The Art of Captivating Your Audience in the First 60 Seconds

The internet offers plenty of suggestions on how to open and close speeches. However, most speakers still make a common mistake that you can avoid. This blog post is the first of two, and it aims to address a specific concern: how to select your opening and closing rather than which one to use.

Asking "how" is crucial since the success of your speech depends on how well you engage your audience from start to finish. To achieve this, it's important to understand what's at stake, and then learn the secrets of creating compelling introductions and conclusions.

What's at Stake? The Audience

Without a killer set of first lines and last lines, your speech is over before it's started. Here's why: A good opening earns your audience. A good closing moves your audience. 

Without an audience, no one listens. Without movement, nothing changes. Both are required of any great presentation.

Let's take the opening first. You will gain or lose your audience's trust and attention from the very moment you start speaking (in fact, from the very moment you step on stage.)

How will you earn that trust and attention? By giving them what they want: a performance.

The Performance

Audiences crave to be captivated, whether it's a small business meeting or a packed TEDx event. They want you to take them on an unforgettable journey. However, if your introduction is lackluster and consists of a feeble attempt at public speaking, your audience will lose interest quickly.

It's a common misconception that the type of opening and closing you use is the key to success. However, what truly matters is the impact your opening and closing have on the audience, regardless of their format. In this post, we will examine the force that your opening and closing should communicate to captivate your audience.

Earning the Audience

The introduction to your speech has one goal: to persuade the audience to give you their most precious and scarcest resources--their time and attention--for the next many minutes.

The intro doesn't need to solve world peace or sound like Shakespeare. It needs to convince your listeners that you're someone worth listening to.

There is an infinite number of options: a quotation, a deep question, a prop. One that never fails is "I'd like to tell you a story." 

Who doesn't want to be told a story?

In fact, almost every opening should have a story, either implicitly or explicitly, because every good speech has at least one story.

How did Steve Jobs open his historic Commencement Address at Stanford in 2005?

"Truth be told, I never graduated from college, and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today, I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it, no big deal--just three stories. The first story..."

And just like that, we're hooked.

Because we know who Jobs is, and because we now know he's got three stories for us, if we get anything less, we'll feel cheated. We want them all. 

He's earned our time and attention.

Which Forms of Opening Works Best

Clients often ask our speechwriters at Moxie a seemingly simple question, hoping there's a right answer: "How should I open the speech?"

Speech writing is an art, not a science. In all art--and I learned this early in my acting career--the only true answer to the question "what should I choose?" is "whatever works!"

So experiment. See what works for your setting and message. Maybe it's a song lyric. Maybe a poem. Maybe a shocking statistic from your latest white paper. Try them all out on friends and find what's effective.

You'll know you've got it when the audience is ready for more; when they've decided your message makes it worth sticking around.

The key to a killer opening, then, is this: make it worthy of your audience, so that they know it's worth their time.

After that, they're all yours.