334 Those Vital Few Seconds When You Start Your Talk In Japan
The Cutting Edge Japan Business Show By Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo Japan
Release Date: 01/13/2025
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....
info_outlineThe 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...
info_outlineThe 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...
info_outlineThe 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...
info_outlineThe 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...
info_outlineThe 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...
info_outlineThe 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 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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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...
info_outlineThe 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....
info_outlineDon’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.