engagement Archive - The Art of Communicating

You’ve got my attention

I give you permission to use a chunk of my attention.
However, you must choose between two options:

Option #1:
You can get 30 minutes but you have to fill it with 30 ideas of one minute each.

Option #2:
You can get 10 minutes but you have to fill it with one idea and one idea only.

Many businesses instinctively pick option 1.
But is this a smart choice?

Which of the two do you think has a better chance of intriguing me?
Which one is more likely to get me to engage in a conversation?
Which one will stick with me for longer?

What would you pick?

How to give a boring talk

The easiest way to bore a smart person is to figure everything out for them, isn’t it?

But it’s exactly what happens in many talks. The speaker shows up as the smart guy who’s got everything figured out, leaving no space for the audience to figure anything out.

But smart people love to do that.

Giving your audience something to figure out, even it’s just a brief moment to think about your statements before you present your conclusion, can have a profound influence on how they engage with your thoughts.

Of course, when there’s nothing else to figure out, people might turn their attention on the argument itself and try to figure out if something could be wrong with it.

Which means that if you don’t leave space for critical (or even just curious) thinking, it could be that this is exactly what triggers it.

So, here’s a thought for your next talk. What if you didn’t show up as the smartest guy in the room but allowed the audience to feel smarter?

Things your audience does during a presentation

Tick all boxes that apply:

□ listen carefully to every single word
□ look the speaker up on LinkedIn
□ catch up on this morning’s emails
□ surf Instagram
□ try to match what’s being said to own experience
□ sleep
□ prepare to ask a question
□ flirt
□ doodle/take notes
□ mentally rate the presentation on a scale from 0 to 10
□ imagine giving the presentation themselves and how they’d do it differently
□ make a photograph of a slide
□ make a selfie
□ fact check a claim the speaker made
□ …

The list goes on.

The important question is:

What do you want your audience to do during your next presentation?

And how do you create the conditions to make that happen?

SEARCH

Explore

Work with me

Connect

SUBSCRIBE

You’ve got my attention

How to give a boring talk

Things your audience does during a presentation

Spread the Word

Dr. Michael Gerharz