Three levels of presentation openings – which should you use?

I get frustrated at presentation advice which says you have to do something clever or dramatic at the beginning of a presentation to grab your audience’s attention. That’s for three reasons:

1. You don’t have to grab the audience’s attention at the start. You have their attention at the start. The challenge is to keep it. (I’ve written about this a lot – see these posts on this blog The Attention-Getting Myth and Attention-Getting The Evidence and also a discussion between myself and Rowan Manahan on his blog).

2. It’s hard to pull off a dramatic opening when you’re nervous. And most people are most nervous at the beginning of a presentation.

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Claim your Space

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.

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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.

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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:

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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: [Read more]