Why Is It So Hard to Keep Audiences Engaged? As I wrote extensively in my book, the human attention span is about 15-20 minutes. My original research has been copied or quoted by just about every business author, so this should be familiar ground. 20 mins. That's the longest amount of time we can reasonably be expected to stay 80%+ focused on a single topic, idea, or activity without some kind of additional stimulation.
When you give a presentation, it seems exciting and fascinating to you because you're the one who is talking. Your adrenaline is pumping and you're moving around the stage. Biologically, you are the most interested person in the room in what you have to say.
For shorter speeches of 5-10 minutes, this is fine. The audience can pick up on your enthusiasm and it will carry you through. But when you have to give a speech or presentation that is longer than 20 or 25 minutes, you'll need to do something to engage and re-focus your audience.
According to the research, there are two main things you'll need to do. First, you have to provide some pacing changes and media changes (e.g., show a video clip, play some audio, or introduce another speaker). You have to break things up. Second, you'll need to provide markers and "sign-posts" that make the organization of your speech extremely obvious.
Techniques for Breaking it Up
Motivational speakers are famous for asking audience members to stand up and high-five each other or give 10 other people a hug. These kinds of activities work great for giving the audience a mini-break and getting their blood moving and endorphins pumping. But if you're giving a serious speech to the board of directors of your company about quarterly revenue growth, the Tony Robbins approach can feel cheesy and out-of-place.
On today's episode of the podcast, I talk to Jim Davies about a number of different strategies you can use to break up your speech and re-engage the audience. The most effective method is the use of video. But while video clips are a great way to break things up, they also present a host of problems if you use them incorrectly. Learn what the science suggests about the proper way to use videos during presentations of different lengths.
Adding Sign-Posts
The other problem for presenters is that the structure of your speech is extremely obvious to you because you wrote it. But if your speech is more than 20-25 minutes long, your audience is going to have a hard time following the points of your talk. This is because humans have a limited ability to hold items in our working memory. When we pass the 25 minute mark, the mechanical functions of the brain start to fatigue and we forget what we heard at the start of the talk.
The solution is to "sign-post" and make the structure of your talk way more obvious than it seems like it needs to be. The farther you go over 25 minutes, the more obvious the sign-posts should be. Learn exactly how to achieve this on today's episode.
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