Nick Morgan, Public Words

Commencement Speeches

Tis the season to be wary -- of commencement speeches.  We're almost through the danger period for another year, but it doesn't pay to relax your guard too early.

I had to write a dozen (that's 12) commencement speeches -- on different topics -- over 2 summers for the Governor of Virginia when I started my career as a speechwriter 20 years ago.  That experience left me wary of the genre and easily spooked by the thought of hearing another one delivered. 

It almost goes without saying that the majority of commencement speeches are terrible -- vacuous, platitudinous, and ponderous.  And too long. 

I heard a contemporary example recently at Columbia University.  It was a proud day for me; my daughter was getting a degree.  Like so many others in the audience, I was thrilled to be there, and disposed to be charitable to all and sundry.  In fact, there was a great vibe in the crowd -- lots of joshing of neighbors and jolly comments about the day, the giant TV screens we were watching (because the crowd was so vast) and how proud we all were.

Then the President of Columbia stood up to speak.  It's always a danger sign when the head of an organization gives his/her own speech.  Ego, arrogance, stinginess -- I found myself wondering -- which was it gonna be?  Those are the only 3 reasons not to hire someone from the outside. 

I don't know about the stinginess, but ego and arrogance were certainly on display as the President droned on for far too long about far too little.  This was the guy who had brought the President of Iran to campus only to browbeat him like a naughty student in a public exchange, leading many to question his political savvy and his general acumen.  I mean, why bother if you're just going to insult the guy?  You can do that from a distance and save the air fare. 

I guess that's why the Prez went on so long about freedom of speech.  But it wasn't convincing, the prose was pompous and in love with itself, and the speech was only too typical of the sickly genre.

Contrast that one with the one J. K. Rowling delivered to the Harvard graduation.  (I didn't attend, just read it on line.)  I don't know how it sounded, but it read beautifully.  It was a moving tribute to Amnesty International and the power of the human imagination.  Timely, important, and worthy of her enormous talent.  I hope she got a standing ovation.  The good commencement speeches are rare, and deserve accolades.

So if you're going to give a commencement speech, please remember three things.  One, keep it short.  Twenty-two minutes is the absolute top, since that's the average attention span of an adult who doesn't have ADD.  Twelve minutes is better.  Two, make it about something you care about.  You're there on the dais because of who you are.  Speak from your passion.  And three, don't give advice.  Ever.  That's taking advantage of a captive audience and (usually) a beautiful day.   

How to give a short speech

I often get asked about short speeches, and off-the-cuff remarks.  How do you do them well?  What are the pitfalls to avoid?  It can be surprisingly hard to say something interesting in a very short time, and to avoid running on at the mouth and saying too much.  What's the happy medium, and how do you think about it?

First, I would distinguish between responding to a question, or making a statement of less than a minute or two, and making a short speech of, say, 5 to 7 minutes.  Time constraints necessarily make them two different genres.

The minute speech is best handled as follows.  Decide what you're going to say, take a deep breath, and then give the headline.  "I don't think that mice should be allowed in the Vatican."  Then go on to give up to 3 supporting reasons, depending on your thinking and the time allowed.  Hygiene, worry about the destruction of precious manuscripts, and the eek factor during prayers.  Finally, finish off with a repetition of the headline:  "So that's why I think that mice should be banned from the Vatican."

When you've got more than 3 but less than 7 minutes, think in terms of problem-solution.  If you have a great story to begin the problem section, then do so, but don't allow it to take over the problem section entirely.  You need to spend half of your allotted time discussing the problem in as much detail as you can (which is not much).  Heretical mice are running amok throughout the Vatican.  This deplorable plague has led to illness, destruction of some of the Vatican's most precious artifacts, and the discomfort of many visitors and residents....About half way through your total time, switch to the solution and buttress that with as much logic and passion as you can muster.  I recommend beginning with an excommunication, followed by mice traps, poison, and the playing of Barry Manilow recordings in the basement.... 

That's really all there is to it.  Keep it simple.  If you want to conclude by describing the benefits of your solution, then go ahead, in a sentence or two. 

Repetition and simplicity will help you keep your remarks organized and under control, and will help your listeners follow you. 

How to write a great speech -- 8

By now you have written a persuasive speech, with a structure that respects the audience's need to hear your message in a certain order that makes sense to them.  All you have to do is hit the print key, grab the pages, and you're off to the podium, right?

Not quite yet.  First of all, never hide behind the podium, but that's another blog for another day. 

Second, there are a couple more things that it would behoove you to think about. 

I like to apply Maslow's hierarchy of needs to a talk to see how viscerally it's going to grab the audience.  Start by turning the hierarchy upside down.  Maslow's whole point was that people work their way up the pyramid by satisfying their needs in the order that he describes.  So, if you're worried about food and shelter -- basic physiological needs -- you're not going to be thinking about whether or not you've got the esteem of the local flower club.  That comes later, after a good meal and the prospect of more to come.

Turned upside down, Maslow's hierarchy becomes a way to gauge whether or not someone will pay attention to your talk.  Most people don't start attending closely until their personal safety or the safety of their business is at stake.  So try to find a way to express your message in safety terms.

Don't make it up or distort things to accomplish this feat.  Make it real.  But do your best, because your audience is probably going to be thinking about the critical issues nagging at them, and to cut through that clutter, you have to be at least as low on the hierarchy as they are. 

The other way I like to think about speeches overall is to apply one of the great stories of our culture to them.  There are only five basic stories -- the quest, rags to riches, the love story, stranger in a strange land, and revenge.  These are powerful stories that we learn from the cradle, and we know them deeply and respond to them powerfully.  So if you can fit your message into a quest for profits, say, or a chance to beat the competition at a new product launch, or a merger that is a love story, then your audience will 'get' what you're saying more powerfully than otherwise.

Don't be obvious about it.  Don't say, "Let's go on a quest."  Instead, say, "Today, I'd like to ask you to begin a journey with me.  We've got difficult terrain ahead, and there will be many obstacles to overcome.  But at the end of the journey, we will achieve something that very few other companies ever get to achieve, a ....."  In other words, tell the story, don't announce it.

I say a lot more about these stories and how to use them in my first book.  Next time I'll conclude this series of blogs on writing a great speech with some thoughts about Power Point and other visual aids. 

How to write a great speech -- 7

Your audience is chattering away amongst themselves because you've given them permission to become active, in some step that is designed to help cement your message into their minds.  It's chaotic, but the audience is happy, and cementing, and those are good things.  You're tempted to leave now, but you know you have to finish the speech off in some style.  And anyway, you're the one they came to see.   

Here's where you need to expend some energy to get them back.  They will come back, but you have to insist, politely and firmly, that they do.  You're asking them to sit down and become passive again, and that's asking a lot, so don't hold them for long and don't try to do much.

Your goal at this point is to remind the audience, in a stirring and powerful way, of the central theme of the talk.  Great closes are inspirational, and aspirational.  Remind the audience of the big reason they're all there, or point the way up the path to greatness, or quote some great words by some other orator if none will come to you. 

Keep it short (under 3 minutes, closer to 1 minute is better), keep it inspirational, and then NEVER FORGET to say 'thank you'.  That's the universally understood signal that a speech is done and the audience should applaud.  If you've done well, they'll leap to their feet. 

By the way, if you're going to take questions, then save this ending segment until the very end.  If you end with Q and A, then you're at the mercy of the last question.  Often, the last question is not the best one, and it may even be asked by a crank who has been waiting, and fuming, for some time.  So deal with the questions, but then close with your own statement.  Audiences tend to remember best the last thing they hear, so make it yours.

Next time I'll talk about thematic ways to think about the whole speech. 

How to write a great speech -- 5

You’ve reached that point in creating your speech where you’ve worked with the audience to understand the problem, and you’ve offered a solution.  Now, you need to take a couple of steps to seal the deal. 

Remember what you’re doing:  you’re trying to persuade the audience of something.  Now put yourself in the audience’s shoes.  It has just been presented with a compelling problem and a solution.  Where is it likely to be?  Fully or nearly persuaded.  It needs just a little more help to push it into the comfort zone.

So now you’re going to spend a few minutes helping them along with a great example of the wonders of your solution.  If you’re a consultant, for example, touting the benefits of a new way of managing customer service, it’s time to present a case study of a company that adopted your approach and succeeded magnificently.

Think of this section of the speech like the counterpart to the opening hook.  If you used a 3-minute story there showing what happens when customer service goes horribly wrong, then this is your chance to close the circle logically and emotionally by telling a 3-minute story (or case study) where it goes right. 

This section doesn’t have to be long, and in fact it shouldn’t be.  Three to five minutes is optimal.  The point is to give a concrete example of something that shows the benefits of your solution.  Audiences aren’t very good at imaging new states, so help them. 

If you’re discussing ways to stop global warming, this is the point in the speech where you tell a success story, or draw a picture of a world turning the global warming problem around.  What would that look like?  How would people feel, and what would the benefits to them be?  Use specifics and concrete imagery as much as possible. 

After this step, you’ve only got one more to go before you’re done and ready for a celebration at the bar.  I’ll talk about how to close a great speech next time.

How to write a great speech -- 3

So you’ve captured the audience’s fleeting attention, with a great story, a statistic, or a compelling question.  Congratulations; you’ve survived the first few minutes of a speech better than most.  But what do you do now?

How do you keep the audience’s attention for the next 15 minutes or so?

There’s only one way that works reliably, and that involves asking yourself one simple question:  What’s the problem the audience has for which the information I’m ready to talk about is the answer? 

So for example, let’s say you’re a world-class expert on bees and their diseases.  You’re ready to go crazy on the subject.  All you need is a problem. 

Fortunately for you (and unfortunately for the bees) they’re dying of some mysterious disease that some say has to do with global warming, and some say has to do with viruses, maybe from Israel, and still others say has to do with a combination of the two. 

That’s what you should spend the next fifteen minutes (of a 45 minute speech) talking about.  The only prerequisite is an audience of people who care about bees. 

Or at least, an audience that cares about what the bees can do.  If it’s a general audience, in other words, the problem becomes, what are you going to do in a world without bees, where crops don’t grow, flowers don’t bloom in spring, and honey is gone forever?  Different audience, different problem. 

The point is to shape your talk to the audience’s problem.  Talk about that, because that’s the only topic that answers the question the audience has – what’s in it for me? – with sufficient punch to hold their attention for the next while. 

Go crazy, because audiences love a speaker that understands and talks about their problems. 

Next time I’ll talk about what to say after you’ve exhausted the problem, but not the audience’s patience. 

How to Write a Great Speech -- 2

So you want to write a great speech, and you’ve thought about the audience, and the occasion.  You understand what makes the audience tick, and what’s happening on the day, and the days leading up to it. 

 

The next thing to think about is how am I going to get that audience’s attention?  You need a great hook.  The idea is to frame the talk in the first 1 – 3 minutes, in a way that draws the audience in, but doesn’t simply give them an agenda.  That’s boring.  No one pays attention during the presentation of the agenda slide, so don’t do it.

 

Instead, tell a compelling story, one that shows (rather than tells) the topic you’re going to be discussing.  If you’re giving a speech on trends in customer satisfaction with your premier line of products, and the trends are down, then tell a quick story about a particular customer and how she was unhappy with the product.  That gets the audience’s attention, lays out the problem (without suggesting the solution, yet) and suggests the agenda for your talk rather than spelling it out. 

 

Another way to start is to ask a question, either rhetorical or real.  I started a recent talk to a group about authenticity and branding by asking them what the following famous brands had in common:  K-Mart, Sears, Old Navy, AOL, Circuit City, and Dodge. 

 

I let the audience guess the answer, and they did, without too much trouble.  Each of those brands is in trouble, and will probably be gone within a year or two. 

 

That was enough to hook the audience, and suggest that the topic of the morning was to be something about how strong brands go wrong. 

 

A strong statistic can also get things going, providing that it is startling enough.  Big numbers don’t hook us as much as numbers that we can process in human terms.  “Look around you.  You are seated in rows of ten.  One of you in each row will be diagnosed with cancer before the year is out.”  Or something like that. 

 

You need to find a way to encapsulate your talk vividly and quickly, so that you get the audience’s attention, and hold it long enough to get started, in an era when attention is famously a scarce commodity.  Think of it like the way filmmakers start movies these days.  In an action movie, there’s at least one big explosion before the opening credits are done.  Or, in a murder mystery, at least one body turns up.  We may even start with a murder.  Gone are the days when a movie would start with credits that went on, over cheery music, for 3 minutes or more, without any plot at all. 

 

Next time I’ll talk about what to do once you’ve got the audience’s attention. 

How to write a great speech -- 1

I'm going to write a series of blogs on how to put together a great speech, since I've heard a number of bad ones lately. 

Let's begin with first principles.  A great speech puts the occasion, the audience, and the speaker together in an unforgettable way.  All three pieces of the rhetorical puzzle are important. 

When Churchill was going to give his famous 'Iron Curtain' speech after WW II, he didn't go over to the House of Commons, where he delivered most of his orations.  Churchill knew that the speech would be controversial, since the post-war world was not in the mood to hear that war-time ally Stalin was launching the Cold War.  So instead, Churchill traveled to Fulton, Missouri, Harry Truman’s home turf, with the President in tow.  He wanted the imprimatur of the U. S. Presidency so that people would be forced to take the speech seriously. 

The gambit worked.  The speech took a pasting in the press, as Churchill knew it would, but it began a discussion that alerted the world to the dangers of the USSR.  And Churchill’s prescient words remained relevant until the Berlin Wall came down, more than 4 decades later. 

But what if you have to give a speech and you want it to be well-received now, not forty years after the fact? 

You need to consider the audience’s needs.  A great speechmaker possesses great tact.  You have to be prepared to speak to a particular audience on a particular occasion.  Ultimately, then, a great speech is only partially about you.  It’s also about the audience and the occasion.

If you keep that rule in mind, you won’t go wrong.  Ask yourself, who is this audience?  What does it want?  What does it fear?  Why has it invited me to speak to it?  What aspect of my message is relevant to it? 

And then ponder the occasion.  What’s happening right now that will be on the minds of everyone in the room?  What should I not talk about?  What does that audience need to hear?

The first rule of great speechmaking:  consider the audience.

I'm Giving a Speech Tomorrow

I'm in the unusual position of having to take my own advice -- I'm giving a new speech tomorrow.  I usually talk on individual communications, but this time the topic is communicating brands.  That's a subject I've worked on with companies over the years, but I don't usually lecture on the subject.

I rehearsed on Friday, and it did not go very well.  I realized that I need to take my own advice, and quickly.  So here are my three most essential rules for fixing a speech and getting it ready to go, when you're facing a deadline.

First, focus on one message and one message only.  I realized during rehearsal that I was trying to do too many things.  I need to whittle the speech down to one clear message:  Why each employee must become a passionate storyteller on behalf of the company brand in today's marketplace.  I'm going back to the draft to eliminate everything that doesn't support that one point.  Focus is essential for successful public speaking. 

Second, find a good hook that frames the message of the speech so that your audience is intrigued and brought into the discussion.  I've been trying out several openings, one a story, one a question, and a few others.  I've got to pick the one that best answers the question, why are we here?, for the audience. 

Third, deliver the speech in the problem-solution format.  The rehearsal made clear that I was trying to be too clever with my structure.  The only one that makes sense, when you're trying to persuade the audience of something, is problem-solution.  That's because our minds are structured to solve problems, and when we hear one presented to us, we automatically begin to think about how to solve it.  The structure follows our natural thinking processes, so we're happy. 

So I've got some work to do, to repair the speech, simplify it, and focus it on the audience.  Then, I'll be ready for another rehearsal.  The deadline approaches!

Storytelling -- 3

I've been working hard lately on my new book, tentatively entitled Being Real:  The Four Steps to Authentic Communication, and so I've been slacking off on the blogs.  But here goes on storytelling:  the basic themes.

I've talked and written quite a bit about the basic stories, because understanding them is key to understanding why some stories grab you and some don't.  We have 5 stories hard-wired into us from an early age, because they're fundamental to Western culture and thus the way we think about ourselves. 

The most fundamental is the quest.  We're ready to go off on a quest at the drop of an even slightly possible hat.  We cast ourselves in the role of the hero, we charge off, encountering obstacles and help -- and mentors -- along the way, and then we finally reach our goal and the celebration we're entitled to.  It's so fundamental, in fact, that we don't think of it as a story, but more like a frame of mind, a way of thinking about reality.  They say fish don't see the water they swim in; we're that way when we're on a quest.  It's just what we do. 

So when you're telling a story, if you can turn it into a quest, everyone will get it and your work will be that much easier -- and more successful.

After the quest, there's the love story (LS), stranger in a strange land (SIASL), revenge (R), and rags to riches (RTR).  Each has its own structure and emotional states associated with it; you know these stories deeply if you've watched TV, read books, gone to the movies, and listened to politicians at some point in your life. 

The love story is again one that we don't see as a story, but as a part of life -- it's what happens to us (or doesn't).  We fall in love, we fall out of love, we're happy, we're sad -- it's what we do. 

The other stories are equally basic -- we've all been thrown into a new situation where we don't know the rules (SIASL), wanted to get back at someone who's wronged us (R), and many of us have worked our way up from nothing to something (RTR).  The point is that, in addition to being life experiences, these are stories, which means we will shape our experiences, and certainly our memories of our experiences, to fit the conventions these stories demand.  If you doubt that, listen to yourself the next time you tell one of those tales to your friends that you've told many times.  Where does the exact truth lie, and where do you start to shade things ever so slightly?  Around the conventions that the stories demand, that's where.  You'll find yourself shaping life to fit the construct.

All of which is simply to say that these basic stories are powerful, people get them, and therefore you should structure your presentations around them, because they will make your speeches much more memorable, easy to grasp, and satisfying for your audiences. 

Storytelling -- 2

The next thing to think about when telling a story is structure.  And here again you've heard some pretty useless advice.  A story has to have a beginning, middle, and end, say the geniuses giving out that advice.

But what does that mean?  To the extent that it's true, it's true in a meaningless way.  Just by virtue of the fact that it's linear, a story has to have a beginning, middle, and end.  But you could just as well say it has to have a beginning and an end.  What goes in these crucial spots?  What does it mean to begin a story?  How do you do that?  How do you end with a bang, that's satisfying, surprising enough to keep your audience's attention, and yet not unbelievable?  And so on.

A good story has moments in it that I call points of no return.  In other words, something happens that can't be undone.  Many classic stories begin with a meeting, for example.  Once two people have met, they can't 'unmeet'.  It's a point of no return, and a good way to begin a story.  Love stories pretty much have to begin with the two lovers-to-be meeting.  Many quests begin with the hero meeting someone who changes his or her life.  A mentor, a stranger, an evil demon -- you name it.  Meetings often start things off in interesting ways.  One famous hollywood scriptwriter once said that all his stories either start with 'a stranger comes into town' or 'the hero leaves home'.  The former necessarily involves at least one meeting, and the latter typically involves more than one.

Other good beginnings that are points of no return include murders and other sorts of mayhem.  Until they regularly start bringing people back from the dead, murder is a point of no return.   

Once you've had that beginning action, you've got to raise the stakes.  Star Wars begins with the murder of Luke's relatives, setting up a 'hero leaves home' situation.  He meets his mentor, Obi Wan, right away, but the second crucial scene doesn't come until he finds R2D2 and the intriguing message about plans and rebels that enlists him in the cause against the Empire.  Cleverly, this scene also begins the apparent love story between Luke and the Princess.  A great story often has 2 story lines interwoven, and Star Wars is a good example of this. 

Finally, you have to offer the reader/viewer a scene that brings about a showdown, so that the audience is fascinated with the question, will the hero (Luke) overcome the obstacles (the Empire's forces) and win the prize (defeating the Empire's forces and becoming a leader of the rebel alliance)?  In this case, Luke breaks away from his training with Yoda to help his friends, thus precipitating the showdown. 

Of course, Star Wars is also a longer revenge story involving Darth Vader, but that's for another day.  For now, a great story has three pieces.  Not beginning, middle, and end, but 3 points of no return -- a meeting, raised stakes, and a showdown.

Storytelling -- 1

I'm going to write a few blogs on storytelling, because it's so often talked about and so rarely gotten right.  Most of the time, when people talk about storytelling, they talk about the details -- being vivid, concrete, and specific -- as if that were all there was to it. 

The gun she was holding was still smoking slightly from the barrel, and her hand didn't quite close around it, as if she was reluctant to grasp it, and reluctant to let go.

Is that sentence interesting because of the detail?  Partly, but it's also interesting because of the gun, obviously just fired (who got shot?), and the emotion hinted at in the reluctance passage. 

The point is that there is a lot to telling a story beyond detail. 

And too much detail can kill a story: 

It was last Tuesday, I remember because it was bowling night, and I was wearing my bowling shoes -- the ones with the purple laces so I can find them in a crowd of bowling shoes -- when I was driving to the Lanes. 

I guarantee you're not interested in hearing more of that one.  Am I right?

So the first lesson in storytelling is that detail does matter, but only if it's important to forwarding the story.  Detail isn't inherently interesting. 

And the second lesson in storytelling is that the stakes (for the characters) have to be high enough to hold our interest.  E. F. Benson built a whole mock epic around two people who lived in a tiny English town where nothing ever happened -- and everything.  The battles royale over who was invited to what party and the decisions to snub so and so -- all of this becomes fascinating because it's so important to the characters involved. 

The third lesson is, when in doubt, add a gun.  That almost always ratchets up the fascination. 

Next time I'll talk about structure. 

How to structure a presentation

How do you structure a presentation?  The short answer is, logically.  And clearly.  Have pity on your audiences -- make it easy for them.  They want a clear, straightforward journey.  Don't wander through the thickets of your own expertise; give the audience the simplicity of boiled-down expertise.

That said, there are a couple of structures that work better than others.  The classic organization, and one that's been around since the Ancient Greeks, is the problem-solution format.  Here, you begin with a problem (The economy is heading south!) and then propose a solution (tax breaks for everyone!)

This structure works best when you have a clear issue that you want to address the audience about -- and a clear point of view that becomes the solution.

A second format that also can work well is the timeline.  This organization is best when, sensibly, there's a clear history or sequence of events involved in the information you want to impart.  ("My involvement with the CIA began in 1953 when I was born.  I was the first spy-baby.")  Beware the "and then and then and then" danger of just saying one thing after another. 

A third format is the elimination of options.  This one works best when there are a number of possibilities for the issue you're discussing, and you want to go through each one in order to show why yours is best.  ("You could increase the number of troops.  But that would put a strain on Army families.  You could.....") 

Each of these formats can work well in a speech.  In persuasive speaking, the problem-solution format works most often, simply because it's the way our minds most easily function -- we like to identify, then solve, problems.  But pick the format that works for the issue you're discussing, and follow the one essential rule of organization:  keep it simple and clear. 

Take a lesson from Achilles

When it comes to thinking about how to present your material in a speech, take a lesson from Achilles.

Let me tell you the story.  There came a time during the Trojan War when things were not going well for the Greeks, camped in the plain outside Troy.  Achilles, who was a bit of a manic depressive, had taken to his tent, feeling blue.  As the Greeks' principal hero, he was getting bored slaughtering Trojans, and he was feeling underappreciated by his colleagues.  He thought he was doing all the work -- and indeed he was. 

But with Achilles out of the action, the Greeks were losing badly.  Soon, they were desperate.  So they sent an envoy to Achilles, to beg him to come back to the fray. 

Now, because the Greeks were clever, and had invented rhetoric, they were too smart to do what most speakers do -- start dumping information on the audience.  Did they whine to Achilles?  Did they say, "hey, we're getting creamed without you -- help"? 

They did not.  Instead, they framed their message in terms of the audience's interest and needs.  They understood that Achilles was a prima donna who was feeling underappreciated.  So they began their presentation with egregious flattery, reciting all of Achilles' feats of war and telling him what a wonderful fighter he was.  Then they got into the teensy-weensy problem they had, that the Greek war machine was nothing without him. 

Soon Achilles was back on his feet, killing Trojans left and right.  The Greeks were back on top, and the denouement was not far off. 

The point is, frame your message in terms that matter to the audience.  Does that mean you should always begin with flattery?  No, not unless your audience happens to be an aging warrior with self-esteem issues.  Frame your message in terms that matter to your audience.  That's how you create a successful speech.

Storytelling

A lot of ink and electrons have been spilled (if that's the word) on storytelling.  Surprisingly little of it is helpful.  How do you tell a good story?  The advice varies, from useful-sounding stuff like, include the telling detail to focus on what you know.  The best book on storytelling is one about myth, Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces.  It's an exploration of the power of the quest in our culture. 

But even Campbell doesn't tell you how to structure a story.  How do you put together a narrative so that people will want to listen to it?  Better yet, how do you keep them on the edge of their seats? 

Here's how.  A good story has three elements.  Call them plot points if you like.  Three things have to happen in a story in order to make it interesting. 

First, there has to be an incident that gets things started.  It has to be an irrevocable incident -- something that, when done, can't be undone.  Most great stories in our literature, movies, and plays start with a meeting.  Once two people meet, they can't 'unmeet'.  Another way to go is to subject the hero to some event that suddenly thrusts her out of her usual world into a new (and typically dangerous) place.  One of my favorites -- I forget the story -- was very simple.  The heroine returned from some ordinary activity only to find a note that said Don't go home.  That's a great starter, because it raises the stakes and a thousand questions.

Second, there has to be a further incident that raises the stakes.  Romeo and Juliet meet and fall in love.  Great.  But then they get married, secretly.  Suddenly the stakes are raised, because in that era a marriage was final.  And now the feud between the two families will find unbearable tension in their joining.  Exciting stuff.  We want to find out how they're going to manage it. 

Finally, there has to be a third incident that brings about a showdown of some sort involving at least one of the main characters.  In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo duels with and kills Tybalt, a young man from the other clan, and this leads to a showdown -- either Romeo stays and faces murder one, or he flees. 

That third incident then precipitates the rest of the story.  We want to know, how will Romeo resolve this dilemma?  And how will Juliet react?  The great stories reveal the true characters of their heroes in these moments.  Both Juliet and Romeo kill themselves when they believe that the other is dead.  That's why they are icons of true love forever in our culture.

That's all there is to good storytelling -- 3 crucial incidents.   It's that simple.  And that hard:  the art is in picking the right incidents.  Craft them cleverly and you will be a storytelling master.   

Closers -- How to Finish a Speech

I’ve written before on how to open a speech.  How do you close one?  Think about whom you’re talking to:  an audience full of people who are paid to be active.  You’ve asked them to be passive for an hour or so.  The best way to close a speech, then, is to allow them to revert to their normal selves and be active.  Give them something to do.

If you’re the typical speaker, two questions have immediately come to mind.  First, what do I get them to do?  And second, won’t I be starting something chaotic?  How do I keep control?

You get them to do something which would follow naturally from the point of your talk.  Think of it in the following way.  Supposing you have given a great speech, and the audience troops out, back to their workspaces.  But something is different, now:  their lives have been changed.  You have changed the world for them.  What do they do back at their desks?  What’s the first action they take? 

The action you get them to do at the end of the speech should be the first step toward that change, that different way of looking at the world, that new way of thinking.  Have you been telling them about new ways to organize their lives and get more done with less?  Then get them organizing, or making out a new to-do list, or deciding what they’re not going to do.  Have you been inspiring them to make new resolutions, set new goals, find new horizons to march toward?  Then get them to commit to something new there in the room – perhaps to the people sitting next to them.  Have you been helping them to lose bad habits and make new, better ones?  Then have them start a support group right there in the room.

You get the idea.  The point is to get them started, in some small, simple way, on the larger journey you want them to go on.  If there is no larger journey, what were you talking about?  You were wasting their time and yours.

OK.  What about control?  Speakers experience that burst of energy when you set an audience to a task as a loss of control, but what it actually means is that the audience is getting back into their active groove, having been passive for an hour.  That’s a compliment to you, the speaker, that they want to be up and doing.  A far worse sign is lethargy at the end of the speech.  That means they’ve checked out and you haven’t changed the world or moved the audience to action.  That’s bad.

But energy is good.  Here’s how you deal with it.  Let it run for a few minutes, longer or shorter depending on how complex the task is you've set them to.  Then, save a bit of your speech for the very end.  Signal with your body language that it’s time to gather back again.  (You’ve sat down, say, when you turned them loose.  Now get back up again.)  Ask them how it went.  They’ll want to report back.  Validate with the whole group what they’ve done individually or in small groups..  And wrap it up with some stirring words of action and encouragement. 

Then say ‘thank you’ and sit down. 

In Public Speaking, Address the Audience's Safety Issues

It's hard to get anyone's attention these days.  We receive, what, a billion marketing messages a day, something like that.  People you pass in the street have ads tattooed to their foreheads.  The piles of books on our nightstands threaten to scrape the ceiling.  Magazines and newspapers?  Forgetaboutit.  You'll never catch up.  We're oversaturated, so why pay attention?

In public speaking, how do you pull the attention of the audience away from their Blackberries and planning their kid's next birthday party to listen to you? 

Don't assume that your topic is interesting enough in itself to automatically grab the audience's attention from the moment you start to the very end.  It's probably interesting to you, but it's a big world out there, and not everyone shares your predilections. 

There's only one way to grab the attention of the audience, and that is to answer the question 'why is this relevant to me' (where 'me' is a member of the audience) early in your talk -- preferably the first 3 minutes. 

More than that, your 'why' statement had better have reference to a problem the audience has -- one that you're going to solve.  That's how you achieve relevance for an audience. 

But here's the thing.  That problem had better be one that is affecting the safety level of your audience, or they still won't be hooked.  If it's a business audience, for example, they're worried about profit and loss.  Don't talk to them about redesigning the corporate logo.  That won't do it -- unless you can make a convincing case that it will affect the bottom line.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a useful way to think about this, if you invert it.  Maslow said that people think about their needs beginning with a base of physiology (food, shelter), going up to safety, to love, esteem, and finally self-actualization.  He argued that people move up the list as they satisfy needs below.  His goal was to get everyone working on self-actualization in a happy society.  The other way to look at this is that if you're worried about a safety issue, say, you won't be worried about anything higher on the list.  Hence, to grab someone's attention, tell them their safety (in business terms, profit and loss) is at stake.  Then you got 'em. 

That's the only way to grab and hold the audience's attention throughout a speech.

How to Give a Bad Speech

The vast majority of presentations given throughout the business world are mediocre.  The political world has a more interesting mix of good speeches and truly awful ones.  Remember John McCain's speech the night of the New Hampshire primary?  He read a bad speech badly.  The only palliative we can extend him is that he probably had no time to prepare (or his speechwriters either).  And don't get me started on education.  Again, there are brilliant lecturers, but in any given student's experience of education, how many of those does she run across?  A handful.  That means hours beyond count of crimes against the ear and the mind.

Few people set out deliberately to give a bad speech, so how does it happen?  In my work, having seen thousands of speeches, I see three primary problems over and over again.

1.  Not enough research.  About a quarter of the failed speeches I see come about because the speaker didn't learn enough about the audience to match the topic well with the group.  The speaker may know the subject, and may even deliver the speech well, but it's to the wrong audience.  Bad speech.  And so easy to avoid:  just do the research.  Find out about the audience.  Find out everything about the audience.  Then you're ready to go.

2.  Too much research.  Another quarter of bad speeches comes from the speaker preparing -- out of panic -- way too much material, and then determining that even if the audience dies of boredom or old age, he will tell them everything.  Speeches -- an oral genre -- are a poor way to convey information.  They are for persuasion, and that means picking and choosing what you're going to say with great care. 

3.  Not enough preparation.  The other half of bad speeches, roughly speaking, come from too little rehearsal.  Nerves get in the way, and never get out of the way, because the speaker starts on that downhill spiral and doesn't have the experience or the grounding to save the day.  Most speakers can handle one thing going slightly pear-shaped.  Say the lights are brighter than anticipated, because the speaker didn't rehearse in the room.  The speaker squints, and goes bravely on.  Then, something else goes wrong.  Say the technology freezes up for a few minutes and the speaker can't advance beyond the agenda slide.  Strike two.  But the speaker is still ready to bat, fixes the technology, and moves on.  Then, someone gets up and leaves.  That's strike three, and that's when you see the unprepared speaker get the deer-in-the-headlights look and it's all over.

Ultimately, bad speaking is a matter of tact.  If you are tactful, you'll do the research you need to do, and you won't think of boring the audience with too much information.  You'll rehearse, because that's what a tactful person does -- he doesn't want to embarrass himself or the audience. 

The bad speaker is a tactless speaker. 

Understanding your audience

At the heart of great public speaking is understanding your audience.  If you don't know who you're talking to, you're not ready to talk to them. 

What does that mean in practice?  It means that you need to research your audience well in advance of your presentation, in order to make sure that you're solving problems they actually have, rather than just preaching your particular expertise at them.

This research should go well beyond the standard questions of how many, their demographics, and the time of day.  Of course, you do want to know whether they've been fed recently, or whether they're looking forward to a meal.  You want to know if you're after-dinner entertainment or a keynoter first thing in the morning.  And you want to know if there are going to be 100 people or a thousand.  You need to know all the practical issues associated with the audience, the venue, and the occasion.   

But the most important questions to ask are, what do they want -- what are their hopes and dreams -- and what are they afraid of.  Your speech should be about helping them realize their dreams and triumph over their fears. 

The kinesthetic connection a speaker has with her audience is profound and emotional, when it works.  When it doesn't, everyone's time has been wasted. 

Understanding your audience means being able to go on a significant emotional journey with them.  That's the only journey worth taking in public speaking.

What's an elevator speech?

What's an elevator speech?  Let's say you're about to speak at an important conference.  You leave your hotel room, high up on the 25th floor or so, and you punch the button for the mezzanine.  The elevator stops on the 12th floor and someone gets in.  He's wearing golfing attire, and he looks at you with an expression both sheepish and defiant. 

"You're the keynote speaker," he says.  "Why should I attend your speech?  They've got this amazing golf course out there and it's calling me." 

You've got 11 floors -- less than a minute -- to persuade this sartorially challenged ingrate to attend your speech.  You say, "because if you attend my speech, you will learn how to have rock-hard abs and an improved sex life with less than 5 minutes a day of exercise -- guaranteed."

"Oh," he says.  "Hmmm.  Maybe I could golf in the afternoon."

That's the perfect elevator speech.  It relates to the audience members (the word "you") and their needs.  It solves a problem that they have.  And it contains emotion -- in this case the emotion surrounding sex and fitness (and laziness). 

For every presentation you give, you should first craft an elevator speech that's as compelling as this one.  If you don't know what the elevator speech is, your audience won't either, and they may never learn why they're there.

As you're preparing your presentation, put the elevator speech on a sticky note on your computer, and ruthlessly eliminate everything that doesn't support that elevator speech.  One of the main causes of bad speeches is the urge to include too much. 

Audiences will only remember one thing you say anyway, so make sure you know what that thing will be.  Use the elevator speech to keep yourself on point.  Both you and your audiences will be glad you did.      

Don't Tell Them Everything You Know

The art of public speaking is the art of deciding what NOT to say.  The urge, when you combine expertise, adrenaline and an audience, is to tell that audience everything you know.  Unfortunately, long after the audience's enthusiasm has waned, because they're overloaded with information, you'll still be going strong -- because you love the subject! 

So you need to decide what the one vital idea is that you want to get across.  And one more thing:  your emotional attitude toward that idea. 

A great speech is composed of two things:  one interesting idea and the speaker's emotional attitude toward that idea.  It's that simple.  Don't lard up your speech with caveats, asides, extras, nuances, added thoughts, one more thing, or anything else.  Stick to your well-honed subject and make your attitude clear and your audience will love you. 

Even more important, they'll understand you.  And remember what you say. 

Using Humor in Speeches, and Other Bad Advice

There are a few basic rules that many people seem to have stuck in their minds about public speaking:  Tell-'em-what-you're-going-to-say,-say-it,-tell-'em-what-you-said; a-speech-should-have-a-beginning-middle-and-an-end; and open-with-a-joke.

All three are wrong.

I've talked about the first rule before.  That came from the Army in WWII, where it was meant to increase the likelihood that everyone up and down the line would give the same battle instructions and that the grunts would remember them.  Not needed today.  Today it sounds like way too much repetition, and you run the risk of losing your audience to their blackberries. 

The second is just inadequate.  As a structure, it doesn't give enough guidance to guarantee anyone a truly well-organized speech.  The beginning, middle, and end of what?  If you haven't thought deeply about the topic and its significance for the audience, this advice won't help.  More than that, it doesn't respect the needs of the audience to hear the information you want them to hear in the order that they can best absorb it. A good order is to start with a problem the audience has, and then propose a solution to that problem. 

Finally, the third rule is actively pernicious.  At the opening of speeches, the speaker is most nervous.  Usually a speaker settles down to go the distance a few minutes into a speech, but those opening moments are tough for just about everyone. 

Add to that the difficulty of telling a joke successfully, and you have a recipe for disaster.  Don't put that pressure on yourself.  The odds are that half the audience has heard the joke already, and how will you feel when half the audience doesn't laugh?  Not a good starting point.  Don't do it.

Instead, allow your own brand of humor to show up during the speech naturally.  Mother wit, as Shakespeare called it, is far better than Jay Leno for everyone except Jay Leno.  And if your spouse says you're humorless, then listen to him or her.  Don't even try.

How many ideas can you get across in a speech?

How many ideas can you get across in a speech?  To judge from many business speeches -- and the President's State of the Union address -- the answer to that question is "lots."  Speakers have some information, they're eager to share, and so share they do -- one idea after another. 

We call this approach to public speaking the data dump, and while it feels good to the speaker (I'm delivering lots of value!  This is what they hired me to do!), it's overwhelming for the audience. 

It's a tough feeling to fight against.  Good intentions steer you wrong here, because you naturally want to tell the audience everything you know, in an effort to do as much good as possible.

In fact, though, audiences remember something like 10 - 30 percent of what they hear.  That's not much, and so if you think your job is to hand out information like cookies, you're bound to disappoint yourself (why are their eyes glazing over?  This is important!) and exhaust the audience.

Instead, realize that you can only get one idea across in a speech.  That's essential, so I'll repeat:  you can only get one idea across in a speech. 

That's all people will remember anyway, so ruthlessly eliminate everything in your speech that doesn't support that one idea.  Ruthlessly.  That's if you really do want to communicate with an audience.  Some speakers just want to hear themselves talk, but you're not like that, are you?

The intimacy of public speaking

Something has changed since World War II, and I don't mean lapel widths and skirt lengths.  Public oratory as FDR and Churchill practised it harkened back to the Ancient Greeks more than it looked forward to Reagan, Martin Luther King, and Bill Clinton.  It was formal, delivered from a podium, and rhetorically elegant. 

To be sure, both of those politicians used radio to good effect, but it had nothing like the transformative effect that television has had.  Instead of rhetoric now, for the most part, we have conversation. 

Because television has brought our leaders, politicians, and speakers up close, as if they were in our living rooms, we now demand that they talk to us like our neighbors might.  Anything else seems fake, pompous, or over the top. 

The result has been that our speakers have had to learn a new kind of rhetoric, one that follows the contours of everyday speech more closely than an Ancient Greek funeral oration, say. 

But it also means that when leaders do adopt high rhetorical phrasing, the effect is to create a sense of high seriousness.  If the speaker carries it off, without becoming pompous or boring, then the result can be very powerful.  In truth, both kinds of speech are available to the speaker today, if used with care.

Conversational phrasing can become too trite for the occasion, just as more elegant flights of rhetoric can go over the top.  And we still have a sense that, during important civic moments, the speakers should show their sense of the occasion by upping the rhetorical ante. 

What is the appropriate language of public discourse?  It's anybody's to influence, to create, to master.  The key test is always authenticity.  That's what we demand of our speakers first, last, and always. 

What is rhetoric?

A study of rhetoric begins with the Ancient Greeks.  Most of the basics of public speaking were figured out thousands of years ago by these early democrats. 

The Ancient Greeks were the first society to have public trials for their citizens accused of a crime where the two sides, accuser and accused, were expected to argue on their own behalf.  And speakers today complain of nervousness!  Soon those who could afford them hired rhetors -- eloquent speakers who would argue the case for them and significantly increase the chances of the desired outcome.  Out of these beginnings came both rhetoric and lawyers. 

Modern rhetoric can still learn from the Greeks.  No one has improved upon their analyses of tropes or turns of phrase that will move and inspire listeners.  A standard history of Greek rhetoric logs more than 70 figures of speech, including paronomasia (words that sound alike but have different meanings), antithesis (joining together of opposites), and periphrasis (the substitution of a word or phrase for a proper name) -- all of which are still widely used today. 

The Greeks also helped us spot logical flaws in arguments, and that is particularly helpful in a primary season that seems to go on forever.  Arguments ad hominem abound -- that is, rather than addressing the issue, you attack the person making the argument.  It is a particularly low form of argument that both parties use when they want to distract our attention from the issues themselves. 

And the Greeks most importantly taught us to structure speeches beginning with the problem and moving to the solution.  That's a logical flow for an oral argument, and it hasn't been significantly improved upon these 3,000 years.  For those interested in improving their public speaking, a study of the Ancient Greeks still yields good dividends.   

Who is the hero of a speech?

Most of us are accustomed, whether we acknowledge it or not, to cast ourselves in the role of hero of our own life.  Apologies to Dickens and David Copperfield, but for most of us, it's a foregone conclusion. 

What happens when we give a speech?  The temptation becomes irresistable.  After all, you are the one who is standing up in front of everyone else, talking, laying bare your feelings, moving the audience to action.  If ever there were a heroic moment, that's it, right?

Wrong.  Think instead of casting the audience members in the role of the hero.  They are the ones going on the journey -- if the speech is to be successful.  They are the ones who will learn something, change their minds, decide to act, become inspired.  They are the ones in whom the speech will live, if it does.

So make the smartest move of your public speaking life and allow the audience to shine.  Allow that sea of faces out there to become the hero.  It will change how you think about public speaking, for the better.

How does it work in practice?  Spend your time developing the speech with the audience in mind.  Ask yourself, where are they at the beginning of the speech, before the journey?  How can I persuade them to pay attention, realize that something has to change, begin the journey with me?  What shall I say for their ears, not for my ego?

When you're giving the speech, focus on the audience.  Make it about them.  Ask them how they're doing.  Interact with them.  Challenge them at appropriate moments of your presentation. 

And after the speech is done, follow up.  What did they get out of the experience?  What feedback do they have for you?  How can you make the journey more compelling the next time?

The audience is the true hero.  Pay attention to its story. 

How Fast Do You Speak?

So you got asked to give a speech, and you've been given 30 minutes.  How much material is that?  A classic faux pas of an inexperienced speaker is to undershoot or overshoot the mark you've been given and have too little or too much to say.  Of the two, speaking too long is by far the worse sin.  No one ever complained because a speech was too short.

How do you estimate the length of the speech?  Fortunately, Word has made this easy.  Get a word count, and divide by 125, and you'll have the length of your speech.  People speak at the rate of 125 words per minute, on average. 

Of course, for that number to be useful, you have to have written out your speech.  What if you haven't?  What if it's just a collection of Power Point slides -- or notes scribbled on the back of an envelope?  Here, practice helps.  I worked with Professor E. D. Hirsch (of cultural literacy fame) when I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia, and I saw his notes for one of the most brilliant lectures on the history of philosophy I ever heard.  The notes were as follows:  Aristotle.....Plato.....Hume....Nietzsche....

That's right -- 4 words.  And he spoke for exactly 85 minutes, leaving time for a question or two at the end of the 90-minute session. 

If you're not that clever, you'll have to rehearse.  That's a good idea anyway, after all.  Too many inexperienced speakers (and some experienced ones who should know better) just think the speech out in their heads, and then discover in the event that the transitions kill you when you haven't practiced them.

That 30-minute speech is 3750 words.  Long enough to get into trouble if you don't rehearse.  And do write out that speech.  That way you'll find out where the awkward transitions are.   

Take your audience on a quest

Life is a quest, and so is a good speech.  Quests are something we understand; they are deeply imbedded in us from an early age from movies, books, games and stories our elders tell us, if you were lucky enough to have an elder who told stories.

Because we understand the genre, it's a great advantage when we're working our way through a speech.  It's hard to retain information aurally; we need all the help we can get.  If we have generic expectations, then we can match the information coming in with our expectations.  That's an easier way to retain things than if all the material coming at us is a complete surprise. 

So take your audience on a quest.  How do you do that?  A quest has a hero, an initial challenge or problem to get things rolling, and a journey in search of something -- a cure, a magic bean, a lover, a kingdom -- almost anything is possible -- and a final goal.  Quests work well in business presentations when you're trying to take a division somewhere, launch a new product, or business, enter a new marketplace, achieve a quarterly, yearly, or any kind of goal, and so on.  And doesn't that describe most of business activity?

Cast your audience as the hero, not yourself.  The challenge is whatever you're hoping to achieve, overcome, put an end to, or begin.  And the journey involves lots of sacrifices -- all the sacrifices the audience will have to make in order to reach the goal.  But they'll expect -- even demand -- to have sacrifices, because that's what heroes on quests do. 

An audience on a quest is a happy audience.  Don't let them down.  Challenge them and they will not disappoint you. 

The bar is set too low.

The public speaking bar is set too low.  I used to think it was only in the business world.  But now it's clear that the bar is set low in the political world as well.  I'd just forgotten how low it is.  There are both long-term and short-term reasons for this.  Watching the primary season speech coverage lately has made me aware of the problem all over again. 

The long-term reason has to do with message.  The Republicans have been 'on message' since forever; it's how they took over the political world in the last 25 years to begin with.  Lately, the Democrats, tired of losing, have gone on message too.  What does this mean in practice?

It means that everyone sings from the same song sheet, repeating the same messages over and over.  On the Republican side, they even use the same words.  The same 7 words, they boast. 

That has enormous virtue in a media-and-information-saturated age.  Nobody pays attention for long, so hit low and hard with simple stuff, and maybe it'll stick. 

The downside is that this doesn't respect the audience.  Speeches, communications, sound bites -- none of this barrage of information from both sides respects the audience's need to be engaged. 

A good speech is as much about the audience as it is the speaker, and the 2 parties have forgotten this in their need to stay on message.

The short-term reason is exahaustion and the need to reach so many people in such a huge country in such a short time.  The candidates are getting 30 minutes sleep some nights.  All they can do is repeat the stump speech over and over.  On message. 

For a clue as to why Senator Obama is so charging up his crowds, take a look at one of his speeches on the hustings.  His opening is all about the audience.  To be sure, he does get around to giving his message on change, but it's always couched in terms of the audience.  Most of the other candidates -- on both sides -- talk about themselves incessantly.  Here's what I would do, here's what I have done, and so on.  And Obama could be even better with more focus on the audience!  The bar is set so low by Bush, Kerry, Gore, and all the others, that he shines in comparison.   

It's time to raise the bar.  When you're giving a speech, make it about the audience.  That takes a lot of work -- you have to think about them and their problems more than yourself -- but the payoff is potentially huge.  Think Obama. 

The earth has a fever, and it's rising

Al Gore has learned a lot since his Presidential bid ended in failure 7 years ago.  Of course, he's learned more about the political process,to his chagrin, and about the environment, to his even greater chagrin.  But he has learned something positive:  how to write a good speech.  His delivery is still far from oratorical perfection, but the subject matter was so compelling that it lifted his performance above his usual level. 

The speech began with a long explanation of the problem.  The earth has a fever, and it is rising, said Gore.  He pulled quotes with the help of "Mr. Google," as he said in an interview, from writers all around the world, giving a nice universality to the message. 

The only aspect of the speech that rang oddly in my ears was Gore's insistence on calling global warming a 'moral' problem.  It probably is that, but it's a very practical life and death issue first.  Why not keep it on that plane?  As soon as you invoke morality, you run the danger of getting bogged down in discussions of whose morality counts or is to rule the day.  And that's a pity, because we really need to do something, actually a lot of things, and fast, if we're going to save ourselves from creating a hell on earth out of the Eden we were given lo these many years ago. 

He was a little vague on what the solution might be, except that it's already late, we have to move fast, and we have to act both individually AND collectively.  That was a nice touch, because many writers and speakers on the environment leave one with the impression that it's up to us to turn off lights and turn down the thermostat or else the world is a goner.  That makes most people feel guilty, and they may change their behavior slightly, but it doesn't affect governments, corporations, and other large organizations that are using massive amounts of energy that dwarf anything you or I can do with our lights or thermostat. 

What's needed is both governmental carrots and sticks, and individual green behavior, not just one or the other.  That's an important point, and Gore made it well.   

He ended with a plea for action, real and fast.  It was a good speech.  When are we all going to get to work? 

Openers

How do you start a speech?  There are still human beings who wander this earth recommending beginning with a joke -- and even attempting it themselves.  The problem with that is, for the majority of us who aren't professional comedians, it's hard to deliver jokes successfully.  As any professional will tell you, most jokes fall flat.  That's why they have so many comebacks up their sleeves. 

It's even harder to deliver a joke when you're beginning a speech, because that's when you're most nervous.  So don't try it.  Just don't. 

Begin instead with something that will capture the audience's attention in a way that's relevant to what you're talking about.  Frame the discussion in some way.  You might have a startling statistic.  You might have a factoid that puts things in perspective.  You might have a question to ask the audience that gets its attention.  You might have a personal anecdote -- a relevant one, well told -- that shows your interest in the subject matter.  "I first became aware of the plight of Asian yak herders when I was trekking up the North Face of Everest, looked down, and saw three yaks dangling off a cliff a thousand feet below me with three herders desperately trying to get them back on the thin ribbon of trail...." 

OK, so there probably aren't yaks that high up on Everest, but you get the idea. 

Another great way to open is to involve the audience directly in some way.  Challenge them to do something, ask them questions about the topic, get their input in some fashion.  Try not to ask
"guess what's in my head" questions, or difficult questions with right and wrong answers secretly designed to show off your expertise.  Instead, ask open-ended questions about the audience's experience with the topic.  The point is to involve the audience and make them feel important and smart, not to make you feel important and smart. 

Finally, you can begin with a story.  Again, make it relevant to the topic.  Have it frame the discussion in some way that opens up new ideas for the audience rather than closes them down.  Have it make an emotional as well as intellectual point.  And tell it well.  Cut out the extraneous details.  Get clear on why the story is relevant and only incl