The Presentations Japan Series

By: Dr. Greg Story
Listen for free

  • Summary

  • Persuasion power is one of the kingpins of business success. We recognise immediately those who have the facility and those who don't. We certainly trust, gravitate toward and follow those with persuasion power. Those who don't have it lack presence and fundamentally disappear from view and become invisible. We have to face the reality, persuasion power is critical for building our careers and businesses. The good thing is we can all master this ability. We can learn how to become persuasive and all we need is the right information, insight and access to the rich experiences of others. If you want to lead or sell then you must have this capability. This is a fact from which there is no escape and there are no excuses.
    Copyright 2022
    Show more Show less
Economics Management
Show more Show less
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2
Episodes
  • Seven Tips From The Front Line Of Presenting

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

    The Incredible Lightness Of Speaking
    Dec 24 2024

    Bonseki is a Japanese art creating miniature landscapes, on a black tray using white sand, pebbles and small rocks. They are exquisite but temporary. The bonseki can’t be preserved and are an original, throw away art form. Speaking to audiences is like that, temporary. Once we down tools and go home, that is the end of it. Our reach can be transient like the bonseki art piece, that gets tossed away upon completed admiration, the lightest of touches that doesn’t linger long. Of course we hope that our sparkling witticisms, deeply pondered points and clear messages stay with the audience forever. We want to move them to action, making changes, altering lifetime habits and generally changing their world. In the case of a business audience, we are usually talking to a small group of individuals, so our scope of influence is rather minute. How can we extend the reach of our message?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What listeners say about The Presentations Japan Series

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Audible.com reviews

Amazon reviews
No Reviews are Available