BUILDING A SUCCESSFUL TALK

BLOCKS: Using blocks to structure a speech is the key to presenting a successful talk. In simple terms, a block represents a self-contained story within a story. Think of each block like a chapter of a book, magazine article, or a scene in a movie. Each block is a story with a beginning, middle and end and, more importantly, a block has a reason for being. A block makes a memorable point AND reinforces the central theme of your talk.

A block should run 4, 5, even 6 minutes. But remember, audiences don’t like and won’t pay attention to boring. So, the bigger the block the better it must be.

According to a recent scientific study, which surveyed 2,000 participants, and studied the brain activity of 112 others using electroencephalograms, the average adult’s attention span, what they call Selective Sustained Attention (or Focused Attention) is approximately 5 minutes — and that the good news. The bad news is that our Transient Attention (our short-term response to stimuli, that temporarily attracts or distracts our attention) can be as short as 8 seconds.

The average store-bought stick’em in a fish bowl and flush‘em down the toilet when they die goldfish has a nine-second attention span. Which means human beings have a shorter attention span than a goldfish.

That means if you successfully get and hold the attention of an audience for the first eight seconds of your presentation, the average audience is still going to miss 84 percent of everything you said during a 30-minute speech. To be clear, unless a presentation is structured properly using short digestible and satisfying blocks the audience is going to miss most of what you have to say. Which is why we use blocks, typically eight of them on average, for a 40-minute talk.

Start simply enough by telling a story. Any story. Grab your phone or a digital recorder and start to talk. Talk about your first job, a new business concept, or how you broke last year’s sales record. The subject of your first block doesn’t really matter – it’s an exercise in storytelling, and the devil is always in the details.

Talk about a memorable vacation, how you met your husband or wife or, in my case, how you didn’t think life could get any worse after waiting at the airport for eight hours to take a six-hour flight until your connecting flight home was canceled for up to five days – leaving you stranded in a city you didn’t want to be in, only 800 miles from the city you just left. Describe spending the night at an overpriced airport hotel, where the front desk clerk laughed out loud when you tried to use an airline-discount room rate vouchers, and then tell us about how you spent hours on the phone frantically trying to make reservations on another airline to hopefully get home sometime in the next few days. Oh, and don’t forget to talk about the guy in front of you at the airline counter who was hauled away in handcuffs by police and homeland security after going crazy and threatening the gate agent when the flight was canceled – and how his wife really didn’t seem to be bothered all that much that he got arrested.

The above is called exposition.

In each block, always tell the audience what you’re going to tell them then tell them, then tell them what you just told them, and then tell them why you just told them what you just told them.

I recently worked with a financial executive in writing a keynote on the new Department of Labor fiduciary rules, and how their industry needs to adapt. Within the talk was a block explaining of the new rule in detail and when the rule would go into effect. Some of the other blocks included:

• A discussion on how the financial industry changed in the United Kingdom after they passed similar legislation
• The amount of a client’s retirement assets that could directly be impacted by the Department of Labor’s new rule
• The opportunities waiting for those advisers willing to embrace the change
• New strategies for financial advisers

Instead of a five thousand word 40-minute presentation, we crafted a total of eight interchangeable blocks of around six hundred and fifty words each.

Blocks make it easier to write and edit a talk. Block make it easier to organize, memorize, and customize a presentation. Most importantly, blocks allow you to easily add new material to your core presentation anytime you need to.