How to Speak and Hold Attention in a Distracted World

When giving a speech or presentation, how do you capture and hold attention?

Well, with little distraction boxes in everyone’s hands… and big boys like Google and Facebook hiring behavior addiction specialists… the competition for attention has never been stiffer.

And, it's obvious that if you can’t get and hold attention, you can’t give instructions, run an organization, or do something as simple as sell ice water to a dying man in the Sahara Desert.

Attention is everything - at every level - in business.

So, I’m going to give you a secret weapon… one simple thing you can do in any presentation, webinar, or speech to grab and hold attention.

But first, let me tell you about something very interesting that happened to me not long ago…

Do You Think You’re More Interesting than Cute 8 Year Old Twins?

Margie, my dear wife, and I were sitting at a restaurant on a hot date.  (Happens often!)

A super cute little family sat down in the booth next to us.

Mom. Dad. Twin daughters that Margie guessed were about 8yrs. (As the mother of 11 children, Margie always guesses children’s ages right!)

Almost a full minute went by after they all sat down before mom and dad’s cell phones came out. Their heads went down and their thumbs started flying.

The cute twin girls sat quietly for almost another minute… and then began doing all kinds of things to get a wee bit of attention from the padres.

Laughing… crying… hitting each other… climbing on the table… crawling under the table.

Nothing. Worked. At. All.

Mom and dad just sat glued to the phone.

As the father of 11 children I wanted to forcibly extract the phones from their hands and give them a lecture on 18 summers and the shortness of life… but I refrained.

I think of this scene every time I take the stage, make a presentation, and especially when I do a webinar..  

If grown adults are more interested in their phones than their beautiful twin girls, then how in the world am I going to compete??

You should wonder the same thing.

All of your employees, business partners, and associates are living in a world of insane distractions.

How do you breakthrough and capture their attention… for 10 minutes… 30 minutes… 90 minutes… or even a full day?

I’ve done two day training sessions where people were fully engaged with me and the other humans in the room… and totally disengaged from their electronics.

How to Maintain Unlimited Attention in Any Setting

The one thing you can do to grab and hold attention is associated with the neural connectivity in the brain.

Your being - your mind and body - are designed for maximum efficiency.

This means, among other things, that your subconscious likes to put everything on autopilot.

This is why you can drive to work in the morning and not even realize that you drove to work. You’ve done it a zillion times… your brain is on autopilot and took over driving while you think of other things.

You do this with eating, shaving, breathing, emotionally responding to family and friends, etc…

Researchers say that around 90% of all of our decisions each day are run on autopilot, by our subconscious, and never even hit our conscious brain.

This is a good thing!

Because the conscious brain can only manage one dominate thought and 5-6 minor thoughts at a time. Yet, literally billions of bits of data are coming at us every second of everyday… which the subconscious handles with ease.

The 3 Options Your Listeners Have

Understanding this setup, it is easy to see why humans are hardwired to pay attention to stories.

A good story simulates situations where there is the unknown, danger, adventure, romance, and all kinds of things that aren’t on autopilot.

They also present complicated challenges and riddles.

The mind takes all this and and immediately wants to begin sorting it, organizing it, making sense of it.

The mind is searching for three resolutions:

1. Do I need this information right now?

For example, are you facing a major crisis in your marriage and a well-known expert just told you she was going to tell you exactly what your wife needs to be happy. And, you can do it in the next 5 minutes.

Immediately useful, right?!?!

In situations like this, the mind pushes the information to the conscious mind - we call this attention.

Attention is activated by useful, immediately relevant information.

2. Do I need to store this for later?

A lot of information is useful and important, but not immediately.  

For example, if you’re a mid-level manager and you watch the Board of Directors sack the CEO for manipulating the annual report, you might take note… “When I’m CEO, I’ll keep the books clean.”

This kind of information grabs attention… but only for as long as it takes to store it. Once it is stored, the mind goes somewhere else.

Too many speakers make this mistake. They give lots and lots of information that is useful… later.

Have you ever sat through a mediocre presentation? Mildly interesting, but nothing to fire up the imagination. This is probably why useful, semi-relevant information gets stored.

3. Can I ignore and flush it?

Anything that is not dangerous or useful gets flushed.

Think of all the emails you get that have zero relevance to your goals, aspirations, or problems.

Delete. Gone. Ignore.

This is where most speakers operate. They fail to grab attention with relevant, immediately useful information. Attendees stay in the seats physically, but their minds are in a galaxy far, far away.

We’ve both been in those seats, right?

Open Loops… With a Daisy Twist

There is one simple technique you can use to capture attention and keep it engaged.

It is called, “The Daisy Open Loop Technique”.

The idea is pretty simple.

Imagine a daisy for a minute.

Multiple petals, all attached to a central disk.

The central disk is like your big idea, the one main thing you want them to learn and act on. The petals are supporting ideas, actions, and resources that will help them understand and benefit from the big idea.

You take the stage and open up a loop in the listener’s mind, using the promise of relevant, immediately useful information.

But, before you give the full solution and idea, you introduce another open loop - equally useful and interesting, but 100% related to the core solution.

Then you do it again… and again.

You can do this two, three, or four times.

It depends on how much time you have and how complex your presentation is.

For example, in this article, I used 4 loops…

1. Promise of one simple technique to hold attention
2. Story of the twin girls
3. Neuroscience of attention
4. 3 options for listeners

All of these lead you to one core idea… use open loops in a 4-part daisy pattern to grab and maintain attention.

The Daisy Open Loop approach can be used in just about any setting… in the boardroom, online in an interview or webinar, or giving a keynote address.

Here’s what you can do next…

First, connect with me here on LinkedIn, subscribe to my YouTube channel, and listen in on my podcast. That way you’ll receive updates on new training and resources.

Second, check out my latest FREE training program: The Charisma Code.

Inside I share the science and art of mastering charisma so you can always command the room and get people to want to be around you, listen to you, and follow your lead.