Episode #36: Are You Any Good - It Is 10 Minutes in?

Worried your audience will disappear into their phones after 10 minutes?

You can open strong and close well — yet still lose people in the middle. In Tokyo (東京 — Tokyo) and across Japan, business audiences arrive armed with smartphones and endless distractions. If your talk isn’t designed to keep attention moment by moment, your key message gets buried under social media scrolling.

Mini-summary: Great openings and endings matter, but sustained engagement in the middle is what makes your message land.

A powerful start isn’t luck — it’s logistics and intention.

• Plan before you arrive. Contact organizers early and learn who registered and what they care about.

• Arrive early and remove friction. Check the venue, sound, slides, and laptop setup. Don’t waste the first minutes fiddling with tech.

• Choose your first word on purpose. Your opening line should be deliberate, not an accidental warm-up.

• Connect before you speak. Talk to early arrivals, learn names, and reference them to break down the “speaker vs. crowd” wall.

Mini-summary: Credibility is built before you speak; connection begins in the first sentence.

Strong presenters finish twice.

1. Close the talk. Summarize your core message clearly at the scheduled end.

2. Close again after Q&A. Re-state your key point so people leave with your message, not the last question.

During Q&A:

• Repeat neutral questions so everyone hears them.

• Paraphrase hostile questions to remove any sting while keeping the meaning.

• This ensures clarity, protects your credibility, and keeps control of the room.

Mini-summary: Two closes and disciplined Q&A handling ensure your final impression is strategic, not accidental.

What’s the real danger in the “middle” of your presentation?

Phones. Every audience has escape hatches.

Look around any presentation 10 minutes in: many people are secretly scrolling Facebook, Line, or news feeds. They may look attentive, but cognitively they’ve left.

Your job is to design the middle so attention keeps resetting back to you.

Mini-summary: If you don’t actively re-engage attention, your audience will drift — silently and quickly.

Every five minutes, switch the pace. This needs D-Day-level planning, not improvisation.

Rotate in:

• a brief story

• a concrete example

• a demo

• audience involvement

• a surprising contrast or data point

Plan it slide-by-slide: what happens at minute 5, 10, 15, and so on.

Mini-summary: Attention renews through variety; variety requires a timed design.

Your voice is one of your most powerful engagement tools. Use:

• Pace: fast vs. slow

• Strength: loud vs. soft

• Intonation: up vs. down

Japanese speakers often face a natural challenge because Japanese is a more monotone delivery language. But you don’t need to change who you are — focus on pace and strength, and your delivery gains enough variation to keep listeners present.

Mini-summary: Vocal variety is a skill you can practice — and it instantly boosts engagement.

People love reality TV because it’s storytelling: small human wins, fails, lessons, and drama.

Business audiences are the same.
Tell:

• your disasters

• your hard-won lessons

• your surprising turnarounds

• your triumphs

Use short, memorable quotes and references to well-known leaders (e.g., JFK, Churchill) to make points stick.

Mini-summary: Stories humanize you, make ideas memorable, and keep audiences emotionally invested.

How do planning and rehearsal turn a “good talk” into a great one?

What reads fine on paper can sound clumsy out loud. Rehearsal fixes that.

• Practice your cadence and transitions.

• Ensure each five-minute block has a deliberate gear-shift.

• Give the audience something to do occasionally — reflect, laugh, nod, or raise a hand (sparingly).

Mini-summary: Rehearsal aligns your words, timing, and energy so engagement feels effortless.

• Design your presentation for attention resets every five minutes.

• Plan the opening and two closes to control first and last impressions.

• Use vocal variety — pace and strength especially — to avoid monotone drift.

• Storytelling plus rehearsal keeps your audience with you, not in their phones.

Engaged employees are self-motivated. Self-motivated people are inspired. Inspired teams grow your business — but are you inspiring them?

At Dale Carnegie Training Tokyo, we help leaders and organizations build communication, trust, and influence through world-class programs in:

• leadership training (リーダーシップ研修 — leadership training)

• sales training (営業研修 — sales training)

• presentation training (プレゼンテーション研修 — presentation training)

• executive coaching (エグゼクティブ・コーチング — executive coaching)

• DEI training (DEI研修 — DEI training)

Founded in the U.S. in 1912, Dale Carnegie Training has supported individuals and companies worldwide for over a century in leadership, sales, presentation, executive coaching, and DEI. Our Tokyo office, established in 1963, has been empowering both Japanese companies (日本企業 — Japanese companies) and multinational firms (外資系企業 — multinational/foreign-affiliated companies) ever since.