In a fast paced world like ours attention, is among the most

precious resources of any audience.

And that makes the ability to find the words that glue your audience to

your lips or their screen invaluable.

Leaders who master this skill have a sharp understanding of the journey

they're taking their audience on.

They create tension right away from the very first word so that their audience

just has to know how the story unfolds.

If you want to improve in this area, it helps to understand that the

human brain is a prediction machine.

At any given time it tries to figure out what happens next.

Tension comes from the uncertainty about the prediction.

Will the prediction match the true course of events?

That's by the way, why criminal stories are so popular.

It's also why we love a good riddle or puzzle.

We just love to figure things out.

And of course be right about it.

Great communicators create tension by using this principle, they

trigger our prediction machine and then they use our anticipation of

the resolution to keep us hooked.

For example, they might hint at a clever way to solve one of our problems.

And then use our craving for knowing the secret to inspire us to listen

to them, glued to their lips, for sometimes more than an hour.

In other words, try to think of ways in which you can make your

audience want a piece of information, before you give it to them.