How to captivate an audience in less than 30 seconds

thank you thank you thank you I'm honored to be here today I'm grateful that you all came to listen to me talk so I want to make you a promise right now and that is I will not waste a minute of your time okay that's my promise to you right now fair enough all right so I know that just before lunch the heads might be a little disconnected thinking about other things I have two exercises would you be willing to participate before I get into the material yes excellent oh what a nice crowd all right the first exercise is really simple I'd like all of you to please take out a blank piece of paper or open up your smartphones your iPads whatever it is I want you to make a list so for 60 seconds just 60 seconds I want you to make a list of everything that's on your mind right now it has nothing to do with what we're going to talk about just all the things you're thinking about all the people you have to call emails you have to send pick up the cleaning ready go 60 seconds three two one go ahead and quickly finish up that last item and for those of you who wrote it on a piece of paper fold that up and put it in a safe place if you did it on your smartphones or an electronic device go ahead and save it now and now you should have nothing on your mind alright how's that feel okay good way to start the next thing I'd like you to do the second exercise I'd like you to go through is kind of a life-changing event so I want you to prepare yourself now if you've seen this before I ask that you think back to the first time you've seen it I'm gonna put some words up here right now I'd like you to read them to yourself and when you're done reading them look back over here at me so I'll know we're all done okay and if you've seen this before I ask that think back to when you first saw this and it has to be done in complete silence ready go ahead and read okay all right everybody got it we're not reading for context not for meaning just read it okay great so now I'm going to ask you to do something very simple I'm gonna put those words back up here by the way how many of you have seen this before I know one person has - Oh excellent three excellent all right I'm gonna put the words back up here and this time I want you to count all of these all of the FS like in the word finished okay now in finish there's an e I'm not looking for partial letters so I'm not looking for an F inside an e direct F's right there in front of you I'm not looking for black text on a black background or white text on a white background when you have your answer of how many of these you see please stand up when we're all standing I know we have it ready silence go this is not hard so somebody can stand up very quickly there we go thank you you can double-check yourself while we wait I know some of you have already triple checked yourself okay now watch what happens around the room all of those of you who saw three or fewer F's could you please sit down now now we've all we're looking at the same thing weren't we how about four could you please sit down now five could you please sit down six could you please sit so it we're six right there right in front of you go ahead and find the others because we don't have a lot of time I'm going to help you out here's one here's two and there's three right there in front of you there was no trick right I didn't stand there in front of it and block it the point to this exercise is very simply this what I'm about to share with you right now about how to captivate any audience is not new in fact many of the things I'm going to tell you right there they're right in front of you but you just don't see them so hopefully when you leave here today you'll have at least one more F than you walked in with and with that let's get into the material so to begin with whenever you're presenting people always ask me what do i how do I start what do I say in those first thirty seconds and my response to you always is who's the audience you've got to know who the audience is before you can actually design how you can captivate them in the first thirty seconds but let's assume for today that you know who your audience is whether it's one on one one on many makes no difference and let's get into the actual material so now I'm going to present I look at presentations as having basically well I'm sorry I forgot I'm gonna hand you today some tools tools that hopefully you'll aren't using when you present I'm going to share three tools with you here today okay and as we get into it what I want to focus on is just the opening because the rest of it most people are fine in the middle of their presentation but the opening tends to be the weakest part of most people's presentations the closing also but I'm oli going to talk about the opening here today so let's begin I see hundreds of people present whether it's entrepreneurs or customer presentations wherever they're presenting and they all kind of look like this and like this they all sound the same they smell the same they use the same words they look the same if they're in social networking and they're all saying the same things but every once in a while you see somebody that stands out and this is what I'm going to give you some tools today so you can stand out you don't have to stand on your head to stand out but you will stand out if you start using some of the tools that I'm going to share with you today and number one is this how to stand out among a crowd Romero Britto is a pop artist happens to be one of the most popular part of pop artists in the world today because he was willing to go big and go colorful and break the rules of art so I want to tell you how never to be the same as anyone ever again and all you need to do is remember this s ames1278 is and you're going to say I know you're going to say oh I already knew that here it is and it doesn't even take 30 seconds the first s story you need to tell stories and when you walk up in front of an audience and say you know before I begin today just want to share a short story that happened to me on the way here today well you'll never believe what happened on the flight when I was flying in yesterday do you want to hear the rest of that story I'm just making it up but the point is when you start with a story just like Steve Jobs went in front of the 2008 graduating class at Stanford he walked up to the lectern and he said thank you ladies and gentlemen I have three stories to share with you here today and everybody got their paper out and they wrote down one two three because they were ready for three stories so story if you're looking for help on how to tell stories one of the most effective books that I've read was written by Craig Wortmann he and I presented at the Kauffman Foundation last year and I thought he was an excellent speaker his book called what's your story really breaks it down for you it breaks it down into success stories failure stories customer stories prospect stories personal stories backstories logo stories feature function stories all these different stories that you can use when you're talking to people that make it a lot more interesting than if you just talk fact fact fact or feature feature feature the best part of stories is they're repeated so when you tell someone a story if it's a good one they might repeat it when you're presenting to angel or venture capitalists and you're doing a one-on-one presentation with them guess what they have to go back and talk to their team and their partners are they going to repeat your facts maybe but they might repeat your story okay so that's the first s now let's jump to the e the e is a place where most people go when they want to talk about what they're doing they use examples and examples are great but in a large room if you choose one example like a director's chair as an example and you describe what a director's chair is like some people in the room might be thinking about a club chair or rocking chair so you might confuse your audience a little bit so examples while good I believe tend to be not as effective as a story or the other three things I'm going to share with you right now so examples of what the e stands for the next I want to share with you is a story so at the IBM smart fine a smart camp finals last year there were twelve presenter 11 presenters that went up to present and the seventh one went up and he said ladies and gentlemen I'm so excited to be here today because I want to share with you our machine that turns water into money and that's how the four hundred people in the room reacted and he actually does make a machine that turns water into money and this is it it's a about so big turbines on the outside edges flappers in the middle you throw it into a waterway the flappers start turning you plug it into the grid and now you have free electricity so does he turn water into money no of course not not literally but he's using the famous metaphor metaphors are so powerful in business but we don't tend to use them enough so the m insane stands for metaphors and metaphors just in case you need to remind yourself of the formula because it's been a while it's just when you say a is B or a are B the trees are the lungs of the earth that's a metaphor they're not literally well in some cases some people say actually yes they are literally okay so that's what the M stands for okay the next is another story so I always like to ask people what they do and in a workshop about eight months ago I said so what do you do and the gentleman said to me Nathan I'm the CEO of maverick surfboards we do for surfers what the chairlift does for snow skiers so okay you got my interests interesting and they said you know the problem with getting with skiing is getting to the top of the mountain and the chairlift fix that problem well the problem with surfing is getting out to the waves and we have fixed that problem by producing an electric surfboard there's a wireless controller that goes on your thumb and you press the button and it engages the little motor so you can motor out to the wave you want to surf that's a professional surfer here he's motoring out to the wave and here he's motoring in front of the wave say isn't get crashed on top of the way so you might say well why do you need an electric surfboard well if you have more fun doing the sport you love to do why not make it electric of course there's no you don't to plug it in and take the cord out and get that so the point here is he could have said to me Nathan we make electric surfboards which is what most people tend to try to do in one sentence they try to tell people what they do and often it gets lost you make electric surfboards that's not a baby Wow to me it's like why would anybody need one of those but the way he presented it using an analogy and that's what the a stands for analogy and the formula is to be as B is to C I'm sorry ICS to D simple as that so you need to use more metaphors and analogies and the last one the other s is when you say things like I slept like a baby or sleeping in that hotel last night the bed was like sleeping on a bed of feathers so it's the old simile where you just use a is like B or just as with this okay so we don't have to go back to grammar school but similes analogies and metaphors or what you need to use more when you're presenting they will be lasting in the minds of your audiences when you go back and take a look at this presentation which you'll have a link to at the end I have a list of just some similes analogies and metaphors I collect them because often with my clients I have to sit down and get creative with you and figure out okay well how do we come up with an analogy for your business well I'm not a creative savant I need input so I just collect them and then when I need help I just go look at the list you can do the same thing as well just start collecting them but the most important thing I want to tell you about similes analogies and metaphors is this they are culturally sensitive right so if I was in Ireland right now and I said you know that's like chalk and cheese how many of you know what that means one or two three four of you might know what that means so if I said that here assuming all of you know what that means that might just fall flat but if I said you know it's like oil and water they don't mix that's one of the meanings of chalk and cheese and just lastly on similes analogies and metaphors in terms of how powerful they are you know this guy professor Stephen Hawking so he came to California and my wife and daughter went to see him present at a conference I thought I don't need to know about that stuff they came back and they said dad you would never believe it you should have been there I said why he said because every time Stephen Hawking's spun our minds with scientific terms and whatnot we couldn't understand he'd stop and say oh wait a minute that what I've just described to you is like taking a heavy ball and dropping it on a rubber mat and when it does this and does this that's like air light bending through a wormhole so he is similes analogies and metaphors constantly throughout the talk or nobody would understand a thing well a few of us would understand the thing of what that man talks about that's how powerful they are okay so now I don't like to talk about what unless I give you a howl so how do you come up with your own one you could go hire a PR firm for a lot of money and they'll help you come up with these or use your own brains and the people you work with you can go to the places like Getty Images or Jupiter images some of these really great photography websites out there and do something like this so let's say you're looking for a metaphor insecurity you put in the word security and take a look at the pictures you need to help the right side of your brain get more involved in the creative process now there are over 500 pages that came up when I put the word security in there so don't start on pages one jump to the last page and work backwards because the last page is going to have photos that are tagged a little bit weirdly which is kind of what you want you want the right side of your brain to start going oh what does that have to do with security like what does a oh yes a bank vault security or maybe the yellow tape could have something to do and that metaphorically represents this in our business or better yet here now we have this and this is and then your brain starts going oh yeah okay so that's one way to help your brain come up with similes analogies and metaphors the second way is a very famous website out there called Reader's Digest it comes in 68 different languages I believe so you should be able to go there and find stories all sorts of things like taglines titles of different publications that can help you with your creativity so you start looking at the titles of their articles and you start to think well maybe I could use that title and switch this word to that word or it triggers an idea so readers digest calm Ardi calm great resource and I believe most of what you can get there is free and then the last tool to give you four is movie critics movie critics come up with great things like things that go bump in the Attic or just look at their how they describe their movies the mysteries upon mysteries of Lisbon well maybe you're not dealing with Lisbon but you kind of like that the mysteries upon mysteries so you can take that line and maybe change the word so it meets more with what you're trying to do and there's tons of movie critic websites out there now all of this leads to a paper that was published a few years ago by this gentleman who's sitting the audience here today bill Reichert oh you'll be hearing from later on today now bill didn't know I was going to do this today so bill I apologize but years ago when I read this article that bill wrote I started to coach my clients on it and the article is getting to the Wow which is what can you say to someone in one two or three sentences that they say Wow how do you do that or Wow tell me some more I want to know more most entrepreneurs they study their two-minute pitch or their elevator pitch and they get it ready and somebody says so what do you do and I don't think you have permission to go into your elevator pitch at that moment I think it's more important that you get them to say wow or hmm that's cool I'd like to hear more so I encourage you to go take a look at this article and here's garage ventures Wow they say we startup startups that kind of encapsulates it for you doesn't it and then you'll say hopefully Wow how do they do that and every one of you need to have some sort of a Wow I have a friend from Sidney is he he walks up to people he says hi I'm Sydney from Sydney it's really his name and he's really from Sydney that's his Wow statement people go wow that's so cool so it doesn't have to be technology related or business related it can be anything that gets somebody to say Wow all right that's tool number one what's your Wow now normally in a in a environment where we had a workshop I'd break you all into groups right now and we come up with some wild statements that you all can use in your future I leave that to you to do this homework tool number two if you walk in to any audience whether they're an audience of one or many if you assume that they all look like he looks you'll be in much better shape to present any information that you have to present what does he look like right now bored tired to me he encapsulates that look encapsulates preoccupied he's preoccupied with something else on his mind so what I'm gonna share with you now is a 40 year old secret when I was 15 years old I found a book in my basement and the book was called the magic power of emotional appeal and I have it right here so you know it's this is really a true story it was written in 1960 you think what could a book written in 1960 have to do it today but I'm gonna summarize what this book did for me when I was 15 that I've used over and over and over with just about every audience and every communication I've used throughout my career and I'm gonna give it to you all right now in about five minutes the books out of print sorry all right so what row Garn did is he summarized the fact that he got me to think everyone you talked to his preoccupied so you need to do something to break through the preoccupation and you shouldn't leave it to luck now some of you do it very naturally but I'm going to break it down a little bit into the science behind how to get through the preoccupation that we all have when given a presenter all right here it is this is the number two tool it's called the fatal four the fatal four emotional appeals and he calls it the fatal four because there's no defense your audience cannot stop you from using these things there's just no defense against them that's why he calls in the fatal four let's go through them and again you're gonna say oh yeah of course I knew that number one the number one preoccupation breaker is to talk about money how to make it how to save it how to spend it anything to do about money you'll break through the preoccupation that people have in their minds okay number two self-preservation security safety so if you have a product that will secure your data protect it from others getting access to it you're pressing on this emotional appeal if you have a product that will say that will keep my family safe if we're in California right now I'd start getting to think about earthquakes and I'd ask you how many of you are prepared for an earthquake right now with food and water for three days in your car and maybe one or two hands would go up and we're in California so when you start talking about things that we rely on revolve around self-preservation security or safety boom you'll get their attention next recognition whenever you give recognition or get recognition that breaks the preoccupation I did that with all of you to start with didn't I was the first thing I said to all of you the simplest way to recognize give recognition thank you I thank all of you thank you for being here three or four times so I use this emotional appeal just to get you break through that preoccupation a little bit how many did that work for okay most of you good and number four you're gonna get this one you would say oh yeah of course number four is sex sex breaks through the preoccupation no matter what your sexual preferences are in the world but we're not here to talk about sex unless you're doing a pornographic website and then we're not here talk about that so thinking about how to break through this preoccupation you have romance or future promise or new experience so when you talk about the future and what you'll be able to do with this and how your life will be so much better and how much more you'll get out of this all of these types of statements are talking about the future these are the four fatal for emotional Appeals and you can use one or more of these in your presentations and not just in the first 30 seconds but what about seven minutes later when you start to see the audience is not quite with you use another one and five minutes later use another one ten minutes later you use another one so intertwine them throughout to make sure you keep breaking through the preoccupation because you can't guarantee that people will stay with you for the entire time so it's your job as the presenter to check in once in a while with their heads okay so that's number two number three is a study that came from dr. Albert Mehrabian at UCLA back in 1972 so when I was in mainframe computer graphics in the early 80s I was quoting this study about how much more effective visuals are to communicating data than the spreadsheets were and I researched and we were all quoting this study from dr. Albert Mehrabian and some of you may have heard of it but I like to go back to the source so I picked up the phone and I actually dialed the phone 1981 when we still had dial phones called him up and I talked to him on the phone and what was so exciting about this study was that he showed me how people receive the messages that we impart so when you're talking to a group how do you know what people are hearing it's not about what you say it's about what they hear okay so he put this study together to break down communication what happens when people actually communicate they broke it down into three parts the words that you use how you use your voice and how you use your face and today we call it body language over the face side of things but how many if you take a look at the PI of a hundred percent what percentage of the message people hear from you comes from the words that you use 15 will high five was a little low it turns out to be seven seven percent of the message people get from you come from your words okay how about your voice thirty-eight and you could do the math 55 percent more than half the message you're communicating to your audiences is coming from your face how many of you have rehearsed your face not many of you right so it's really important they start to get a sense for what's happening up here because if you're not paying any attention to what's happening right here your audience is your audience is and if you're saying something and your face is not matching what you're saying guess what they believe your face your face typically doesn't lie so be very cognizant of the fact that 80 I'm sorry ninety-three percent of communication is what's happening with your voice how you use your voice the tone of your voice the speed the volume and other things that you can play with on your voice how you emphasize words not just standing there ladies and gentlemen very excited to be here today and I have three tools that I would like to get everybody really excited about today that's just a way to put people to sleep so keep this in mind if you want to read about this study he has a book out called nonverbal communication and while I'm not a big believer in all the nonverbal communication of what you see when you're looking at people as far as how you are perceived by people I would take a close look at what you're doing when you're in front of people get yourself on video and watch you want to know what message you're giving out when you present the best way to do it get about three-minute video clip of yourself turn off the sound and then ask a hundred people to watch it and say to you what message did you get from me what message did you get by watching me present remember there's no sound so they only have your face to look at and you'd be amazed at what people will tell you I love to get before video of my clients and get people to say what they get from them and then get after video of them it's night night end day because you realize your face is a big part of what you're communicating to people you actually have more muscles in your face than most other parts of your body so use them have fun with them and if you're having fun you should let your face know it too alright to wrap this up I want to show you the power of storytelling and what it can do to move people to take action and the story comes from two women that I met at the Kauffman Foundation last year who are at Columbia University and during the Haiti earthquake the project that they were given in their master's class was to come up with something to help the victims of the earthquake so these two women came up with this product called luminaid and I'm just going to let you watch the video so you can hear the story from them hi I'm Anna and I'm Andrea we're working on a project to make and distribute a very simple solar lighting product that we designed for disaster relief aid so 1.6 billion people in the world roughly one in four lack access to a stable source of electricity and light more recently disasters in areas such as Japan Haiti and Pakistan have left millions more without electricity many of these people are forced you're alive and dangerous toxic and expensive kerosene lanterns as their primary source of light in the wake of the Haiti earthquake and I came to know more about the dangerous and unsafe conditions in the tent cities at night especially for women and children light is a very basic need and we believe that in addition to food water and shelter that light should be distributed with other relief supplies portable rechargeable lights could have greatly improved living conditions for those living informal settlements but there wasn't a product that was designed with this scale a distribution in mind most are too expensive and too bulky to distribute in large quantities right so we designed our life to directly address these challenges the luminate solar light is a solar recharge of a life that is inspired by a few very simple ideas so for example for every eight solar flashlights you can pack and ship over 50 limiting plans this saves on shipping and transport emissions it is also simple and easy to use you charge it in the Sun for four to six hours and the solar panel charges a rechargeable battery that is connected to super-bright LEDs you inflate the luminaid light to diffuse the light like a lantern and reduce the glare of the bright LEDs you can turn it on to the high setting to read for up to three hours or the low side six illuminate light is designed to be waterproof to float and to be extremely portable and lightweight it can also be printed with patented logos we wanted to make a product that was useful in many different contexts and situations so the same like that you can use for campaign can also be an emergency way in a disaster situation we've evolved impro to take the design to reduce the cost make it brighter more durable and easier to use we hope you'll take a light on your next adventure or trip find creative ways to use illuminate and share the stories and pictures with us staying true to the inspiration for the design will send matching lights to our community projects with the lights that we make and produce for you so we really appreciate you taking the time to learn more about the luminaid light we're excited to share these lights with you as well as with those in need and with your support we're really excited to get this off the ground thanks thank you so this is it it's a rechargeable portable inflatable lantern you literally blow it up and you turn it on and to know little know about their success they were they went on to indiegogo they were looking for $10,000 they raised fifty one eight it's through crowdsourcing so the reason I like to show this story is because that video that they created was done for free they didn't go to some professional to videotape it most of it was just pictures zooming in and out using what they call the Ken Burns effect but wasn't the story compelling it was a story it wasn't hey we made this inflatable thing that you can press turn it on it's got two different light intensities it's made of plastic and this that it didn't go into all of that it made it into what it is is a story and all of you can do the same thing with whatever it is that you're doing whether it's a product a service or a cause okay and that's it folks I wanted to thank you so much for your time today I hope you've seen at least one more F and you came in here with today and I want to thank you very much for your time today and I'll be able to take questions after if you'd like so thank you so much

Channel: Build2Grow TV

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Id: 87cnFmCr9PY

Length: 34min 9sec (2049 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 01 2015