Claim your Space

Welcome to this blog - my aim is to make a difference to the success of your presentations. If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! Olivia

Lisa Braithwaite from Speak Schmeak has commented on my post about the attention-getting myth. I started responding to her comment, but my response got so long I decided it was worth a blogpost in its own right.

The issue is how to best help nervous speakers at the start of a presentation . Lisa suggested that:

Using an opening that immediately involves the audience, for example, through asking questions, engages them while also immediately taking pressure off the speaker to perform.

When the audience is allowed to participate and share their own knowledge and life experience, they are more engaged. The presentation becomes about them, not the nervous speaker.

My take on it is different. Nervous speakers are generally at their most nervous at the start of a presentation. As they get into their stride and realise that the presentation might just go OK their nervousness often reduces. So my approach is to help the nervous speaker get into their stride with as little risk as possible.

And I think asking questions is risky. It can easily go wrong. For example, you might get no responses - or you might have a garrulous member of the audience who takes over. This leaves the nervous speaker in an even more difficult situation. Asking an effective question that elicits the type of response you want and then handling the responses you get is a skill that requires practice, confidence and experience.

In fact, I don’t recommend asking questions right at the beginning for any presenter. During a presentation, the presenter is the leader. And leaders should start by leading. A leader can become more democratic once they’ve established their authority and credibility as a leader. So at the beginning of a presentation, the presenter should “Claim their Space”. Once you’ve claimed your space, which could be as little as two minutes, then it can be an effective strategy to involve the audience by asking questions.

Finally - does asking questions and getting the audience to respond mean that people are more engaged? Not necessarily. Audience participation has to be well-managed for it to be engaging for everybody. I might be more engaged in the moment that I’m offering my own opinion - but listening to other people make unprepared and often waffly comments isn’t what I’m there for. In that situation, I would rather hear from the speaker who has (hopefully) thought about and prepared what they want to say.

Audience participation is a great tool - when managed with skill and at the right moment in the presentation.

Go well with your next presentation. If you found this post useful, subscribe to my RSS feed.

Why you don’t need to grab attention

As a relatively new blogger I’m spending a lot of time reading other people’s blogs. I came across this intriguing story from the Washington Post which was blogged by both Seth Godin and Laura Fitton when it was first published last year.

A world-class violinist, Joshua Bell, was asked by the Washington Post to busk during the morning commute at a Washington metro station. The paper wanted to see how people would react to hearing a world-class violinist in such an incongruous setting. If you want to read the full story, click over there now, as I’m about to reveal what happened.

Joshua Bell played for 43 minutes and in that time 1,097 people passed by him. Only a handful of people stopped to listen and then only for a couple of minutes.

I’m intrigued by this story for what it can teach us about getting attention. Joshua Bell got virtually no attention at the metro station. Because of the context - people weren’t expecting a world-class violinist to be paying at the metro station - he needed to grab their attention before they would isten to him. But when he plays with the world’s most famous orchestras in venues where people have paid $100 a ticket - he has rapt attention from the moment he steps on stage. He does not need to grab attention.

It’s all about the context. The people in the concert hall have come to hear him - the commuters have not.

When you’re presenting - you’re like Joshua Bell in  a concert hall - people have come to hear you and the valuable content that you can give them. You don’t have to grab their attention.

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Attention-getting - The Evidence

In my last post I wrote about the attention-getting myth. I argued that the idea that you have to grab attention at the beginning of a presentation is a myth. Here’s the evidence to back that up.

Studies have been done measuring the attention levels of students in university lectures. Here’s the results of a study that asked students for their subjective assessment of their attention at different points in the lecture:

(Reference: Hartley J and Davies I “Note taking: A critical review” Programmed Learning and Educational technology, 1978,15, 207-224 cited by John Medina in Brain Rules).

In another study students were asked to write summaries of the lectures they had attended. The researchers then tallied the bits of information reported according to which half-minute segment of the presentation they had ocurred in. Students recalled the most information from the first five minutes of the presentation. (Reference: Burns R A “Information Impact and Factors Affecting Recall” 1985 cited in Middendorf J and Kalish A “The Change-Up in Lectures” National Teaching and Learning Forum, 1996, 5, 2).

So now you’ve got evidence that you don’t have to wrack your brains to come up with some clever attention-grabber at the start.

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The attention-getting myth

There is a pervasive myth in public speaking and presenting that you have to have an attention-getting opening.

I would argue to the contrary. The beginning of your talk is the one time that you can guarantee that the audience is paying attention. They will pay attention for the first one or two minutes to see if your presentation is going to be useful to them. But after that, if you don’t deliver good value through your content they may get bored and turn-off.

I believe that this attention-getting myth came from the advertising world. Advertisers generally have to interrupt what people are doing to get them to pay attention to their ads. So they’ve developed many attention-getting devices. Classic advertising formulas like AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) have been imported into public speaking and presenting without consideration of the different context. Generally, our audiences have decided to come and listen to us - we’re not having to interrupt what they’re doing to come and listen to us.

This attention-getting myth has led to two problems:

1. Some speakers feel like they have to start with an attention-getting device. This puts extra pressure on you just when you don’t need it.
2. It’s led some speakers to start with inappropriate attention-getting devices. I heard today about a speaker who started a business presentation by showing a photo of himself in an apron with a woman’s body in a bikini painted on. That may be an extreme, but often the attention-getter is cheesy and has little relevance to the content of the talk.

Here’s my advice. If you’re a beginner or nervous speaker, let go of the need to start with an attention-getting opening. Start in a conversational manner by simply introducing yourself and your topic. Be yourself.

If you have more experience, do try out different ways of opening your talk. But ensure it’s relevant to your topic. A useful technique is to design the rest of your talk - and then choose something interesting from the body of your talk to open with. For instance, you may have a good story or case study which would make a good opening, or you may have an interesting statistic that will intrigue your audience. But remember it’s a myth that you have to have an attention-getting opening.

Go well with your next presentation. If you found this post useful, subscribe to my RSS feed.