When a young Eva Kollisch arrives as a refugee in New York in 1940, she finds a community among socialists who share her values and idealism. She soon discovers ‘the cause’ isn’t as idyllic as it seems. Little does she know this is the beginning of a lifelong commitment to activism and her determination to create radical change in ways that include belonging, love and one's full self. In addition to Eva Kollisch’s memoirs Girl in Movement (2000) and The Ground Under My Feet (2014), LBI’s collections include an oral history interview with Eva conducted in 2014 and the papers of Eva’s mother, poet Margarete Kolllisch, which document Eva’s childhood experience on the Kindertransport. Learn more at www.lbi.org/kollisch . Exile is a production of the Leo Baeck Institute , New York | Berlin and Antica Productions . It’s narrated by Mandy Patinkin. Executive Producers include Katrina Onstad, Stuart Coxe, and Bernie Blum. Senior Producer is Debbie Pacheco. Associate Producers are Hailey Choi and Emily Morantz. Research and translation by Isabella Kempf. Sound design and audio mix by Philip Wilson, with help from Cameron McIver. Theme music by Oliver Wickham. Voice acting by Natalia Bushnik. Special thanks to the Kollisch family for the use of Eva’s two memoirs, “Girl in Movement” and “The Ground Under My Feet”, the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College and their “Voices of Feminism Oral History Project”, and Soundtrack New York.…
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Greg Story and Dale Carnegie Training에서 제공하는 콘텐츠입니다. 에피소드, 그래픽, 팟캐스트 설명을 포함한 모든 팟캐스트 콘텐츠는 Greg Story and Dale Carnegie Training 또는 해당 팟캐스트 플랫폼 파트너가 직접 업로드하고 제공합니다. 누군가가 귀하의 허락 없이 귀하의 저작물을 사용하고 있다고 생각되는 경우 여기에 설명된 절차를 따르실 수 있습니다 https://ko.player.fm/legal.
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415 Engaging Audiences: Why Eye Contact Challenges Presenters In Japan
Manage episode 454649769 series 2950797
Greg Story and Dale Carnegie Training에서 제공하는 콘텐츠입니다. 에피소드, 그래픽, 팟캐스트 설명을 포함한 모든 팟캐스트 콘텐츠는 Greg Story and Dale Carnegie Training 또는 해당 팟캐스트 플랫폼 파트너가 직접 업로드하고 제공합니다. 누군가가 귀하의 허락 없이 귀하의 저작물을 사용하고 있다고 생각되는 경우 여기에 설명된 절차를 따르실 수 있습니다 https://ko.player.fm/legal.
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 hopeless, there are many chances for us to shine.
435 에피소드
415 Engaging Audiences: Why Eye Contact Challenges Presenters In Japan
THE Presentations Japan Series by Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
공유Manage episode 454649769 series 2950797
Greg Story and Dale Carnegie Training에서 제공하는 콘텐츠입니다. 에피소드, 그래픽, 팟캐스트 설명을 포함한 모든 팟캐스트 콘텐츠는 Greg Story and Dale Carnegie Training 또는 해당 팟캐스트 플랫폼 파트너가 직접 업로드하고 제공합니다. 누군가가 귀하의 허락 없이 귀하의 저작물을 사용하고 있다고 생각되는 경우 여기에 설명된 절차를 따르실 수 있습니다 https://ko.player.fm/legal.
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 hopeless, there are many chances for us to shine.
435 에피소드
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For many people it may seem we are getting into oxymoron territory here. “Public speaking…enjoyable? You must be kidding mate”. Many are called upon to speak and reluctantly they give their talk without talent, enthusiasm or particular motivation. A duty, an unavoidable pain, like going back to the dentist for that root canal. As we rise in our careers, the necessity to speak in public goes right up in frequency and length. Unfortunately, no one tells you this is what is on the cards for future you, so you are perpetually unprepared. If we knew this was part of our unescapable future, then we would all get the training and end the misery right there. Even for those who are sufferers, do they seek relief through getting training? No. They just continue blundering forward, reeking havoc wherever they go, destroying their personal and professional brands. This includes those who are devastated by nerves, quivering, pulse racing, hot flushes sweeping over their body, faces going bright red, knees knocking, stomach queasy and throat parched. Do they get training? No. They just lurch from fearfulness to fearfulness, whenever they are required to speak in front of others. What do we need to fix this. Obviously training is one part and so is repetition. Most speeches though are one offs, a one and done affair. The speech has been used up for that audience, on that day and then it is shelved forever. So how do we get repetition? We may not get the chance to repeat the content, but we can give more talks. To do that though we have stop hiding from the chance. As a child in Brisbane, I watched the Three Stooges on black and white television and one of the jokes would be two of them would step back when asked to volunteer, making it appear that the other one had stepped forward, wanting to do the task. Reluctant speakers are mentally doing the same thing. Whenever the chance to get some repetition going comes up, they step back and let others do it. Even if the chance to present to an audience is a one time thing, that doesn’t mean the talk is a one time thing. If we are smart, we are giving this speech numerous times. We do these without an audience, in private, as a rehearsal for the big event. I competed in senior level Karate competition for many years and would never dream of going on to the mat and doing the kata or prearranged patterns, once only just for the judges. I would be practicising for months in the Dojo, rehearsing that kata, over and over again until I dropped. Why would putting your reputation out there in business require anything less? By the time you hit that stage you are well practiced and confident. Consequently your brain doesn’t release masses of chemicals preparing you for battle with a sabre toothed tiger, where you either run away or stand your ground and fight. Consequently, come showtime you are not so nervous. Some nerves yes, but not debilitating. The other mental shift is to decide who this speech is about. Not what it is about, but who it is about. For people who hate speaking in public or become crippled with nerves, the speech is all about them. It is about their mental trauma, induced by how they feel they will be judged by the audience and their deep fears of imminent, unmitigated disaster, about to humiliate them for the rest of time. We must switch the focus to the audience. We are giving each person six seconds of eye contact, inducing that feeling in them, that they are only person in the room. Hawk like, we are scrutinising their reaction to what we are saying. We are judging if they are with us or do we have to push harder to bring them on board. We are pumping out our ki (気) or intrinsic energy into the audience, to maximise our body language. We are using congruent gestures to add lustre and power to our words. Tonal variety, variations in speed and power engage the audience, such that they are eschewing their mobile phone’s siren call to escape to the internet. In response, some will smile, nod, laugh at your amusing asides, follow you through the navigation of the talk. After a while, some will start to lean into you. It will only be a few millimetres, but what a rush that feeling is. When twenty, thirty, fifty, one hundred people start doing that at the same time, there is a powerful energy in the room. It hits you like a drug racing through your veins and leaves you looking for your next hit. This is when public speaking surpasses duty and becomes a real pleasure.…
1 Simultaneously Dealing With All Four Audience Types When Presenting 14:14
14:14 
나중에 재생 
나중에 재생 
리스트 
좋아요 
좋아요14:14
나중에 재생 나중에 재생 리스트 좋아요 좋아요Experts, pseudo experts, amateurs, believers, sceptics, supporters, enemies make up that sea of faces in front of us when we get up to speak. We can get some basic data from the organisers about who is in the room. What industries, companies, gender, age configurations are arrayed in those venue seats. What we can’t tell are the information assimilation biases of our audience members. This means we have to plan for a spread of reactions to what we are going to say. By plan, factor that into the content and the delivery of our talk. How do we do that? There will be four basic personality styles in that random selection of individuals gathered to hear our talk. Obviously we can’t easily satisfy four different demands at the same time. During the course of the presentation we have to input elements which will appeal to all four, at different times. Usually speakers don’t do this at all. They plan and deliver based on their own preferred styles and to hell with the rest of the room. Actually, it isn’t that nuanced. It is not a conscious decision and more of one by neglect. Content needs to have evidence. The degree of granularity we can go into however will be linked to our knowledge base and also to the time available to cover the topic. If we just bludgeon our audience with numbers for forty minutes, the Analtyicals in the room will be euphoric and everyone else totally nonplussed. They love the detail, the proof, the evidence through numbers and 0.0001 is a fully acceptable number for them. They don’t care about us speaking in a monotone or being fully boring, as long as we keep coming with more valuable data. They will ask us incredibly detailed questions about what we presented and will be carefully checking to spot any contradictions or errors in the numbers or the assertions. Amiables are very conservative and low key. They don’t like bombastic outbursts. Radical ranting and venting don’t go down very well with them. Calm delivery, in not too a loud a speaking voice is appreciated. They like plenty of reference to people. Who was involved, what did they do, how did they feel about it, are all curiosity factors for them. They generally won’t raise their hand to ask a question, because they prefer to keep a low profile. If we are low key throughout the talk, then the Analyticals and the Amiables will be fine with that, but not so other key types in the audience. We need to have periods of calm interaction with our audience, to keep these first two groups happy. Focusing on data and people tends to go down well. Expressives are bored with all of that data and hate that low energy stuff speakers get up to. They want some action, flamboyance, excitement, passion, enthusiasm, pizzazz and entertainment. They don’t care too much for the nitty gritty detailed evidence. They want to see some powerful belief and emotional commitment to what we are saying. They like the towering rhetoric of the motivational speaker. If really moved, leaping out of their chairs and being supportive would be no problem for them. We need to provide some big picture speech elements for this group. At specific moments we can unleash our passion for our recommendations, get very powerful in that advocacy and really push out the volume and the energy. Drivers are very outcome focused, so what value can you bring to me? What can I learn that will make me better so that I can use it to improve what I am doing now. The “five key things”, the “ten steps” are all super attractive frameworks. They want to know the why, the what and the how. They don’t need the cheerleader, because they want the takeaways. They are their own cheerleader, so they search for new knowledge they can apply. Your passion is appreciated but the viability of the information in concrete usage terms is more appealing. Having lots of energy is fine but having very little is not. Be powerful at times but come laden with gifts of guides to doing better. In our talk we need to have phases that provide value to all four groups. We cannot favour our own style or one other style exclusively, because we have effectively excommunicated the rest of the group. This is a delicate act to pull off, which is why it needs careful thought and planning beforehand. You can't make this stuff up or get the balance right on the fly. We have to start with the premise that we have a range of people in the room. We need to give them all a taste of wonder, defined by how they see that playing out.…
In our High Impact Presentations (HIP) course, we do a number of presentations over two days of training. What I love about teaching this programme is that you see the results immediately. If we are teaching leadership or sales, it is very hard to see immediate results and those programmes are multi-week efforts. Day One we have the first presentation which forms the marker for the programme. I challenge everyone to give me their very best, knock it out of the park, most spectacular presentation they have ever given in their life. When we get to the end of Day Two and they compare the last video of their presentation with this first one, everyone has exactly the same reaction “oh, my God” because they have made such vast, almost unimaginable improvement in just two days. People who are already quite good, become more polished and sophisticated in their presenting. The real eye poppers are those who are shy, panicking, timid or inaudible through fear. Two days later they are unrecognisable from what they were the day before. I was looking at some of this amazing progress being made and I was thinking to myself, what has made this huge difference? Kiai is a key factor. Kiai (気合) is a Japanese word made up of two characters ki ( 気) and ai (合). Kiai means to bring your life force to a point of convergence. In karate terms, this means the blow is delivered with a total commitment at the point of impact. Your whole bodyweight, mind, breath, voice are all layering on top of each other, to register an explosive outcome inside the body of the opponent. Your middle body area from the hips to the rib cage, are compressing like a vice. All of this is being done at hyper speed as well, to create the maximum amount of power. The first time I heard a kiai was in February 1971. With other beginners, I was waiting outside a door that led to our first karate class and we could hear all this crazy yelling going on inside. I peaked through the gap in the door and saw many people dressed in these white pajama looking get ups, leaping around and making a hell of racket. I didn’t know then that for the next 50 years, I would be doing the same thing. The same phenomenon is not limited to martial arts. If you have ever watched competitive weight lifting for example, you will hear the kiai when the lifter drives total concentration to the point of the lift and exhales with a strong breath at the same time. This is what we do in karate and what we need to be doing in our presentations. Instead of grunting and exhaling, we are using our vocal delivery range to bring impact to our message. The students I was teaching presenting had no kiai when they started the HIP. Their words were just words, spoken at normal conversation level, as if they were chatting with the person sitting next to them. The presenter has permission to lift their speaking voice to a much higher level than is normally the case in polite conversation. Remember, we are standing up in front of others seated in a venue, so we have to project our voice to the back of the room. If we are presenting online, it is the same thing. Video has two nefarious impacts on us. We appear to have gained three kilos in weight when on camera and our normal voice strength is down by about twenty percent. That means we have to raise the speaking level twenty percent online, just to get to a normal level, let alone going a bit harder because we are presenting. In the course, I explain that we have to speak with more power. We have to hit the words harder than normal. We also have to mentally project our energy into the audience. So it is not just the voice range that is important. As I mentioned, we are focused on the kiai , the convergence of our life force. We push our body energy toward the people sitting in front of us through our body language. The breath is being exhaled with the delivery of the words and the energy output level is extremely high. Our gestures are also being added in to provide even more physical presence to what we are saying. I always need to encourage the participants to go bigger with their gestures. This helps to raise their energy level and to add more power to their presentations. When I am telling them to go bigger, they never go big enough, so I have to really push them. They think this looks completely crazy and is making them come across as totally out of control. Every single person coming back from the Review Room having looked at themselves on video say that even though they thought they looked over the top, it didn’t look like that on the video and in fact it looked completely congruent with what they were saying. When we are speaking using more kiai , the audience feels our presence. They feel our passion, commitment and belief in what we are saying. This is very attractive to the listener and they are more likely to accept and support what we are saying. Bring your breath, physical energy, gestures and voice to a point of convergence when you speak and you will have real impact as a presenter.…
Sometimes the organisers of the presentation event ask us if they can distribute our slides before the speech. They are thinking that this will help the audience to follow what we are saying. Especially in Japan, audience members are probably better at reading than hearing the content. So having the slides at hand to refer to during the talk makes a lot of sense. Never do this! Ignore the supposed sage advice of event organisers, who themselves rarely if ever give public presentations. There are very few occasions when you need to be handing out bits of paper to support your talk. The only exception to this rule of mine would be if there are numbers involved and they are locked into tiny cells in a spreadsheet. I am sure you have suffered the ignominy of sitting in an audience and struggling to make sense of the numbers being shown on the screen. The speaker gracefully moves through the spreadsheet, pointing out various gripping correlations and conclusions. Of course, they have added an important caveat before their pontifications about what we are all looking at, by saying “you probably can’t see this but….”. Naturally we can’t see it. The tiny number squiggles are unable to be claimed from the cells on screen, because the presenter has not considered the needs of the audience. I could arrange for just those spreadsheet numbers to be distributed before the talk, so that people can read along with my explanation. This is giving verity to what we are claiming because the audience can check the numbers themselves. I am still reluctant to do that though. As soon as I refer people to the sheets of paper in their hand, I have lost my connection with them. They are now looking at bits of paper and not at me. I can’t see how they are reacting, because their faces are looking down. I would prefer to treat the spreadsheet numbers like wall paper on screen. They form a backdrop, but I don’t expect anyone to plumb the depths of numbers they cannot see, let alone read. Instead I would use some animation and blast out key numbers in huge font in a call out emerging from the background. Now everyone is looking at one huge number and I would explain the importance of that statistic or number. The wall paper in the background is a type of proof that we have the numbers, we are not hiding them. We don’t need to show every number in the collection though, because there will be some numbers more important than others. We just keep repeating this animation process for every key number. We can make the sheets of paper available at the end, for anyone who would like to go more granular. In this way, all eyes are kept on me as the presenter. I can also read the faces of the audience as I present these key data points. I am scanning their faces for resistance. Am I going to get any pushback during the Q&A? Are they buying my argument? If we distribute the entire slide deck before the talk, then what is the point of the talk in the first place? We may as well all stay at home and just send everyone an email with the attachment and they can read through it all at their leisure. Once the audience has that document, they are reading page eighteen while you are explaining page one. You have lost control of the narrative. They are now processing what they are seeing in the document and somewhere in the background, they can hear some white noise. That white noise is you, by the way, droning on about your presentation. They are not fully listening any more and as the speaker you have effectively lost your audience. As the presenter, we must never become second fiddle to the slide deck or the spreadsheet. We must control the flow of the argument. The story is meant to unfold in a certain logical order, a build that pushes ever onward, toward a powerful conclusion. We are here to sell our argument and that means we have to get right behind it all the way. Don’t delegate the point of the talk to the slide deck. Get out in front where you can dominate proceedings and where you can read ever nuance of your audience’s reaction to what you are saying. We must be the star of the show, not the cells in a spreadsheet or masses of text on screen. So, when the organisers, those never presenters, insist we need to distribute the talk beforehand, cast them a steely glance. In an icy voice of shivering indignation refuse their idiotic offer. Others are allowed to be unprofessional, but we must be the island of insight, knowledge, intelligence and experience. That is the path of the real presenter.…
1 “Many People Say” And Other Strategies For Dealing With Pushback 11:26
11:26 나중에 재생 나중에 재생 리스트 좋아요 좋아요11:26
나중에 재생 나중에 재생 리스트 좋아요 좋아요Donald 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.…
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 length, so only the highlights associated with your being an expert on this subject can be covered. It is not a job application, so don’t send in your modified CV. This has to be crafted by you as power text, not a shopping list of bullet points. We want to build our personal brand and establish our credentials to talk on this subject. Remember many more people will read about you, than will ever be able to attend the actual event. This is a free kick, advertising you to the world. So, what do you want people to know about what a legend you are?…
1 Outlining Your Talk Using The Balloon Brainstorming Technique 14:09
14:09 나중에 재생 나중에 재생 리스트 좋아요 좋아요14:09
나중에 재생 나중에 재생 리스트 좋아요 좋아요A 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. There will be sub-chapters inside the talk, to arrange the evidence into a flow, that is easy for the audience to navigate. We need to remember that every five minutes we must switch up the presentation content, to keep our audience in our grip. The last thing we design is the start of the presentation. This is where we build that all important first impression with the audience. In this Age of Distraction and Era of Cynicism this opening has some heavy lifting to do. We have to establish our credibility to deal with the sceptics and smash through all the clutter clogging up the brains of our assembled audience. It has to be powerful or the masses will be scrambling for their phones to escape from us. Outlining our presentation is where we start. The assembly of the slides we will use comes last. It is important to get the order right. Do so and you will always come across as a polished professional when you speak.…
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 to around three major points in a thirty minute talk. Pile on the evidence though, because we are always speaking to a room full of sceptics recently force fed a diet of “fake news”. Save the heavy detail for the Q& A, if you need it. Keep the points clear and accessible, pitched at the level of expertise of your audience. Forego all the acronyms and jargon which appeal to the cognoscenti, if the audience are mere mortal ordinary punters. Don’t get into arguments in the Q&A. There may be hot questions hurled forth by provocateurs, self-aggrandising show offs, flouting their knowledge in front of the great unwashed. Answer them to the best of your ability and then say sweetly, “let’s continue this discussion after the talk. Who has the next question” and move on, giving them no more eye contact or recognition for the rest of the talk. Always prepare a second close after the Q&A, so that you dominate the last item to linger in the memory banks of your audience. The conversation triggered by a final question can be completely tangential or even totally unrelated to what you were there to talk about. Don’t let someone hijack your purpose. Seize back control of the point of this presentation, by unfurling your final close. Thank the audience and then elegantly descend from the stage to mingle with the masses. Leave everything on the podium and pack the gear up at the very end.…
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 into your next presentation, it will be remarkably more effective. Are any of these tips especially hard? Not at all. What is required is self awareness and the ability to adjust what you are doing to make it better. A bonus tip is to rehearse. Don’t experiment or practice on your audience. Don’t spend all your prep time on beating the slide deck into submission. Allocate time to practice the talk and if possible video it for review. You will be better at getting the time limits of the speech correct and will be so much more confident when the big day comes for your talk.…
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.…
1 416 Unlocking The Vortex. How to Engage and Inspire Any Audience In Japan 12:30
12:30 나중에 재생 나중에 재생 리스트 좋아요 좋아요12:30
나중에 재생 나중에 재생 리스트 좋아요 좋아요Think 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 saying. We will never be forgotten by the people in that venue, as a powerful and professional speaker. This is what we want, isn’t it?…
1 415 Engaging Audiences: Why Eye Contact Challenges Presenters In Japan 12:04
12:04 나중에 재생 나중에 재생 리스트 좋아요 좋아요12:04
나중에 재생 나중에 재생 리스트 좋아요 좋아요At 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 hopeless, there are many chances for us to shine.…
1 414 How to Promote Your Company When Presenting Without Sounding Like a Sales Pitch In Japan 11:55
11:55 나중에 재생 나중에 재생 리스트 좋아요 좋아요11:55
나중에 재생 나중에 재생 리스트 좋아요 좋아요Recently, I was asked to coach the President of a 100,000 person company with a long history for his presentation. What I noticed was how difficult it was to do a good job of promoting the firm, without it sounding like a blatant commercial for the business. Many of us in business are asked to give public presentations and these are excellent opportunities to promote our personal brands, professional brands and company brands. The only problem is that as soon as it sounds like propaganda, the audience just us switches off. Here are some ideas on how to bridge this tricky divide. 1. Tell Stories Get straight into a story about the firm and keep sprinkling stories throughout the talk. In the case of the President, he mentioned that the firm was a venture business when it started decades ago with just three people. They came up with a breakthrough technology for the audio business which made this firm a household name and we all owned their products. He could have done a lot more with this. Why were there three people at the start? Who were they? What did they do to build the business? In particular, we needed to hear about their struggles, which set up the basis for their ultimate triumph. There is bound to be a tremendous amount of drama hidden away in there. We are all trained to absorb drama, which is why we have favourite movies and TV series. The drama remained well hidden by the President, so the opportunity went begging. Their breakthrough technology was overtaken by new technologies and they had to exit that business. Here is a treasure trove of stories about how they made that pivot, all the problems they faced, and the struggles they went through. Nothing from the President about these details, but this is the type of drama we thirst to hear more about. 2. Provide Insights As the audience, we are seeking insights and guidance on what to do and not to do. We are seeking hints, lessons and direction on what we can do with our own firms for when we face the same struggles. Yes, the details about what happened in the stories are great, but we have to move things up to a higher level and get into the take aways for the audience. Tell us what we can learn from what they did wrong. Inform us of the pitfalls to be careful about. Warn us about the hidden dangers lurking in the shadows which could bring us down. 3. Provide Valuable Data Not all data can be shared publicly, but wherever possible, expose the numbers, tell us about the key data and results from the actions which were taken. Even if we can only talk in terms of percentages, rather than raw numbers, these are great indicators for the audience to latch on to in order to add colour to the story. “Data needs stories and stories need data” is a good mantra to work off. Usually at business talks, all we get is the data and no stories or insights. This tells us that there is a tremendous opportunity to build our brand, because it is so easy to differentiate ourselves from all the other boring, mediocre, unprofessional business speakers. 4. Engage Through Questions Rhetorical questions are a gold mine for speakers. They allow us to really engage the audience and get them on our wavelength. If their concentration is flagging or they are distracted by their phone, tossing out a question to the assembled masses is a great way to get them back and focused on us. The power comes from the fact that nobody, except the speaker, knows this is a rhetorical question which the audience won’t have to answer and only the speaker will provide the response. That tension acts like an attention magnet for us to grab our listeners and hold them tight 5. Third Party Endorsements Saying we are great doesn’t fly, but quoting a reputable third party who says we are great is well accepted. We think our Dale Carnegie Course is terrific and if we say that, for the audience, this is a “so what” moment. Instead, we can say, and this is true, that Warren Buffett thinks the course is terrific and it changed his life. This is gold. Warren is the most impressive investor of all time and he is well respected. His endorsement carries a lot of credibility. Who can you find as a third party authority figure to add lustre to your firm’s story? We should promote our companies when we have the chance to speak in public, but in a ninja way, which doesn’t provoke scepticism or disdain. The line is clear about this and we have to navigate that divide with great caution and be adept at making the most of the opportunity without blowing the chance. Remember, people don’t recall what you said in detail, but they do recall you. Always start your talk design with how you want to be remembered by the audience and go forward from there. The upside is unbounded because the competition is so lacking and unremarkable. Our time to stand tall and shine.…
1 413 Seamless Slides and Stellar Delivery. Unlocking AI’s Potential in Presentations In Japan 12:44
12:44 나중에 재생 나중에 재생 리스트 좋아요 좋아요12:44
나중에 재생 나중에 재생 리스트 좋아요 좋아요Seamless Slides and Stellar Delivery. Unlocking AI’s Potential in Presentations In Japan Something I had never heard of before called “Steampunk” popped up in my TikTok feed. Now I write a daily blog published on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook and X, called “Fare Bella Figura: Make a Good Impression, Be A Sharp Dressed Man” on the subject of classic men’s wear for business. Obviously, I am interested in how we men choose to master and control our first impressions in public. Everyone is judging us based on how we appoint ourselves and that is before we have any chance to utter even one word. If that is the case, and it is, why not make an effort to control that first vital impression? Anyway, that is another podcast subject, so back to today’s theme. These Steampunk videos were AI created and featured seriously “killer handsome” men wearing very, very cool Victorian era clothing. The imagery was amazing, fantastical, and addictive. Sadly, probably no one looked anything near that good in foggy Victorian London and few guys today could even come close to these AI images. It is all fake, and this is an important point to keep in mind when we are dealing with AI. This got me thinking about AI and fakery in the field of business presentations. Where is the line to discriminate between fakery and authenticity? Let’s look at some of the AI tools and see where they are leading us. Canva, Beautiful.ai, Visme etc., use AI to arrange our basic slides into very sophisticated output. If we are not sure what style of visual presentation will best suit the content, then we can access help from Microsoft Designer and Google Slides AI. If we have numbers to represent on screen, then Infogram and Datawrapper can help. The AI will suggest the best chart type based on the data. I don’t know that we need that much help though: for data over time use line graphs, for short-term comparisons use bar charts, and use pie charts for gauging proportional differences. If we are thinking about how to put the talk together, then ChatGPT, Claude and Jasper AI can craft a script as a base for us to work with. If we want a formal tone, we can command it or go for a conversational tone, and the AI will respond accordingly. If like me, you are not that red hot on grammar and punctuation, then Grammerly or ProWritingAid can make suggestions. They don’t always get it right, so we have to maintain a certain amount of knowledge to intervene when needed. It is handy though to be reminded that you have started the last three sentences with the same word, so that we can introduce more variety into our prose. I haven’t tried them myself yet, but I am told that Orai and Speeko will analyse my delivery in real time. I can get feedback on pacing, tone, filler words, modulation and pronunciation. I had to give a major keynote recently to an elite audience and if I had been more organised, I could have tried them out. I will use them the next time during my rehearsals. I wonder if they give us Good/Better feedback, rather than confidence sapping critique? By the way, a word to the wise, if you ever ask anyone to listen to your practice sessions, instruct them to give you only Good/Better feedback. Otherwise, their first inclination will usually be to criticise what you are doing and demotivate you. I have seen some speakers using Mentimeter and Slido, which are AI driven to facilitate real time audience interaction. We can run instant polls, pose questions, and get feedback during our presentation. We can do the same things analog too, but it looks cool to use these tools. I have seen simple bats with “Yes” on one side and “No” on the other used to gauge audience agreement with whatever the speaker is proposing and it works well. We can simply ask people to raise their hands in response to their agreement with the question or not and no tech involved. Personally I go for simplicity when presenting. I do recommend keeping a hawk-eyed accounting of the faces of the people in the audience. If you think that is too old school, you can try Beyond Verbal and Emotional AI. These tools will interpret audience facial reactions and voice tones to help you understand the engagement levels of the audience. All great stuff but I find watching their faces carefully does the same thing, and it is real time. There is no doubt AI is here to stay and capacity will only broaden and improve. We have to keep in mind, though, that these are just tools and not a substitute for our role as the speaker. I actually don’t want my AI enhanced slide deck to be so spectacular that the audience stops watching me and becomes totally engrossed with what is on screen. We, the speaker, have to be the center of attention and the tools are at our command, rather than commanding us. That is why I don’t like using videos. If they are to be used keep let’s them super short. Like those handsome dudes in the Steampunk videos, the presentation is superb, but the AI is fake and we can never match what is being presented. We can dress ourselves in the same Victorian way, using fine fabrics, but we will never be that handsome and cool looking. We need to keep AI in perspective too, not get carried away with the tool set and forgetting about the human dimension aspect of the delivery. We, the presenters, must always be the main game, the core talent and the real focus for our audience. The tech has to be used in moderation and the speaker must be soley placed in the spotlight. Don’t let the AI become the star like in those Steampunk videos I mentioned. We reserve that position for ourselves, always, everywhere and we allow no AI substitutes for us.…
1 412 Expert Tips To Standout As A Panellist In Japan-Engage, Project, Impress 11:56
11:56 나중에 재생 나중에 재생 리스트 좋아요 좋아요11:56
나중에 재생 나중에 재생 리스트 좋아요 좋아요We see a lot written about public speaking and presenting. Usually it is on the assumption we are the sole speaker or one of a line-up of speakers who wow the audience one after another. Interestingly, a lot of speakers I see these days are often members of expert panels, herded together by the MC and taken through the key points of the topic. I also notice that none of them are much good in this role and almost no wowing is going on ever. The irony is we are on the panel because we are an expert in our field, but no one bothers to inform us how to perform our expert role when being a panellist. Whether we are the solo speaker commanding the audience from behind a podium or prowling around the stage or sitting down in a row of other speakers, the fundamental things which work best don’t change all that much. The key thing I have noticed which is missing most from panellists is projection. When we are standing, we have more access to our body language and to voice projection. We are also elevated in stature too, so we are readily visible to the audience from top to toe. We feel more powerful when standing, and this comes across in how we deliver our talk. When we are seated, we are literally cut off at the knees. We are hunkered down in our chair, sitting low and are physically constrained. It has a deleterious psychological impact as well. This seated position is the format we use all the time for casual chats over coffee. This positioning sets up a mentality that is relaxed and conversational. Nothing wrong with a conversational speaking style, however the associated soft volume we use is the issue. Of course we have been handed mics, but most people are not used to using them and often don’t know how to get the most out of the tech. They usually don’t get a chance to work with the mics, which is something you would get as a single speaker when you are there setting up your laptop, etc., before the event starts. Also, holding a mic means we have tied up one arm, so our gestures are handicapped, compared to when we are standing using a stand mic or a pin mic. In short, we become small on stage and we stay that way throughout. I teach speakers to use their ki (気) or intrinsic energy when speaking to reach all four corners of the venue. Projecting your energy is magnetic with audiences and we can deeply connect with the crowd. Sitting low in a chair makes this energy projection much harder. You really have to be aware of the disadvantage you are at and you need to compensate for it. If you don’t know, then you don’t know and you just become insignificant on stage very quickly. I recommend having a strategy for your panellist presentation. I would strongly recommend you make it your goal to connect with everyone in the audience. We do this one person at a time. What we see speakers doing, though, is looking out at everyone at the same time, at each other and at the MC in particular. They are not thinking of connecting with the audience at all, at the individual level. Use six seconds of contact with each person. Don’t look at the other panellists or the MC – ignore them completely and only spend your time looking at the people in the room. Pick up one person in the audience at random and stare straight into that person’s eyes as you speak to them. At a distance, down the back, the ten people seated around that person all think you are looking at them, so the impact is magnified. When you look out at the audience, break the room up into zones – left, middle, right and then front half and back half. This gives us six zones to work on and we make use of this zone breakdown to engage as many people as we can during our remarks. In a minute we can engage with six people. In three minutes we can engage with eighteen people, and if we pick up the ten people around, then we have one hundred and eighty people engaged. Sit super tall and on the front edge of the chair, so that you are physically thrusting your body language toward the audience. Direct your ki energy to the very back wall of the room when you speak. Make the most of the mic and use a strong voice, without yelling or creating static with the mic, to project your energy to the audience. Hold the mic a little out in front of you and then speak across the top of the mesh. I have seen panellists actually encompass their entire palm completely over the mesh, which totally defeats the efforts of the sound engineers, who have slaved over perfecting the tech. Use the other hand for large gestures. Remember, you are tiny up on the stage and the chair has made you short, so you have to overcompensate for the lack of physicality. Don’t be afraid to go big with your gestures. Way down the back, it still looks small. We want our three arrows coalescing together: (1) one-on-one eye contact for six seconds with specific individuals in the audience, (2) strong energy projection through the medium of our body language and voice and (3) the power of our larger than usual gestures. All of our attributes are in sync and congruent with what we are saying. When we do this, we instantly self-select as a real professional in presenting skills, stand out from our Lilliputian colleagues on stage with us, including the MC, and we become totally memorable, whereas everyone else is immensely forgettable.…
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