How do you avoid that your audience will fall asleep during your presentation? How do you avoid that your audience will lose focus and attention for your presentation? Obviously you have a big role to play in ensuring your audience is captivated by you presentation and will follow you along. One aspect is the opening of your presentation that can have a big impact. During the first minutes your audience will decide whether or not is it worth their time to listen to you. Therefore it is important to have a strong beginning of your presentation.
One of the things that you can do is to start your presentation with an intriguing question. A question that will make your audience wonder and immediately become curious about the answer. To structure your presentation with a fascinating question at the very beginning, it will lure your audience into the moment and make them pay attention.
For example if you need to follow a presentation about the attention span of people and there are two options. Presenter one will start his presentation as followed:
“Hello everybody. My name is XYZ and I am a professor at the university of ABC and I have studied human audience behaviour, or psycho attendance neurofins, for the last 20 years. I will present some of the results of my research in the coming two hours. Let me start with showing you a detailed table with statistics about …”
Presenter number two will start his presentation about the same topic as followed:
“How do you avoid falling asleep during this presentation? Don’t worry; I asked this question myself and I have the answer for you. The answer is based on 20 years of study. I am fascinated about the human audience behaviour and became professor to find answer to the question how to avoid that your audience falls asleep during a presentation. Let me tell you about …”
Presenter number two will be more successful in grabbing the attention from the audience from the start. Looking for more tips about how to best start your presentation? You can find this in the book that is part of the Public Speaking Kit.