Episode #220: Close The Gap With Your Audience In Japan

Lawyers in Japan are an elite group. I attended a legal symposium, involving these super elite Japanese lawyers and yet the communication skills on offer were incongruent with their elite educations and high social status. I can never resolve how intelligent people can manage to stand up in front of an audience and position themselves such that they fully ignore one third of their audience.

So here is a hint to ourselves. Whenever we are standing before an audience, always make sure we position our feet such that they are facing ninety degrees directly forward and just turn our necks and upper body, when we want to involve each side of the room in eye contact.

Actually there wasn’t any real eye contact underway either. Speaking to everyone and nobody at the same time, is a common lack of professionalism in many speakers in Japan. Winning the audience over to us, getting them to listen carefully to what we are saying and drawing them in to our point of view, are all aided when we use eye contact.

We seek to hold eye contact for around six seconds, before we move our gaze and make eye contact with another member of the audience. When we do this, we really engage our audience.

In typical Japanese fashion, the main speakers were allotted a table to sit behind, decorated with a microphone stand. In this seated position, out came the sheets of the speech transcript to be read to us in a monotone voice. Extremely painful and ineffective.

We must always keep in mind one key advantage we have over our audience. Only we know what we are going to say. If we forget something or if we deviate off topic slightly, well, only we know that. So whenever possible we should stand and deliver, no safety net, in full gaze of the audience without notes and use our eye contact to draw everyone into our message.

The last part of the day was devoted to panel discussions. A couple of things to keep in mind for ourselves, if ever we are engaged in a similar panel discussion. Learn how to use the microphone correctly, so we can be heard clearly. I notice, so many people don’t speak across the mesh of the microphone properly, so they are not getting completely picked up by the audio technology.

These are highly educated, super elite people in Japan and yet they make these fundamental presentation errors. So it tells us that being well educated and being in a prestigious job, does not automatically anoint us with the magic fairy dust of successful public speaking professionalism we all need.

Remember, these are our personal and professional brands we are holding out there for all to see. To bolster your brand, get the training, because today is the age of persuasion power and we must master this skill if we want to be fully successful. Connecting with our audience is one of the key business skills we need to add to our repertoire when presenting.