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357 Sabotaging Your Conversations? show art 357 Sabotaging Your Conversations?

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

 We are often good talkers, but poor listeners. We have many things we want to say, share, expound and elaborate on. For this we need someone to be talking it all in. We like it when people do that for us. It soothes our ego, heightens our sense of self-worth and importance. We are sometimes not so generous ourselves though when listening to others. Here are six nightmare listeners you might run into. By the way, do any of these stereotypes sound a bit too familiar to you? The “preoccupieds” are those breathless types, racing around, multi-tasking on steroids, permanently distracted....

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356 How To Win Business With Japanese Buying Teams show art 356 How To Win Business With Japanese Buying Teams

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Selling to companies in Japan usually means sitting in a meeting room with a single buyer or perhaps two people.  There are occasions though where we may need to present to a larger number of buyers in a more formal setting.  It may be a pitch to secure the business, or it may be a means of getting the buying team more easily coordinated on their side. Before we know how to present to a team, we have to analyse the people in the team.  That means we need to know ahead of time, who will be in the room from their side.  A team comprises multiple layers of...

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355 How To Make Your Employees Actually Like You show art 355 How To Make Your Employees Actually Like You

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

We often hear about the need for bosses to do more to engage with their teams. The boss looks at their schedule and then just checks out of that idea right then and there because it seems impossible. The employees for their part, want to get more praise and recognition from the boss, to feel valuable and valued. Bosses are often Driver type personalities who are extremely outcome and task orientated. People are there to produce, to get the numbers, to complete projects and to do it with a minimum of boss maintenance needed to be invested. The snag in all of this though is employees don’t...

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354 Presenting Elicits Valuable Lessons. Capture Them. show art 354 Presenting Elicits Valuable Lessons. Capture Them.

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

 Today is a good time to start reviewing and reflecting upon the presentations you have over the past few years.  What have you learnt not to do and what have you learnt to keep doing?  Those who don’t study their own presentations history are bound to repeat the errors of the past.  Sounds reasonable doesn’t it. We are all mentally geared up for improvements over time.  The only issue is that these improvements are not ordained and we have to create our own futures. Do you have a good record keeping system?  When I got back to Japan in 1992 I was the...

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353  Build Relationships That Last: Get Your Re-Order Mojo Happening show art 353  Build Relationships That Last: Get Your Re-Order Mojo Happening

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

Here is an important mantra: We don’t want a sale, we want the re-orders. That task however is getting harder and harder.  Customers today are more educated, better prepared and have more alternatives than ever before.  Satisfying a customer is not enough – we have to exceed their expectations and provide exceptional customer service.  Customer service has only one truth – how the customer perceives the quality of the service. Forget what we think is good customer service.  We have to be really clear about what is the customer’s perception of good customer...

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352 Let’s Build Our Personal Brand As A Presenter show art 352 Let’s Build Our Personal Brand As A Presenter

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

The New Year’s resolutions concept is ridiculous, but only because we are weak, lazy, inconsistent and lacking in discipline.  Apart from those small barriers to execution of desires, the concept works a treat.  The idea of a new start is not bad in itself and we can use the Gregorian calendar fantasy, to mark a change in the year where new things are possible.  We learn as we go along and we add experience from year to year to hopefully make life easier. So as a presenter what would be possible? There are around 4.4 million podcasts around the world.  Blogs are in the...

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351 My Boss Isn't Listening show art 351 My Boss Isn't Listening

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

351 My Boss Isn't Listening f you reading this title and thinking “this has nothing to do with my leadership”, you might want to think again. We hear this comment a lot from the participants in our training. They complain that the boss doesn’t talk to them enough because they are too busy, don’t have much interest in their ideas or do not seek their suggestions. In this modern life, none of these issues from staff should be surprising. There have been two major tectonic plate shifts in organisations over the last twenty years. One has been the compression of many organisational layers...

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350 The Rule Of Three show art 350 The Rule Of Three

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

350 The Rule Of Three   Our financial year ended in August and we were up over 20% on the previous year’s revenue results. I should have been ebullient, chipper, sanguine, fired up for the new year, but I wasn’t.  Was it because we were back to zero again, as we all faced the prospect of the new financial year?  That sinking feeling of , “last year was hard and here we go again, but this time with an even higher target”.  Maybe that was it, but it was hard to tell.  There were three other things which were gnawing away at me, regarding incidents which...

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349 Success Speaking Formula show art 349 Success Speaking Formula

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

 I was invited to an English Speech contest for Middle School students.  The students must have home grown skills and are not eligible to compete if they have spent more than six months abroad, in an English speaking environment.  This was pretty grand affair.  The organisation running it is run by students at university, who took part in the contest themselves when they were in Middle School.  Many of the graduates become business patrons and supporters as they work their way up in their business careers.  It a perfect Japanese storm.  Japan loves uniforms...

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348 Open The Kimono Leaders show art 348 Open The Kimono Leaders

The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan

The supervisor has super vision. The leader knows more. The captain makes the calls. The best and the brightest know best. The cream rises to the top. We accept that there will be leaders either our “superiors” or “the first among equals”. We put leaders up on a pedestal, we expect more from them than we expect from ourselves. We judge them, appraise them, measure them, discuss them. When you become a leader what do you find? There are rival aspirant leaders aplenty waiting in the wings to take over. They have the elbows out to shove the current leader aside and replace them....

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Last week we talked about when presenting, you need to transfer your energy to the audience.   However don’t have your energy levels at the maximum volume all the time.  That just wears an audience out and wears you out too.  Instead, you need to have some variation.  Very strong and then sometimes very soft.  And I mean drop it right down.  Remember to have that in the voice range.  Sometimes say your point in an audible whisper.  

I remember when I gave a presentation in Kobe.  It was at a university summer school for students who had graduated and were going back to their home countries. I was giving this uplifting talk about how they could use the experience they had in Japan back in their home country.  It was powerful, a very powerful presentation.  It was an urging my comrades to “man the barricades” type of speech. The speaker after me was a Korean professor. Maybe because of the way I presented, I don’t know, but he spoke very quietly. He spoke in a very soft voice throughout the whole presentation.  It really forced you to lean in and listen to him, because you had to work a little bit harder to listen to him.  So he got peoples’ attention by having a softer voice. At the time, I thought, “wow look at that”.  That was very effective and I realized, ah, just operating at one power level all the time is not going to work.  I need to have variety in my voice, so I should have times when I am very powerful and other times when I am very soft.  So just watch yourself that you are not getting into too much soft or too much strong mode.  Variety is the key.

I said before gestures are very important.  Be careful about getting your hands tied up with things.  If you are saying one thing is important, hold up one finger.  If it is the second thing, hold up two fingers. This is important.  When you hold up your fingers like that, hold them up around head height.  Don’t hold gestures around waist height.  It is too low and people struggle to see it.  Get your gestures up high in a band from chest height up to around head height.  That zone is the key height you want for showing gestures. 

When you want to show a big point, open your hands right out.  Don’t be afraid of big gestures.  Use gestures that are congruent.  Be careful about waving your fist at your audience though.  It looks aggressive. It looks unfriendly and combative.  Use the open hand rather than a closed fist. And don’t hit your hands together, slap them together or slap them on your thigh.  That activity creating noise becomes distracting.  Just use the gestures by themselves.  As I said before, 15 seconds is probably at the maximum you want.  You can walk around on the stage, but be careful about walking around too much, especially pacing up and down.  That makes you look nervous and either lacking in confidence about your message or lacking control over what you are doing.  Try and hold the main center point of the stage and move because you have got a good reason to move.

Using the names of people in your audience is a great thing to do.  If you get there early, meet some of your audience.  Have a conversation with someone.  It is a nice connector with the audience to refer to that person and say, “I was just chatting with Jim Jones over there before and he made a very interesting point about current consumer trends.  In fact, Mary Smith made an addition to that point, when she said “blah, blah, blah…”  Suddenly you have both people very much proud of being recognized and involved in your talk.  They have been recognized by the speaker and they like it.  The audience now feels that you have a stronger connection with those listening.  Refer to people by name.  It is very, very effective.  Don’t leave it to chance, try and look for those opportunities to engage with your audience.  

Let’s concentrate on the basics.  What is the point of your presentation?  Who is your audience?  What is the point?  Be conversational and customize the delivery to your listeners.  Have exhibits or have demonstrations or whatever that are custom-made to match that audience or match the point that you are making.  Don’t just bring out a set off the shelf points you recycle for every presentation. 

You might have an existing basis for a presentation, but think about who are you talking to?  What is the key point and then take it and re-work it, re-package it up, customize it.  I have given 530 presentations in the last 20 years here in Japan.  I have never given the same presentation twice, ever.  Even with the slides, I will always have some small variation.  Certainly the way I present it will be different every time. This keeps it fresh for me, as a speaker.  And it also keeps it fresh for an audience. 

If I feel stimulated and interested in what I am talking about, then the chances are that is how the audience will feel about it too.  They will feel stimulated and interested as well.  Be wary of receiving the presentation pack. You often see the CEO had some munchkins out the back preparing the presentation for him or her.  Often, it will be the first time that they have even seen the presentation.  Sadly, it is obvious that it is the first time they have seen the presentation.  They don’t know what’s coming next and they struggle through it.  This is really killing the brand.  It is killing the brand and the organization.  It is killing the presenter’s personal brand.  You don’t want that.  Get it, customize it, make it yours, then present it.  

So there we have some ideas on how to present your visuals when you are giving your presentations which are based on our training called High Impact Presentations, where we teach people over two days how to become a high impact presenter and how to learn a number of different structures.  It’s really the Rolls-Royce of the presentation skills.  This is where Dale Carnegie started in 1912,teaching people how to be persuasive.  If ever you have a chance, after listening to this, to do that particular course if you haven’t done it before, grab that opportunity because it is a powerhouse course.  It’s a game changer of a training course.   I have taken it myself and I strongly recommend it.

So best of luck and remember, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.  Do not be consumed by the construction of the materials.  They are secondary to you.  But when you do construct your materials use these ideas, these hints and you will give a much, much better presentation.