Episode #174: Owning Your Material When You Didn't Create It

The minions are swarming around the venue. There are people setting up cameras, sound equipment, teleprompter invisible screens, and additional hangers on and assorted riff raff just standing around watching the chaos. In swans the big shot to rehearse the delivery and the tension in the room rises. This is Japan, a no defect, no mistake, no error society where big occasions scare the hell out of everyone. The pointless game of panic induced “what if” now gets going, as various nobodies try to run the speaking coach ragged, in their efforts to head off the thousand things which could possibly go wrong.

The speaker has not had much time to even look at the content and the time allowed for the rehearsal is zen like minimalist. Someone in the marketing department or the PR department has prepared the material or maybe it came from the big name PR company. The speaker certainly had very little chance to even look at it, let alone rework it. To reduce the amount of speaking time, the geniuses organising the speech have stitched videos into the proceedings, unknowingly sacrificing valuable face time for the speaker, who is now relegated to the second string, behind the video images.

This is what it is like being the speaking coach to big shot executives in Japan. In one case, the speaker was thrashing around trying to fit into the straight jacket his staff had created for him and the speech rehearsal was going nowhere. The teleprompter set up had just one screen, so the speaker was very efficiently speaking to only the left side of the room. The rest of the audience were being blanked by the speaker and that is not a good look.

When I looked at the material, I wondered why does the President of this company have to read his speech at all. Doesn’t he have some personal knowledge of the business? Can’t he just throw out the prepared script and speak to a number of pertinent points, following the theme of the talk? He could tell this set up wasn’t going to deliver him the best opportunity to get his message across. In the end he tossed out the teleprompters and came up with his own speaking points and used those at the international event. It was so much better.

Another senior Japanese executive from the automotive sector was due to speak overseas in English, even though his English wasn’t strong. The slide deck from the PR company had speaking notes for every page, written in perfect English. The speech was short, only seven minutes, but even so memorising the entire speech was folly. I assured the executive that speaking English perfectly was unimportant, because communication goes beyond words. Mimes discovered that centuries ago and there was an entire silent movie industry that thrived for decades without any words ever being spoken, until the “Talkies” arrived.

Next the slide deck presented a problem. How was he supposed to follow the script? He could spend his time with his head down, reading the words in English for each slide. If this is all that was required, we could keep him at home and just show a video of him doing just that and have almost the same lack of impact as having him do it in person. Instead, I asked him to distil the essence of what each slide meant to him, down into one single sentence and then one single word. That word was placed on each slide in Japanese kanji, like a secret code, and all he had to do was speak to that word. By telling the audience what that slide meant to him he was authentic. His English may have been garbled and the grammar mixed up, but it didn’t matter. He was communicating from his heart what the slide content meant to him and that message registered with his audience, in a way a speech just read out loud to the audience could never do.

No matter how busy we are, we take a big personal brand risk of allowing others who know nothing about presenting, to decide how we will appear as a speaker. Get an expert to help, if the stakes are high or work out a way to own the material. Make it yours and the speech will go more smoothly and easily. The impact on the audience will be significant and the key messages will get through. That is what we want isn’t it.