334 Those Vital Few Seconds When You Start Your Talk In Japan

Don’t let your speaker introduction be a disaster. Usually when we are speaking we are introduced twice.  Once at the very start by the MC when they kick off proceedings and then later just before our segment of the talk.  The MC’s role is quite simple.  It is to set the stage for the speaker, to bring something of their history, their achievements and various details that make them a credible presenter for this audience.  This can often be a problem though, depending on a few key factors.

How big a risk taker are you? Are you relying on the MC to do the necessary research on you? Are you sure they can properly encapsulate your achievements and highlight why you should have the right to stand up here in front of everyone and pontificate on your subject?  Most people in the MC role are not expert or trained speakers.  Usually, they are clueless about this MC gig and just happen to have control over you for this brief interlude.  They are probably too busy to do better than a perfunctory job of preparing your intro and often they won’t appreciate what particular points need grander highlighting than others. 

Be warned.  It is always best to prepare your own excellent introduction.  Keep control of what is being said about you and the areas you wish to showcase. You can decide for each occasion which elements of your history or current focus are going to be most impactful for this particular audience and topic.  Don’t make it too long though, because we are in the Age of Distraction, where audience concentration spans are frankly pathetically brief.  

I was recently organising a speaker for an event and his self-introduction was very long, a potpourri of his entire life.  He obviously couldn’t discriminate between very, very high points, very high points and high points, so he cobbled the whole thing together as a single lengthy unit.  I wasn’t the MC that evening, but the actual MC simply ignored the whole thing altogether, deposed their own role and just said, “you have seen his biography in the meeting event notice, so I won’t go through it now”.  Well, yes, we may have glanced at it, but we were not remembering it in detail.  Thanks to this lazy and incompetent MC, the chance to reconnect with what was in the flyer was no longer there for the speaker.

As you can imagine, the person in the MC role can be difficult to handle for the speaker.  They can choose to ignore everything you wrote and then give their own ad hoc version.  Usually this is laced full of distortions, errors, exaggerations, serious gaps and miscommunication.  Some MCs have pretty big egos too. They think they are the star of the show and that they can do a better job than any offerings from you as the speaker.  What actually comes out of their mouth is usually an amazement to you, because you know what they were supposed to say. It is seriously late by then though and no repairs are possible.

For this reason, my advice is to only feed the MC the key points. Completely deny them the option to seize hold of your reputation and background and pervert it into something totally unrecognisable or unsatisfactory.  You only need them to set the stage and give you a chance to connect with your audience.  When it is your turn to speak you can go freely into the details you want to highlight about your glorious career thus far.

I would also not rush into your background immediately following on from the MC.  We need a break and the biography is not the best way to start your speech anyway.  The start of the talk has only one purpose. That is to stay the hand of every single person in that audience from secretly reaching for their phone, to escape from you, to the irresistible charms and siren calls of the internet.

Take the first few seconds of your talk very, very seriously. Design a blockbuster opening that will grab the attention of the audience. Only after that introduce yourself, rather than the other way around.  Starting with your history is too passe, too expected. It doesn’t get any excitement going. When you get to your self-introduction, rather than reading your resume, look for opportunities to tell a brief story that brings some highlights to the attention of the listeners.  This is a more subtle way of telling everyone how fantastic you are.  This also limits the amount of content you can share with the audience, ensuring it doesn’t get too long and too detailed. 

We will remember your story more than any other part of your introduction, so choose something that is highly memorable about you.  Make it positive rather than negative.  In other words, set yourself up for success. You can tell plenty of stories in your talk about how you suffered and eventually learnt through failure, but for the introduction, choose those incidents which portray you in a good light.  This is what you want people to associate you with – success, ability, innovation, bravery, learning. 

Don’t allow your introduction by the MC just unfold like a train wreck, with you standing there as a horrified, innocent bystander. Grab hold of the key content and feed certain parts to the MC to allow them to do a proper job.  Don’t miss this – tell the MC to stick to the script. Be insistent, because these are your personal and professional brands we are talking about here. Keep the really juicy parts of your intro for yourself, and so set the scene for your speech to be a great success.  Prime your audience for what is to come. We don’t get that many opportunities in business to speak, so let’s go for the best outcome we can manufacture and not let anyone get in our way of achieving that. Be nice about it, but be bolshie about your protecting your intro.