Attention is all you need

Every Sunday morning it is my job to train a group of clients who are not motivated to learn the training materials, are quick to give harsh feedback and mostly find the whole exercise boring.

Last year I managed to make this group of clients happy and successful and most gave me 5-star reviews! Read on to find out who they were and what I learned from this experience.

Raise your hand if you’ve been in a meeting you felt was a waste of your time.

Maybe you were bored and couldn’t wait for it to end. Maybe you were multi-tasking replying to emails or knocking out some household chores like online shopping.

Now raise your other hand if you were the person leading or presenting in such a meeting and your audience were all tuned out.

Grabbing and holding attention from your audience - also called Stage Presence - is a valuable leadership skill. And I have learned the most about it from the unlikeliest of activities - my Sunday morning job.

The clients in question are my 8-9 year old students and I teach them Hindi at Gurukul, a local non-profit organization for teaching Indian languages and culture to kids.

Top 3 Learnings

Here are my top 3 learnings from my teaching experience that transfer well to corporate meetings and presentations.

1. 3 Ps

My first tool for holding attention for a large and impatient group - whether it is elementary students or 150+ folks dialed into a virtual all team meeting - is the 3 Ps. Pitch, Pace and Pause.

When you are speaking, whatever the content, modulating your voice pitch, changing the pace of your delivery and strategically pausing will make your audience pay attention.

💡 Try this

The next time you are presenting and feel like your audience is drifting away, pause just after asking a question or making an important point. And count one banana, two banana, … all the way up to five banana. You’ll see many who have tuned out coming back to see what the sudden silence is about. And those who were paying attention will start listening even more closely anticipating a big reveal!

2. Involve your audience

If you are speaking to a large gathering it is easy to forget that speaking is a two-way activity. For a speaker to succeed, there must be listeners. Building interactivity in your meetings and presentations is much easier than you think.

💡 Try this

At your next presentation ask your audience a question and use their response in your talk.

Or start your next meeting with a “brain break”. Just have everyone stand up and stretch or clap to a rhythm like 1-2-123.

3. Time management

I’ve seen this scenario play out so many times at work: A presenter is speaking and someone points out “we have 5 mins left”. The speaker starts rushing through their slides trying to cover 20 mins of content in 5 mins. They do a poor job of going through it and everyone leaves with a feeling of dissatisfaction.

My unofficial-theory-of-presentivity is that time speeds up when you are presenting and even with the most careful preparation you may sometimes find that you have more content than time.

💡 Try this

The next time you have 5 mins left with a ton of content to cover, instead of rushing through all of it pick one slide to skip ahead to and summarize it in 2-3 mins. Stop there and end early.

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I hope my tips today help you successfully lead your next meeting or presentation! I’d love to know in comments what worked and what didn’t if you’ve tried out the tips. Also dropping a short poll here to get a quick pulse check on which of the tips resonate most with you.