Archive for the ‘attention’ Category

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This Is Why Your Audience Isn’t Paying Attention To You…

Tuesday, May 17th, 2011
Image Credit What Your Speeches Need Is Some Spicing Up…

What Your Speeches Need Is Some Spicing Up…

Ever get the feeling that your audience just isn’t listening to what you are telling them? I mean sure, they seem to be with you at the start of your speech and then they seem to show up once again at the end, but how’s that middle part going for you? Researchers have studied what’s going on with your audience during the middle of your speech and let’s just say that it’s not good – they are checking out. Looks like we’re going to have to have a talk here – let’s find a way to keep them on board…

Why Your Audience Is Leaving You

If you need to understand why your audience is checking out half-way through your speech, then the first thing that you need to realize is that you talk too slow. Well, not really.

A better way to say what’s going on is that your audience is thinking too fast. Research has shown that the human mind has the ability to comprehend words that come at us at up to 600 words per minute. The problem here is that you and I talk at a rate of 120-200 words per minute.

Now there’s nothing wrong with the way that we’re speaking, it’s just that we’re giving our audience a lot of spare mental time to start to think about other things while they wait for us to say more. If we’re not actively working to hold on to their attention, then they are very quickly going to be thinking about other things.

Just to make things a bit worse, the folks up at the Northwestern School of Speech have done some studies and they’ve discovered that the attention span of an audience is roughly 9 seconds. Ouch!

What You Can Do To Get Your Audience To Stay Focused

Now that you know that you’ve got a problem on your hands, you’re going to have to figure out what to do about it. If there is any good news in this it is that you do have the audience’s attention at the beginning and at the end of your speech – they perk up and listen to what you have to say during both of these times.

Thankfully, the researchers have looked into our problem and they have a suggestion for us. What they tell us is that our audience needs to have their attention grabbed every 6-8 minutes during the body of our speech.

There are a lot of different ways to go about doing this attention grabbing. Books have been written on how to use everything from eye contact to body language to keep your audience engaged in what you are saying. However, there is another way…

The really good speakers, politicians, know how to wake their audience up after they’ve started to grow restless with the droning on of a typical political speech. They tell their audience that they are getting ready to wrap things up (‘… in conclusion…”). This causes the audience to start to pay attention again.

However, all too often the politician doesn’t wrap things up – they just keep on talking. After a while, they will once again communicate that they are going to be wrapping things up and the audience will again perk up.

This may not be a technique that you want to use all the time. However, at least now you’ll have it in your back pocket to use if you need it.

What All Of This Means For You

Listening to a speaker for 30, 60, or even 90 minutes is a hard job for an audience to do. In fact, it’s so hard that often they don’t do it – they’ll drift off and start to think about other things during the middle of that speech that you worked so hard on.

In order to prevent this from happening and to boost the probability that at least some of what you are saying will get into your audience’s heads, you need to change the way that you deliver your speech. You need to “wake up” your audience every 6-8 minutes with a startling statement or the appearance that you are starting to close your speech.

By realizing that your audience will start to drift off during your speech and taking steps to keep them onboard, you can become a much more effective speaker. This means that you will need to map out your speech and make sure that you include the spicy parts that will wake up your audience and make them hungry for more of what you are serving…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that it is ok to pretend that you are getting ready to close your speech multiple times?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Giving a speech is hard. Delivering an eulogy can be downright impossible. However, if we are asked to give one by people who are grieving, then we need to step up and do a good job of it. Since you are being asked to give the eulogy because you knew the person who passed on, this can be one of the most difficult speeches that you’ll ever give. I can’t make it any easier, but I can show you how to do it well…

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Posted in attention | 6 Comments »

Big Game Hunting: How Public Speakers Capture An Audience’s Attention

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010
Image Credit
You Can't Go Hunting If You Don't Know What You Are Looking For

You Can't Go Hunting If You Don't Know What You Are Looking For

In the world of big game hunting, the goal always seems to be to try to hunt something bigger and more deadly than you did last time. The world of public speaking isn’t all that much different except that we go looking for the biggest game of all: an audience’s attention.

Do The Unexpected

Face it, we’re all jaded. We live in a world where we expect to be updated instantly via iPhone or Blackberry, we get text messages whenever something important happens, and we can get virtually any type of food within about a mile of where we currently are. What the heck do you have to offer us as a speaker that is going to cause us to pay any attention to you?

David Green is a speechwriter who has to deal with this wandering attention thing as a part of his job every day. He’s got some suggestions on just exactly what you need to do as a public speaker in order to keep that audience of yours hanging on your every word.

First off, David suggests that you pay attention to what your audience is expecting you to say. Do they know who you are? Have they heard you speak before? Are you just like a bunch of other speakers? If any of these are true, then it’s time to shake things up just a bit.

David suggests that you do the exact opposite of what your audience is expecting you to do. If they are expecting you to deliver a speech standing behind a podium, then get out in front of everyone. If they are expecting you to use 100′s of slides, then don’t use any at all. These types of dramatic departures from the ordinary will catch your audience by surprise (in a good way) and they’ll be forced to pay attention to you because they’ll want to know what’s going to happen next.

Accent, Accent, Accent

Nope, we’re not talking about having you sound like Crocodile Dundee or like you are from the U.S. deep South, instead we’re talking about what else is going on on stage while you are speaking. Like PowerPoint.

How much time do you typically spend on the PowerPoint presentation that you are going to use with a speech? As much or more time than you spend on the speech itself? Forget all that fancy stuff, the real star of any speech is you. Make sure that if you decide to use slides that they accent (softly) what you are saying and don’t steal the show from you.

It’s Play Time!

So just what is a speech? If you’re not careful, it’s 20-30 minutes of pure boredom for your audience. If you don’t want to inflict this kind of pain on your audience, then you’ve got to entertain them. I’m not saying that you’ve got to make them laugh (although that might be a good idea), instead I’m trying to let you know that you’ve got to give your speech in a way that will hold their attention.

There are lots of ways to do this. Telling great stories is one way to do it. Slowly unveiling a discovery that you’ve made is another. How you do it isn’t as important as just making sure that you do it.

What All Of This Means For You

Just like a big game hunter, when you are giving a speech you are stalking prey. Your elusive quarry does not have four feet, but rather is sitting in a chair with four legs.

Your goal is to capture and hold your audience’s attention for your entire speech. In order to do this you’re going to have to get creative. Doing the unexpected is one way to keep them guessing – and paying attention to you. Make sure that your PowerPoint doesn’t overpower what you are saying and make sure that you tell a story or two or three.

In the end, you’ll know if you’ve done a good job because the audience won’t want your speech to have ended – they were having a great time listening to you. You’ll know that you’ve had a successful hunt if you get asked to come back and present again!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: What should you do if you sense that you are starting to lose an audience’s attention while you are giving a speech?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So there you are: you’ve agreed to give a speech and now your mind has gone completely blank when you’ve tried to start to figure out what you’ll say. Where did your energy go? Perhaps more importantly, how are you going to get it back and create a great speech?

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Never Give A Speech Without Having A Potato

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
Every Speaker Must Respect The Power Of A Potato

Every Speaker Must Respect The Power Of A Potato

Bored audiences will get up and walk out of your speeches. How would you keep the attention of 400+ engineers who were attending an industry dinner event that they didn’t really want to be at on a weekday evening? I recently had the opportunity to be the master of ceremonies at such an event – great gig, tough crowd.

The banquet’s master of ceremonies (MC) last year had tried very hard, but had ended up not being able to hold the crowd’s attention and they had started to leave before the event was even half over. This year’s planning committee presented me with a challenge: find a way to keep the audience in their seats until the end of the event. It turns out that a single large baking potato was a key part of my solution to this problem…

Not A Speech, But Rather A 3-Act Play

Two weeks before the banquet was to be held, I had a meeting with the planning committee. The banquet is an annual event for all of the engineers involved in transportation in the Tampa, Florida area. I had been asked to be a co-MC for the event in order to help make it a success. The trouble was that I know next to nothing about the transportation industry.

The other MC knew a lot about the industry having worked in it for over 25 years. This was a perfect pairing – his smarts and my creativity held the key to our potential success.

The planning committee wanted to focus on the future of transportation in Florida. Since this was not a typical speech, there wasn’t a speech to prepare. Instead I was looking at creating a play with three acts: an opening, then a second act after the banquet’s first speaker, but before its second speaker. Finally, there would be a third act that would close out the evening.

The Initial Plan: Potatoes Everywhere

Never one to be at a loss for ideas, my initial plan to the team was to propose other forms of transportation that people may not have thought of: catapults, rocket launchers, etc.

I took my plan one step further and proposed that we get someone to come up from the audience, put an apron on them, and then have them try to carry as many potatoes as possible across the stage. They would end up dropping some and we could say that a better transportation system was called for.

I had other ideas that involved the same potatoes: have planning committee members stand on one side of the stage and try to throw them into a bucket held by another committee member. Lots of potatoes were going to get hurt doing all of this.

In the end, the planning committee flatly rejected my potato idea. The possibility of someone getting hurt was just too great and it was sending a negative message about the transportation solutions that are currently being planned for Tampa. Sadly, I think that they made the right decision.

The Next Plan: Jet Packs

The clock was ticking and we were starting to run out of time. We went back to the drawing board and my co-MC did a web search and found all sorts of images of future transportation systems from the 1940′s and 1950′s covers of Popular Mechanics and Popular Electronics magazines. A new idea started to emerge.

Instead of saying anything negative about Tampa’s current transportation plans, how about if we came up with our own vision of the future of transportation? Make it so outlandish so that everyone knows that it’s not a real plan, but incorporate all of that futuristic stuff that everyone has always believed is coming.

I thought that this was a great idea – with one addition. I wanted to have it all lead up to one thing: a proposal for a jetpack based transportation future. Hey, everyone loves jetpacks and engineers especially love ‘em. The planning committee agreed and one of the members even agreed to build a mock jetpack for us to use.

What This All Means For You

So how did it all turn out you ask? The evening was a smashing success. The audience was riveted to their seats – they had to know how this 3-act play was going to come out. Not a soul left before we told them that the show was over.

My co-MC did a great job of reaching out and drawing the audience in using his deep knowledge of the transportation industry. The three-act play did its job by hooking the audience’s attention in the first act, extending the story in the second act and building up to a big finish in the third act.

The crowning point of the evening was when my co-MC brought out the Jetpack model and put it on and announced that the event was over and he was leaving to go home. That was what the audience had been waiting for!

Oh, and the potato? I had brought one to the event as a backup just in case things didn’t go as planned. We ended up setting it on the podium and not talking about it, not moving it, not doing anything with it. It drove the audience mad with curiosity: why was the potato there? What were they going to do with it? Talk about holding an audience’s attention!

What have you done that has helped to hold your audience’s attention during one of your speeches?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Just like a cheesy pick-up line, the first words that come out of your mouth when you are giving a speech will determine if you are going to get lucky with this audience.  How are you going to score?

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Huh? Learning To Stay In The Moment

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

Audiences need to learn to pay attention!

Audiences need to learn to pay attention!


So there I was, on one of those conference calls with way too many people and all of a sudden it started to happen. The moderator would ask a question of someone who was on the call and that person would say “Huh? I’m sorry, but could you repeat the question?” This happened over and over again with different people. I just sat there and thought to myself – “Man, is nobody paying attention to this call?” Although it sounds simple, it turns out that staying in the moment is getting more and more difficult to do…

What’s really going on here? It’s always been difficult to get people to remember & retain what has gone on it a meeting; however, now we seem to be having problems with people not being able to keep up with the flow of a meeting. According to author Cherie Kerr we may have the wrong focus. Outside of those folks who are deliberately doing other work during a meeting (BlackBerry anyone?), the people who are actually trying to participate often make the mistake of focusing on the goals of the meeting instead of what is being said right now.

The real goal of a meeting is achieve some sort of result. This can be an agreement, determine a next step, or reach a decision. That’s the end point. How you get there is the responsibility of the person who is running the meeting. If that’s you , then what you want to have happen is for everyone in the meeting to build on what has already been said instead of coming up with completely new directions for the meeting to head off in. Note that we’re not talking about Brainstorming sessions here, but rather normal business meetings.

By building on top of what has already been said, there will be a clear path from where you started to where the goal of the meeting is. Each discussion in the meeting will have a clear start, middle, and end as you lead into the next conversation. It will also quickly become clear if you’ve gone off the path and you’ll be able to bring the meeting back in line. Your participants will be more engaged because they’ll have a better understanding of where the meeting has been and where it is going.

This suggestion is not new. In fact the folks who do improv comedy do this all the time. Their skits flow from one character’s actions to another’s quickly. Hey, if it works for a 30 minute TV show, then surely it will work for your next business meeting!

Are you ready to keep your next meeting in line? Do you think that an incremental approach to conversations is the way to go or do you like a more open and free ranging approach? What works best in your life – leave a comment and let me know.

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Posted in attention, focus, groups, meetings, retention, teams, training | No Comments »

Differences Count When You Are Presenting

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

Make People Remember By Showing Differences
Ok, so you’ve got a big presentation coming up and you know that you want to make a difference and have the audience walk away with a good understanding of the complex info that you are going to present. What can you do to really make sure that you key points get hammered home? Setting yourself on fire halfway through the presentation or using trained animals both would be great, if impractical ways to accomplish this. How about two simpler ways that us technical folks always seem to forget as we pull together our presentations?

Audience Attention is drawn to LARGE differences that are perceptible.

Let’s say that you’ve got a slide that contains one of the key points that you want to make to your audience. There is probably other things on that slide (like a title?). You need to make sure that your key point, be it a number, a comparison, a figure, etc. jumps out at your audience. Background images, scrolling text, clipart, video clips, etc. are all swell; however, if they distract from your key point then they need to go away. Keep in mind that PowerPoint’s ability to have items join the slide via animation might be a good way to lead up to and introduce the key point.

People group elements into units automatically, which they then remember

The human mind is an amazing thing. We can quickly take in large quantities of information and rapidly make decisions about it. You can make this talent work for or against you in a technical presentation. Things that you place close to each other on a slide will automatically be considered to be related by your audience. A good example of this is labels and the thing that they are labeling. A bad example of this would be a graph that shows that both the price of copper ore and the price of apples have both increased by 25% in the past 6 moths. Both items would be shown closely together on the same graph and the audience would associate them. However, they really have nothing to do with each other (unless you are trying to talk about the cost of copper apples…).

Just a few things to consider when you are making that last pass though the big presentation that you’ve created — do your main points jump out or are they buried?

Posted in attention, differences, grouping, know your audience, PowerPoint, presentations, retention | No Comments »

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