You Got A Big Ol’ Head
Your audience’s attention is guaranteed to meander and there’s nothing you can do to stop that… The only thing you can do is be ready for them when they wander back.
When I’m with my friends I love to play the “did you know when I was younger…?” game. Once we get going one of my favorite cards to play is the religion card. My religious views could probably be described as comfortably atheist. I use the word “comfortable” because for me religion is like soccer, billions of fans but not my thing. Most my friends seem to know this about me so when I say “Did you know I was a missionary?” I’m almost always rewarded with a response like, “Wait, you used to be religious?” I usually smile and say something like, “Oh you have no idea.” As the surprise thins it’s fun to follow that revelation with the story about the time I found myself sitting in a woman’s living room in Chicago delivering the sermon of the century.
God had sent me to save her soul and I was pulling out all the stops. She was kind enough to let me in and patient enough to let me talk. My monologue was refined, well crafted, and filled with jokes and tears in all the right places. I was good. I was really good. Like clockwork I could take anyone on an emotional journey anytime, anywhere... almost. That afternoon in that woman’s home I was on-point and working towards the climax of the salvation story. We had been talking for 20 minutes, my soul was burning and by the way she made eye-contact with me I could tell she was feeling it too. In response to my deepest most sincere Jesus-stare she held my gaze, a sure sign that she was following along and ready to receive the Lord. Leaning in to deliver the knock out punch and invite her to attend our services she leaned back a little, cocked her head, and blurted, “I feel sorry fo’ yo’ momma.” The combined thunder of the record scratch, crashing symbols, and broken plates was deafening. I just sat there blinking and stammering a polite, “Excuse me?” Pursing her lips and raising an eyebrow she said, “You got a big ol’ head.” She hadn’t heard a word I was saying. Her concentration was focused on the geometry of birth canals and empathy for the poor woman that had to push me out. I was crushed and confused and have been laughing about it ever since.
Not every impassioned presentation lands as flatly as my youthful sermon nor is every distraction as profound as my gigantic noggin but think about the last presentation you gave, did your audience hear what you had to say? How do you know?
One thing that I wish I had understood on that afternoon in Chicago is that attention is fickle. Your audience’s attention is guaranteed to meander and there’s nothing you can do to stop that. Fancier slides, more visualizations, more jokes, none of that will stop it. The only thing you can do is be ready for them when they wander back. You don’t know when they’ll be back so your best bet is to remember that repetition is the key to learning. That’s right, repetition is the key to learning. Did I mention that repetition is the key to learning? In other words identify the most important thing you need to say, wrap it in a catchy mantra and repeat it until there is no way on god’s green earth your audience will miss the point.
I search for my mantras early by imagining I only have 5 seconds to deliver my entire presentation. 5 seconds is enough time to say one thing and to say it clearly. Alliteration helps make it memorable, rhyming can be useful as long as it’s not too campy, but most importantly I try to make it as short as possible. Recently I was training a team of recruiters on storytelling and analytics. I needed to share some new key performance indicators (KPI’s) but I wanted them to understand that the goal of Talent Acquisition isn’t the KPI’s, it’s the candidates’ experience. Playing around with some themes from previous training I settled on the mantra “Every Candidate an Advocate”. With every slide I created I played that mantra on repeat in the back of my head, I pruned the visuals to serve that one mantra, and for every question or comment in the room I found a way to weave the mantra into my response. At the end of the presentation I asked each attendee for one key take-away. No one talked about the KPI’s that I shared. The most common response was about how we can use the measurements to make sure that we were turning every candidate into an advocate. Mission accomplished.
The longer your presentation and the more content in your story the more effort you need to spend reinforcing the core message. You have no idea what someone is thinking no matter what signs you see. Eye contact can hide daydreaming and relevant questions can be generated from prior knowledge. Even if you could perfectly understand an audience of one, you’ll never do it for the whole room. If you want your audience to take away what you bring to the table remember, repetition is the key to learning. It’s a numbers game.
