“I Have to Speak Fast to Keep the Audience’s Attention “

This is a very common reason for some of my clients to end up speaking fast.

If you want to keep your audience’s attention, this is the wrong way to go. Your audience will try very hard catching up with you. Eventually they’ll give up and tune out. The result is just the opposite to what you want.

If you want to keep your audience attention, keep them curious.

Have you ever watched criminal investigation tv dramas, e.g. CSI, Criminal Minds, etc.?

If you have watched any episode, you would have noticed how they kept your attention.

They’ll usually start with a dead body, or someone getting killed. You would think, “Who did it”? And the entire episode will lead you to investigate who did it.

Half way through the episode, there was one guy who had all the evidence pointing to him. You thought, “Ah, it’s him!” But you looked at the time, it’s only half way through the episode, it couldn’t be him. Then who did it? The second half of the episode would lead you to discover more evidence and find the real killer.

We could learn a lot from those tv drams series.

If you want to keep your audience’s attention, keep them curious.

We’ll pay attention when something makes us curious. We’ll pay attention when something expected happens. We’ll pay attention when something keeps unresolved. That’s the right way to go.

If you want to make an impact on your audience, go slow. Martin Luther King didn’t go as fast as he could when he declared, “I have a dream.” Instead, he went, “I…..have..a dream.” Winston Churchill didn’t go as fast as he could when he reminded the British people, “Never give in. Never never never … give in.” And Barack Obama didn’t go fast when he inspired the audience, “We are the change that we seek.”

The entire world is going crazily fast. We speak fast. We eat fast. We want things to happen fast. We lost patience, become indifferent and want instant gratification. In this crazy world, you stand out when you can keep your mind clear and go “slow”.

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