Tuesday 26 April 2022

Getting Your Audience’s Attention

How long does it take before you stop listening to others at work?

Data published in the past two years suggests that our ability to get (and then keep) the audience’s attention when we’re trying to influence them has never been harder. Two years of working remotely has made our ability to ‘switch off’ listening commonplace – and it is brutal. Seconds have become mere moments… sentences have become a few words, before we stop engaging with the person speaking because we simply don’t relate to any relevance in what they’re saying.

My conversations with clients this month focused on answering the ‘why should I care?’ question fast and right up front. If we don’t get this right; then everything we say afterwards doesn’t matter…..because our audience is no longer listening.

Common mistakes include demonstrating the validity of our work by explaining the rigour of our process or providing an overly lengthy description of the background to our project or our idea, demonstrate our credibility by a too long introduction, or get overly excited by our propositions (because they’re fabulous).

We’re social animals and we’re pack animals, and we like to talk. So, we think this helps. Without making context clear and relevant, then it just does not work.

There’s a reason why Simon Sinek’s ‘Start with Why’ – How Great Leaders Inspire Action TED talk is one of the most watched of all time. He says, “people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it”. If our audience doesn’t immediately understand the answer to the ‘why should I care?’ question, then we will lose them. Everything after that doesn’t matter.

So how can you get their attention right at the start? Rhetorical questions, relevant statistics, compelling facts, metaphor, analogy, voice of the customer, soundbites all work. But they must relate to what your audience cares about and, what you’re trying to achieve through the conversation.

What do you need to dial up in order to get your audience’s attention today?