Introduction Induction
Squeezing the very best out of your introduction
I’ve made myself a fresh squeezed glass of orange juice from scratch, maybe three times in my life. Honestly, I feel like the effort it takes to walk to the store, buy a bottle and spend $4 is far less tedious than the chopping, juicing, cursing because the damn juice got me in the eye, and finally cleaning up the sixteen pieces of cutlery I somehow managed to dirty just for a half glass of lukewarm orange juice.
I get it, there’s value in juicing an orange, a sense of accomplishment and the satisfaction that you just saved the world from one more empty plastic bottle that will never be recycled properly. But it’s still a pain in the ass, it still takes work and it still feels like the effort wasn’t worth the output in the grand scheme of things. The more I think about it, the more I realize that maybe it is worth it though. Maybe there is some value in putting in the work. Maybe it could be worth the effort to clean up. Why? Because ultimately it saves other issues for other people that I don’t see. Sure, the benefit I receive from simply buying a bottle of OJ once a week is the convenient path I want to take, and it has the best overall result for me. I save time, I don’t spend a lot of money, I’m putting in minimum effort and getting maximum results, especially from the goodness of the juice itself. But what about everyone else? One bottle of juice each week is 52 empty bottles each year, and the $4 dollars I spend works out at $208. Both the bottles and the money don’t seem like huge amounts, but multiply it by the number of people who think exactly like me, which I would argue is probably a majority, and suddenly we’re talking crazy amounts of wasted plastic and money that could be used for something worthwhile, or spent on helping people in need.
Don’t worry, this isn’t an environmentalists quip.
There are so many area’s of our lives where the effort outweighs the output, and so we simply take the easiest possible path. I see this, or at least I hear it, on a regular basis when it comes to how we introduce ourselves while speaking. I couldn’t count the number of people I’ve spoken to that, when asked about their introduction, will tell me something like, “I’ll wing it.” to which I usually respond, “No, you won’t.”
In the speaking world, I’ve often heard the old saying, “fake it til you make it” usually spouted off as a bland form of encouragement to a newer speaker. The problem I’ve always had with this is this: If you fake it til you make it, eventually everything you make, will seem fake. If you think you can stand in front of an audience and hustle your way through a semi thought out introduction and still make a great impact on the people you’re speaking to, you’re either an incredibly seasoned speaker, in which case this isn’t for you, or, you’re a fool.
Our introduction can feel a little bit like squeezing fresh orange juice. It’s hard work to put together, and it feels somewhat pointless compared to the fully developed thoughts we’ll be bringing later in the talk. But that’s simply our perspective. We might not want to take the time to think through our introduction, but like I asked earlier when talking about the orange juice, we need to be asking the question, “What about everyone else?”
“You never get a second chance to make a first impression”
If you’ve managed to get through life so far without realizing how quickly people judge us, I’ve got some bad news for you. It’s quick. So, we need to be putting the time and effort into making a great first impression, every time we stand before people to speak. This is the first thing I want to impart to you, and it’s probably the most important because, if you have really great content but look like an arrogant or angry person, you’ll lose the interest of most of the people you’re speaking to. In my extensive research (a brief google search) I found that we have somewhere between 60 second and 1/10th of a second to make that initial impression, that means that before a word has come out of your mouth, a good portion of the room has made a decision about how they feel about you. The first thing you want to be practicing when preparing to speak to any group of people, is the openness of your body language. It almost sounds too simple, but working on your smile, the placement of your arms, and even the way you walk to center-stage, will all play a part in helping or hindering the way the rest of your talk takes off. We tend to avoid working on these things because, to be completely honest, it feels stupid to do so. In the same way I can think of hundred things I would rather be doing than squeezing orange juice, I can easily think of a hundred things I would rather be doing than practice smiling at myself in a mirror. And yet to be successful, I have to purposeful. It will be awkward, I’m not going to lie, but getting better at making minor adjustments to be more open in your body language, will greatly help your initial introduction to any group that you speak to.
The second thing I want you to take away from this is the importance of you. Sounds good right? Wrong. Too often I see speakers introduce their talks with the assumption that the people listening know exactly who they are. Now, if you speak to the same group of people on a semi-regular basis, like at a church or in a business meeting, that’s fine because you can safely estimate that most of that room do indeed know who you are. If you are speaking at different locations and to different groups of people however, it’s incredibly important that you introduce yourself in a way that the group you’re speaking to can relate to you. When I speak, I’m constantly aware that before I can impart any kind of wisdom into peoples lives, I have to impart a piece of myself into their lives. I love this quote:
“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”
— Theodore Roosevelt
People want you to be real with them. Before you ask them to do anything, before you offer them advice or impart wisdom, they want to know that you’re not just a salesperson trying to con them into or out of something. Let’s look at it another way. If you think about a car salesperson, when we walk onto their car lot, we immediately put our guard up, because we know that every word out of their mouth is going to be an attempt at trying to sell us a car. This is a generalization, I’m sure there are car sales people who aren’t like this, I’ve just never met one. On the other hand, if you think of your favorite celebrity on a talk show, even though they know people want to hear from them, and they know people are excited to see them, if they get a three minute speaking slot, they will spend the first two and half minutes talking about their family and being as normal as possible, before taking the last thirty seconds to plug their latest movie, album or charity. Let me be very clear, that is scripted that way on purpose because it is the most effective way of selling for them. We, I assume, do not have the luxury of being famous. We have a few minutes at the beginning of our talk to make people feel like they’re speaking to a car salesperson trying to sell them something, or a real human-being trying to share some truth with them. Your introduction may not have to be long, it may not feel very important, but it is the only chance you will get to make people relate to you as a normal person and not as a salesperson.
So, work on your introduction.
I can’t make it any clearer than that. Work on it, adapt it to the audience, be sure to ask someone what the people you’re speaking to are like. What’s their age demographic? What’s is the cultural majority of the group? What is the purpose of the talk you’re bringing? All of those questions are important because as they change, so too does your introduction. Younger groups will want to hear your jokes, older groups will most likely enjoy hearing about your family. Certain cultural groups have ways of introducing themselves, be sensitive to that and honor it where you can. What’s the purpose of your talk? Part of my job is speaking about the state of poverty in my nation, so speaking to how poverty has touched my life and my family in the past can help people understand that I’m not simply going to download information, but that I’ve lived some of the things I’m talking about.
Taking the time to introduce yourself may feel like a lot of effort for minimum payoff, but a meticulously planned and executed introduction will lay the foundation for the rest of what you say. As tough as it can be to do, take the time to do it well. Be personable, be relatable, be real.
I would love to hear you think about this or any other area’s you’re keen to know more about in the speaker space, leave me a comment and let me know your thoughts.
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