Episode 48: THE Leadership Japan Series - Introducing How to Make Your Presentations High Impact
Greg: Konnichiwa and welcome to Episode 48 of THE Leadership Japan podcast. I am your host in Tokyo, Dr. Greg Story, president of Dale Carnegie Training Japan, and much more importantly, you are a student of leadership, highly motivated to be the best in your business field. If you would like your own access to 102 years of the accumulated wisdom of Dale Carnegie training through free white-papers, guidebooks, reports, training videos, blogs, course information plus much more then go to japan.dalecarnegie.com. Today, we are going to explore how to make your presentations high impact presentations. This is a course introduction on how to have more persuasive, more impressive presentation skills.
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Greg: Thank you for coming to our preview of High Impact Presentations. We will be taking you through how the program works and you get a chance to practice. So this won’t be just sitting there thinking about it, you’ll actually have a chance to do it so we can demonstrate how this works. Today we are going to look at some examples of high impact. This is not just a presentations course. We have presentation courses which are a little bit shorter in nature, just a one day activity called `basic’ for people who are beginning. This is High Impact for people who want to have real capacity to be persuasive. That might be a one on one capacity. It might be like this, one to a small group. It could be one, two or three to a large group. What you learn in this particular course is how to deal with every single level of complexity. That’s very very important.
The objectives. Overthe two days program, we take 12 people so it’s very intense because it’s so much coaching. There’s so much coaching involved. With 12 people it’s a very good number. The course - how to plan and structure your presentation. We do many varieties of presentations so you learn the full scope of what you need to know. And how to begin a presentation with a very positive impression and how to keep that. Your first impression and your last impression are really important. You know yourself; your first impression of something tends to be very strong and it’s very hard to unwind that. So with presenting you’ve got to get that right. And also the last thing you say tends to be what people remember. And the final impression is what they tend to remember, so you’ve got to get that right too. And how to be natural and relaxed. At Dale Carnegie, we don’t teach acting. This is not Shakespeare. You don’t have to be somebody else like Steve Jobs or Barack Obama or whoever it might be. No. The critical thing is you are you. You be yourself. Be your natural self, but be skilled as your natural self. So what you already are-perfect. You don’t need to be anybody else-you have your own style. But be skilled in your own style. And clarity around the ideas. Sometimes, particularly in complex cases where there is a lot of information, the audience can’t follow. Your explanation might be too long and you can’t quite get to the point. We teach how to get to the point. And also with force so the people will follow what you say. If you don’t have that energy and passion when you say it, people don’t tend to go with it. Let me give you an example. If I started my presentation today, like this. How would this be? (Quietly) Hi. It’s great to be here today. I’m the president of Dale Carnegie Japan. We’re a fantastic training organization.
No force. But listen to what I said. “Hi, it’s great to be here today. I’m the president of Dale Carnegie Japan and we’re a fantastic training organization.” The words are great, but there’s no force so you don’t buy the message. You don’t buy the message at all. So we are going to learn how to communicate and create some force so people buy that message. And how to sell ideas and inspire other people.
This is very interesting. They did a survey in America of 200 vice presidents of very large American companies. What do you think about the presentations that you listen to in business? Only 3% thought they were stimulating. 40% say,“it makes me feel sleepy”. Who here in Japan has ever been to a Japanese presentation that you felt sleepy? Go on. Everyone put up your hands. Of course you have, right? That’s always the case, especially after noon. It’s a killer in Japan. And then 44% said they’re boring. So if you think about it, 97% of people aren’t doing a particularly good job. So by learning some fundamental skills, and practicing, you can be in this elite group,very, very simply. But you have got to put in the work. What it says to you - hey not many people are good at this. I could stand out just by improving my skills. I could be much better than 97% of the population. Think about your own business that you are in now. How hard is it to be better than 97% of the other businesses that you are competing with now? That’s pretty tough to be 97% better. But you personally, you could be. You could definitely be better. 97% better than everyone else, through this course.
I gave you a little example before where what I said and the way I said it didn’t work. We call it incongruent. Things didn’t line up. What I said, the words, and the way I said it did not match. When that happens, a study by Albert Radin, at UCLA found that people don’t listen to what you say. People don’t listen to the words. Only 7% of the actual words get heard. They’re making up their feeling about your presentation by looking at how you’re dressed, how you look, and the other thing it said was by your voice tone and style of speech. But, when you make a presentation, all of you when you prepare a presentation, I’m sure you put a lot of effort into the content. Would that be right? Do you worry about the content? Yes, of course you do. You want to make sure that the content is right. So what do you do? You probably spend a lot of time on PowerPoint or time in preparation, in content writing. Most people spend 99% of their time on PowerPoint and 1% on preparation of delivering the PowerPoint. That’s the problem. PowerPoint is not the presentation. You are the presentation. And you need to practice, so, when things don’t work here we go for what we see. So when I did that little demonstration before and I said, “It’s great to be here. I’m Greg Story, president of Dale Carnegie Japan. We’re a fantastic training company.” If I put those words on the board, you’d say ok, right, I get the message 100%. But you didn’t get that message at all. You got no power, no eye contact; voice is weak, looking down. You got all of those messages so it killed the message. Now here is the point. Even if you do fantastic preparation and you get the best PowerPoint in the world, if you get up there and you don’t deliver it in the right way, with enthusiasm, energy, then people won’t go for the message. They’ll go for you and conclude - not very good, because you are not energized or interesting. They just forget you and think boring. That is why you are in that 97%. You’re not working. So this is something we need to look at.
So this is the question: What is the message? What do you think is the message?
(Student) Body language.
Greg: Body language, yes. That’s definitely one of them. What else do you think is the message? It’s not a trick question. But I hope that you have the answer. You are the message. And this is very important because the PowerPoint is not the message. The handouts are not the message. Actually, you are the message. Now we have to understand that. You are the message. So, what you do becomes absolutely critical to making this work. We’re going to practice a little bit of a presentation in a minute. But this structure, for example, is just one of the structures we teach. We have many different structures. I’ll talk about those in a minute, but just to give you an example of one. Where we’re looking for persuasion power. You need to design how you’re going to open the speech. Now opening the speech either in Japanese or in English does not really involve saying,“Thank you very much…Thank you for inviting me…I’m really pleased to be here…my name is Dr. Greg Story…I’m the president of Dale Carnegie Japan….” That is not an opening. That is definitely not an opening. Yes it’s one type of opening, but a very weak opening. And everybody does it. So it doesn’t stand out. No power. No power at all. So what you want is something that is both cleverly designed, lots of power, and then you’re giving points, key points. But those key points have to be backed up with evidence so that people will believe the point. So point, evidence, point, evidence. Then, go into your close. Again, final impressions are very important.
The close, we break it up in this particular case into an action benefit statement. “There for everyone, I recommend that you take the point of the presentation with you and if you do, you will become a much more persuasive speaker. See, action benefit, that type of thing. Particularly in business, this is very powerful because you are able to get people to come onboard. Now, if you do it the other way, and this comes up sometimes Japanese audiences say well, I heard that you know for western culture you guys get straight down to business and give the action benefit at the front. First tell people what the conclusion is. Yes, in some cases that is true. But if you want to be successful as a communicator, that’s not the way to go. Because as soon as you get into this you start getting push-back because there is no context, no background. You’re giving the answerand immediately people are thinking all the reasons why that’s wrong, why they should reject your idea. So if you’re clever, you go into an opening, you provide some context, then go into the close which is action-benefit. What we recommend is what you call the magic formula, where it’s like this - 90% of the time is providing the context, and 5% is providing the action benefit at the end. The beauty of this magic formula system is that you cannot argue with my context, because it’s my context. You can argue with my conclusion about the context, but you can’t argue the context. So you’re going to hear the context, the background of why I’m recommending something first, without being able to challenge it. You can’t challenge that. When I get to this part, you can challenge that recommendation, you can challenge this part. But if we do it round the other way, people tend to reject what you are saying because they don’t accept your recommendation and then when you try to get to explain the context, their minds are already closed off. You see how this works?
This is just one example of how we teach people to be more effective at communication by switching the roles. I’ll give you an example. Say we’re at a company meeting so we’re thinking about marketing, budget, what we’re going to spend on marketing. And we’ve got some issues on how much money we have to spend. An example and I’ll be very brief.
“I was talking to Mark, who is based in New York and he was telling me that their experience was when they allocated this amount of money in their marketing budget to buy ad-words with Google and Yahoo - prominent ad-word sites, they found that there was a tremendous take-out in leads being generated by that. They also found that the wording had to be very carefully decided on, which ad-words they selected. But the upshot was that by investing a certain amount of money, the return they got was 3 to 4 to 5 times the normal reaction that they got previously. So therefore my recommendation is that we should also allocate similar monies for ad-words, and if we do we are also liable to get 4 or 5 times lead generation.”
So when I talk about Mark, when I talk about his experience in New York and what happened, you can’t argue with that. You can’t say that didn’t happen. Or Mark wasn’t there, Mark didn’t say that. You can’t argue with that. When I get down here where I say, “Let’s do what they did”, maybe you can argue with that but you already heard me out and then I give my recommendation. So as an example of the magic formula to convince people, this is one of the examples that we use.
Now as I said, this is a two-day intensive program. It’s coming up in August. It’s a Tuesday and a Wednesday, runs from 9 to 6. On day one, we come out creating that first impression. We’re going to practice that today, all of us. We’re going to practice creating a positive first impression in a little bit. In the second session we look at how to be more credible when you present. Because, like I was before, this has no credibility, no body language, no power, voice is weak, looking down. Lacks credibility. You’re not going to follow my recommendations. So how to speak with credibility. And how to present complex information. This is very important. Sometimes it’s not a simple subject. We have to give very detailed, difficult information. But how to do that in a way that people can easily absorb it. That’s not so simple, but we teach that. So, for example, first impressions. We try and work on that first positive impression, get that right. And you’ve got to think about yourself as a presenter. What is your benchmark, what is your standard for that? What are your objectives for the training? So we’ve got two days of training and in the beginning you set some objectives for yourself. How to build up a rapport with your audience. And then also create a vision for yourself so you’ve got a pathway. So the training is set up - what’s the standard that I want? What is the particular objective that I want out of this? And what is my vision for where I will be in six months to twelve months’ time? So you can work towards that vision. So you do all that in the first session.
The second session is on increasing creditability. So the second session, how to communicate with increased creditability and so forth. How to present a positive image of our organization. How to project enthusiasm. Enthusiasm it’s catching, it’s contagious. If you’ve got energy and enthusiasm, people are more likely to follow you and believe you. And competency with confidence in your communication. And then how to bring in evidence. You make a statement, I might doubt it. But if you make a statement with evidence, I’m more likely to follow you and believe you. We need to work out how to do that in a way that’s very effective. And then presenting complex information. So we need some flexibility in making complex material simple. So you've got to think differently. Particularly experts are very aware of the content. They’re used to talking to other experts, but when they’re talking to non-experts, sometimes you can’t follow them. So you’ve got to understand how to make it understandable to others, even though it’s very complex. We’ve got techniques for doing that. And then make it interesting. Make it interesting. It doesn’t have to be boring. You’ve got to find ways to make even complicated information exciting. And then find the level of your audience and pitch your presentation at that right level. Logical progression through the presentation, and then try to make some emotional contact. You’d think in a dry formal presentation that wouldn’t be important. But it’s important because we are emotional creatures. Justify with logic, but we’re emotional. So you’re trying to develop emotional contact with your audience so they’ll believe you, or they will follow you. We’ll do that with a whole series of activities that we have today.
So day two, we work on how to have great impact. So this is a real stretch session. It’ll take you right out of any comfort zone to have a bigger range of possibilities when you present. You’ll come out of this session really confident, really confident. Your realm of possibilities will become much larger when you do this session. Very exciting session, my favorite session. And then how to motivate others to action. If you’re a leader, or if you’re in sales, or if you want to get cooperation from your team members or your subordinates then you've got to get them motivated to come with you. How do you do that? You can’t just yell at them, “Be motivated!”. That doesn’t work. You have gotto find out how to get their motivation, how to get them excited to adopt your policy, to adopt your idea, to cooperate with you, to buy your product, whatever it might be. We’re talking about presentation skills here. As I said it could be one to one, it could be one to a smaller group or it could be one to many. All of these things are important. Then, when you have a pressure situation, particularly when you get into things like questions and answers. When you’re presenting, you’re in control. You’re good. As soon as you get to Q&A, you’re no longer in control. Right? The questioners are in control. Unless you know what you’re doing. We teach you how to know what to do. So you never, ever get into a situation where you feel, I’m out of control here. Or, I’m embarrassed. Or, I feel under attack or stress and pressure. We fix that for you. And this might even be simple; it doesn’t have to be a big audience. This could be at a typical meeting. I’ve been in companies where there is a lot of rivalry between different divisions: sales and marketing; IT and everybody. You get these different groups and sometimes you get into the meeting and people are using questions as knives. It’s not really for the information. They are trying to embarrass the person. They are trying to make a political point. They are trying to score points, as we say in English. That's the reality of some people’s use, particularly of Q&A. Or it could be inside the company, it could be a wider audience. But how we respond to that shows a lot about our professionalism. And this is the most high pressure. We put you through some really high pressure stuff here. So you’d come out much stronger. When you come out of that you say no problem. It’s like an athlete will over-train for the event. Will they run 26 miles for a marathon, some 42 odd kilometers for a marathon? No, they run hundreds of kilometers for a marathon, right? They over-train. Same thing here. We over-train so that when you get into a situation and someone attacks you through a question, you don’t fall apart, or look embarrassed, or try to escape. You look very professional, very calm, very confident, and you answer the question beautifully. And everyone goes, wow, I’m glad that guy didn’t ask me that question. They look at you and say, geez I wish I could do that. That’s what we do here.
How to inspire people to embrace change. If you are leading your organization, no matter how small a group and you want an improved outcome. Now I don’t know, in your company are they happy with last year’s results? Or do they want a higher result this year? A better result or a higher result is two things. Either you do something new or you do something you’ve done before but you do it in a slightly different way. Otherwise same thing, same way, we get the same result. So better or improved or higher means new or slightly different. Either of those things is a change. And people are resistant to change. They’re in their comfort zone, they’re comfortable. They don’t want to step out of their comfort zone. They don’t want to embrace change. But you need to get the better results. You’ve got to get people to come with you to embrace change. How do you do that? This is how you do that. We’ll talk about that.
In that particular section we’re going to increase our flexibility by use of expression, gestures, voice modulation, speed, effort. With Japanese people that’s a bit tricky because you’re speaking in Japanese style - it’s a very flat language. When I first came to Japan, I went to Jochi University and started learning Japanese and the sensei said, no no no no. Not up and down. Flat, flat. Because as a foreigner, I would be saying (Japanese phrases) up and down right. He said, no, no. Flat,flat. So when you’re speaking Japanese, because it’s a rather monotone, flat language, we’ve got to teach you how to inject speed, and take speed out. Teach you how to inject power and take power out. To have the variation. In many other tonal languages like English, we can add the tones, up and down. You can still get a lot of variety in Japanese, but you’ve got to practice that.
Sometimes you have to get up and deliver material that’s not created by you. Suddenly someone says, oh you’ve got to present this. Oh my god, I have? How do you own that material? We teach you in those sort of situations too. And sometimes you have to read the material. We of course, would say, you never read material. But sometimes you have to read things. You might be representing your boss. It might be a particular document that for legal reasonshas to be exactly as it is written. How to do that in a way that’s interesting. We can teach that. Also, things that might stop you from being flexible. We deal with those. So that’s that section.
And the section on motivating others to action. This section here. We look for motivating others to action. How do we get results? How do we persuade an audience to take action? How do we provide evidence that’s credible? How to be motivational and brief, clear, and be convincing. And that’s what we are going to cover in that part of the session. So we are talking about inspiring people to embrace change. The content for that one will be both logic and emotion. We buy on emotion and we justify with logic. That’s how the world works. We buy on emotion and we justify with logic. It’s the same. You buy the message emotionally, and you justify it with logic. Same thing. So were going to teach you how to have both working for you. You get plenty of structure, plenty of presentation, detail, evidence. That’s all great. But if you don’t have a way of appealing to the audience, it doesn’t work. And then that structure makes it easy for the audience to follow. Be convincing. Again, how to provide that strong evidence and also offer solutions that show your objective. You might offer them three ways of doing something and recommend one of them. And then people feel, oh I’m getting a choice of things as opposed to a directive. And responding to pressure situations. This is difficult. How to keep calm when your audience is rather hostile. Someone’s attacking you. How do you keep calm? We teach that. How to have very positive clear messages. Strategic ideas - how to sell those. Big picture ideas. And again you’ve got to be competent, confident. And how to handle a stressful situation with good communication.
For impact you want three things: good structure; content that’s got good evidence in it; interesting, but also delivery. If you’ve only got a logical structure but the evidence is weak, it doesn’t have impact. If you have really good content, but the structure is all over the place, I can’t logically follow where we are going with this. I get lost. It doesn’t work. If you've got really good structure and its content is really great but your personal delivery isn’t good, that’s not going to have impact either. So you see, you need all three. And these require practice. Often people will get, maybe the structure is ok, content might be ok, but this is often the weak point – the delivery. It doesn’t match. And again, everyone spends all their time on PowerPoint and no time on practice. They wonder why they have a problem. As I said before, this part here is the presentation. Your face is the presentation. That is the presentation. Not the PowerPoint. The PowerPoint should be secondary to what we’re doing. We have to be the one.
So firstly, things that are defining our influence. How we look. How we look is very important. How you stand. How you’re dressed. That’s one thing. And how we communicate with people. They judge us by how we look. We do this don’t we. We meet someone. We can see their clothing. We can’t see inside their hearts. We can see their clothing, we can’t see inside their minds. So we make a judgment about how their face looks. How they’re dressed, the color combination or something. We make all these judgments. Then communication style is another one. Our attitude and self-control. So how do you come across? Do you come across as a confident professional someone who’s a bit shy and not really sure of themselves and worried about how you look. And your attitude and self-control is under pressure. You look professional all the time. And then how we relate to people. This again, first impression. How we are dealing with an audience. And then finally this, the combination of your professional competence. If you want to be seen as a professional, these are the sorts of things that we need to be looking at.
We are going to do some coaching in a minute. Let me talk a little bit about that. Now, if you imagine a golf coach, the golf coach is teaching someone how to swing. After the person has taken a swing, they don’t say you should have done this or you should have done that. Next time do this. It’s too late. What does the golf coach do? While you are taking the swing, the golf coach is saying,“Left should down. Drive on the back leg, drive on the back leg.” Peppering you with corrections so you can make the adjustment while you are doing the swing. That’s how we coach. So when you are up here presenting, and you will be up here presenting in a minute, we’re not saying to you after you’ve done it, oh you should have done this and you should have done that. While you are doing it we’ll give you some correction so you can fix it while you’re up there. So you get instant change. As I said before, getting people to change is not so easy. People don’t want to change because they like their comfort zone. It’s very active the coaching. Innovation, it’s helping to stretch you. It’ll challenge you of course. And we ask you to be accountable for your own progress too. Hold you accountable for what you are doing. Well also model the outcomes.
First impressions, let’s think about that. This is coming back to the objective that I dealt before – first impressions. This is what we are going to work on now. We’re all going to work on this – how to set up your first impression. How you want to come across to people. We’ll work mainly on this part, just now. We’re just take one little section of the training and try it.
Closing: Thank you for joining THELeadership Japan podcast. I hope you enjoyed that. A few hints there on how to give high impact presentations. Remember, to access your Dale Carnegie free white-papers, guidebooks, training videos, blogs, course information, plus everything else then go to japan.dalecarnegie.com.
