Episode #317: Applying the Japanese Shu-Ha-Ri Concept For Presentations

The Japanese idea of Shu-Ha-Ri is a combination of three characters – 守破離. I first came across this concept when I was living in Australia and studying karate there. It is a very typical concept in all traditional arts in Japan. Each character has a separate meaning, so they don’t make up a compound word, as is often common with Japanese phrases. The idea represents a learning journey. Shu is to protect the traditional techniques, the basics, the fundamentals. Ha is to detach and break away from the tradition, to innovate and depart from our attachments to what we are doing. Ri is to transcend to a level where there is no self-consciousness of what we are doing, we make it our own, because we have absorbed it all and it is now part of us.

This is very much the journey of the presenter. I was reminded of this the other day when I was giving a talk to a Tokyo American Club audience. I was the guest speaker and I chose as my topic the Six Impact Points Of Persuasion. One of those six points was on the use of gestures. In the Q&A, one of the audience members asked me if I was using gestures during my talk with conscious thought or whether they were just happening naturally. Actually, I had never thought about that and I realised these were unconscious acts driven by the content of what I was saying and by my delivery skills as a presenter. I was in a mental state of Ri, in the Shu-Ha-Ri format.

For most businesspeople this is a very hard stage to reach. They often get only a few opportunities a year to speak. Unfortunately, they usually do no rehearsal and only deliver that talk once in their lives. Also, they get no coaching on how to make their next talk even better. Even if there are only a few chances to stand up in front of an audience, we can get to work improving trying to move to the next stage. It may be that stage one – Shu – could occupy us for a number of years, but as we say, the best time to start becoming excellent at presenting was yesterday and the second best time is today.

In this first stage of Shu, we need to consciously remind ourselves what we are supposed to be doing. We need to make sure we get our feet in the right position to make sure our body posture doesn’t start excluding audience members, because we are only facing half the hall. We need to remember to look people in the eye when we speak, as opposed to letting our gaze wander aimlessly like a cloud over the whole audience and find we are paying no attention to anyone. We need to engage the audience and using direct eye contact is the best way to do that. We need to manufacture our gestures to match the content of our message and to hold them for no longer than 15 seconds so that the power doesn’t disappear from the gesture. We have to get our face involved rather than letting it become wooded and that is actually a pretty hard habit to break. We have to remind ourselves not to slip into a monotone voice when presenting and make sure we have vocal variety and that we are not getting too fast.

As we get more chances to speak, we keep concentrating on these points, so that we make sure we are covering all the bases. At a certain point we start to internalise what we should be doing and have to expend less energy to keep checking what we are doing. We are getting into the Ha stage. We start to think of new things we could be doing. Perhaps we will move around the stage a bit and try and get closer to the audience. If it is a big stage, we want to move to the left and right extremes and try and connect with the members of our audience there. We are no longer worried about out foot position, because we are capable of re-setting our body so that we never eliminate half the audience from our gaze by looking off to only one direction. We become more comfortable with our gestures and they are not needing to be forced anymore and are occurring naturally. In fact, we might be getting more flamboyant and larger with our gestures to reap a bigger impact on the audience. We are getting better at being more focused on the audience, than on what we are doing.

In the final stage of Ri, we are not even conscious of all of these little building bricks we need to make the presentation a success. We are not even conscious of ourselves because we are now totally focused on the reaction of the audience and reading their thoughts about what we are saying, to see where we need to make some adjustments. We are now focused on what they like and what interests them. We start to get into a close embrace with our audience as we move them around, dancing to our tune. We are in sync with them and they with us, as we become one unit.

Next time you present, make a mental note about which stage you feel you are in. Start thinking about what you need to be doing to move along the journey to the next stage. When you break the process up, like this, it provides good insight into our progress and helps us to move forward.