The Presentations Japan Series By cover art

The Presentations Japan Series

By: Dr. Greg Story
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  • Summary

  • Persuasion power is one of the kingpins of business success. We recognise immediately those who have the facility and those who don't. We certainly trust, gravitate toward and follow those with persuasion power. Those who don't have it lack presence and fundamentally disappear from view and become invisible. We have to face the reality, persuasion power is critical for building our careers and businesses. The good thing is we can all master this ability. We can learn how to become persuasive and all we need is the right information, insight and access to the rich experiences of others. If you want to lead or sell then you must have this capability. This is a fact from which there is no escape and there are no excuses.
    Copyright 2022
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Episodes
  • 383 Removing Distractions When We Are Presenting In Japan

    383 Removing Distractions When We Are Presenting In Japan
    Apr 29 2024
    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 mins
  • 382 Double Trouble Speakers In Tokyo

    382 Double Trouble Speakers In Tokyo
    Apr 22 2024
    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 mins
  • 381 Always Provide Value When Presenting In Japan

    381 Always Provide Value When Presenting In Japan
    Apr 15 2024

    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 mins
Management Economics
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