the example and apply it in our world. That idea is something we need to be constantly hammering away at too. Keep telling them to think how they can adapt it, and apply it for themselves. In this way, we can keep switching the focus back to the audience away from us and we will get the balance right. Would the people who know you or meet you describe you as persuasive? Do you think you are persuasive enough? Persuasion power is the most important, but the most commonly lacking skill in the business world. Do it yourself trial and error wastes time and resources. It is time to change things up and get that key skill. There is a perfect solution for you- to LEARN MORE click here (https://bit.ly/3VhvR2B ) To get your free guide “How To Stop Wasting Money On Training” click here ( https://...
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    11 分
  • 379 The End Of The Beginning When Presenting In Japan

    379 The End Of The Beginning When Presenting In Japan
    2024/03/25
    I was recently reminded of the importance of openings and transitions when presenting watching a new speaker in action. They were using the occasion to establish their business here in Japan. Like this speaker, most of us face an audience who don’t know us when we start speaking. They may have glanced at the blurb from the organisers listing our accomplishments and background, all proving we are a legitimate expert, someone people should listen to. Regardless of the massive self-promotion we passed across to the hosts of the event to send out to everyone, we still have to deliver the goods. The audience enters the room thinking about a lot of things, but thinking about us isn’t the highest priority. They have that day at work to process what has happened so far. They also think about things they must do after our talk and what is coming up later that day or the next day. In other words, mentally they are pretty busy and then we turn up. Usually, the MC will introduce us and set the stage for us. The quality of these introductions is scarily various. Some MCs are arrogant and won’t be guided by the carefully hand crafted, elegantly wordsmithed script we have laboured over. We have been working hard to marshal all of our key selling points, aiming to stack high our massive credibility. Whenever one of the MCs goes off piste, it is rare that they do a better job than what we have put together. They often get the facts wrong and miss the key selling points. As the speaker, we should “insist” to the meeting hosts that the MC read out what we have prepared and not ad lib, freestyle or indulge themselves with our entry point to our talk. Be firm with this. Most people don’t give talks and don’t put their personal and public brands out there. They have no idea how important these small details actually are. In this speaker’s case, the MC did a great job of selling them to the audience. What comes next is very important. We have to say something which grabs attention and sets the stage for the main points we are going to make. Remember, the entire crowd are fully obsessed with themselves and not us, so we have to smash through that mental preoccupation they have with their world and bring them into our world. We should have received a list of company names and their positions before the talk. This is a big help. It allows us to gauge the temperature in the room. Are they experts or amateurs or a mix? Depending on who is in front of us, we construct our opening. We know they are all self-interested, so if we can open with something which appeals to that obsession all the better. In this speaker’s case, the opening was all about them and not about the greatest interests of the audience. That was an opportunity missed. We need to connect us with what the audience is most interested in and typically with the thing they fear the most. We are all risk averse and we gravitate toward our fears before we head for our pleasure points. That means scaring the hell out of your audience is always a reliable starter to make sure they have forgotten all about the day and are now solidly with us in the room. Think about the hottest topics with the greatest sex appeal at the moment. Talk about that. Always avoid controversial elements like politics and religion, though. As Michael Jordan famously said, “Republicans buy sneakers too”. We do not want to create hostiles in the audience, if we bag Trump or Biden in our opening. There are plenty of other scary topics to choose from and something closer to home is always best. For example, in Japan, we have a major decline in population underway. That is an abstract idea for most of us. We just see the media headlines. We don’t really notice the decline though, because it is gradual. The trains seem just as crowded as ever, when we are going to work. However, if we can connect that to our own futures, we can bring that scary topic alive. We can say, “It is good that we have a Government run pension scheme in Japan that we all contribute to. It is a worry though, that probably by the time you are ready to collect, your money may not be there. That scheme works based on the younger generation paying into the scheme, so you can get our money out when you are older. If there are not enough young people contributing, there won’t be enough money for you when you retire. That is what declining population means for most of us. Are you going to be okay when you stop working?”. After hearing that opening, the audience will be all ears to hear what we have to say on the subject. They are expecting we come with a solution and they are ready for it. That staff meeting they have after this talk or them picking up the dry cleaning is now completely out of their minds and they are fully concentrated on us. This then sets us up the transition to the main talk where we outline our key...
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