Confessions of a Public Speaker (12 page)

There are some things the human mind loves paying attention to,
including the following:

With this list in hand, an easy trick would be to stick one
of these things into your talk every five or six minutes
just to jolt people’s
attention back to you. This doesn’t work. It’s too
obvious. Standing at the front of the room blasting a foghorn while you
drop your pants every 60 seconds will certainly keep everyone’s
attention, right up until they rush the stage to pummel you. People know
when they are being manipulated. Showing a movie clip, telling a joke,
or putting up a pretty picture that has nothing to do with your topic
will have little lasting effect. It doesn’t mean anything. Only
well-chosen pictures are worth a thousand words, and, even then, they
can only be valuable if they’re displayed long enough for the audience
to comprehend their meaning. If you find natural ways to draw attention
to things that illustrate your point, use them.

The simplest way to do this is by telling stories. Frankly, as
soon as you open your mouth, you are telling a kind of story. All
communication has a narrative: a beginning, a middle, and an end. The
best way to direct attention is to talk about situations (another word
for a story) that the audience cares about. Then they have two reasons
to be interested: the situation and who it’s happening to. It’s one
thing to say, “Here’s line 5 of the new tax code.” That’s just a boring
fact, floating in space, encouraging people to put their attention
elsewhere. It’s quite another to say, “80% of you in the audience
confused line 5 with line 6 on your last tax return, which cost you
$500. Here’s how to not make that mistake.” Even a topic as
mind-numbingly dull as tax forms becomes interesting if the speaker
cares both about the problem and the people affected by it. When an
audience is curious about the story you’re telling, they’ll follow your
lead almost anywhere. Good storytellers know this intuitively. As
Annette
Simmons wrote in
The Story Factor
(Perseus):

If you do choose to do something fancy like show pictures, charts,
or movies—or interpretive dances, musical performances, flaming chainsaw
juggling, or any other possible thing you could do on stage to get
attention—consider the following: “Why is the audience watching this?”
Bad answers include: you think it’s cool, you want to show
off your chainsaw skills, or, perhaps the greatest sin of
all, you feel obligated to fill the assigned time slot. You have to do
better than that. The best reason is that it fits the story you are
telling. Know what the point is and what insight the audience will gain
from what you are
directing their attention to. Go well out of your way to
pause midway through a movie clip to emphasize the key things they are
supposed to see or understand. If you’re not sure what the point is, or
whether it applies to the audience, cut it out of your material. It’s
better to keep the attention of the room for 10 solid minutes and then
open for questions than to stumble through an hour in a stupor of
mediocrity.

People always have
expectations. If they go to a fancy restaurant, they
expect outstanding service and perhaps a snooty maître d’ they can make
fun of. If they see an action movie, they expect explosions that defy
the laws of physics and plots with cave-size holes. And if they give you
an hour of their time to talk to them, they expect you to be confident
in what you say and do. If you fumble with the remote for your laptop,
get confused by your own slides, or apologize for not being more
prepared for the presentation, you are making it clear that you are not
worthy of their attention. You are not playing the
role they expect—that of a confident, clear, motivated,
and possibly entertaining expert on something. You do not have to be
perfect, but you do need to play the part.

In other words, be bigger than you are. Speak louder, take
stronger positions, and behave more aggressively than you would in an
ordinary conversation. These are the rules of performing. It’s what kids
in high school are taught when rehearsing for the annual production of
“Annie Get Your Gun.” They are the same rules that good stand-up
comedians, professors, and talk-show hosts follow. Specific to lectures,
consider this: if you are at the front of the room, how far away are the
people in the middle rows? Now realize half the audience is even farther
away. Those people in the back need more help to connect with you and
your message.

If you do webcasts, teleconferences, or otherwise speak through
computers, this point is even more important. Being on a computer means
you instantly fall from being three-dimensional to two. They can still
see you, but it’s a pixelated, washed-out, flat video version of you.
The subtleties of your humor and the nuances of your points have a
harder time coming through. To compensate, you have to project more
energy. Doing so feels unnatural if you’re sitting alone in your
cubicle, but your onscreen audience needs every extra bit of energy they
can get from you to keep their attention from sliding away.

A common mistake people make is to shrink onstage. They become
overly polite and cautious. They speak softly, don’t tell stories, and
never smile. They become completely, devastatingly neutral. As safe as
this seems, it is an attention graveyard. It’s like being given the part
of Hamlet—who has some of the best monologues in human history—and
indifferently mumbling lifeless sentences into your sleeve. I’m not
suggesting you should be phony. Don’t act like a game-show host or a
cheerleader. Instead, be a passionate, interested, fully present version
of you.
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That’s who your audience came to hear.

The biggest advantage I have over every crowd, no matter how smart
they are, is that I know what will happen next. I described this earlier
in the book, but it deserves to be mentioned again because it’s one
powerful way to control attention. I’m convinced I could
know half as much on a subject as my audience, yet still amaze,
surprise, and entertain them by how I weave my stories together. This
makes the
transitions between slides critically important. I have to
know what’s coming next and set up what I say on the current slide to
make the following pay off. If I know this, I can summon the room’s
attention at the right time to make sure they are all looking at or
listening to me when the next thing I’m going to say is funny,
important, or
powerful.

Doing this well depends on how much I practice. I can’t remember
the transitions between points or how one story will best tie in to the
next unless I’ve rehearsed and learned how to do it. Often I throw away
a great idea because I can’t figure out how to get smoothly into it from
the previous story, or get from that great idea into the next story.
Also, invest in software like PowerPoint or Keynote, which have
presenter modes that allow you to see the next slide on your laptop
only. This tool will help prepare you to make a smooth transition, just
like you practiced.

If I tell you someone will win a million dollars before this
paragraph is over, I have introduced drama. Who will win? Why will they
win it? Suddenly, reading paragraphs is thrilling. Drama is one easy way
to build tension. All great experiences involve a dramatic rhythm of
tension and release, whether it’s a masterful magic show,
a rollercoaster ride, or a flirtatious first date on a blanket by the
sea at sunset. And in all cases, tension is created by the suggestion of
releasing it. If I said someone
might
win a million
dollars, or there is a slim chance you
might
get
laid, it’s not as interesting. There must be a reasonable expectation
that the payoff will happen.
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If you’re smart, that payoff is made clearly in the title
and description of your presentation.

The simplest kind of tension to build and then release is the one
I mentioned before: problem and solution. If your talk consists of
several problems important to the audience, and you promise to release
the tension created by those problems by solving each one, you’ll score
big. The audience will follow you through each sequence of tension and
release. If you do a great job with the first problem you identify, and
offer a practical or inspiring way to handle it, they’ll stay with you
throughout your entire talk. Other kinds of tension can be created by
the premise of the talk. Your subject could be, “Why no one should go to
school.” Your entire line
of thinking creates a kind of tension, which you will
release with each fact offered and point made.

Patterns of tension and release can simultaneously be used to
establish a rhythm. The top-10 list, popularized on David Letterman’s
late-night talk show, is one system for both generating an easy rhythm
and creating various levels of tension and release. As the list is read
and descends closer to #1,
the audience’s anticipation is building the whole time as
to what the top answer will be.

At the beginning of my public-speaking career, I never involved
the audience simply because I was terrified of them. I found that when I
let people ask me questions midway through the talk, I’d get flustered
and never regain my initial confidence level. So, I did the only
sensible thing I could think of: tell people at the beginning not to ask
any questions until the end. This was a bad solution, attention-wise;
they’d become immediately disinterested upon hearing that the next hour
was going to be an uninterrupted lecture (I’d often go for 80 minutes,
earning my own private corner of attention hell). Every audience has
plenty of energy that, when channeled, even if only in small amounts,
always invigorates their attention levels. Eventually, I learned some
easy tricks for getting an audience involved without spoiling my
rhythm:

Every audience is different, so interaction can be risky. When you
allow someone in the audience to speak, you are giving him the floor and
with it some of your
power. The good news is, he’ll nearly always give the
power back to you. Sometimes, he’ll give you even more power in the form
of his attention and positive energy. And even if no one answers the
questions you’re asking, more people will be listening to the silence in
the room than were listening to you talking before the room went silent.
You have, regardless of why, regained the
audience’s attention.