Episode 50: THE Leadership Japan Series-Successful Public Speaking Part One
Intro: Greg: Konnichiwa and welcome to Episode 50 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 enjoy the program then you might like to consider subscribing on iTunes. Also, 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 talk about successful public speaking. This is a presentation to the Japan Market Expansion Competition (JMEC) audience on how to give a fantastic presentation.
(Audience Clapping)
Greg: Congratulations on getting your documents in on time. That is a fantastic achievement. No penalty points sounds good to me. As you heard, now its crunch time because the best plan can be overtaken by the second best plan if the presentation of the plan is superior. There are so many points in play for you. What we’re going to do this morning with our presentation skills will make a big difference in the final results. What you have in front of you is a manual, which is actually a manual for a full day of training on successful public speaking. Obviously with the time we have available to us, we won’t be going through the whole manual. I’ll pull little pieces out of it and we’re going to have lots of opportunity for actual practice. I’m going to talk today about giving presentations so that in your business career, as you are called upon to represent your organization or represent yourself, you’ll be able to do it in a professional manner. The most immediate application of the training will be for the judging panel, for JMEC oral presentations. I’ll talk about that in some detail as well as about some things you can think about for that.
So let us begin and we will look at some of the problems that come up in the research on oral presentation skills. Now this is a very interesting diagram. When they looked at presentations, the vast majority of presentations of people listening to are thought to be boring. And ones that aren’t boring make you plain sleepy and only 3% of business presentations were considered to be stimulating or interesting. What that says is that you very simply can place yourself in the top 3% because the competition is so weak, and so impotent, basically. It is worthwhile to think about that because you represent your organization in the first instance but you also represent brand you. We made assumptions about your organization based on you and how you come across. Now it could be an internal meeting, it could be a broader meeting, it could be a very large gathering. The presentation skills don’t change that much in terms of what you need to know. What we are going to look at today is how to be a person in the 3% group, rather than in the boring and sleepy group.
So can we talk with confidence? We are going to talk about fear of presenting in a moment, and structure and purpose of your presentation. Your opening and closing are very critical. We’re going to talk about why that is. First impression, last impression, how that works, and then evidence. What you say may or may not be true to the listener unless you have solid evidence to back it up. So this is the agenda for today. And again this is normally a whole day of training with lots and lots of role play and practice. We’ll have a truncated version of that for today and still have some practice.
Before we begin, though, in pairs, discuss yourself. Think about outstanding presenters. Think about people you respect; people you see and think wow that was a great presentation. What was the outstanding feature of their presentation? So take some moments. I’ll give you a couple of minutes. What are some qualities that you recognize yourself in outstanding presenters? Please go ahead, take a couple of minutes, discuss at your tables, and we’ll get some feedback. Go on up there and let’s get some feedback. George? Maybe you can start off and give us some qualities of an outstanding presentation that you’ve seen.
George: I guess interactivity. Not just speaking to the audience but engaging them at some level through dialogue, activities or something.
Greg: Ok, so the speaker is not separated from the audience. There is some interactivity, so they engage with the audience. Good point. What else came up? This table here.
(Participant) Impact. First impression. Eye contact with the audience.
Greg: Impact. First impression. Eye contact with the audience. Yes, we’re going to talk a little bit about that too. How about you guys? What did you come up with?
(Participant) Passion.
Greg: Passion. Some sense of energy. As trainers, we operate at about probably 120 to 130 percent energy levels. We do that because we take the audience of participants from around about 60% energy level driving it up to about 80 or 90%. It’s the same with an audience. Audiences can leave you very quickly. You have to have a lot more energy than you would in a normal conversational tone. When you are just chatting with each other, that’s a certain level. But if you want to be a presenter, you’ve got to take it right up and get that audience involved. Ok, how about this table over here?
(Participant) Clarity.
Greg: Clarity, yes. So it’s clear to understand what the points are that are being made.
(Participant) Yeah. Like there’s a structure.
Greg: So a structure that the audience can follow. Yes. How about over here, ladies?
(Participant) Confidence?
Greg: Confidence. How can you tell they’re confident?
(Participant) The way they appear or present themselves.
Greg: Yes. Body language. Voice tone probably would show a lot about their confidence. Any other points that you’ve thought about at your tables that haven’t come up yet? Yes, please.
(Participant) Voice modulation.
Greg: Voice modulation. So what about Japanese, though? What about when you speak in Japanese? It’s a flat tone, right? It is a problem. If you are a Japanese speaker and your language is flat, it’s a monotone, isn’t it? And if you are a foreigner and you are learning Japanese here, what has happened? Your sensei says, no no no. Greg, not that up and down. Flat, flat, flat. Which is a definite no in speakers. So the Japanese in the audience, you have to think about how you can have variety in your voice, and not put your audience to sleep. And hold that thought for a little bit later. One more? You’ve got another one, great you’re on fire.
(Participant) Easy to understand. No technical words and a clear message.
Greg: So no technical words and a clear message. No jargon, probably. I think most of us operate in companies where you can have an entire sentence composed of acronyms, which are entirely intelligible to the people outside the company. For the people outside the company they are like, what the hell are they talking about? So we’ve got to be careful with our audience consideration. I’ll take one more.
(Participant) Surprise.
Greg: Surprise. How do you mean by surprise?
(Participant) Something unexpected. Something not obvious.
Greg: Ok. Grabbing the attention of your audience. When you came in this morning, first of all you were stressed because you couldn’t find this building. (Laughter) Then you were stressed because you couldn’t get in the building. You’ve got a lot on your mind, and so does your audience. They’re at work, at an internal meeting. They have got a lot happening. You have to break in. You’ve got to get inside their head with your message. Sometimes something a little bit surprising captures our attention, grabs our attention and allows you to then bring in the message. So remember your audience’s heads are already bursting; they’re full. How can we get inside and get our message across? That’s a very good point.
In your manuals, if you have a look on page 1.3 there’s the qualities of outstanding presenters which many of you have already mentioned. We’ve picked most of those up. One of the problems - now I am going to use accounts as an example. I love using accounts as an example. Knowledge is thought to be very very critical. “I have got a lot of technical knowledge. I am an expert. I know what I am talking about. That should be enough. You know this presentation stuff, no. That’s fluff. People want the meat. They want the quality of my knowledge and the depth of my information.” Now, interestingly enough that’s not the case. What do people think is the case? They don’t put any effort into being a conveyor of that knowledge, of being someone who’s an exponent of their expertise in a way that really captures the attention of an audience. In this triangle, skill and attitude are basically 80% of what you need to be successful. Skill of delivery, skill of persuasion, skill of structure of a presentation. The delivery of the presentation. Attitude. Comes back to that passion that you talked about a minute ago. Wanting to be persuasive. Wanting to be memorable. Wanting to represent your organization as someone who is standing out amongst the crowd, and part of that 3% that we mentioned before. Don’t get trapped in the idea that because I am an expert in my field that’s enough. A lot of people make that mistake and they use it as an excuse not to develop their skills and they’ve basically got the wrong attitude. They are not seeing that they are the face of the company. If you are up here representing your company and you are boring, you are unprofessional, you are flat, you are dull, you are unclear, we judge your entire organization to be just like that. Because we make assumptions about the whole organization based on our exposure to you. So it’s not just your personal brand that’s being killed. Your company or organization brand is being killed as well. So don’t get tied into, oh I have knowledge so therefore that’s enough. It is not enough.
Now, there is a very famous study done by a professor Merangu. He looked at what happens when the communication delivery and the communication message don’t match up. What we call incongruent. They don’t match up. I’ll give you an example of that. (Quietly) “Good morning. My name is Dr. Greg Story. I’m the president of Dale Carnegie Training Japan. We are the world leaders in teaching presentations.” (Laughter) What did I say? I said,“Good Morning. My name is Dr. Greg Story. I am the president of Dale Carnegie Training Japan. We are the world leaders in teaching presentation skills.” Those were my words. But how many of you heard my words? Probably no one. Almost no one. What he found was that only 7% of our words are picked up where the delivery mechanism doesn’t match the message. If I write on the whiteboard what I just said and you read that you’d go, right, I’ve got that. But you would not get that from the way that I delivered it because I had no energy, no eye contact. I had no voice, no passion. And so you read my body language more than you listened to my words. You read or listened to my tone of voice more than what you heard I was saying. So the danger is when we are presenting something, if we are very flat and dull and weak in energy, people don’t hear the message at all. And if you team this slide up with the last slide and you’re a high flying accountant with lots of great knowledge and you are a very dull individual in terms of your presentation skills, or an engineer, or you’re anything in any profession, people don’t get the message. They buy what they see and the tone of how it is delivered. So we need to really pep it up when we are in front of groups, even if a small group, if we are going to get the message through. And this was researched a long time ago and it is very consistent. So incongruent. We go for everything else but the message. So we’ve got to be very careful about that.
In terms of preparation, we’ve got to look a little bit at fear and how to minimalize that. There’s a famous joke about people given selection, things they can make choices about, things they fear. And often death comes in behind public speaking. I don’t know how that works but people fear public speaking more than they fear dying. Jerry Seinfeld has a famous one liner. He talks about because of this, most people are more worried about giving the eulogy than being in the casket, than being dead. We’ll talk about that, and understanding your audience and trying to build a rapport. Some of you said that earlier-having a good first impression. You have strengths. You know, we don’t teach Shakespearean oratory at Dale Carnegie. We ask you to be yourself, but to be a professional you, not to be someone you are not. (Stage voice) “Ladies and gentlemen today we are presenting presentation skills. Let me tell you my struggle.” We don’t teach you that. We want you to be you. We want you to be a professional you. So don’t try to be Barack Obama or Steve Jobs or whoever you might think is a great presenter. Be the better you. Communicate with confidence and competence of course, and finally, help the audience to relax. This is what we would cover in the initial part.
Now the fear factor. We shouldn’t worry about the fear of speaking. It’s a natural human instinct. And it generally derives from the fact that people are unskilled. Adrenaline we know gives us a couple of things we can tap into. We can fight or we can flight. Those are classic - fight or flight. When you are presenting you can’t fly, necessarily. You’re stuck here. You’ve got to fight. But for some people that’s a very tricky thing to do. Now you can have a look at Michael Bay who is the director who did the Transformer series of movies. If you’ve not seen them on YouTube it is horrific. Absolutely horrific. He’s in Las Vegas. He’s in the Samsung event. He’s coming onstage. He’s going to give a presentation. His teleprompter goes down. Goes down. And he starts. He gets about 10 seconds into it and he’s got no teleprompter and he’s got no back up. He just gives up. He literally walks of the stage with his head down, his tail between his legs, destroying his personal brand, destroying the event, and disappeared. Because he didn’t have a backup plan he didn’t know what to do without a teleprompter. So you can see yourself destroyed very easily if you don’t know what you are doing. There was the fear factor for him. He didn’t know. The teleprompter’s broken. What do I do? Oh my god. I’m out of here. He escaped. He fleed. He fleed actually in that case.
It does give you energy though. Have that passion because the adrenaline is pumping. If you are rather a mild mannered person, tending to be a bit flat, that helps you get the energy going. Helps you get a lift in the voice a bit of body language going on there. And shows you’re committed, you care about the outcome. With fear it’s usually things we are worried about. In your manual we covered this onpage 1.5. You see a whole bunch of things on how to minimize fear. Let’s pick up a couple of those. One of those, obviously, know your audience, do your homework, be prepared. That’s an obvious thing. Funny thing. We talked about being prepared. Most people think preparation is doing the PowerPoint. So you’ll find the majority of presenters is going to spend 99% of their time on the PowerPoint or getting the materials together. And they spend 1% or less on practicing the delivery. The balance is totally crazy. Totally crazy imbalance. Just running through the flow of what you are going to say before you deliver it to an audience helps you a lot to realize where you need to put in some high energy parts, some low energy parts, speed in, speed out. But people don’t do that. They don’t take the time. Practice, even if it is on your own. If you can, do it in front of a mirror. If you are traveling, it often happens to me, I’m traveling and I am going to be presenting, keynote speaker. I’m in a hotel the night before. You know the hotel windows can become like a mirror actually. I use that and I’m gesturing and I’m speaking to people who don’t exist, imagining the audience in front of me to get myself in the flow of how I am going to present the next day. Practice, practice, practice. And keep practicing. So that’s a very very critical thing. Most people don’t bother to do that.
Don’t memorize it; know it so well that you can give it. People fear mistakes. Now only Michael Bay in that example Samsung event in Las Vegas knew what he was going to say. He was the only person in the room, perhaps other than his cohost, who did a lousy job of saving the day, let me tell you. Really left Michael Bay at the hand, I think. But he was the only guy in the whole room who knew what Michael Bay was going to say. So if the teleprompter goes down, Michael Bay talks about something. Only Michael Bay and the other guy know that. No one else would have a clue. Same thing for you. If something happens, remember, only you know where this is going. Your audience hasn’t got a clue. They haven’t been told yet. So it’s not quite going in the order that you anticipated it should go. Guess what. Only you know that. Oh no, oh no! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I got the second section before the first. Oh what did I do? Don’t tell the audience that right? Keep it a big secret. Don’t show that you made a mistake. Don’t show a thing. Poker face. The show must go on. Who would know that the order got mixed up? In most cases your audience won’t have a clue. They are not able to tell. So don’t be fearful of making a mistake. Because only you know it was a mistake.
Arrive early is a good one. I’m presenting so I think I was here with my friend I met in the elevator. The two of us arrived at the same time. Get here early. Set up early. Make sure it’s all working because there is nothing more pleasurable for a presenter than to see a PowerPoint on the screen, trust me, if you’re going to use PowerPoint. And even then it doesn’t matter. The show goes on anyway. A lot of audiences are quite happy not to have PowerPoint frankly. So when you get here make sure the equipment is working. And try and meet some of the people. I had the opportunity, if you remember, at that first event when I spoke about business planning that I went out into the audience and I talked to quite a few of you. I met you and I chatted. That was for me to get a tone for the audience and get a pulse of the day and find a bit about some people. Look for the French people in the audience so I can talk about them in business planning opportunity and look for that. It’s a good chance for you to do that early and then you feel a bit more connected with the audience. For example, I startedoff my presentation by asking George to make the comment. Now I know George because I see George all the time at his workplace. And so I can bring George into the conversation so now I am connecting with a member of the audience. I feel I am much closer to the audience and the audience feels I am much closer to them because I brought one of them into the conversation with me. This is a good thing, actually, if you are starting your presentation. You might say, well I was talking to Jim just before we started and he made a very good point. Or Mary raised an issue with me before I started that I want to talk about. Thank you for that Mary. Now Mary’s there and she’s not very important and Jim’s not very important so you’ve got the audience connected with you. And this will help you to allay your fears of I’m up here and you are out there, which tends to happen a little bit.
Butterflies. Sometimes it’s hard to stop your physical manifestations of fear. Now we have a beautiful prop here which I am going to grab. Imagine I’m at an event and there’s a speaker. He’s got one of these. It’s on a platform just like that. He’s representing his company, it’s actually one of the Japanese ministries. It was an IT sector New Year’s Eve party. And he’s representing his boss. He’s giving this presentation that his boss would give. And he is suffering. How do I know he is suffering? Well he makes a mistake. And I see some of you, a gentleman here and a couple of the ladies, wearing colored blouses or tops. If you are a presenter, never wear anything but white. Because if you perspire, and this room is getting hot, if I'm operating at a 120%, I will heat up, and you will start to perspire and your lovely blue shirt there is going to be a two tone dark blue and light blue combination. And the audience is going to be going, oh look at that. They won’t take any notice of your message. Now this gentleman, he unfortunately is wearing a blue shirt which had become two tone. And this might bring more excitement to it. He’s sweating. Perspiring. And it’s coming down the sides of his face here, pooling at the chin. And then he’s going… (Sound of drops) (Laughter) Right through the whole presentation. Now that guy was in severe pain. He’s under a lot of pressure and he showed it. Sometimes you can’t help it. Yes you might perspire. Try not to drip onto the mic, though. Maybe stand back a bit. Let it go on the floor or something. Get a handkerchief maybe.
But breathing is something that we profuse. Now Japanese should have a better sense of diaphragm breathing than Western culture. There is a classic example. There is a beautiful American woman, blonde, blue eyes, curvaceous. Speaks awesome Japanese, perfect. She married into a Japanese family in the sake business and she’s become involved in that and she also gives presentations. I attended one. And she’s gorgeous, the whole package. And yet she had this very big issue with breathing in the sense of she was taking very shallow breaths from the top of her lungs. So it would be like this. “I’m very pleased to meet you (loud shallow breath). Today is a very important day for our company (loud shallow breath).” Like this and she’s taken these shallow breaths all through the presentation which becomes incredibly annoying. She had to learn to breathe from the diaphragm. I am going to ask you to stand up now. Please everyone stand up. Now ladies this is going to be a bit embarrassing, I’m sorry. You are going to have to let your tummies go out, ok. Just place your hand, one hand on your tummy. What I want us all to do is as we take a breath in, try to take the breath from down here, not from the top of our lungs, so that the stomach actually goes out. You are pushing it out like that. So if you are going like that-wrong way. You want it to go this way. Ok so deep breath very slowly. Ready, go breathe. And out. Try to push that hand out. One more. Ok, sit down now. That’s a very simple demonstration of diaphragm breathing. We are trying actually to get the stomach area to expand because you are breathing air from deep in the lungs rather than breathing that very shallow breath that I talked of that this young lady was doing, which actually had a big impact on how she was speaking. That tends to give you a lot more oxygen to the brain, makes everything clearer and tends to calm you down a bit. So if you get a bit nervous, just take a moment. Slow your breathing down a bit. Use a bit of diaphragm breathing and give yourself a bit of a pep talk. I am a person who knows what they are talking about. I know my subject. I know what I am going to speak about. I should have no fear about my audience. I am going to engage with my audience. Get yourself in a very positive mode around the things that you can do.
The key point here you can see is preparation. Who is the audience? Who am I speaking with? What’s the purpose? We’ll talk about that in a minute because not every presentation has the same purpose. How to open and close it. What is your content with evidence? And then practice, practice, practice. It may be difficult for you to practice with other people,but if you can that’s great - they can give you feedback. Now, don’t ever ask for feedback unless you specify how you want that feedback. If you say, “please give me some feedback”, every single person, unless instructed, will usually go into critic mode. Let me tell you what’s wrong with you. And proceed to tell you and your confidence goes kaplunk, like that. Ask them, “please give me feedback - tell me what am I doing that is good; that’s working for me, then please tell me, because I’m going to do this again in a moment how I can do it better”. So the whole feedback process you control and you can put off on the front foot not the back foot. And you’ll be more open to receive the feedback. You’ll be happier about it. You’ll be calmer about it. You’ll see it as very positive when you are getting feedback.
Who’s the audience? With you, the audience will be the judges. They’ve read through the business plans, all of them. Ok so they are very knowledgeable. And they have been judges before. They have done this for a very long time. Ok, so, what’s the purpose? The purpose of your presentation is to win the competition by showing the most professionalism, being the most persuasive, and taking a very long piece of work and press it down to a very small period of time and give the highlights. Don’t worry about anything but the gems. Look for the gems, look for the diamonds and just hit them with that because that’s the key thing that is going to be most impressive. How will I open? How will they break through all that clutter that’s in the mind of our audience? What will I be able to say? Now particularly if you are going to have half hour blocks, bang, bang, bang. A whole couple of days of presentations. You can imagine, you’re the last team on the day. You’re the last team or the team after lunch. Now if you get the draw and you get the after lunch, you say redraw, redraw. I want a redraw. Don’t take the one after lunch. That’s a tough one. You’ve got to be really on fire with the opening if you’re doing the after lunch one or you’re the last one of the day. You better be on fire. What are the key points I am going to make? What are the gems? What are the absolute gems that we’ve found? The real insights, the real value pieces that we’re going to add to the client. What are they? What’s the evidence? You’d better have the evidence, proof. Back it up. Point, proof. Point, proof. Like that. Last impression. How can I finish this off so the judges are going to remember our presentation? That’s what we are looking for.
Now in this particular case, your audience is of a very specific nature. They’ve been doing this a long time. But think about a business audience. What degree of knowledge do they have? Are they all experts? Are some of them experts? Are some of them amateurs? You’ve got to judge according to the audience. They might be a mixed group? If you go too complex you lose your audience, or simple your audience gets bored. What level do you need to hit it at? What’s their degree of expertise? What’s their degree of experience about the subject? And then bias. Do they have a bias? Do they have a doubt about something you are going to say? You might have made some claims, perhaps in your paper that the judges might think sounds like a bunch of crap. That doesn’t gel with my experience. So you might have some points you know are going to get some pushback from the judges. So you’ve got to be prepared for the pushback. Expect that in your audience you will have that, some people who will ask nasty questions.
Closing: Well that’s the end of Part 1. Thank you for joining THE Leadership Japan Series. Remember, consider subscribing on iTunes. To access your Dale Carnegie free white-papers, guide books, training videos, blogs, course information plus much much more then go to japan.dalecarnegie.com.
