Here is the second installment of the PSU articles. More to come!
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In Class One – Starting Off With a Bang – I began an overview discussion of presentation introductions by telling a story, and cutting it off just at the point where you NEEDED to know what was going to happen next.
Maybe you hated me for it.
But you read the whole article.
And that’s exactly the point of this technique! When you stand up in front of a group of people, especially strangers, you need to grab their attention first and foremost. They need a reason to listen to you, and a reason to keep listening even if the topic itself is less than engaging.
Class One briefly mentioned three methods of creating an introduction that does just that, and Telling a Story is one of those methods.
Why does this method work? Put simply, we have all grown up with an inborn desire to hear a storyteller spin his yarn. As children, we loved to have our parents read to us from exciting picture books that brought a simple story to life in vivid color and word. As we got older, we slowly traded that in for more complex storylines and our own imaginations, or the faster-paced sensory assault of the television and movies.
Either way, our desire to experience – and become absorbed in – stories has always been nurtured. Not only do we enjoy the act of putting our own “story” on hold for a while to experience another’s, once we do so, we NEED to know how it turns out. We need to feel some sort of closure at the end, so that we can put the story to rest.
Think for a moment about the last time you were watching a television episode, and just as the story struck a vital crossroads, those fateful words “To Be Continued” flashed across the screen? Did you sigh in frustration? Probably. Did you watch it the next week. Almost definitely.
You needed to know how it turned out. A lot of modern series depend on that element without even notifying you that the story is continuing. Consider the hit show “Lost.” If you miss a week or two, you’re the one that’s lost! They have manufactured a viciously loyal fan base by exploiting every human being’s inborn desire to see how it all turns out.
So, spiraling back to the subject at hand, how can YOU exploit this same desire and use it to grab your audience’s attention and keep it through the end of your talk?
The first step is in your preparation or writing of the speech. (If you have a professional speechwriter writing for you, you may want to mention this concept to them so they know this is the direction you want to take.)
You will want to give some thought to the general themes you will be developing in your talk, and consider what sort of mental images appear when you consider those themes. For example, in Class One, the general themes I was considering involved either succeeding or failing at quickly grabbing your audience’s attention, and how important the introduction was to your success.
The analogy of a batter in the tension-filled last moments of a baseball game popped into my mind because the success or failure of his team rested on what happened in the course of the few seconds he was swinging the bat.
The story you choose may be a direct retelling of an actual event, a reworking of a standard story everyone may recognize (such as a fairy tale or fable), or a work of fiction you create solely for this purpose.
The decision is yours, and if handled correctly, will not change the effectiveness of this method.
The focus in all cases must be on three qualities of the story:
Brevity – Don’t make this a long, drawn out tome. You can lose your audience just as quickly as you grab them. The best introductory stories take less than a minute to establish, reach a crux, then apply to your talk’s general themes.
Relevance – Don’t choose a story and try to shoehorn it into your talk with questionable connections or application. Start with your themes, and allow your mind to make the most logical connections. Then, build your story from there.
Engagement – You want to build your story in such a way that your audience cares about the outcome. Don’t focus on a character no one can relate to or an event that will bore them. Try to infuse some sort of tension, excitement, even mystery into the story so that your audience NEEDS to know what happens next!
To effectively use this powerful story, you should begin your talk with it directly, not watering it down with other unnecessary introductory comments or apologies. Get right into the story.
But don’t finish it!
Bring the story to a crux, then stop!
Now, of course, you’re going to need to give some serious thought to the transition, but the basic technique is to reach a point in the story where a decision needs to be made or the character is “hanging from a cliff”, then swing your audience back into your themes with a series of questions or a powerful statement of comparison.
Make sure you let them know that you’ll be coming back to the story later in the talk, but don’t tell them where, and don’t let them know how it’s going to turn out.
This hooks them into listening to what you have to say, making the same mental connections you made when you came up with the story yourself.
In other words, they are listening intently what you have to say, following your lead.
A captive audience.
If you can successfully develop a story that contains the three vital qualities of brevity, relevance and engagement, and you can incorporate the cliff-hanger into your presentation, you have created an attention-grabbing introduction that will hook your listeners and make them listen closely to your presentation so they don’t miss a word of it!
