The Presentations Japan Series

 It was a big affair.  Many supporting organisations had promoted this expert dual speaker event and the large audience filed into the prestigious venue.  I was sold on the advertising too.  I was in…

I hesitated to use this title, because it smacks of click bait, doesn’t it?  To hell with it, live dangerously, I say! What flagged this question for me was an article in the Financial Times by Anjli…

 Pasedena, January 31,1993. Michael Jackson performs at the Super Bowl.  He suddenly pops out of the smoke on to the stage and strikes a dramatic pose facing right.  He holds that pose for one minute…

It is very common to see panel discussions at business events.  There is danger lurking in the shadows, though. The hosts invite a number of experts, usually around three to four, to interact with th…

The education system in Japan from the early stages, right the way through varsity to most corporate training, is based on the lecture model.  The instructor provides the information, and the partici…

There is a famous speech construct which we have all heard; “Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you just told them”.  Basically, this says open the talk by flag…

“I want to be perfect when I speak”. No, you don’t! Let me tell you a tale of two CEO presenters with different approaches to addressing their audiences.  One CEO used recent movies as his navigation…

The Master of Ceremony (MC) goes to the microphone to get the programme underway but the audience are simply oblivious, caught up in their own riveting conversations. The situation is much worse at r…

Best intentions, higher callings, righteousness – all good stuff but without good communication, our efforts fail. Instinctively, we all know storytelling is a great communication tool, but the word …

Public speaking throws up many fears and challenges for all of us. As part of High Impact Presentations, one of our public speaking courses, we have been surveying the various participants for the la…

It is a big crowd, yet the conversation suddenly dies and a hushed silence now sweeps through the room. All eyes are fixed forward, as the MC tears at the envelope and announces this year’s award win…

We are such a judgmental lot aren’t we! We form opinions about people within seconds of seeing them, often even before we hear them speak. We judge their dress, their body language, their style witho…

There are a number of common structures for giving presentations and one of the most popular is the opening-key points/evidence-closing variety. We consider the length of the presentation, the audien…

Our mental approach to our activities determines our success.  We know this in sports and in business, but when it comes to speaking in public, we somehow manage to forget this vital point.

 We know …

 We may not have the chance to give that many public presentations in a year, but usually we will have some common themes which we can speak on.  As businesspeople, we will have our areas of expertis…

 The chances of this happening anywhere is pretty remote, but especially so in Japan.  Audiences here are polite and wouldn’t be so rude as to interrupt the speaker.  Having said that, things can hap…

 We often mix up words like metaphor and analogy, using them in the wrong context.  Anecdote is another word we often use, but sometimes are not sure what it means.  Basically, it is storytelling abo…

The chances of this happening anywhere is pretty remote, but especially so in Japan.  Audiences here are polite and wouldn’t be so rude as to interrupt the speaker.  Having said that, things can happ…

I had an interesting collision of presenting styles recently.  We were conducting one of our High Impact Presentations Courses and I was one of the two instructors for this programme.  On Day One, a …

Presenting is physical labour.  We can do it with minimal energy or we can expend large amounts of effort.  There are dangers with both extremes.  The dull speaker, barely getting the words out of th…