Utterly captivated or totally bored? How to craft a talk that thrills your audience.

The art of showmanship for spiritual speakers (technique 1 of 5)

Have you seen a movie called The Prestige? It’s one of my all-time favourites. It's about two Victorian-era magicians who become obsessed with sabotaging and one-upping each other.

In one scene, Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) performs the best trick the world has ever seen. But the audience doesn't clap, they just sit there in silence.

'He's an amazing magician, but a horrible showman,' remarks Cutter (Michael Caine), 'he doesn't know how to present the trick. The audience missed it.'

Alfred Borden, and many spiritual speakers, have this in common. Great ideas are the magic tricks of spiritual teachers, and they’ve often spent decades honing them. But when it comes to presenting their ideas to an audience, their talks lack the necessary showmanship to move the audience and take them on a wild, exhilarating, mystical journey.

Without 5 specific presentation skills, any speaker will struggle to transfer to the audience the enthusiasm he or she feels for his or her own ideas, and the audience will fail to see how good the 'trick' really is.

Sometimes a talk doesn’t land well because the speaker is academic and super-nerdy about their research, but they don't know how to bring the research to life for the audience.

Sometimes it's because the speaker tends to 'wing it' and their presentation is a bit airy-fairy and disorganized.

But most of the time, it boils down to this:

Presenting ideas in a talk that captivates your audience, takes them on a journey, and moves them to take action, requires a specific set of skills.

For Alfred Borden, this lack of skill meant no applause, and his magic trick fell flat. For spiritual speakers, you can tell a lack of showmanship when:

• There is a lack of book or course sales at the end of the talk (people vote with their hard-earned money)

• Speaking gigs and podcasts are not leading to other opportunities (if your talk has moved people, they’ll want to help you spread the magic!)

• There are no notes of 'thanks' on social media or by email after the talk.

• Within the speaker, there is a general feeling of disappointment that the audience were not as engaged and excited as they’d hoped for.

Over the next 5 articles, I’m going to introduce you to the 5 elements that any captivating talk MUST include. This is for those among you who are spiritual teachers, researchers, authors, business owners and healers, who want to speak to move, help and heal people.

Step 1 is in this article, so to find out what it is, just keep reading.

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Getting an audience excited about spiritual ideas can be a challenge. How do you take something abstract and intangible, and make it relevant, concrete, and thrilling to the audience?

Most speakers either don't know the steps involved in delivering a talk that moves people, or they think that simply explaining the ideas that excite them will be enough to excite others.

It isn’t.

But that doesn’t mean your ideas are bad - they just haven’t been presented in the right way!

Have you ever tried to tap out the song 'happy birthday' on a table with your fingers and have someone else guess the song?

To you it's BLATANTLY OBVIOUS that you're tapping 'happy birthday' but to the listener it sounds like absolute gobbledegook because he or she is not inside your mind, and has no point of orientation from which to listen.

The key to a captivating talk is to close the gap between your mind and the audience, so they can clearly hear the tune you’re tapping. Over the next 5 articles, I’m going to show you exactly how to do that. Your audience will laugh, cry, gasp in amazement, and be exhilarated by your ideas.

And it’s this emotional and intellectual shift that will sell your books, and your courses, and will have people calling YOU with opportunities to speak, rather than you having to spend hours chasing down gigs or waiting for that golden email.

Whether you give lectures, teach seminars, or get interviewed on podcasts, these five steps are guaranteed to give your talk that little bit of extra showmanship, ensuring that your amazing ‘magic trick’  - be it research, a unique philosophy, or an incredible personal experience - thrills your audience and moves them to action.

Step 1: Your talk must begin with an irresistible hook.

Put yourself in the audience’s position. Why should they care what you have to say?

In the first few seconds of your talk, each audience member is searching for clues about how closely they should pay attention. You need to find a way to convey to them that they ought to pay very close attention.

We pay closest attention to the things that affect us the most. We also pay close attention to puzzles and mysteries, where a burning question has been opened up and left unresolved in our minds. We pay attention until we get the answer.

The words that compel your audience to pay attention from the get-go are known as ‘the hook’.

Your first opportunity to ‘hook’ your audience is with the title of your talk. Take great care in coming up with a title that speaks to the needs, desires and concerns of your audience, and which is somehow surprising, or which subverts expectation, and you’ll be on to a winner.

Recently, I gave a talk for the Scottish Society for Psychical Research. I named it:

Mediums: Allies of Science in the Search for Consciousness.

I chose this title because it subverts the expectation that science and spirituality are opposing ideas, and introduces them as allies. Each and every audience member is a user of consciousness, and is curious about the nature of their own experience. The title speaks to this curiosity.

Beyond the title, the hook of your talk must come at the beginning. It should be the first thing you say.

Most speakers start their talks by introducing themselves, thanking the audience for being there, and the host for having them. Do not do this. This is a mistake. This is boring and a waste of the precious few seconds you have to convince the audience that you are worthy of active listening.

You can introduce your credentials and thank people, but do it later, after the hook.

To come up with a scintillating hook, try answering the following questions:

• How is your research relevant to the audience member’s daily life?

• How do your ideas help them solve a problem they’ve been struggling with?

• How does your philosophy speak to a mystery they’ve been pondering?

• How does your talk help them get what they most want?

• How do your ideas challenge the audience’s current expectations?

In the first few sentences of your talk, you must get inside their heads, verbalize what they’ve been thinking, surprise them and/or promise to further their personal concerns in some way.

Too often, talks are about the speaker’s desire to be acknowledged for their ideas, when it should be about using those ideas to serve the audience. Just this one fix alone will create an audience who are absolutely captivated.

It’s worth coming up with a few introductory hooks for your talk, and testing them out on different occasions to assess which ones your audiences respond best to.

In my talk, I wanted to bring into question the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, and that it is merely synonymous with neuronal processes, so I had the audience consider their relationship to their own pinky (their smallest finger), and their relationship to their most cherished loved one.

I asked them, ‘Which would you rather give up? Your pinky or your loved one?’

Everyone chose to give up their pinkies.

I used this thought experiment to illustrate a point. Our first intuition that things which are physically attached to us are more ‘real’ breaks down with just a little exploration. The relationships we share with the people, places and things around us are more important to us than parts of our own bodies. This shows that the space between ourselves and others is where consciousness truly exists. This example made the audience think. Subconsciously, many of them concluded ‘my intuitions were wrong about this - I better pay attention!’

I knew the audience were listening carefully after this because they were leaning forward in their seats, and responding quickly when I asked for their feedback. They were also silent, and every time I looked at someone, they were looking right back at me.

My hook was successful for three reasons.

1. I asked a question that introduced a mystery - the audience didn’t know where I was going with it.

2. I made the audience consider their own bodies and their own relationships, thus making my research relevant to them.

3. I subverted their expectations about the locus of consciousness with a tangible example.

So if you’re a spiritual speaker, and you want to influence people with your ideas, start with a strong and engaging hook.

Consider:

Why should the audience care about your ideas?

How do your concepts affect them?

How can you subvert their expectations?

And remember:

The title of your talk should hook people so they actually come to your talk.

Then the first seconds of your talk should hook the audience into active listening.

Are you interested in speaking and sharing transformational ideas? Please introduce yourself and share your thoughts and questions in a comment.

Ps. Next week, I’m going to introduce you to the magic of story, and show you how to draw upon narrative in a way that makes your point better than any abstract theory ever could!

Pps. I will soon be announcing a special opportunity for spiritual speakers to work with me 1:1 to develop their speaking careers, attract more speaking gigs, sell more books and courses, and elevate their influence as a spiritual teacher through speaking.

This will be the last opportunity to coach with me before I go off to have my baby and focus on motherhood, so spots will be very limited. Look out for further details in the next article!

Pppppsssss. If you enjoyed this article and found it useful, please share it.