Seize their attention, draw them in, then teach your lesson. Catch their eyes and hook their hearts so you can engage their minds. Get them laughing, then you can get them learning.
I learned these lessons as I prepared for my very first public speaking experience. I was 10 years old and an enthusiastic member of 4-H, a national organization of clubs for children where they learn a wide variety of life skills. 4-H began as an organization devoted to passing along the wisdom of farming and home economics. Public speaking was a core component of education for us too—not just to learn techniques, but to demonstrate competency by teaching about what we’d learned. Following a simple structure, we’d prepare brief talks and posters to share at the annual county-wide Public Presentation Day.
Every summer, we’d enter projects in the county fair where we’d present our work to judges wielding ribbons and smiles of approval. The stakes were high: in the late 80s, a blue ribbon came with a five dollar payout. The summer I was 10, we were gearing up for the county fair, and all I knew about presenting was that I had to catch people’s attention if I wanted to teach them something —and I wanted to teach them so I could earn a ribbon for speaking.
Batting flies and the sweltering heat of summer in Upstate New York, I gleefully embraced the opportunity to deliver a presentation in the 4-H barn amid prize-winning pies, ribbon-worthy wood carvings, and carefully crafted needlepoint canvases. At my assigned time, I stepped up to the platform in the cavernous space: a large wooden box looked out on a few rows of chairs. To the side was an easel sized for a sheet of posterboard big enough to convey the main points of a 15-minute talk, with all the power that electronic PowerPoint slides would one day promise.
Getting the attention of an audience is hard. But getting and keeping the attention of walking, talking, moving audience members, who are distracted and eager to see the next display or racing pig exhibition? Even harder.
Seize their attention, draw them in, then teach your lesson. Easier said than done.
I didn’t learn my lessons all at once, of course. Our learning spirals, like the cross-section of a nautilus shell. We center ourselves in our earliest lessons, where we collect information and spiral out, building knowledge through successively more expansive experiences. We’re not always aware when we go around one more time, but sometimes we can stop and catch ourselves when a concept feels familiar. We’ve been here before. We can learn and do better. Good speakers embrace this process when they meet audiences where they are, introduce the terminology of the topic, and repeat concepts in successively more complex layers, finally releasing them from the spiral to go forth and apply their new knowledge in the world.
But first, seize their attention. Draw them into the spiral. Catch their eyes, and you can hook their hearts—and hook their hearts, and you can engage their minds. 4-H gave me the experience and taught me the structure and techniques I still use today.
I start by thinking of my talk as a simple, 15-minute structure with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I start with a bold statement that draws in the listener and makes them want to sit down and hear more. Then I offer three to five proof points or steps to explain the concept. Standing on the platform at the county fair I’d gesture to my poster as necessary. That’s the beauty of a single, 22” x 28” expanse: you’re forced to distill your ideas down to just a few, brief statements that can be read even by people in the back row—skills that serve you well, whether you’re engaging an audience with slides or writing so that your pithy statements make it into viral Tweets. Finally, it’s “time for a quick review”—the statement so many 4-Hers learned to say before a brief recap that would lead into a big, so-what conclusion or impact statement. Ask yourself: How can the audience put this new technique into play? How can your workshop participants act on this new approach when they’re back in the office tomorrow? Corporate event organizers today pay well for actionable thinking, just as 4-H judges awarded blue ribbons and five dollars for it back then.
One year, I created a presentation about how to make a simple breakfast smoothie. “Don’t think you have time for a nutritious and delicious breakfast? Think—and taste—again!” Armed with enthusiasm, bananas, and a blender, I offered the promise of free samples after my talk. Four steps later—freeze the bananas, combine the ingredients, blend, and pour—my audience was happy to learn how they could balance protein and carbohydrates while they tried a Dixie cup of something cold and sweet on a hot day. A couple years later, I taught how to use a manual single lens reflex camera. Different topic, same approach: big statement, several key points, quick review, actionable takeaway. Those talks were 15 minutes, but the structure works for many contexts. By varying the volume of detail in my key points, I could reduce the premise of a talk to a brief abstract or expand it to a 45-minute lecture or three-hour workshop.
I still lean on the framework and flow of energy I discovered in 4-H, but over time I’ve added nuance to my structure. With more complicated subjects, an audience may not immediately accept the initial idea, so I like to disarm them. I start by introducing the premise as an idealized solution to a familiar problem. Then rather than just moving through my points, I get vulnerable. For each point, I introduce a straw man argument, or the “but what about” naysaying counterargument. If they happen to be skeptical, I beat them to the punch by setting up a foil and then debunking it. I modulate my energy too, so each point gets successively more emphatic until we arrive at the conclusion together.
If vulnerability fosters an audience’s trust, the volume of detail we share cements it. Examples, anecdotes, and applications make our points more plausible and practical. For me, that means weaving lots of examples into a structure of big statements and key points. Because my audiences tend to include a variety of brands across a range of budgets and industries, I offer everyone something that feels familiar—and relevant.
Examples help me vary the tone of a talk too. I may start out with a lofty, inspirational vision that demands grounding in concrete, actionable cases to feel useful and tested. 4-H valued that kind of practicality, as did philosopher Henry David Thoreau: “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them,” he wrote.
In public speaking, we meet people where they are and move them to where we want them to go. We convey knowledge through persuasive, engaging education to pull people in and move them forward. Whether you’re in a hot barn at the county fair or a frosty ballroom at an industry conference, the lesson is the same: catch their eyes, hook their hearts, and you can engage their minds.
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Excerpted from Present Yourself, © 2024 Danielle Barnes and Christina Wodtke. Used with permission.
