Open Your Talk with Impact!

The opening is one of the most important parts of your talk, arguably the most important part. Because you need to grab your audience's attention, if you fail to grab their attention at the beginning of your talk, you will struggle to capture their attention as you proceed. This is our focus for the 5th issue in the over-the-shoulder (OTS) series.

It is much easier to retain your audience's attention than to capture it when you don’t have it.

This post will discuss key aspects of creating a powerful opening for your presentation, talk or pitch. To do this effectively, you should have mapped out your logical and emotional audience journey and completed the ending and call to action.

Most people think an effective opening is a powerful hook. The hook is an important part of an effective opening, but it alone is insufficient. Equally important is making some promises and opening loops that will be closed throughout your talk. -This is why it is important that the bulk of your talk is outlined in detail before you tackle the opening.

So today, we will look at your hook and your promise and review loops (discussed in issue #023 -The Worst Mistake I See Speakers Make).

Grab Attention

Let’s start by grabbing attention. An effective hook captures the imagination of your audience. It forces them to wrestle with an idea and think of an explanation or a response. Often, questions are a great hook. Simply asking a question engages your audience, but not all questions are equal. A better-quality question creates a better-quality hook.

A great question surprises the imagination. Uniquely asking the same question will greatly improve the effectiveness of your hook.

For example,

1. Which productivity habit is actually hurting your business?

2. How can you get your boss to replace you with AI and give you a pay rise?

But questions are not the only hooks. A counterintuitive statement or statistic can also make for a great hook. The more controversial or left-field, the more engaging a hook will be.

And I cannot mention hooks without bringing up my ultimate hook example…

Sharknado. The first time you hear it, it grabs your imagination: a tornado made of sharks!

Nobody has ever told me that Sharknado was the best film, the best acting or the best story. Yet, at one time, Sharknado was the highest-grossing film franchise of all time. That is the power of an incredible hook.

Make a promise

Grabbing attention is just the first step of the opening. To lock it in, you need to turn that grab into a promise of future things. Imagine your audience thinking, “Okay, you have my attention. What have you got?” Your promise is your answer to that question.

Your promise gives your audience why they should invest their attention in what you have to say. A promise only works if it is of interest to them. If you have a young child and you want them to tidy their room, making a promise that they will feel better with it tidy will probably not work.

Promising that Mummy or Daddy will be happy if the room is tidy, may work, but probably points to some parental issues you may want to look at. Promising them that when their room is tidy we will go to the park and get an ice cream on the way, will likely have the best effect.

In the same way, your promise to your audience needs to be something that they care about. You want to talk in their terms and call out something that they want to be, have or do.

A big promise is great, but it also needs to be believable. The only thing worse than an unbelievable promise is any promise you make and don’t meet.

“By the end of this talk, you will know how to make $1m in your business.” That might be an interesting-sounding promise, but it is also not believable. We have all heard these sorts of statements at one point. And your response, like mine, is often to fold your arms and mentally say something like, “Go on, then, show me.”

This is not the attitude we want our audience to have at the beginning of our talk. Sceptical and challenging attitudes make it more difficult for you.

“I made a million dollars following some simple rules. I can’t promise you will make $1m doing the same, but I can promise that you will learn the mistakes to avoid, which will stop you from making $1m.” This is a much more believable promise. The attitude is different; I am more curious about these rules and whether they will apply to me.

Making your promise believable is one thing, but ensuring you keep it is even more important. To consider this, we are going to look once more at loops.

Open Loops

If we made the promise above about sharing some simple rules that will help you avoid mistakes in your business, we have, in effect, opened a loop. Humans are problem-solving organisms; this is why we love stories so much. In the back of our minds, in our subconscious, we are preparing for this information, these rules, and our subconscious is now monitoring what is being said to match the content with the promise.

This is why we open loops. It engages our audience’s subconscious and ensures they pay attention at some level. Not all loops are equal. Some will be stronger than others, or you may open multiple loops, with the number of them ensuring that attention is paid.

There are many ways to open loops other than making promises. You can start telling a story, then partway through go on an aside. The original story then becomes an open loop until you go back and finish the story. In the background, your subconscious has another tab open, waiting for that story to finish so your mind can close the tab.

This is how we close loops; we give the completion of the story or fulfil our promise.

But what happens when you don’t close a loop?

It feels uncomfortable, and sometimes, we are not even sure why. Have you ever seen a film and walked out of the cinema feeling somewhat disappointed, like you are missing something, but you are not sure what? This is likely due to an open loop that was never closed.

Sometimes, this is poor storytelling, but in the case of movies, it is more often that the cinema edit was made in a way that cut one of the story elements that closes a loop. However, your subconscious is still waiting for that information, and when you leave the theatre, your brain tells you that you are missing something.

However, this is worse when a promise is made but never fulfilled.

If they remember the promise, your audience is not just bereft of the fulfilment of that promise; they feel that you have deceived them. You have lied. This impacts your credibility and your authority. This is bad.

This is one of the reasons that your opening is the last thing you put together when crafting your talk. You can see if you are meeting your promise because you have already got the rest of your talk together. And if you are not, you can immediately jump back into your talk and make whatever changes you need to meet that promise and close that loop.

Conclusion

Ultimately, there are three things you should be concerned about in your opening.

1. Grabbing attention

2. Making a promise

3. Opening a loop

A good opening will have all of these elements, but they must all link to the remainder of your talk. Your attention-grabbing device must be relevant to your talk, you must fulfil the promise you make, and the loops you open to engage your audience's attention must be closed by the end of your talk.

Unpacking Wisdom is a weekly section in which I explore a famous (or not so famous) quote and how it applies to the Compelling Communicator.

I love this “quote” as it is a great illustration of a common problem. We assume we are being clear in our instructions or explanations, but we always need to have those assumptions checked by someone unfamiliar with out topic or systems.

Too often speakers believe they are answering the underlying question of the audience, unaware that there is a disconnect. The message is not received because it is not understood.

When we go through our speed bump run on talks with our speakers we are looking for these areas that may be misunderstood or miscommunicated. These are statements or words that can distract your audience while they try to figure out what you say. If you are addressing a general audience it is important that you get someone outside of your industry to listen to your talk and look for these sorts of errors.

What I am up to this week…

Professionally:

My contracting work is about to flood in after the client has been sitting on it. Things are proceeding with the new TEDxWaikato, which looks like it will become reality.

Recreationally:

I finished the Dungeon Crawler Carl books and need to refrain from any more fiction reading for a bit as I get carried away.

What I am reading:

The Mountain is You by Brianna Wiest