Episode 310: Your Good Old Days Storytelling Is Dull In Japan

Gaining credibility as a speaker is obviously important. We often do this by sharing our own experiences. However, having too much focus on us and away from the interests of the audience is a fine line we must tread carefully. When we get this wrong, a lot of valuable speaking time gets taken up and we face the danger of losing the attention of our audience. They are like greased lightening when it comes to ignoring us and escaping to the internet, so that they can go find things they feel are more relevant.

We must always keep in the front of our mind that whenever we face an audience, we are facing a room packed with critics and sceptics. We definitely have to establish our credibility or they will simply disregard what we are saying. The usual way to gain credibility is to draw on our track record. A great way to do this is telling our war stories. The focus is usually on things that are important to us, so we certainly enjoy reliving the past. In fact, we can enjoy it a bit too much. We begin telling our life story because we are such an interesting person. We are certain everyone will want to hear it, won’t they.

Actually, their own life story is much more fascinating for them. So, we should be trying to relate what we are talking about to their own experiences and their realities. When we want to tell our stories, we have to be committed to keeping them short and to the point. As soon as an audience gets the sense the speaker is rambling down memory lane, they get distracted, bored and mentally depart from the proceedings.

I was listening to a senior company leader giving a talk and he went on and on about how he started in sales and all his exciting adventures. He was obviously enjoying it, but what did something which happened forty years ago in America have to do with the rest of us here in Tokyo? It came across as self-indulgent and self-serving rather than inspiring and adding to his credibility for the market we are in today.

A good way to keep the audience engaged and focused on themselves is by asking rhetorical questions. These are questions for which we don’t require an actual answer, but the audience don’t know that. This creates a bit of tension and they have to focus on the issue we have raised. The focus is now on the same points the speaker wants to emphasise. Because of the rhetorical question, they have to mentally go there themselves and think about the issue. It is much more effective than having the speaker try and drag them there against their will.

Rather than just telling war stories, we can ask them to compare the story we are going to tell with their own experiences. In this case, the speaker’s example is just a prompt for the audience to identify with the situation being unveiled. This is better because they are now relating the issue to their own reality. They can take the speaker’s example and either agree with it or disagree with it.

Even if they disagree with it, their different stance will be based on their own facts and their own track record rather than simple fluffy opinion. We might say, “I am going to relate an incident which happened to me in a client meeting. Have any of you had this experience and if so what did you do? Listen to what I did and see if you think I made the best choice or not”. We have now set up the comparison with their own world. This gets their attention in a natural way, rather than me banging on about what a legend I was in the meeting with the client and how I scored the big deal.

Talking about ourselves is fun and personally fulfilling, but it is dangerous. How should we incorporate it? As we plan our talk, we have to work out the cadence of the delivery to include our war stories. If we are talking too much about ourselves the audience may lose interest and mentally escape from us. If we have designed in content which will involve them, we can keep them with us all the way to the end.

This doesn’t happen by itself. We have to carefully insert it when designing the talk. It is also very important to test this design during the rehearsal. Better to discover any issues in rehearsal rather than testing the content on a live audience. Sounds simple enough, but remarkably, 99% of speakers do no rehearsal at all. Doubt that statistic? How many speakers have you heard where you got the sense they had carefully rehearsed their talk and finished perfectly and comfortably on time? Case closed!

In developing our attention grabbing cadence during the talk, rather than waiting to Q&A to deal with any pushback on our opinions, we can get ahead of the curve. We can anticipate what those objections might be and handle them during the main body of our speech. We pose them as rhetorical questions. Some people in the audience when they hear these objections will be thinking “yeah, that’s right”.

We then use our evidence drawn from our experiences, our war stories, to demolish that potential objection and ensure we maintain control of the issue. This technique also engages the audience more deeply in our presentation, as they start to add perspectives they may not have thought of before. There is also a strong feeling of comprehensiveness and balance about our talk too. It shows we are aware of different views, are not afraid of them and have an answer to remove them as a consideration.