In my mind, there are two kinds of attention: neck down, and neck up.
Neck-up attention is when the listener has to make an effort to pay attention. Neck-down attention is when the listener is riveted to the speaker: she can’t help but pay attention.
Please note that, in our language of English, attention is paid because attention is a valuable currency. When listeners pay attention, they are rewarding you with arguably the most valuable currency in the world.
Here are techniques that are guaranteed to earn you more attention without losing any of your professional credibility.
Start with the unexpected.
Start with a bang, not a whimper. Smokers like matches that light with the first strike, and listeners like presentations that ignite interest with the first sentence. For instance:
“We stand today at a place of battle, one that 40 years ago saw and felt the worst of war.”–President Ronald Reagan
“I stand before you today, the representative of a family in grief, in a country in mourning, before a world in shock.”–The Earl Spencer, brother of Lady Diana.
“I wish you could have been there…”–Patricia Fripp, CSP, Former President of the National Speakers Association.
Each of these opening lines makes us lean in, lend an ear,and wonder where the speaker will take us. They jump right into the subject and create suspense, intrigue, curiosity. They capture neck-down attention.
Make it about them.
Now that you’ve gotten listeners’ attention with your magnetic opening, make the story about them. Increase your You-to-Me-Ratio. Talk about their goals, their aspirations, their anxieties. Cicero, a Roman statesman and orator, and one of the greatest speakers in the history of the world, said, “Tickling and soothing anxieties is the test of a speaker’s impact and technique.” He meant that you can capture attention if you remind an audience of a felt need, a pain point, or a threat to their well-being.
[ctt tweet=”You can capture attention if you remind an audience of a felt need, a pain point, or a threat to their well-being.” coverup=”U8jaL”].
“Ring around the collar,” was a 1968 ad in which a housewife protected her husband from loss of social status and career disaster by using Whisk on his shirts. And many consultants I know use something called FUD to sell their projects: Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. A smattering of FUD gets our attention. When I feel it, I feel it in my chest.
Keep it concrete at the start.
Show a prop. Use language that appeals to the senses. Don’t tax the audience right away with abstract reasoning or academic concepts. Better to hide your smarts than to wear them on your sleeve. Storytelling is a powerful way to get into a topic because we are hard-wired to absorb information through storytelling. Tell a good story and you’ll get neck-down attention.
For example, I once heard Robert Kennedy, Jr. speak about conservation on a boat on the Hudson River. He began by pointing south. “If you look in that direction,” he said, “You will see the channel that for millions of years has been the largest spawning ground for sturgeon in the world.”
Of course, when I looked where he was pointing, I saw nothing but gray polluted water, not a sturgeon in sight, but I had the image of millions of large fish teeming so densely on the surface of the river that I could have walked across their backs to New Jersey.
Only then did he dive into the data about the poor, languishing Hudson.