Sheila and I are finishing up the manuscript for our forthcoming book, The Engaging Expert: A Fieldbook for Occasional Presenters and Accidental Trainers. The book walks you through all the steps from the moment you are asked to share your expertise with a group through proving it had an impact afterward.

Below is a quick excerpt from the chapter called “Wow Your Audience.”

These techniques add more than just polishing touches to your presentation. They recapture audience attention, which must be re-won regularly throughout your session.

“Better attention always equals better learning,” explains John Medina, director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University . “We have known for a long time that ‘interest’ or ‘importance’ is inextricably linked to attention. … [Marketing professionals] have known for years that novel stimuli – the unusual, unpredictable or distinctive – are powerful ways to harness attention in the service of interest.”


Establishing Groups

You can squander an awful lot of time having participants group themselves with no guidance from you. Speed it up, make it genuinely random, and add an element of the unexpected by using categories like these.

• “If you have been in this industry less than one year, go to this corner. If you have been in it for two to five years, go to that corner. If you have been around longer than five years, come to this corner.”


• “Look at the playing card you drew when you came into the room. Form a group with the people who are holding the same suit as you are.”
• “If you listened to the radio on your way here this morning, raise your hand. You are the ______ group.”


• “Look at the amount of green, yellow and/or black you are wearing. If you have more green than the other colors, go to this corner of the room; if you are wearing more yellow than the other colors, go to that corner of the room …."


• “If your birthday is in the first half of the year, go to this side of the room; if your birthday is in the second half of the room, go to that side of the room.”


• “You can also divide groups by which quarter of the year their birthday falls in, or even which month to get lots of groups. You will probably need to adjust the group sizes after the fact with these options, but it’s plenty easy to do.”


• “Who is your favorite James Bond? If you prefer Sean Connery in the role … Roger Moore …” etc.


• “Everyone choose a [candy bar] from the pile on your table.” (Wait for everyone to select an item from a pre-defined variety.) “All the people who chose [Milky Way], gather over here. [Salted Nut Rolls] gather over there, …” etc.

Choosing Individuals for Specific Roles

Often in small-group activities you need someone to serve as the leader or table spokesperson or as the recorder taking notes or writing answers.

Randomizing how you choose an individual within a small group relieves some anxiety, often induces laughter and maintains interest. Here are a few ways to identify specific people quickly and efficiently, with a dollop of humor that adds interest.

“Find the person in your group ….

• who has done [your topic] before”
• who most recently delivered a presentation of some kind.”
• whose birthday falls closest to today.”
• who is the tallest.”
• who is wearing the most red.”
• with the most change in his or her pocket or purse.”
• with the biggest face … on your watch!”
• who traveled the greatest distance to get here today.”
• who most recently fed a pet.”
• who has the most siblings.”
• who has the most anatomical legs in their home.”
• who most recently bought a book.”

Tip: To add humor and an element of surprise, once you identify a specific person in a small group, indicate that the leader will be the person to his or her left, for example, or someone else in the group that the person you identified chooses.


Raising or Lowering the Energy in the Room

To raise the energy in a quiet group,

• If you don’t get any answers when you ask the large group a question, say, “Take 30 seconds at your tables and brainstorm the answer.”


• Do a pairs activity. Having lots of people talking at the same time raises the level of energy in a room.


• Use high-energy music to set the tone during breaks and to cue the beginning and end of group activities.


• Introduce movement. For example, ask participants to answer a poll question by standing or moving to one side of the room or the other to “cast their vote.”


• To reduce the energy of a boisterous group,


• Do a small groups activity using groups of at least 4-8. Having fewer people talking at the same time lowers the energy in a room.


• Do an individual reading or writing activity -- possibly with calm music to cue the beginning and end of the time for individuals to work.


• Suggest a short break, during which you might put on soothing music.

Names matter. People can love your content and your delivery, but if your title doesn’t “click” with your target audience, they will never even find out about your cool content and delivery, because they won’t make it through the door in the first place.

As they say, if you’re going to make rabbit stew, first you have to catch the rabbit!

Our rebranding efforts for Accidental Trainer have us thinking about the importance of titles for the people we serve too. After all the effort participants in our workshops put into reworking their content and delivery, it would be more than a little discouraging to discover the title of the session failed to attract an audience to appreciate it.

So what makes a title effective at catching the interest of the people you want in your workshops? Or, if they have no choice but to come, how could your title signal that your offering is considerably better than business as usual?

Well, if the title of this blog post caught your attention, then our intent of provoking curiosity was successful. What do rabbits have to do with Accidental Trainer’s mission of helping experts get what they know out of their head so others can apply it?

If the focus of this post were slightly different, we could have used a specific number (“Six ways to write titles that draw an audience”), since people seem to like learning a defined number of things.

We could have used a “how to” (“How to write presentation titles that change the world”) or tips and tricks (“Tips and tricks to attract a huge audience with your workshop title alone”). Promising specific solutions to specific challenges faced by your audience is far more enticing than merely stating your topic (“Writing Effective Titles”).

Another method could have been to frame the title as a question (“Why does it matter what I call my presentation?”). Or make it a warning (“Why your workshop title might send your audience screaming in the opposite direction”).

These techniques all start with the target audience’s perspective rather than the presenter’s. They speak to specific challenges, promise specific benefits or, at the very least, evoke specific ideas that your target audience is not expecting in connection with their interests.

Starting by thinking from the perspective of the people you want to influence should sound familiar, of course. To paraphrase something you just might have heard a time or two in one of our workshops, what do you want your people to DO when they see your title?

Our new-member orientation for a large professional association was boring. We knew we needed to get participants involved and “practicing” something.

But seriously, how in the world would you add a “practice” component to new-member orientation? What’s there to practice?

We decided that the biggest difference between someone who had taken orientation and someone who hadn’t was probably the way they would select which participation opportunities to use. There was too much for anyone to do everything offered.

So one of the key actions we wanted from orientation graduates was to pick out the activities and events that most interested them from a more-or-less continuous, seemingly random stream of information from the organization.

Here’s one of the ways we created for participants to practice:

• We invented profiles of several imaginary members -- complete with pictures to make them more “real” -- with dramatically different professional needs and constraints.
• We created job-aid-style descriptions of all the ways to get involved in the association, grouping them in ways that were easy to search.
• During orientation we distributed the profiles of our imaginary new members to small groups of participants.
• We set out the involvement “job aids” and gave groups 10 minutes to identify what they would recommend to each of their imaginary people, given their particular imaginary circumstances.

After about 10 minutes for exploring the options and discussing the best matches for each profile, participants reported their recommendations to the group.

The result was dramatically different from what happened with the same content in the previous version of orientation. No droning presenter, no shifting quietly in chairs, no glazed eyes. Instead there was energy and laughter and plenty of discussion of what the real people in the session were going to choose for their own participation.

And that, of course, was exactly what everyone wanted.

Who knew such dry lecture could become such animated practice?

The predicament is familiar: You need to share some critical aspect of your expertise, and you only have a fraction of the time you believe you need.

How do you trim your content when so much of it is important?

Change your question. In fact, change just one word of your question.

Presenters almost always start by asking themselves, “What do I want them to know?”

But something powerful happens when you change it to, “What do I want them to do?”

The impact of using this approach is a detailed part of Accidental Trainer workshops, but the gist of it comes back to this idea: Imagine you are a fly on the wall watching two people go about their work. One of them took the required workshop, and one of them did not. Now, from your position as a fly on the wall, how can you tell which is which?

What do you see? How can you tell from watching their behavior that one of them knows what you need them to know?

What does the “trained” person need to know in order to be able to do what she is doing? And if push came to shove, could she still do it if she didn’t know this bit of content? Or that bit of content? Could she get by and still be effective if she simply knew where to find the information she needs?

Presenters who have the discipline to be ruthlessly honest with themselves as they examine these sorts of questions find that the “nice to know” content begins to fall away naturally, and even the “need to know” starts to shrink. You’ll know it’s time to stop when there is nothing left to strip away.

Now that limited presentation times seems a bit less daunting. And you are probably in for a pleasant surprise at the often dramatically improved impact.


For more about using this approach effectively, come learn how to do “action mapping” at an Accidental Trainer workshop.

“Pay attention, class,” says the teacher.

Dutifully the third graders focus on the task at hand … until someone walks by the window. Up go the little heads, eyes on the movement.

Are the kids “paying attention”? Sure they are.

From their brains’ perspective, with movement comes the possibility of threats. Is that a bird swooping by? or maybe a rock aimed at your head? Millennia of evolutionary experience make determining whether or not to duck an immediate, possibly life-and-death priority.

To the brain, attention is all about risk management.

To the trainer, teaching is all about repeatedly earning that attention.

Your Brain’s Alert System

In a sense, your brain is always paying attention, continually scanning the environment for anything unusual -- an “intrinsic alertness,” to use the jargon of neuroscience. Changes, novelty or contrast trigger what neuroscientist pioneer Michael Posner famously dubbed the “alerting” or “arousing” stage of attention.

An example familiar to parents everywhere would be the change from the sounds of raucous play to abrupt whispers and silence. To the manager, it might be the sudden drop in the volume when she enters a room full of employees.

With the parental or managerial brain alerted to an abrupt change in the noise level, it next seeks to identify the nature and source of that change. Posner called this “orienting.”

Finally the brain’s executive function kicks in and makes a decision about what to do about the sudden silence that set off the alert. (Unfortunately for the grammatical symmetry of the model, Posner does not appear to have a tidy “-ing” to label this focused attention.)

Earning Attention

What does all this have to do with training?

Your participants need to be paying attention in order to learn whatever it is you are trying to teach them. Obvious, right?

But their brains’ intrinsic alertness keeps right on scanning the environment; and after about 10 minutes or so, your content drops off the top of the priorities list, if only for a few moments.

In the words of authors Stolovitch and Keeps*, “Attention, like breathing, tends to be automatically controlled. You can take charge of both of them for a short time, but as soon as you cease consciously controlling them, they revert to automatic.”

So as you pass roughly the nine-and-a-half-minute mark, you need to give participants’ brains a good reason to keep paying attention.

That means introducing change, novelty or contrast.

Not just any old change, novelty or contrast, of course. It needs to be relevant to the flow of what you are teaching. Breaking out into song would certainly recapture your participants’ attention, but it wouldn’t do much to enhance your credibility in a class about, say, how to operate your new enterprise-wide software. (And it would probably do nothing to improve participants’ ability to use the system, would it?)

Even with less blatant tactics, punctuating your presentation irrelevant attention-getters will only make your talk seem disjointed, and you’ll still miss your objective of helping your participants learn.

What kind of change will set off the brain’s alert system and earn you another 10 minutes of focused attention?

Emotions Help Anchor Learning

Remember that the more parts of the brain that are involved in encoding new information, the better that information sticks. And the brain remembers the emotional components of an experience better than any other aspect.

So possibly the single most effective way to trigger an orienting response and recapture executive attention is to evoke an emotion --fear, laughter, happiness, nostalgia, incredulity, and on and on.

What might that look like? A quick anecdote to illustrate your point, for example. Or posing an interesting question about it. Or sharing a jarring statistic. Or asking participants to share their reaction with a partner or at their table groups. If it breaks the pattern or changes the pace of what you had been doing for the previous nine and a half minutes, it can re-arouse participants’ attention.

Once you earn their attention, you have another opportunity to help them learn. And you have spared the world from a round of well-intentioned dullness. Everybody wins.




*Harold D. Stolovich & Erika J. Keeps in their best-selling book Telling Ain’t Training