Episode #399: Anything We Can Learn About Presenting From Kamala Harris?

I am not an American, so I cannot vote. I always tread the line of neutrality when discussing what is happening in America, turning myself into the Switzerland of speech giving advice. Previously, I have written about the presenting skills of both Biden and Trump. Now I move on to the new Democratic candidate for the US Presidency.

Republican politicians and Fox pundits criticise Kamala Harris for only being coherent and capable when she is reading her lines off a teleprompter. I have no idea if that is true or not, because I don’t see enough of her unscripted talks. Donald Trump, apparently, has trouble reading teleprompters and so he prefers to speak extemporaneously. He is often criticised for rambling and going off message.

Teleprompters are certainly part of the machinery for politicians and sometimes for captains of industry. I was coaching a German executive who headed up a large Japanese manufacturer here. He had an international keynote due to be delivered in English. The major Japanese PR company had brought in a single teleprompter for him and set it up to his left. Actually, I didn’t work well because the teleprompter was like a magnet and his ability to engage his audience was compromised.

Audience members on his left got all the love. Those on the right and in the centre got almost nothing from him. I suggested he drop the teleprompter or get one for the other side as well. In the end, he went with just his notes as prompts. This was so much better. He also wasn’t reading his speech word for word, which was a major blessing.

I read a funny story the other day about Barrack Obama when he was President giving a speech based on a written text. You can imagine how much vetting goes into a Presidential speech before it is delivered and how carefully the wordsmithing is considered. Midway through the talk, he turned the page over and he suddenly realised one of his staff had managed to miss placing the next page there for him. He had to wing it on the spot, which he did. So even written speeches can provide unnecessary excitement and potential heart attacks for the speaker. Remember folks, only we know what we are going to say, so we can wing it if we have to. The lesson for all of us though is to always check the pages are all there before we give the talk.

A couple of things I think we can learn from Kamala Harris are timing, creating anticipation and relaxation. I notice she has very good timing with her delivery when giving campaign speeches. Even if you are using a teleprompter, getting the right cadence is not easy. She makes good employ of pauses when she is speaking. This is smart because for most of us we get nervous giving a big speech and consequently, we can tend to speed up.

This happened to me. I was giving my very first public speech. It was in Tokyo and in Japanese to some unlucky Sundai Yobiko prep school students. I was terrified that my poor Japanese grammar would be totally unintelligible and a mess, so I wrote the whole thing out. I did this romaji which uses the English alphabet to reproduce the Japanese sounds for words. My Japanese tutor Ms. Higashi helped me to put the speech together, so I was ready for the big day, for my first public speaking debut. I looked down at my page the whole time, read every word and never engaged my audience in the slightest. It was a total disaster, which put me off public speaking for many, many years.


Originally, I was scheduled to give a twenty-five-minute talk. My hands were sweating, I felt red hot, my mouth was as dry as the Sahara desert, my pulse rate was pounding and so elevated I finished the whole thing in eight minutes. The point is that when we get nervous, we can really speed up. Kamala Harris doesn’t do that because she injects a lot of pauses to control the cadence of her talks.

These pauses allow the audience to diligently digest what has just been said and for each point to be clearly heard. Even though we may find ourselves speeding up, the judicial placement of some pauses enables us to control the pace, regroup and slow down. In her case, she often gets applause throughout her talk. Pauses allow her to avoid speaking over the applause. Now, this is unlikely to be a problem for any of us in business when giving speeches, but pauses are still a valuable tool for cadence and clarity.

She is also quite skilled at slowing down her remarks to draw out the anticipation of what she is about to say. The audience correctly guesses where she is going with her remarks and they applaud before she even gets there. We may not get any applause midway through our business talk, but we can use the same idea of building anticipation by slowing down. Let’s make sure we get the audience to mentally meet us where we are going with our points.

She is also very relaxed and looks like she is enjoying herself. I am struggling to think of too many CEOs here in Japan who I have seen in action looking relaxed and like they are enjoying the occasion. I see Japanese Presidents, in particular, utilising the corporate video so that they can reduce the amount of torture they have to endure, by cutting down the time they have to speak.

If we are feeling the pressure and are nervous, it is very hard to look relaxed and like you are enjoying yourself. As we get more experienced and add more notches on our speaking belt, the process improves. We can seem more relaxed and like we are enjoying the opportunity to proclaim our message. Until that happens, it is a good idea to fake it until we make it. A nervous presenter makes the audience uncomfortable. We all want to see people presenting who are bursting with skill and confidence.

Looking cool, calm and collected makes it much easier for our audience to accept what we are selling. Confidence convinces and bolsters the words we are saying. Try speaking with the face muscles relaxed, the body language congruent with the words being used and pay careful attention to gestures. Nervous people tend to get stuck in the same gesture and hold it for way too long. After fifteen seconds, that gesture loses all of its power and just becomes annoying to an audience.

So copy Kamala and be relaxed when you speak. Introduce well timed pauses and use anticipation. Enjoy the opportunity to deliver your key messages to your business audience and burnish your professional and personal brands.