Episode #88: What Is The Correct Breathing Method When Presenting

Breathing. How hard can that be when we are presenting? Funnily enough we do crazy things and create problems where we don’t need them. Today we are going to look at how to make sure we have enough oxygen to the brain and enough wind power to drive the vocal chords.

Welcome back to this weekly edition every Tuesday of "THE Cutting Edge Japan Business Show"

I am your host Dr. Greg Story, President of Dale Carnegie Training Japan and best selling author of Japan Sales Mastery. We are bringing the show to you from our High Performance Center in Akasaka in Minato-ku, the business center of Tokyo.

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In this show, we are looking at the critical areas for success in business in Japan. We want to help advance everyone’s thinking so that we be at the forefront, the Cutting Edge, of how to flourish here in this market.

Before we get into this week’s topic, here is what caught my attention lately.

The biggest and most powerful Japanese business federation is the Keidanren. It’s chairman Hiroaki Nakanishi recently told a news conference that lifetime employment is no longer sustainable. The link between tenure and wages in japan is one of the strongest in the OECD countries. With lifetime employment the firm is supposed to develop you throughout your career. However, more than two thirds of Japanese workers believe they need further training, which is double the OECD average. Participation in lifelong learning in Japan is in the bottom quarter of OECD members. Also the share of Japanese workers who find training useful for jobs is the lowest in the OECD. In other news, Softbank has used at least five investment vehicles, including the one hundred billion dollar Vision fund to make its mobility investments. Deep pockets and aggressive investing tactics and sweeping vision of the future of transportation give SoftBank and its founder Masayoshi Son and outsized influence in shaping the entire industry. The Vision Fund has more than thirty investment professionals who work to promote cooperation and integration among the portfolio companies, which they refer to as a family. Finally, Japan’s greenhouse gas emissions fell one point two percent in fiscal two thousand and seventeen, a fourth straight year of decline. The Environment Ministry said this was a result of increased use of renewable energy. Japan is targeting a twenty six per cent cut by twenty thirty. So far they are at eight point four percent.

This is episode number eighty eight and we are talking about What Is the Correct Breathing Method When Presenting Soredewa ikimasho, so let's get going.

Breathing is such a natural act and normally, we don’t pay it much attention. Some how though, when we are giving a presentation, our breath control becomes a factor of success. One component is our nerves, which are driving the chemical surge through the body, making our heart rate skyrocket, which speeds up our breathing pattern.

If we are not breathing properly, we can have mental white outs of the brain, because we are not getting enough oxygen. We can’t remember what it is we are supposed to say. We get lost, become panicky and come across as disorganized, unconfident and flakey.

Voice is driven on the winds of breath exhalation and lack of breath power impacts audibility. If we don’t have good breath control, we can find ourselves squeaking out to the audience in this little voice that says, “I am not confident. I am not confident, I am not confident!”.

We might find that our lack of breath control results in our final words of our sentences just dropping away to nothing. We often see speakers kill their key messages, by not supporting the key points with their words voiced with power and conviction. There is no opportunity to punch out a strong message, because we are just vocally doing a disappearing act in front of the audience.

It could also be that we are becoming very breathy when we speak. It sounds similar to people who have respiratory illnesses. They always seem to be gasping for breath. Actually they are and so are speakers with no breath control. They simply can’t pull in enough oxygen.

The lack of breath control gets transmitted to our cadence of when we speak. A lack of air means we are confined to short breathy sentences and the lungs are only being filled in a very shallow fashion just from the top portion.

So how do we stop this and better instruct our instrument – our wonderful speaking voice? I am going to pass on what I have learnt from nearly 50 years of karate training, where breath control is absolutely vital. It is the same method used by singers.

Controlling our nerves is a key part of breath control, because if we don’t, we are working at cross purposes with ourselves. One of the techniques for controlling our nervousness is to go through some deep breathing exercises, before we go on stage in front of the audience. We can do these seated or standing and they don’t take very long.

Find out more when we come back from the break

Welcome backand if you would like to improve your public speaking skills then take a look at our Successful Public speaking course. This is a one day programme and the next course will he held on July eighth. If you want to develop a very high level of speaker skill, then our two day High Impact Presentations course will do just that. Japanese language versions are being held on July tenth and eleventh and later in the year on November thirteenth and fourteenth. The English version will be held on July sixteenth and seventh . The details can be found on our website at enjapan.dalecarnegie.com

Back to where we left off. Place both hands on your tummy and just touch lightly. As you breath in, imagine you need to fill the lungs from the bottom most part of the diaphragm. To help us do this we breath slowly and deeply and we can see if we are succeeding, because the hands on our tummy are starting to move forward. This pushing out of the tummy is a good sign, it means we are doing the deep breath sequence correctly. We reverse the process and slowly exhale and the hands are slowly drawn back in. We need to do this slowly, because a bit too much force and speed here and we can become dizzy, as the flood of oxygen to the brain makes us feel lightheaded.

This diaphragm breathing is actually how we should be breathing all of the time and I recommend you start the practice and make it your default habit. When we are in front of the audience, they cannot see the breathing rhythm, so there is no need to feel self-conscious. Every breath we take starts at the lowest point of the diaphragm and we sense our tummy being pushed out and then being pulled back in. This is how we should be breathing while we are on stage.

Interestingly enough, if we lose the flow and suddenly, the breath begins from the very top of the chest, we will feel our pulse rate pick up, our chest tighten and our shoulders start to rise. This might happen at first, before we can master this deep diaphragm breath control, but don’t worry. Just slow the breath down and concentrate on the lower diaphragm and trying to push your tummy out with each inhalation. Once you do this, the cycle will re-institute itself and you will be getting plenty of air. The key is to pick this up in rehearsal.

Correct breath control gives us the ability to make the tonal variations which keep command of our audience. We can bring power to words and build to crescendos, when we want to emphasis particular key points. It also helps us to relax and look super composed when we are standing in front of people. That confidence is contagious and our audience buys what we are saying. And that is what we want isn’t it.

Action Steps

1. Get to the venue early and find a quiet, private place to do some breathing exercises
2. Place the hands over the tummy and check if we are breathing from the lower diaphragm or not
3. Make this method your default method of breathing from now on
4. If you start to feel yourself lacking air, then re-set and concentrate on breathing from the lower diaphragm.

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You might also enjoy my podcasts. Look for the Leadership Japan Series, The Presentations Japan Series and The Sales Japan series wherever you get your podcasts.

In episode eighty nine we are talking about Presenting Our Sales Materials. Find out more about that next week.

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