Confessions of a Public Speaker (11 page)

There is a moment
at every movie, symphony, and lecture, right before the show
starts, when the entire audience goes silent. All the conversations and
rustlings stop, and everyone, at about the same time, falls into quiet
anticipation for what is about to happen. This is called the hush over the
crowd, but really it’s the moment when the crowd itself first forms. The
200 unique people with different thoughts and ideas now become one single
entity, joining together for the first time to give their unified
attention to the front of the room. And the strange part is that the
audience gives control over to the unknown. They have not seen the movie
before. They haven’t heard the lecture or seen the play. It’s an act of
respect and an act of hope—and it’s amazing. There are only a few things
in the world that can silence a room full of people, and the beginning of
a performance is one of them.

I get chills when it happens even if, like last week, I’m just in
the back row of a movie theater about to watch
Crank: High
Voltage
, a hopelessly silly action film. Even there, right
after the previews and before the opening credits start, the sensation of
listening to a crowded room trying to be silent is bizarre and magical at
the same time. On this day, however, I broke the silence. A peanut M&M
escaped from the stash in my hand, crashing to the floor. The sound of
each and every bounce, as it rolled down to the front row, echoed in the
ears of annoyed strangers. My clumsy violations, as embarrassing as they
were, demonstrated how silence is rare, special, and easy to break.

And when I’m the speaker, I know that special moment is the only
time I will have the entire audience’s full attention. Unless an alien
spaceship crash-lands on stage midway through the talk, the silence before
I begin is the most powerful moment I have. What defines how well I’ll do
starts with how I use the power of that moment. The balance rests on a
bigger question: how will I keep people’s attention after that moment is
gone? There’s an easy way to keep score: what percentage of the people in
attendance is listening? 70%? 50%? 1%? Even if 70% of the room is
listening, a pretty good score, how many of them understand what I’m
saying? Who knows. But for those not paying attention, there’s no chance
they’ll gain anything from my talk. For me to have value, I have to keep
the attention of as many people as possible.

The science is clear. No one can keep the undivided attention of his
audience. Not really. How much uninterrupted attention do you ever get
from your friends or coworkers? Or better yet, how often do you give all
of your attention to someone else? Nodding your head every so often, while
your spouse rambles on about his day at work, doesn’t count if you’re
thinking about what’s on TV. It’s rare today to have more than a few
undivided minutes with most people in your life. Email, Twitter, and
mobile phones have made it worse, but it’s always been a problem. Our
species has survived because of millions of years of hunting and working,
using our muscles and brains in the active pursuit of things. Sitting and
listening to someone drone on and on—which, unfortunately, so many
lecturers do—is an attention disaster. Our genetic nature opposes the
design of a basic, everyday lecture-room environment.

This is far from a surprise, considering that most people avoid
lectures when they can. No one says regretfully on his deathbed, “If only
I’d gone to more lectures!” We know that the best way to learn something
is by doing it, and in a lecture, you never do much of anything except sit
and stare (two things few of us need to practice). So, if we must go, we
sit in the back, bringing fully charged electronic escapes, and we select
the lecture with the greatest chance of being interesting or entertaining.
Consider how minimally lectures have changed in the last 200 years
compared to the exponential growth of everything else. If you used a
time-travel machine to bring the crowd at Gettysburg into the seats at
your next annual corporate meeting, the only question they’d have is why
so few people wear hats.

The science of attention—a topic popularized by books like Malcolm
Gladwell’s
Blink
(Back Bay Books)—can also be
thought of as the science of boredom, which is a surprisingly useful way
to think about how a speaker tries to keep people interested. If you can
stop boredom from happening, and stop doing things that bore people,
you’re well on your way to having an attentive crowd. Professor Donald A.
Bligh, while doing research for his book
What’s the Use of
Lectures?
(Jossey-Bass), strapped up his students to heart
rate monitors during various lectures and measured what happened over
time. It’s no surprise that their heart rates declined. They peak at the
magic moment of attention right at the start, and, on average, decline
steadily (see
Figure 6-1
). With this
depressing fact, it’s easy to understand why most lectures are slow
one-way trips into sedation. Our bodies, sitting around doing little, go
into rest mode—and where our bodies go, our minds will follow.

Figure 6-1. What your body does when sitting at a lecture. Adapted from
Donald A. Bligh’s
What’s the Use of Lectures?
(Jossey-Bass).

John Medina, molecular biologist and director of the Brain Center at
Seattle Pacific University, believes 10 minutes is the maximum amount of
time most people can pay attention to most things. In his bestselling book
Brain Rules
(Pear Press), Medina spends an entire
chapter applying this theory to the challenges of teaching—the 10-minute
rule is at the core of how he plans his lectures. He never spends more
than 10 minutes on a single point, and he makes sure to structure the
entire lecture around a sequence of points he knows the audience is
interested in hearing. With enough study about the audience’s interests,
and a 10-minute time limit, boredom can be kept at bay for an
hour.

Ten is not a magic number, however. Lectures that are 8, 12, or even
45 minutes long can be captivating, provided the speaker knows what he’s
doing and understands how to keep people interested. But most don’t. There
is a good reason the most well-respected conference in modern times, the
TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference, uses a
mixture of 8- and 20-minute long talks at its events. At this ridiculously
popular and supremely expensive lecture-centric event (tickets are $4,000
or more), famous minds like Bill Gates, Al Gore, Bono, and hundreds of
other CEOs, political leaders, and geniuses in various fields, fly from
all over the world to speak—but for a maximum of 20 minutes. They spend
more time eating lunch than they do giving their presentations. This
forces speakers to distill their message down to its most concise,
passionate, potent form, so even if they fail to keep people’s attention,
they won’t be on stage long enough to bore anyone to death.
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Television sitcoms—a format that has been studied for
decades to perfect its attention-capturing qualities—are also in the same
time range: 30 minutes long, divided into thirds, and with generous
helpings of 30-second commercials.

Most lectures are an hour long for no good reason other than we like
that neat increment of time. If you have to hire a babysitter, drive to
the venue, and find parking in a crowded lot, just to listen to someone
speak for only 15 minutes, you’d be rightly upset. Either that, or you
wouldn’t bother going at all. Time is an easy way to measure value, which
we can apply before we pay for whatever the thing happens to be. And for
the host of the event, it’s more convenient to schedule sessions for an
hour or 90 minutes. It’s challenging enough to wrangle one decent speaker
(let alone managing his schedule and panic attacks); finding three or four
additional speakers to fill each hour would only multiply the event
planner’s overhead. People often complain that they only learned a few
things in an hour-long lecture, but would they be willing to go at all if
the talk was only 10 minutes long?

Sadly, we’ll always have long lectures for reasons that have nothing
to do with the actual lectures at all. It’s an artifact of culture, the
logistics of putting together events, and the reluctance to change that
ensures most people, until the end of time, will lecture longer than their
audience can tolerate. And the cynical icing on this paragraph of
frustrations is that even if you limit the average speaker to 20 minutes,
or 10, there’s no guarantee he’ll use that time well. A true dullard can
make any amount of time feel like too much.

But there’s a solution. The answer to most attention problems is
POWER
.

Power is a fun word, even more so when you put it in bold and all
caps for no reason. People get upset when you say you want more of it, but
I’m going to claim every speaker should seek more power. I know in America
we like to believe in democracy and the even distribution of power, but
any political science major knows the United States, technically, is a
republic. We distribute power unevenly by design; for example, we have 100
senators, 50 governors, and only one president, and each has magnitudes
more power than the citizens he or she represents. Uneven distribution of
power is necessary to get things done efficiently, which is exactly what
you need when trying to give a lecture. If you think things are bad in
America now, in a true democracy of 300 million people, they would be much
worse.

The setup for public speaking is beyond republican—in the political
science sense of the word—it’s tyrannical. Only one person is on stage,
only one person is given an introductory round of applause, and only one
person gets the microphone. If the aliens landed during the TED
Conference, they’d obviously assume the guy standing on stage holding the
microphone was supreme overlord of the planet. For much of the history of
civilization, the only public speakers were chiefs, kings, and pharaohs.
But few speakers use the enormous potential of this power. Most speakers
are so afraid to do anything out of the ordinary that they squander the
very power the audience hopes they will use.