7 unusual ways to open the presentation to connect or stir curiosity
What is your enemy when you tell the first words of a speech?
You wouldn’t want your audience to be cold, distant, or bored, to have glazed eyes and yawn, would you?”
Distance and boredom are enemies. As a public speaker, you would defeat them from your first sentences. And the intensity and personality of the first 5 minutes of what you say have this power to walk the distance, prevent boredom, and create connection and vivid interest.
Your introduction has the power to start or stop the engines of the public.
Let’s see 7 ways to open a presentation to get the desired effect.
If you want to get more connection, here’s what you can choose:
1. The introduction outlining the common ground
Is there a gap between you and your audience?
Suppose the gap causes them to raise objections (how well you understand them or how helpful your speech will be for them). In that case, the introduction is the most appropriate time to bring them close to you. Dissolve objections, reshape emotions and thoughts!
Call for a moment in the past where you have experienced something similar. Or show them a significant-close person with whom you share a history that can influence what they think and feel.
Let’s say you are 27 and talking to a group of pensioners about how to bring joy every day.
“I know you see me as a child who came to give you advice for an age he has not yet experienced. I want to introduce my grandfather Victor with whom I have spent my afternoons over the last 5 years, gathering many beautiful memories.” (projection with their picture together playing chess and smiling)
2. A short personal story that circles the speech as a gift ribbon. It starts and ends the presentation.
If the central idea of your presentation can be passed through a short personal story, you could start and finish your speech with this story.
You create an echo effect. You reinforce the message. You create a strong connection in the introduction, as your personal story reveals you as a human; let us see and feel you more from who you are, not only from what you know. But it also creates surprise at the end.
3. An imaginary scenario that brings the audience inside your story — “imagine that”
“Imagine that” it’s a compelling framework.
“Imagine that you wake up one morning and everything that was familiar and known is gone. You are in a foreign and cold place, friends are far away, start work from scratch and you do not have savings.
That’s what I lived 7 years ago when I moved to Finland.”
When you use it before a personal story, you ask the listener to walk in your slippers. :) They will feel your experience and connect deeply with you.
4. The unexpected definition that includes the “more than that” factor you offer to the public
Think of giving a presentation to a group of salespeople.
You could start this way:
“The Cambridge dictionary considers the sellers — people employed to sell and serve the clientele.- but I think we are much more than that. We are the ones who make the economy spin.”
It is a kind of introduction that brings together the unexpected factor and the element of appreciation of the public.
Another desired effect in the first sentences of a presentation is to arouse curiosity. Here are 3 examples of these input types:
1. The first mental image
It’s a technique that moves the public into the middle of the story. It transfers the character’s curiosity to the listener, creating the “and now what?” reaction.
“You look in the rearview mirror and see a furious red speed car approaching you aggressively.”
“And now what?” “it’s the natural question in your listener’s mind; you’ve made him wish to know what’s next.
Choose a short story that naturally introduces the subject of your speech.
2. Reveal a moment of insight and “how it hit you.” :)
“I was 6 years old when the news that Santa Claus did not exist fell over me like a rock.” or
“I started to feel for some time that what I did as a job wasn’t part of me, but the day I completed my first public speaking training. I said WOW. I want to do that again! And things settled so that it became my life.”
Be vulnerable. Share those moments that have changed something inside you.
3. The mystery frame/ the discovery adventure
What if the audience were to participate in your speech with the same desire and joy that children attend the Easter egg hunt?1
Make your listener experience a discovery adventure!
It starts with a “puzzling question” to which the listeners do not have the answer, but which arouses their interest and raises their motivation to discover it.
Build the presentation closer to the discovery step by step, leaving the big revelation for the end.
“A talk is a voyage with purpose and it must be charted. The man who starts out going nowhere, generally gets there.”- Dale Carnegie
Start by knowing where you’re going with your presentation.
And then start in style!
Want to make captivating presentations and improve your public speaking skills? Practice the tips from my free guide: Speak so that people listen.
If you want to find out more about diving into your creative core and making your content alive and memorable, read this article:
