Episode #213: You Need More Kiai In Your Presentation Delivery

In our High Impact Presentations (HIP) course, we do a number of presentations over two days of training. What I love about teaching this programme is that you see the results immediately. If we are teaching leadership or sales, it is very hard to see immediate results and those programmes are multi-week efforts. Day One we have the first presentation which forms the marker for the programme. I challenge everyone to give me their very best, knock it out of the park, most spectacular presentation they have ever given in their life. When we get to the end of Day Two and they compare the last video of their presentation with this first one, everyone has exactly the same reaction “oh, my God” because they have made such vast, almost unimaginable improvement in just two days.

People who are already quite good, become more polished and sophisticated in their presenting. The real eye poppers are those who are shy, panicking, timid or inaudible through fear. Two days later they are unrecognisable from what they were the day before. I was looking at some of this amazing progress being made and I was thinking to myself, what has made this huge difference?

Kiai is a key factor. Kiai (気合) is a Japanese word made up of two characters ki ( 気) and ai (合). Kiai means to bring your life force to a point of convergence. In karate terms, this means the blow is delivered with a total commitment at the point of impact. Your whole bodyweight, mind, breath, voice are all layering on top of each other, to register an explosive outcome inside the body of the opponent. Your middle body area from the hips to the rib cage, are compressing like a vice. All of this is being done at hyper speed as well, to create the maximum amount of power.

The first time I heard a kiai was in February 1971. With other beginners, I was waiting outside a door that led to our first karate class and we could hear all this crazy yelling going on inside. I peaked through the gap in the door and saw many people dressed in these white pajama looking get ups, leaping around and making a hell of racket. I didn’t know then that for the next 50 years, I would be doing the same thing.

The same phenomenon is not limited to martial arts. If you have ever watched competitive weight lifting for example, you will hear the kiai when the lifter drives total concentration to the point of the lift and exhales with a strong breath at the same time. This is what we do in karate and what we need to be doing in our presentations. Instead of grunting and exhaling, we are using our vocal delivery range to bring impact to our message.

The students I was teaching presenting had no kiai when they started the HIP. Their words were just words, spoken at normal conversation level, as if they were chatting with the person sitting next to them. The presenter has permission to lift their speaking voice to a much higher level than is normally the case in polite conversation. Remember, we are standing up in front of others seated in a venue, so we have to project our voice to the back of the room. If we are presenting online, it is the same thing. Video has two nefarious impacts on us. We appear to have gained three kilos in weight when on camera and our normal voice strength is down by about twenty percent. That means we have to raise the speaking level twenty percent online, just to get to a normal level, let alone going a bit harder because we are presenting.

In the course, I explain that we have to speak with more power. We have to hit the words harder than normal. We also have to mentally project our energy into the audience. So it is not just the voice range that is important. As I mentioned, we are focused on the kiai, the convergence of our life force. We push our body energy toward the people sitting in front of us through our body language. The breath is being exhaled with the delivery of the words and the energy output level is extremely high. Our gestures are also being added in to provide even more physical presence to what we are saying.

I always need to encourage the participants to go bigger with their gestures. This helps to raise their energy level and to add more power to their presentations. When I am telling them to go bigger, they never go big enough, so I have to really push them. They think this looks completely crazy and is making them come across as totally out of control. Every single person coming back from the Review Room having looked at themselves on video say that even though they thought they looked over the top, it didn’t look like that on the video and in fact it looked completely congruent with what they were saying.

When we are speaking using more kiai, the audience feels our presence. They feel our passion, commitment and belief in what we are saying. This is very attractive to the listener and they are more likely to accept and support what we are saying. Bring your breath, physical energy, gestures and voice to a point of convergence when you speak and you will have real impact as a presenter.