It makes sense to be authentic when presenting, because this is the easiest state to maintain. As someone wise once noted, “if you are going to be a liar you need a stupendous memory to keep up with who you told what”. Presenting is something similar. Maintaining a fiction in front of an audience takes a lot of skill. In fact, if you have that much skill, why worry about faking it in the first place? Well, there is a place for fakery when presenting, but we need to know when is appropriate.

We know that the way we think about things influences how we well we do. Imposter syndrome is a common state of mind though amongst people, across a broad range of situations. You might write a blog and put it up on your website, or waffle away on Clubhouse or pontificate to an audience, live or online. But who are you to talk about this subject? Are you saying anything worthwhile or just regurgitating what far cleverer people have already said? Do you really know this subject? Is your experience valuable or even relevant to others? Are you really qualified to give advice to people running far bigger organisations that your own?

Looking over that list, it can be enough to scare you off emerging from the deep depths of your comfy comfort zone ever again. So, we have to create a positive mindset that “yes”, we have every right to address this subject area, even if we feel a fake when compared to other more famous or clever people. The funny thing is they suffer the same imposter syndrome too, relative to their illustrious peers. Academics, for example, are generally a put upon group, because they have to publish their research to get ahead in their careers. When they publish it, they are now exposing the weaknesses of their intellectual process, their inadequate research ability or their dubious writing skills, to the entire expert community in their area of defined speciality.

Confidence warrants confidence. If we sound and look confident, most people are likely to ignore the emperor has no clothes and is not perfect. They will be carried away with our enthusiasm for our subject, with our passionate belief in our findings and our commitment to share the knowledge. The problems crop up when we become nervous speaking in front of others. Normally, we are quite even keeled and confident, but with all of those beady sets of eyes drilling holes into us, we start to wobble. Suddenly, our imposter syndrome fears come flooding forth and soon our usual cool, calm, collected façade is torn to shreds, as we are exposed as a self doubting, insecure, fake.

Now how would the audience know we are a fake? Well, we very helpfully tell them, by saying daft things like, “I am rather nervous today”. Or “I am not very good at presenting”. Or “I didn’t have much time to put this presentation together and I am afraid it won’t be very good” and any other of the motley collection of dubious, sympathy seeking, self-serving, cop out proclamations. Do us all a favour and keep all of this imposter syndrome stuff to yourself. Here is a secret - we all want you to succeed.

If you are nervous presenting then fake it, such that you appear at least “normal”, rather than being reduced to a quivering tower of jelly on stage. If your knees are knocking from the nerves, then stand behind the podium until you feel more comfortable to walk around. If your hands are shaking and you have to hold a microphone, use both hands and draw it on to your chest, so that your body secures the erratically jiggling instrument. If your throat is parched, then have warm, room temperature rather than iced water, close by and drink it when you need it. The iced water constricts your throat and you don’t want that, so forgo the usual venue offered beverage and request the no ice alternative. If you begin to speak and instead of a mellifluent note, out pops a constrained, awkward, embarrassing squeak, then clear your throat and try again. If you stumble on the pronunciation of a word, try again. If you get the speech points order mixed up or miss one, then fake it and keep going, offering not a hint of anything untoward occurring.

If you act enthusiastically, you will become enthusiastic. If you act confidently, you will become confident. Yes you might be nervous, but as Winston Churchill said, “if you are going through hell, keep going”. That is the point. No matter what happens, the show must go on and that means you must keep going. If it is a disaster, then dust yourself off and climb back in saddle. As the Japanese saying goes, nana korobi ya oki (七転び八起き) - “fall down seven times, get up eight times”.

I listen to some podcasts on writing, trying to better educate myself on the craft. I was hopeless at English at school, so the rest of my life has been a remedial fix in that department. Fundamentally, these podcast authors are aimed at fiction writers, rather than non-fiction scribblers like me. A lot of what we do in business on our dog down days may seem like we are living a fiction, when the numbers are not there or the results are dragging their sorry backside along the ground. Despite these self-recriminations about our situation, we are in the non-fiction storytelling business for business purposes, not for winning literary or public oratory awards. What are some of the elements we need to consider when deciding, “right, time to get a bit more serious about storytelling in my presentations”.

Welcome to the one percent club of presenters, who actually incorporate stories into their business presentations. Usually getting into the top one percent in any professional field is diabolically difficult, but here we have an open field in front of us, devoid of worthy competitors. They have all stayed at home. That is the type of field I like play in.

Now are we going to tell a deadly boring or basically dull story? Are we going to lose our audience’s attention? Are we driving them to their phones for escape to the internet, to get away from us. Have we forced them to search for something more interesting, better suited to while away their time?

What would make for an interesting business story? We need personalities to come to life in this story, preferably people the audience already knows. These might be executives in the company or people from the rank and file. Something happened and they were involved. We need to describe them in such a way that the listener can visualise that person in their mind’s eye, even if they don’t know them. We need a location for our central characters in this story. Where are we? Which country, which city, which building? We don’t need a riveting recounting for the fans of Architectural Monthly, describing the building in deadly detail, but we need some remarks to set the scene. Are we in a massive skyscraper, are we downtown, are we in a restaurant? What season are we in? Is it blazing summer now or deep snowy winter? Just when are we experiencing this incident? How long ago was it?

We need drama. Yes, I know there is a lot of drama in business and we are up to our armpits in drama on a daily basis, but that is what makes it so appealing. People know about their own dramas well enough, but they are superbly curious about yours. Maybe yours is worse and that puts their regular meltdowns in perspective. Maybe your drama is a dawdle, compared to what they are being served up every day, “you were luuucky” they think. Check out Monty Python’s Four Yorkshireman skit, for a humorous masterclass on great one upping someone else’s problems.

Something bad is going to happen, unless something else happens instead. This is the fare we get fed from television and movie action dramas all of the time, so we know the format. The damage will be great to the firm, an individual’s career, the survival of the business, etc. Even if you have some great news to relate, set it up from some bad news dramatic context. No one really relates to perfect people. We can’t identify with those who are blessed with great everything and glide through business, untouched by any blood and gore. We want to hear about the struggles and eventual success. We need a tale of hope, a saga of eventual success, an overcome all odds story of ultimate triumph.

At the end we want a punchline that teaches us something. Give us some guidance on what we should do, genius ideas on what we could do, hints on the possible. The climax has to be soaring, elevating, buoying us up, encouraging us to bear the pain of the present. We all want hope for the future in these grim times. Obviously, the delivery has to match and we need a crescendo call to action at the end, something to have people leaping out of their chairs and punching the air, ready to run through fire. Okay, I got a bit carried away there. I have never seen that happen to date in any business presentation. But we do need a finish that becomes a start for the rest of us, a trigger to go forward, bursting with a lot of heart.

Let’s tell our business story so well, that everyone remembers the point we were making and they remember us, as someone they would enjoy to hear from again.

Bonseki is a Japanese art creating miniature landscapes, on a black tray using white sand, pebbles and small rocks. They are exquisite but temporary. The bonseki can’t be preserved and are an original, throw away art form. Speaking to audiences is like that, temporary. Once we down tools and go home, that is the end of it. Our reach can be transient like the bonseki art piece, that gets tossed away upon completed admiration, the lightest of touches that doesn’t linger long. Of course we hope that our sparkling witticisms, deeply pondered points and clear messages stay with the audience forever. We want to move them to action, making changes, altering lifetime habits and generally changing their world. In the case of a business audience, we are usually talking to a small group of individuals, so our scope of influence is rather minute. How can we extend the reach of our message?

Video is an obvious technology that allows us to capture our speech live and ourselves in full flight. How often though, do you see speakers videoing their talks? It is not like people are constantly giving public speeches in business. Apart from myself, I don’t recall seeing anyone else doing it. You need to tell the audience this is for your own purposes and they will not be in the shot, otherwise you have to get everyone to give you their written permission to be filmed. You may get criticism about being a narcistic lunatic for wanting to capture yourself on video, but the only people who make that type of comment are idiots, so ignore them.

With video, instead of a standard business audience of under fifty people, you can broadcast your message to thousands. The video is also an evergreen capture which allows you to keep using the content for many years. Video has the added benefit that you can cut it up and create snippets to take the content even further. You can have ten videos sprung from the original. This again extends the ways in which you can use the medium. People have different appetites for information, so some may want to feast on the whole speech, whereas others want the digest or just the part on a particular topic of most interest.

Video has two tracks – the video and audio components and these can be separated out. Very easily you can produce the audio record of the talk. Everyone is a firm multi-tasker these days. I sometimes hear people pontificating that you cannot multi-task, blah, blah, blah. What nonsense. Walking, exercising, shopping and listening to audio content are typical multitasking activities. Busy people love audio because it saves them time and allows two things to be done at once. Now your audio content can be accessed by even more people.

Did you know that back in August 2019 Google announced that in addition to text search they were employing AI to enable voice search too. This is taking a long while to roll out but audio books have recently overtaken e-book sales. The audio track can become a podcast episode and be on any of the major podcast platforms. Also we can produce a transcript of the talk. There are AI transcribing services that are very good today which substantially reduce the cost and time of this exercise. Now we have a text version, we can project the value of the content further. It may go out as an email, a social media post or be reworked into a magazine article, or it may become a blog on your website

Repurposing of content is the name of the game. The video and or the snippets can be sent out to your email list, put up on social media and always sit there on YouTube. The same can be done with the audio track. Now what was a simple, ephemeral interlude in a room of fifty punters, has developed a life of its own and is being pushed out far and wide. The same message and messenger, but a vastly different impact and duration. If our object is to influence, then we need to make sure we are supporting the effort to give the speech with the tools available to maximise the results.

This requires some planning and some expense. But as I mentioned, we are not leaping to our feet every month giving a public speech to a business audience. This is something we would be lucky to do two or three times a year. When you take that into account and consider how much we can leverage what we are doing, we get a lot more bang for our buck. We are going to give the talk anyway, so all the preparation is the same, yet the influence factor can be so much grander.

In Part One, we looked at the ideas of primacy (the first thing we remember) and recency (the last thing we remember) and what this means for speakers. Now in Part Two we will go deeper with our entry and exit points of the chapters within the talk and how to choreograph the big crescendo for our polemic’s sparkling conclusion.

We naturally have to pump a lot of energy into designing the opening stanza of our speech. On the surface of it, this would seem to be our one big chance to establish our theme, point of view and talk direction with the audience. The opening is a battering ram to smash into the brains of the assembled masses and launch a takeover of their every thought. This is easier said than done though, because any lapse of logistics or vocal quality and energy will see them scampering for the mental exists to get their internet fix mainlined through their phones.

Even if we do manage to hijack them at the start, we cannot presume we won’t lose them somewhere midstream. That is why when we do the planning for the talk we need to design distinct chapters into the talk. These chapters are constructed around the evidence that supports our central proposition. Now these chapters have a primacy and recency function as well. The opening of the chapter has to dislodge that last thing we told them and replace it with the new bauble.

Most speakers pay no attention to this chapter idea and just arrange their talk to move from one section to the next. The sections of the talk compete with each other for audience attention and we have to be aware of that. At each chapter start we need a mini-battering ram to blast the tunnel deeper into the listener’s mind. We have just told them some scintillating detail backing up our overall point and now we need to dislodge that, so we can ship in the next point.

Stories are good for this exercise as are questions, quotes, facts and statistics. We are wading deep in our evidence portion of the talk at this point, but the facts need to be arrayed before the audience in such a way that makes them irrefutable. In a forty minute speech each chapter will be about five minutes long, so taking out the blockbuster opening and the first stupendous close before the Q&A, we probably have time for six or seven chapters. So that means we need some variety with each opening. Starting each chapter with the same thing becomes predictable and boring. Predictability is the speaker’s nemesis, because it invites the audience to escape from us now that they know what is coming next.

In the planning stage investigate the point you are making to support your overall argument and see what type of opening the evidence lends itself to. There may be some doubling up with opening gambits, but try for as much variety as possible to keep audience attention on you the speaker. The end of each chapter is mini-close as well. That means we have to come up with a zinger one sentence finisher that really makes your key argument sing. This is all a matter of planning and that is the rub. Most speakers do a poor job of planning because they are waist deep in slide assembly and logistics. This is what they call planning but that is delusionary.

We have used each chapter to make our case and each chapter ending to summarise the facts and evidence of that section. At the first close, before the Q&A, we need to bring the whole juggernaut to a crescendo. Again, this is all about our design creativity and communication expertise. Naturally the vocal delivery is a rise at the end of the final sentence that barks credibility, power, conviction and belief.

We finish strongly, implant a pregnant pause that invites the audience to recognise we have finished and that they may now unleash their frenzied applause. We then glide straight into the Q&A, following which we add another powerful close. It can mimic the first one, it could be different, it is all in the planning and what type of impact you want. Nevertheless, the vocal delivery will again be triumphant, strong and commanding. Many speakers end with a whimper, their voice quietly falling away. Don’t be one of them. Go out powerfully, with energy, verve and supreme confidence. Deliver an ending they won’t forget, because we know the power of recency and we want our message to stick.