From the course: Telling a Story to Build a Community

Grabbing attention

From the course: Telling a Story to Build a Community

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Grabbing attention

- Welcome to lesson two, and we're going to talk about how to grab your audience's attention right off the bat, right? A lot of mistakes that I see folks making when they're telling stories is they'll start talking, and they'll say, I'm going to tell you a story, and they don't actually start getting to the story part for 30 or 45 seconds, at which point, I've completely tuned out. So, here are some tips to just engage the audience right off the bat. Number one, start in the middle of the story. Whatever you think the beginning of the story is, start further in, right? Locate it in a specific time and place. Think about great stories that you love or great movies, right? They generally start in the middle of something that's happening. So it could be Bob tumbled onto the floor, and he knew that his life would never be the same again. All of the sudden, I want to know why Bob is tumbling to the floor, why things are never going to be the same again, and what those things are. So I'm immediately engaged. Another great technique you can use is a simple question. Have you ever felt X? Have you ever been X? Right, whatever that is. Have you ever not had anywhere to go for the holidays? Have you ever been, this is one that I feel like pet shelters use all the time: Have you ever been abandoned by your family? Imagine, and then they have a picture of an adorable puppy, right? I'm immediately engaged by that. Another technique you could use is just use the phrase, imagine. Imagine that you land somewhere and know nobody and have nowhere to go. Imagine that you graduated from film school, and you had this incredible vision for a project and no one believed in you. Everybody has felt those things. It goes back to the idea of these universal feelings. And as soon as you ask people to imagine something, or ask them a question, it immediately engages them. So, the action item for this is think about ways to engage your audience. Look back at your outline, what's your exposition? Think about if you were hearing the story, what would engage you? It's probably not going to be a thing that happens. It's probably not going to be a fact. It's going to be a feeling. It's going to be a very specific action. Can you phrase it as a question that's going to engage people's sense of empathy, to get that oxytocin flowing? So, right now, we're just working at the top of the story. It's probably the most important part because this is where you either get people on your side or you lose them. So spend some time, flesh it out, and look at those techniques to engage the audience. Which ones work for you? And then when we come back from the next lesson, we're going to talk about once you have the audience's attention, how do you keep them engaged all the way through? Have fun.

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