Starting your speech with...
First seconds of your speech can be the most important of all. During this time your listeners decide whether your speech is worth of their attention or not.
There are patterns of starting a speech, some helpful strategies which can help unexperienced speakers at the beginning of their journey. But I believe successful, unusual, drawing attention speech requires creativity and connection with the topic. If you don't feel what you are talking about it is much harder to make other people feel something.
That is why in first seconds of each speech I value enthusiasm, first of all. But what else is important?
I watched 21 performances to find out.
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0:26
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3:06
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3
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1:45
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2
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0:54
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2
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2
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8
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0:35
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9
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2:44
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5
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10
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0:27
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2
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11
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0:33
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3
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12
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1:33
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13
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0:47
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14
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1:00
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4
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15
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1:06
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5
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16
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0:46
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0:44
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3
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0:50
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19
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1:13
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20
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21
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1:18
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3
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What made me watch some of these clips till the very end and skip the rest of them? First of all, it is important to mention that none of this speakers used ordinary dull introductions such as "Hello. The topic of my speech is..." Simply because it's not working.
Enormous quantity of information makes us picky and inattentive, we are difficult to impress. That is why startling statements help a lot. Some topics are impressive themselves, and it makes it much easier for the speaker, for example I watched the whole speech "How I held my breath for 17 minutes" by David Blaine not because of his amazing presentation skills, but because of his amazing experience.
Another tendency I noticed, is that I liked more the speeches that contained fresh and new ideas. If we are not familiar with the topic and learn something new at the very beginning it makes us stay (not necessarily though). At the same time these topics should be somehow close to us. For instance, the topic of relationships, divorces and children is not something I am eager to learn about, that's why even the funny attention-getter the speaker used did not encourage me to stay.
Moreover, I found out, that clarifying the topic of your speech is not that simple, while you are struggling to get attention by any means. Some of the topics were not clear for me, I could not tell what it drew my attention to, while couple of them made a wrong impression and I thought the speech was going to be about something else.
Seems to difficult now to start properly... But it is not. Most of the speakers demonstrated brilliant skills. Some of the speakers made me listen to them without thinking about their topics at all: it was just a pleasure to listen to them, it works well with stories and humor.
Unusual and inspiring were the variants with showing a video clip instead of talking or pointing to the person saying that he is a liar. However, we should understand, that these techniques work for a very limited number of topics.
Frankly speaking, I am not a person who is good at telling jokes and that is why for now I hesitate that it would be effective. Being dramatic and startling (as in the speech about childhood trauma) is more my thing. Well, not for the topic I've chosen. Telling a story or referring to the audience are more suitable options.
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