Episodes

  • “Many People Say” And Other Strategies For Dealing With Pushback

    “Many People Say” And Other Strategies For Dealing With Pushback
    Feb 3 2025
    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 is okay, but it is better to deal with it inside your presentation. Most of us are one dimensional when we prepare our talks. We are thinking of ourselves and what we want or need to say. We don’t give much thought to how others will receive it. In Japan, it is unusual for anyone to go after you when you are speaking. Good manners requires that everyone be stoic and put up with annoying counter opinions. No one should lose face in a public arena. This is fine, but those who disagree may not bark, but they do bite. They will do it afterwards, rather than in public. They will criticise your failings to others and you will go merrily on your way, never realising that the audience thinks you are a total light weight. Better to grasp the nettle in the moment and end it then and there. The key is to first design your talk in the first draft. I don’t mean write the whole thing out word for word, but to design the two endings for before and after the Q&A, to create the key points with evidence and finally design the blunderbuss opening to grab everyone’s attention. Once you have this framework start looking for your points of view interventions. There will be a few of these in the speech. These are the things you want us to believe or to do. Now isolate these out and think about the opposite point of view. What would be the strongest arguments against your point of view. If you say there aren’t any, then a big reality check on your self awareness sounds like it is in order. Take the lawyers approach of preparing the brief for the other side in the argument. What would they say, how would they refute the points made, what counter evidence would they proffer. You might not think the evidence is comprehensive but that isn’t the viewpoint of those holding those ideas. Also consider what questions would they ask to find any holes in your proposition? In the talk, you can draw on the Trumpian technique of putting up a stalking horse argument and then disposing of it comprehensively. You might say, “there is an alternate viewpoint that says XYZ. Most experts however believe that ABC is more convincing and better supported by the evidence”. You have said that not just you, but the experts are opposing this XYZ viewpoint and what is more, they have looked at all the evidence and concluded that what you are saying is more accurate. Third party interventions from experts makes it harder for people in the audience to disagree with you. “Japan is different” is an all weather counter for just about everything that people base their views on. Japanese people disregard any surveys or research presented unless it includes Japan in the comparisons. It doesn’t matter what it is, unless there is a Japan component involved, they conclude it doesn’t apply here because, well, Japan is different. We can say that normally we would expect EFG to apply, but because this is Japan then we get UVW instead. This is hard to argue against because it is well accepted here that this logic makes sense. Of course, we have to have good evidence that this is how Japan does work in this case and that usually isn’t hard to muster. Another method is to mention that the evidence is not complete yet, but that the trends seem to be pointing to whatever it is you are recommending. This is allowing that later research may refute what you are saying, but as far as we know up to this point, this looks to be true. Again, we make ourselves a small and elusive target for counterattack. Mentioning this is your experience allows other to have had a different experience, which is fair enough. You are not saying that you are the sole guru on this subject, but everything you have seen so far, tells you this viewpoint seems to be the best case. You are open to other’s experiences and this comes across as a very even handed and balanced approach. The key is in the planning, to know where the hot buttons will be pressed by people in the audience and to head them off at the pass, before they get going. Taking other opinions into account will make your talk seems more rounded and less dogmatic. You come across as knowledgeable on the subject and an expert who should be listened to. It is hard to argue against and your talk will go very smoothly when you get to the Q&A. The Q&A is the graveyard of many a good talk by the way, because the speaker didn’t plan ahead for pushback. We won’t be in that category anymore, going forward.
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    11 mins
  • How To Sell Your Presentation To Pull An Audience

    How To Sell Your Presentation To Pull An Audience
    Jan 27 2025
    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 fifty people and having five people turn up, wouldn’t strike too many people as a triumph. This would be more like an embarrassment. We naturally want to get our message out to as many people as possible and so we want to maximise the audience size. There are a couple of hooks for us to pull an audience for our talk. A key one is the title of the talk. This can sometimes be a talk title which must be approved by the organisers or you may be free to choose the one you prefer. If we look at newspaper, magazine or any media advertising headlines, there is a real skill in getting these titles to grab people’s attention. Most speakers are not trained copywriters. They never imagine they need to enlist the help of a copywriter to help with creating the presentation title. So we are all in the DIY school of speaker copywriting. The best title selection will revolve around a number of factors, such as the content of the talk or the nature of the audience. Think of the title as a hook, to snag interest from potential attendees. What title would locate the sweet spot of both appealing to those interested in the topic and a compelling offer, to inspire the punters to turn up to the speech. The title cannot be too long, in the same way that headlines are kept brief. How can we get the explanation of the content and the hook, into as few words as possible. Last week, I talked about how to use the Balloon Brainstorming Method to create your speech content. The construction of the talk I explained, starts with the punchline, crafted in as few words as possible, in order to drive clarity. I also went through how to create the base content sectors, which are the bones of the talk. Having done all of that, we then create the opening piece. This is there to smash through all the clutter in people’s minds, when they enter the venue, to hear our talk. The title is often best taken from that opening piece. We don’t use it word for word, but we look for the strongest hook therein, to finally create the talk title. We only have a few words available for that, so each word must really outperform for us. I was recently asked to give a talk, but received no great guidance on the topic. The host wanted to pull an audience. So I thought about what is a common topic that would attract as many people as possible to attend. I chose “public speaking” because this freaks most people out fairly universally, across all cultures, ages and gender ranges. I also have a lot of experience and am an expert on this topic, so I have supreme confidence to talk to an audience about it. This sounds like bragging, but we must have expertise and real confidence to stand up in front of others and pontificate. If you don’t have that, then please spare the rest of us the train wreck masquerading as your talk. I used my Balloon Brainstorming methodology for the content creation. Finally I had to create the talk title. I had come up with 15 subtopics, which would be too many for the time allowed to cover, so I needed to trim that down. I decided to go with twelve topics, because it is a substantial number, but doable in the time granted to me. So, I started writing out possible titles, to see if I could find one that would resonate. In the end, I came up with a title using alliteration as a means of grabbing attention. The hook was The “Terrible Twelve” Typical Errors That Presenters Make And How To Fix Them. I was pushing the boundaries on title length, but I liked the alliteration of “The Terrible Twelve Typical” components in the title. Key words were Typical, Twelve, Terrible, Presenters and Fix. Anyone reading that title would have a clear idea of the value of the talk. If they had an issue with presenting, they would feel this would be a talk providing substantial value, through its clear coverage of the topic. The next step was to flesh out, in a few sentences, the content of the talk giving the audience a taste of what will be covered. This will be the text to accompany the title, when the hosts advertise the talk. Again, we only have a few sentences to work with, because there are always space limitations when advertising the talk. We should have some word count indication from the event sponsors, of how much we can say, when we are writing this piece. This overview has to reek with value to the audience and should cover the key pain points associated with the topic. Finally, we need a customised Bio to go with the talk. It also will have a limitation on ...
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    12 mins
  • Outlining Your Talk Using The Balloon Brainstorming Technique

    Outlining Your Talk Using The Balloon Brainstorming Technique
    Jan 20 2025
    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 subjects or thinking about the slides I could create on the subject. In this regard, I am in the minority of presenters. This is the minority you want to be in, because that slide first crowd is categorically not the group you want any part of. When we are tasked to give a talk, how to do we work out what to speak about? A technique I always use when brainstorming about anything is the idea balloon brainstorming method. I will have a problem I need to solve. I need a system that generates the best possible ideas I can come up with and at hyper speed. Maybe someone else has better ideas, but they usually aren’t around when I need them, so I have to work it out by myself. The first step is to use paper and pen. This is old school I know, but there is something about the creative process for me that works best on paper. I am also a visually oriented learner, so being able to “see” the ideas on paper works well for me too. This is me and you may be different. My point is to know what does work for you in the first place and try and master that system, rather than just fumbling around in the dark. I write the key word or phrase in the middle of the sheet and draw a circle around it, an idea balloon type of look. Then I think about what are the related elements to this subject. This is at a high level in this first instance. Say I was going to give a talk on presenting. The center of the balloon would be the word “presenting”. Each element related to this topic would be written and then a circle drawn around it, creating idea balloons, with connecting lines drawn back to the center balloon. Elements might include “topic selection”, “preparation”, “delivery”, “audience analysis”, “common mistakes”. Each of these elements would then be transferred to individual separate sheets of paper and each word goes in the center of its page and the process repeated. The order is important. For example, I need to understand who I am talking to before I plan anything. So I start with “audience analysis”, then drill down to the elements related to that which might include new sub-balloons such as, “gender split”, “expertise level”, “age demographic”, “industry”, “language fluency” etc. These would be points I would ask the organisers about, before I even started the speech preparation. I need to know at what level to pitch my talk – are they experts or amateurs or a mixture. This selection would normally be enough information and I wouldn’t need to drill down any further. For other elements, I would want to go deeper though. For example, “topic selection”, would be the next logical step. I would place that in the centre of a new page and then start adding the sub-elements. This would include topics such as “topicality”, “data availability”, “my angle”, “my expertise”, “audience value factor”, “audience interest”. Taking each sub-element, I can go deeper again. On a fresh sheet of paper, I could place “topicality” in the middle and start building up ideas circling them into balloons on the page. For example, “Covid-19 health concerns”, “business disruption”, “working from home”, “isolation”, “staff retention issues”, “mental health”, “suicide increases”, “leadership issues”, “productivity”, “cash flow”, etc. As you see the list can grow very quickly for some sub-elements. The beauty of this system is the combination of breadth of the topic possibilities and depth achieved with each topic, all being done again at a rapid clip. In ten minutes, you have multiple sheets of paper with a lot of ideas created from which to start making some selections. The next stage is tougher however, as you have to start making decisions on what you will select from the numerous possibilities. The talk has a time limit, so there has to be a sieving of the gold nuggets, that will have the greatest impact on the audience and provide the highest value. Remember, these are our personal and professional reputations we are putting on the line every time we present. Once the topic is decided, I need to write a single sentence or phrase, which encapsulates what I believe about this topic. This is the punchline and should be completed in as few words as possible. I am forced to be clear. This is usually quite difficult, but the effort put in will help to make the conclusion we craft well worth it. The next step is gathering evidence to support the conclusion. ...
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    14 mins
  • Where Do Presentations Go Off The Rails?

    Where Do Presentations Go Off The Rails?
    Jan 13 2025
    You see it. The presenter publicly self-immolates. They might butcher the start, get lost in the weeds of their content or be put to the sword at the end in the Q&A. They can’t engage with their audience, are incoherent and quivering the whole time. It is a train wreck on display. Reputations and credibility are flayed alive. Here is the irony – they chose it to be like this. They made a series of poor decisions about this presentation and then reaped the whirlwind of total humiliation. Rehearsing the presentation takes time. Time which could be devoted to adding massive content, multiple fonts and gaudy colours to the slides. This is why failures fail. They ignore logic and decide that practicing on their audience is much more efficient. It is not terribly effective though. The long term damage from short term decisions is substantial when you thrust yourself into the public eye. If you don’t have big brackets of time available, then just work on pieces at a time, over time. That means start early, so there is no mad rush at the end. I made a genius decision once to prepare my presentation on the flight from Osaka to Sydney. No sleep and subsequently plenty of irritability upon landing made for a combustible cocktail. When someone in my audience had the temerity, the audacity, the gall to challenge my assertions in the presentation, it didn’t go well. I vowed NEVER to try that exercise in efficiency ever again. Turning up just before kick off, to find there is some technical issue with your slides or the laptop or the audio is a life shortening experience. Always make the time to go early. I was giving a presentation to the Japan Market Expansion Competition and dutifully brought along my USB to plug into their laptop. Their Microsoft environment didn’t like my Mac presentation layout, so it changed the whole thing. I arrived early and found myself sweating like a maniac, as I tried to fix every single slide before the start. I finished with one minute to go, but I was a nervous wreck. If I am not using my own laptop, I go even earlier now. First impressions start from the moment the organisers advertise the event and include elements of your bio. People are forming biases and opinions about you, which they are going to size up against what they see in front of them. Get there early, check the tech and then gracefully mingle with the punters. Do your best to be charming. Being an introvert, that is no easy task for me. Do your best to schmooze people in the crowd before you start and build supporters in the room. Don’t eat too much at the lunch or dinner prior to your talk. Try instead to engage your table colleagues, again building rapport. You can always eat later if you are starving. When they call your name stride confidently and effortlessly to the stage. Have zero interaction with the laptop – don’t even touch it. Instead get straight into your opening. You don’t need any slides to begin with, so concentrate of creating a powerful and positive first impression. Once you have done that, then you can look down at your laptop and start the slide deck rolling. By the way, many balding presenters proffer a brilliant view of their sparse, patchy pate, as they lean forward over the laptop, fiddling with the machine. Don’t be one of them. Start off with a power opening to grab attention. Remember, we are all self-focused and supremely interested in what happened to us this morning, what we need to do after the talk and what is coming up for us tomorrow. The speaker is competing with all of these high value items in the minds of the audience. We need to supplant all of that inner-focus with our ideas, views, suggestions and recommendations. Make sure to raise your voice tone from the get go, to set the energy level at the right point to carry through to the rest of the proceedings. It is very hard to start soft, then work your way up, so start strong then vary the tone from there. Keep your eyes on the crowd the whole time. Read their faces. Are they buying what you are saying, are they bored, are they surreptitiously or furtively looking at their phones under the table, are they nodding in agreement? This is why, if some helpful venue flunkey turns the lights down, so that you are dominated by the screen, you should stop speaking immediately and ask for the lights to be brought back up. In my experience, the moment those lights go down, a big proportion of a Japanese audience is lost, because they are sleeping. It seems to be a bit like the rhythmic rocking of the trains here, that induces slumber. Lights go down and off they go Pavlovian like, to the land of Nod. I have seen that scenario play out a number of times here. I find stopping speaking for about ten seconds interrupts the pattern and then resuming with a powerful burst of energy and voice volume wakes them right up again. Keep the main body ...
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    17 mins
  • Seven Tips From The Front Line Of Presenting

    Seven Tips From The Front Line Of Presenting
    Jan 6 2025
    I have the opportunity to give a number of presentations each year. I video them as well, so I can study where I can improve them further. What I find very interesting though, is that I am a poor model in some ways for others, who don’t have that chance to present publically so often. I was teaching some presentation skills classes recently and the students are probably a better fit for most people as a model. They are in the class because they need to become more persuasive and more professional when they speak. Our High Impact Presentations Course is the Rolls Royce of presenting, so allow me to encapsulate some of the big breakthroughs I see in our classes, as tips that you can immediately adopt for yourself. Stand up straight. Well come on, you may be saying, is that a tip? How hard could that be? Surprisingly many people can’t stand up straight. They put more weight on one leg than the other, kick out one hip and so look way too casual. Others are swaying about the place from the hips, like a drunken sailor. This swaying makes them look like they lack confidence and conviction about their messaging, which is extremely bad, but simply fixed. Stand straight and don't’ sway about. Turn your neck Do not turn your shoulders or feet, when looking at people in the audience sitting on the sides. Amazingly, some presenters even half lean over toward someone who is sitting off to the side of the speaker. Or, even more fascinatingly, they do this cute little soft shoe shuffle with their feet to face that person. You look clunky, way too casual and unconvincing. Stand up straight on the one spot and just simply turn your head to look at people to the sides of the audience. Start strong It is very hard to build up the energy after you start. For whatever reason it is easier to start strong and then adjust the strength later. When you begin softly you tend to get stuck there. Remember, this is the Age of Distraction and we face the toughest audiences ever created. When they hit that room to hear your talk, their brains are chock full of stuff already. We have to break into their brain and open them up for our message. A strong start cuts through the crowd noise and grabs immediate attention. Use gestures intelligently The gesture needs to be congruent with what we are saying. A simple way to understand this is, if I was saying, “this is a huge global project” and had brought my palms together in front of my body facing each other only a few centimetres apart, showing a very narrow range, the words and hand position don’t match. For that sentence, I need to have my arms up around shoulder height and stretching wide, almost at 180 degrees to my body. What many people miss is the opportunity to pair the gesture with the concept. Use your hands as a measuring stick to indicate high, low, big, small etc. When the students do this type of gesture in the class, they feel a bit shy, as if it is too exaggerated. However, once they get into the review room with the other instructor, they see themselves on video and realise it looks very natural and normal. Eyeball your audience If we want to persuade our audience we need to engage them. The most powerful way to do that is give them eye contact. Politicians are geniuses at getting this wrong. They do eye contact quick sweeps of the assembled punters, effectively connecting with no one. This is fake eye contact. We want to pick up people in the crowd and give one person solid uninterrupted eye contact for six seconds, then immediately move to the next person at random in the audience and give them six seconds of eye contact. We just keep repeating this throughout the entire talk. Six seconds is long enough to engage without becoming intrusive. Depending on the size of the audience, you may have been able to personally connect with everyone there. That is powerful. Use your voice Speakers speak with their voice, but many are not really using it properly. Using it properly would be to select certain key words in a sentence and either hit them harder or make them softer than the surrounding words. It might be used to slow----things----down or SPEEDTHEMUP when we speak. Also we can go high and low in modulation for more variety. Turn the energy switch on We speak with a certain energy output, when we are having a normal conversation. We cannot transfer that same energy to the stage or to the online world when we are presenting. We need to really ramp up the energy output. We have a different role when we are in the limelight. We need to project our confidence, our belief in what we are saying. An easy way to do that is drive up the energy output and radiate that to the audience. We need to vary the power of course, throughout the speech, but the baseline will be about 20% higher than what we would experience in normal conversation. If you start adopting these seven tips ...
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    16 mins
  • The Incredible Lightness Of Speaking

    The Incredible Lightness Of Speaking
    Dec 24 2024

    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 away upon completed admiration, the lightest of touches that doesn’t linger long. Of course we hope that our sparkling witticisms, deeply pondered points and clear messages stay with the audience forever. We want to move them to action, making changes, altering lifetime habits and generally changing their world. In the case of a business audience, we are usually talking to a small group of individuals, so our scope of influence is rather minute. How can we extend the reach of our message?

    Video is an obvious technology that allows us to capture our speech live and ourselves in full flight. How often though, do you see speakers videoing their talks? It is not like people are constantly giving public speeches in business. Apart from myself, I don’t recall seeing anyone else doing it. You need to tell the audience this is for your own purposes and they will not be in the shot, otherwise you have to get everyone to give you their written permission to be filmed. You may get criticism about being a narcistic lunatic for wanting to capture yourself on video, but the only people who make that type of comment are idiots, so ignore them.

    With video, instead of a standard business audience of under fifty people, you can broadcast your message to thousands. The video is also an evergreen capture which allows you to keep using the content for many years. Video has the added benefit that you can cut it up and create snippets to take the content even further. You can have ten videos sprung from the original. This again extends the ways in which you can use the medium. People have different appetites for information, so some may want to feast on the whole speech, whereas others want the digest or just the part on a particular topic of most interest.

    Video has two tracks – the video and audio components and these can be separated out. Very easily you can produce the audio record of the talk. Everyone is a firm multi-tasker these days. I sometimes hear people pontificating that you cannot multi-task, blah, blah, blah. What nonsense. Walking, exercising, shopping and listening to audio content are typical multitasking activities. Busy people love audio because it saves them time and allows two things to be done at once. Now your audio content can be accessed by even more people.

    Did you know that in August 2019 Google announced that in addition to text search they were employing AI to enable voice search too. This will take a while to roll out but this is the future and audio books have recently overtaken e-book sales. The audio track can become a podcast episode and be on any of the major podcast platforms. Also we can produce a transcript of the talk. There are transcribing technologies that are very good today which can reduce the cost and time of this exercise. Now we have a text version, we can project the value of the content further. It may go out as an email, a social media post or be reworked into a magazine article, or it may become a blog on your website.

    Repurposing of content is the name of the game. The video and or the snippets can be sent out to your email list, put up on social media and always sit there on YouTube. The same can be done with the audio track. Now what was a simple, ephemeral interlude in a room of fifty punters, has developed a life of its own and is being pushed out far and wide. The same message and messenger, but a vastly different impact and duration. If our object is to influence, then we need to make sure we are supporting the effort to give the speech with the tools available to maximise the results.

    This requires some planning and some expense. But as I mentioned, we are not leaping to our feet every month giving a public speech to a business audience. This is something we would be lucky to do two or three times a year. When you take that into account and consider how much we can leverage what we are doing, we get a lot more bang for our buck. We are going to give the talk anyway, so all the preparation is the same, yet the influence factor can be so much grander.
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    12 mins
  • 416 Unlocking The Vortex. How to Engage and Inspire Any Audience In Japan

    416 Unlocking The Vortex. How to Engage and Inspire Any Audience In Japan
    Dec 16 2024
    Think about the business presentations you have attended over the years. How many speakers were really engaging you during their talk. How many speakers can you even recall? One of the problems is that most business presentations are the “inform” type and are downloads of a whole bunch of data about the topic they are covering. Numbers don’t have to be dry and boring. The mantra is “Stories need data and data needs stories”. Do we get any stories though? No, and that is why we cannot remember the person or what they said. There is another problem with why we can’t remember the person, which when you think about it, is a disaster from the presenter’s point of view. What a waste of time to be a speaker and no one remembers what you said or you yourself. That means that their personal and professional brands are not being built through this activity. To get engagement we need to use the Persuasion Power Vortex. We combine eyes, face, voice, gestures and “ki” or our intrinsic energy and we focus all of this power on one point of concentration - on the single, left eye of the audience member. Here is what we are aiming for: 1. Eyes Normally in Japan, we don’t make eye contact, but our role as a presenter gives us permission to do so. By staring straight into the left eye of the listeners we create a powerful bond with that person, such that they feel there are only the two of us in this venue and the speaker, the authority power figure in the room, is talking directly to me. We choose the left eye as a single point of concentration, because looking at two things at once is difficult and because most people are right-handed. The right side of the body tends to be the most powerful, so we choose their softer side to concentrate our power, to have the most impact. The intensity of the eye power is such that we can only turn it on for around six seconds at a time or it is too intrusive. Longer and we make the person we are looking at feel very uncomfortable. 2. Face Our face can be a million watt power source because we can project our emotions. Sad, surprised, shocked, happy, inquisitive, puzzled, excited, dubious, opposed, in agreement – the list is long and we should be using these expressions during our talk. The secret is to match the facial expression with the content of what we are saying, so that we are congruent. When we combine one of these expression with a direct look into the eye of the audience member the impact is strong. That facial expression doesn't have to look mean and scary - we can lock on with a warm smile – it just depends on the congruency with the content of what we are saying. 3. Voice We don’t have to have that silky smooth, deep baritone DJ voice to be an effective communicator. We go with what we have regardless of how unhappy we may be with it. My husky voice is the product of thousands of karate kiai over five decades of training in the dojo. I can’t change that, so I ignore how I feel about it and just get on with it. You should do the same thing too. The tool has power when we know how to use it. Most people have one setting – the monotone and so the tool is ineffective. Like classical music we want to employ crescendos and lulls to create variety. Too soft or too strong all of the time defeats our aim of capturing the attention of our audience. When he hit the audience member with a power stare straight into their left eye, combine it with a strong facial expression and then use our voice to emphasise key words, the effect is instant and tremendous. 4. Gestures are silent, powerful amplifiers of what we are saying. We know that any gesture held longer than 15 seconds loses all power, so like a faucet, we turn the gesture on and off to have the most effect. When I gesture directly to you in the crowd, lock on to your left eye with my power stare, coordinate my facial expression with what I am saying and then hit a key word at the same time, you will really feel the power of what I am saying. The hitting of the key word doesn't have to be loud – it could be a conspiratorial whisper and still be highly effective. 5. Ki – intrinsic energy When we are presenting, our aim to is to project our body language energy right to the back wall, rather than letting it get trapped within our body. We create an electric current with our ki energy and we zap our audience members, one at a time, as we move our gaze around the room, covering ten people a minute. Hitting someone in the audience with this amount of ki energy, and combining our six second power stare, strong facial expression, voice coordination with the key words in our message and indicating directly to them with our gesture, brings everything to the single vortex of their left eye. They get zapped and feel total engagement, almost hypnotic, with us and what we are ...
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    13 mins
  • 415 Engaging Audiences: Why Eye Contact Challenges Presenters In Japan

    415 Engaging Audiences: Why Eye Contact Challenges Presenters In Japan
    Dec 9 2024
    At different times, I have done both formal and informal one-on-one coaching for people who want to improve their presentations skills in Japan. Most people can understand the concepts of voice modulation, gesture usage, posture, movement on stage, energy projection, design elements, slide deck build rules, rehearsal importance, etc. The one area where everyone seems to struggle is with the use of eye contact to engage their audience. I was coaching the Japanese President of a huge company with branches all over the world. I only had an hour because of his hectic schedule, but we got through the basics for the presentation he was going to be giving. We worked on the six pockets and six seconds rules together. The six pockets is an exercise where we grid the audience. Imagine a baseball diamond configuration. They have a left, centre, right, inner, outer field breakdown, which gives us the six pockets. The simple idea is to engage those audience members sitting in these six pockets during the talk. I am sure you have seen it, I certainly have, where the speaker only looks at one half of their audience and just blanks everyone else. This is not the way to engage people. The reason for this is their incorrect foot placement. Our feet should be pointed straight at 90 degrees to the audience and we use our neck to turn in the direction we want, without moving our legs, hips or shoulders. When we break the audience up into six pockets, we are conscious that we need to be including the entire crowd in our talk. There is no advantage to organise the six pockets, but then select one and spread the eye contact across the whole pocket, at the same time. I am sure you have seen this too, where the speaker scans the crowd and gives eye contact to everyone simultaneously and therefore to no one in particular. This will not improve audience engagement. Instead, we need to select one person sitting in one of those six pockets, look them straight in the eye and hold their gaze for six seconds. Less than that is fake eye contact and longer becomes psycho axe killer intrusive. After giving that person the full six seconds, we now switch gears and pick up someone sitting in one of the other pockets, and do it at random. This is important, because we must stay unpredictable. We don’t want the audience to relax and just switch us off. Keep them on their toes, so that they are concentrating on what we are saying and not secretly glancing at their phone. In one minute, we can make a direct one-on-one connection with ten people scattered around the room. For those seated at the back, at that distance, the ten people seated around the person we have selected, all think we are making direct eye contact with them. In this way, we can really amplify the sense of personal connection. Now I went through all of this with the President. He really nailed the posture, energy projection, gestures, voice modulation, but the eye contact was always fleeting and lasting only around two or three seconds. This is not enough to grab the person you are looking at. He also did a so-so job working the six pockets. Actually, I would say he got to the people sitting in the centre and pretty much ignored those at the extremes or in the cheap seats down the back. Later, I was thinking, “why is this eye contact thing so hard for people?” Intellectually, he got it, but he didn’t have the patience or discipline to apply it properly. My conclusion is the lacking ingredient is correct rehearsal. In our High Impact Presentations classes, if we find someone isn’t getting the eye contact completed long enough, we ask everyone in the class to stand up and stay standing until they receive six seconds of sustained eye contact. Making eye contact and then looking away and resuming eye contact once again doesn’t come under the term “sustained”, so it doesn’t count. We actually worked on this sustained eye contact with the President in rehearsal, but the time we had together wasn’t enough. My recommendation is to find a partner and then in Round One, practice holding eye contact with them for one minute, until it feels more comfortable. To take it to the next level in Round Two, stare at them intently with a strong gaze for thirty seconds and no looking away or breaking off the eye contact. In Round Three, maintain that powerful eye lock and keep it for six seconds, then relax. Previously, you had done a minute and then completed thirty seconds, so you will find that a measly six seconds feels like nothing. Like everything, creating new habits takes time and effort. Make the time to practice because, as I have outlined, this ability is not within the grasp of most people. In this regard, it is relatively easy to stand out amongst other speakers and presenters. In most areas of business, this is extremely difficult. When we get to the world of presenting, because most people are so ...
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    12 mins