Attention! Please

This month's tutorial on www.bravocc.com is about how to get your audience's attention using the rules from Dr. John Medina, author of one of our favorite books this year Brain Rules. Millie touched on a few of them with her post about Ted Koppel and how he used unexpectedness to captivate his audience. I think, at the heart of Dr. Medina's rules about presentations is that we MUST stimulate our audiences in some way or we might as well go home. If you do a lot of presentations and you begin them with the following:

1. Hello My name is __________
2. Ladies and Gentlemen
3. Today I am going to talk about
4. Thank you for being here

Then raise your right hand and slap your self on the face! THAT IS YOUR WAKE UP CALL. No one has captivated an audience with any of these attention getters--in the history of EVER (as my seven year old would say).

There is compelling research that suggests that audiences make up their mind in the first minute of a presentation if they are going to listen or not. And if you are not the first speaker of the day? Then get ready, your audience may tune out in less than 30 seconds! When we focus in on corporate speaking occasions I think these problems are even more prevalant. Corporate America loves a good meeting where men and women bore us to tears with the monotonous droning on and on about information that honestly, no one cares about!

So for your next presentation challenge yourself to find a way to get your audience's attention from the beginning. How?

1. Use visual language--if we can't literally see it, then paint us a picture that we can go to in our minds and see
2. Stop it with the old and tired cliches! I swear if anyone says "think outside the box" or "value added program" or "paradigm shift" to me I might punch them in the face. That is corporate speak! Don't do it!
3. Find a great story that is your own personal story or one you find in your research to open up the presentation with. For me--this is the best way to begin any presentation. People are captivated by (good) stories.
4. Don't be self-centered in the beginning or any part of the presentation. Recently I attended a speaking occasion where the CEO of the company kept saying "help me". Help me win, help me achieve, help me.... Yuck! Given the feedback afterwards, people were saying "help you? How bout' you help us! You are the one making the big bucks!".
5. Use (appropriate) humor. Well timed and well done humor puts us all at ease--speaker and audience alike.

You can do these things and separate yourself from the rest of the pack. QUIT doing it like everyone else does! Separate yourself from the mediocre. And watch the results....

-- Libby Spears