Imagine standing in front of an audience for 10 seconds before starting your speech.
What is the audience thinking?
“Is he nervous? What is he doing? What is he doing up there?”, could be going through their minds.
It is then, after 10 seconds that you start, “I bet you wonder why I was just standing here staring at you for the past 10 seconds.”, or you could just yell, “FIRE!” and run out of the room…but let’s not shock them that much.
Anyway that you shock your audience, with a powerful action statement, saying something controversial, or even adversarial, you can shock your audience into paying attention to what you have to say. A shocking opening attracts attention to you and gets the audience to wonder what is going to come out of your mouth next. Trust me. It works and let me tell you why.
Imagine that you just came into a conference room. You had spent the last hour answering phone calls, answering e-mails, and trying to get a late TPS report finished. What is on your mind? The voice mails piling up, the e-mail burying you or the TPS reports that are filling your in-box? Whatever it is, you attention is not fully on this goofball standing in front of you.
Then all of the sudden, he is just standing there or maybe he said something shocking that totally stopped your train of thought. All of the sudden, you are not thinking about that girl in logistics, but you are thinking about what is going to come out of this person’s mouth next. You are hooked.
Why a shocking opening is so powerful is that it breaks the state of the audience. The listeners are usually so wrapped up in their own thoughts, that if you are not someone that they know they have to pay attention to, then it is likely that they might miss a large part of your speech because they were not paying attention. The audience is in a state that is not listening to you. The goal of the shocking opening is to then break that state and get them thinking about you, or more specifically your message.
How do you do it? Be memorable. Don’t start with, “Thank you for inviting me to speak or Mr. Toastmasters, fellow Toastmasters, and guests.”
Instead, engage their imaginations, say something unexpected, or point out something obvious that happened. In my studies of the great speakers, they always have some hook, some device that they use to capture the attention of the audience to pull them away from their inner focused state to an outward focused state of paying attention to your speech.
How do you know when you have succeeded? The audience is staring at you in apt attention and not their blackberries, their hands, or the ceiling above your head. How do you know what to say? Experiment with it. Have some fun with different openings.
What is your favorite way to break the audience’s state and get them to pay attention to you?
About the Author: My Toastmasters Blog is written and edited by Chris Elliott, a professional speaker and blogger. Chris serves as a leader for supply chain and international non-profit organizations. He enjoys uses his knowledge and experiences during his speaking engagements, workshops, consulting projects, and one-on-one coaching sessions. The result—connecting people and empowering change. If you would like information on how you can bring Chris to speak to your next meeting, please download Chris' one sheet or contact him by clicking here.
I live and die on the “shock opening”. I’ve noticed I have two seperate and distinct techniques.
First, the opening sentence technique, Hook ‘em from the first two sentences: “A knock on the door….at 11:30 on a rainy Friday night…is never good news”. Another grabber was “How did YOUR family handle the news that you were going to become a *gasp* Toastmaster?”
Second technique is the “180 degree turn”. Mushy, pedestrian first paragraph and then you turn the volume all the way up and go off in an unexpected direction. I have a speech where I congratulate someone (random) for their recent speech about the joy of skydiving, but then get all agitated and start talking about how dangerous parachuting is and how I’m living proof of it
My all-time favorite opening is doing the mushy “goal-setting is important” blather that everyone has heard 100 times before. In paragraph 2 I kick it up a notch by saying I used these goal-setting techniques to date a Hollywood actress “and here’s exactly how I did it”. Guaranteed attention-lock.