Making Yourself Clear
 
http://japan.dalecarnegie.com
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 last four years about the types of things they most want to improve.  The most common request, from both Japanese and English speakers, is to “be clear when presenting”.  What do they mean by clear?  The speakers want their message to get across to the audience, to be easy to follow, to have some impact from their efforts to get up in front of others and speak.
This is not easy, mainly because we keep snatching defeat from the jaws of victory!  There are some errors we make which kill our ability to communicate with the audience.  Here are some critical factors to make sure that situation never occurs.
Firstly, we should decide what is the purpose of our talk?  Is it to Entertain people, so they leave feeling warm and fuzzy about us and our organization?  Is it to Convince them or to Impress them that our organization is reliable and trustworthy?  Is it to Persuade or Inspire them to take some action that we are recommending?  Is it to just Inform them of some recent data or information that is relevant to their industry?  We need to be crystal clear about what we are trying to do with our talk, before we even worry about the design, production and delivery.
Secondly, we need to thoroughly investigate beforehand just who will we be talking to?  What is the generational mix, the age demographic, the male/female split?  Are they experts, amateurs, dilettantes, critics, supporters, potential clients, etc.?  We need to pitch our talk at the right level for the audience – no dumbing down to the exceedingly well informed, insulting them at every turn.  We don’t want to be an acronym heaven dweller or a specialist jargon snob, baffling the punters completely.  We need to gauge our listener’s level of comprehension and make sure we are talking to them at their level of expertise.
Thirdly, we should rehearse our talk before we give it.  Sounds straight forward doesn’t it, except that hardly anyone does this!  In sales we always advise, “Never practice on the client”.  Presenters should heed the same sage like advice.  If we prepare the talk in writing, we may find the cadence is different when we say the words out loud, compared to when we read it on a page.  We also may find we have misjudged the time completely and be too long or too short.  We need to start singling out key words we want to hit harder than others for emphasis.  Speaking in a boring monotone is one of the most common errors of non-professional, non-competent speakers.
Some Japanese speakers have complained to me that they are at a permanent disadvantage with public speaking, because the Japanese language is a monotone, non-tonal language.  True, it lacks the tonal variety of English but there are two simple changes we can make when speaking Japanese to break out of the monotony.  Apply pace to speed up or slooow right down.  Another variation is to add more power to a word or phrase or to speak in an audible whisper, removing the power altogether.  Both of these techniques will help monotone speakers vary their presentation and maintain the interest of their audience.
Fourthly, get the mechanics of delivery right.  The message cannot stand by itself; the quality of the content is not enough; the supreme value of the data is insufficient - if people can’t hear you.  Yes, physically they can hear you are speaking, but when the content and the delivery are not in harmony, only 7% of the message is actually getting through to the audience.  That is a shockingly low number. 
The research on this is quite well established and it makes sense. When the message content is not congruent with the way you deliver the message, we get distracted by how you are dressed, by your body language, by the tone of your voice.  As an example,