Busting Through Brain Fog
In a recent corporate training for the top sales agents in a large pharmaceutical company, I asked the following question.
Have you ever been speaking and you look out into your audience and you see “screen saver eyes?” It’s that glassy eyed look that let’s you know that you have lost their attention.
The two most important questions to ask yourself are:
- what did you do to lose them and…
- how do you get them back?
This is an age old problem. It was brought on by the need to teach vast volumes of information in short periods of time and totally compounded by one of the worst technological breakthroughs in history - the advent of PowerPoint.
Don’t you think PowerPoint is incorrectly named? Shouldn’t it be called WimpyPoint? PowerPoint has no power at all. The speaker has power. PowerPoint is a visual aid. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of intelligent audience members have gone to sleep by the fourth slide. Why?
Too many speaker put every word of their presentation on slides and then read them. It’s as if the speaker has no intelligence or memory at all. The entire presentation is on the slides.
- Overly wordy slides are boring.
- No eye contact is boring.
- Not speaking extemporaneously is boring.
If you are guilty of losing your audience attention it is because you are not stimulating their whole brain. People lose interest when all you do is deliver content - without making it interesting. In other words, you speak from your left logical brain to their left logical brain. Simply delivering content - disseminating information - is boring.
People want stimulation. Whole brain stimulation. Right and left brain stimulation.
We are all stimulation junkies. We want action. You know what I mean: lights, sound, action! Like in the movies. If you can make any part of your presentation like a movie (auditory, visual and kinesthetic) - and make your movie relevant - you will regain their attention.
How can you make a movie? Tell a story. Stories are inherently auditory, visual and kinesthetic. They activate the listeners’ movie screen and engage attention. One of the primary principles of The Story Theater method and the Dynamite Speech System is that you can’t teach anything if you don’t have people’s attention.
It’s not about teaching, it’s about attention. It’s not about delivering content - it’s about engaging people so they care enough about what you’re saying to listen.
It’s the speakers job to learn how to engage the audience. To learn how, study the Story Theater Method.
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Doug Stevenson, president of Story Theater International, is the creator of The Story Theater Method and the author of the book, Never Be Boring Again.His 10 CD - How to Write and Deliver a Dynamite Speech audio learning system, is a workshop in a box. It contains an 80-page follow along workbook.
Learn more at: www.dynamitespeech.comDoug can be reached at 1-800-573-6196 or 1-719-573-6195 or at: www.storytheater.com
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