Public Speaking Tips From An Acting Professional.

Christopher Gaze shares public speaking tips Bard on the Beach founder prepares to recite Peter and the Wolf for CBC News Posted: Nov 19, 2016 9:00 AM PT Last Updated: Nov 19, 2016 9:00 AM PT Christopher Gaze on public speaking King Lear: the role of his dreams, says Benedict Campbell Drowsy Chaperone, No Exit lead nominations for Vancouver theatre awards A cross country guide to celebrating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death this summer Take a virtual stroll through Shakespeare's London Public speaking can be a daunting experience for many people — and if you're someone who gets nervous and shakes when standing in front of a crowd, Bard on the Beach founder Christopher Gaze shares his sympathy and some advice (spoiler alert: don't bother trying to picture the audience members in their underwear). You might think the professional Shakespearean thespian has never bombed, but one experience in Whistler illustrates the importance of knowing your audience. How to score a live Shakespeare production "It was a complete disaster because no one wanted to listen," he said. "Once there's dinner and good wine, it's hard to hold a crowd, even for really, really good speakers." As he prepares to recite Peter and the Wolf for the Vancouver Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra, he ensures he knows his subject well by listening to recordings by popular narrators Leonard Bernstein and Bramwell Tovey. Christopher Gaze Christopher Gaze will recite the Peter and the Wolf at the Orpheum Theatre on November 27. (CBC) Public speaking is a good skill for anyone to master, says Gaze, whether you're the head of a boy scout troop, a school teacher or the chairman of a big company. Bard on the Beach's King Lear a role that 'everything else is training for' "Recognize that less is best," Gaze says, "If you think you've spoken enough, you probably have. You don't have to go on as if to prove something. Most people have got the point if you've known your subject properly." For recitals, he repeats this phrase 10 or 12 times to warm up his mouth: "The tip of the tongue, the teeth and the mouth."

WHAT WAS THE GREATEST SPEECH? The Big Question: half a century ago, Martin Luther King had a dream and JFK said he was a Berliner. Both were famous speeches—but what is the best speech ever made? We asked six writers to make their choice. Sam Leith sets the scene From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, July/August 2013 Fifty years ago Martin Luther King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and declared: "I have a dream." His words were heard, it is for once no exaggeration to say, around the world. Whole passages now live in folk memory; and, with its formal links to the black folk pulpit and the language of the Book of Amos, the speech itself drew on folk memory. Great speeches don’t come out of nowhere. Threads of debt and inheritance tie the earliest recorded oratory to the speeches of the present day. Every speech relies for its power on the common language of the tribe, and that language is itself shaped by the great speeches of the past. So, though some two and a half millennia separate the earliest two speeches championed here—Pericles’s funeral oration and the Gettysburg Address—Lincoln’s words exactly rehearse the themes and structure of Pericles’s. Barack Obama, one of the most technically gifted orators of the modern day, consciously appropriates the language both of Lincoln and of Dr King (who himself referred to Lincoln). Nelson Mandela’s 1964 trial speech invokes Magna Carta and the US Bill of Rights. And so on. So what makes a good speech? It must be forceful in argument, memorable in style, resonant in its references. It must also, before anything else, connect its speaker to its audience. This is what Aristotle, the first Western authority on rhetoric, called ethos—the basic movement in any effective speech that transforms the "me" of the speaker and the "you" of the audience into "we": "Friends, Romans, countrymen..." Ethos is established by, quite literally, speaking the audience’s language: shared jokes, common reference points, recognisable situations. As the rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke has said: "You persuade a man only in so far as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his." You can then take the shared language—and with it your audience—wherever you want it to go. The turns of language that technicians call figures (as in "figures of speech") capture myriad ways of making language dance: the tricolons—groups of three terms—that make sentences ring; the rhetorical questions (or erotema) with which you challenge the audience and shape an imaginary dialogue; or the anaphora with which, by repeating a word or phrase over and over again, you build an irresistible gathering rhythm. Is great oratory dead, as some claim? It is not. But it is true that it doesn’t look like it did. It adapts itself ceaselessly to the means of its transmission. Language changes, convention changes, media change. The Greek notion of kairos—or timeliness—is apt here. Cicero, addressing the Senate around 50BC, would speak unamplified and at some length. His audience was present, and such written records as survive were usually created afterwards (and probably polished) by Cicero himself. In the age of newspapers, when speeches would be disseminated by third parties, a different tack was required, though it might not always work: "I have a dream" didn’t make the next day’s Washington Post. Churchill, remembered as a great orator, was a radio star; his wartime speeches went over less well in Parliament, but the audience that counted was the one listening at home. The intimacy of the television camera offers yet another set of opportunities. In his famous 1952 Checkers speech, Richard Nixon was able to address the American people, as it were, eye to eye. In the internet age—this ecosystem of interruptions—you’d soon lose your audience if you served up two hours of formal oratory in the high style. Soundbites, though much bemoaned, are not a recent innovation: Cicero was fond of them. But they have come front and centre as first rolling news and now social media have swept in to favour the juicy quote over the rounded argument. The technological arms race is not over. A wonderfully embarrassing YouTube clip shows Ed Miliband answering a series of questions with near-identical versions of the same prepared sentence. He sounds like a robot; but then, he never expected us to see more than a single ten-second clip on the news. His mistake was to gear his strategy to the age of rolling news, not to an age in which the rushes can be posted to YouTube and spread virally on Twitter. It’s a mistake he won’t repeat. Oratory now lives in the age of electric dreams—but the dream goes on. Sam Leith is a columnist on the Evening Standard and the author of "You Talkin' to Me? Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama" Photograph Getty 

What can you do with speaking skills? For business, professionals and politicians it seems obvious. Here is a company in England run by the son of a friend of mine who specializes in speech:www.bespokespeeches.com< Check it out.

22 March 2013, 11:57 Sex toys help singers hit the high notes e-mail A Canadian voice coach is creating a buzz with his unusual technique of using vibrators to help his students hit the high notes. University of Alberta drama professor David Ley uses the sex toys to massage the throats of actors and singers. "I know it's a bit different. I know there's a giggle factor, but it works. It relaxes tension in the larynx, it improves range and projection," he told MetroNews.ca. He was looking for an alternative to massaging the larynx by hand, for people who hate the feel of fingers on their throat, when he discovered the technique. That led him to a sex shop where he found some vibrators that had a frequency around 100 and 120 hertz, the range of the human voice. He tried some on a student with good results. "Not only did it free tension in the laryngeal muscles, but it seemed to stimulate vibrations in the vocal folds," Prof Ley told said. "What I'm trying to do is to help the person hit that high note or harness their emotional energy. "Hopefully, like any good training tool, it's something that gets you somewhere and helps you maintain it, but once you're there, you're there." http://web.orange.co.uk/article/quirkies/Sex_toys_help_singers_hit_the_high_notes

What I planned and what I did ;>}

Nine Ways to Get and Keep Your Audience's Attention By Julie Dirksen Date: Dec 20, 2011 Return to the article Getting your audience’s attention is increasingly difficult in our distraction-filled world. Part of the reason we fail may be because we are crafting our appeal to the wrong parts of our users’ brains. Instructional designer Julie Dirksen describes how attention works, and shows you several ways to attract and maintain the attention of your audience. One of the things I see every once in a while is some statement about people’s average attention spans. Maybe you’ve seen proclamations that the “average adult attention span is no more than 10 minutes” or 15 minutes, or 45 minutes, or… If you think about it, this is just silly. There’s a movie theater near my house that shows a back-to-back marathon of all the “Lord of the Rings” movies every holiday season, and it’s really well attended. And it’s the extended editions of each movie. That’s more than 11 hours of movies. That’s the attention span of that audience—more than 11 hours. Aside from the constraints of hunger, fatigue, and bathroom breaks, there’s really no limit on someone’s potential attention span. What may be much more limited is the length of time someone can force themselves to pay attention. If your audience is happily romping with the hobbits, then attention is easy, but if you are asking your users to pay attention to the procedures for their health savings account, then the clock is probably ticking. You might be lucky to get 10 minutes. I design learning experiences for people, and learning designers are very concerned with getting and maintaining our audiences’ attention. The number one rule I have is that you have to talk to the elephant. Talking to the Elephant Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Happiness Hypothesis, talks about the brain being like a rider and an elephant: • The rider is … conscious, controlled thought. The elephant, in contrast, is everything else. The elephant includes the gut feelings, visceral reactions, emotions, and intuitions that comprise much of the automatic system. (p. 17) NOTE Haidt, Jonathan. 2006. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. New York: Basic Books So basically, he is talking about the idea that there are two parts of your brain that are in control: the conscious verbal thinking brain (the rider) and the automatic, emotional visceral brain (the elephant), as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1 Who’s in charge? The elephant or the rider? The rider part of your brain is the rational, Mr. Spock, control-your-impulses, plan-for-the-future brain. Your rider tells you all sorts of useful things that you know will provide long-term benefit (“I should order a salad,” or “I really should get this homework out the way,” or “If I exercise now, I’ll have more energy later”). The elephant, on the other hand, is your attracted-to-shiny-objects, what-the-hell, go-with-what-feels-right part of the brain. It’s drawn to things that are novel, pleasurable, comfortable, or familiar (“Mmm…French fries!” or “I should work, but HEY, look, the ‘Jersey Shore’ marathon is on!” or “I’m just going to lie down on the couch for one minute…”). The elephant wants, but the rider restrains that wanting. This is a really useful evolutionary advantage; the rider lets people plan ahead, and allows people to sacrifice short-term wants for long-term gain (see Figure 2). Figure 2 We all learn to sacrifice current indulgences for future gain, but it’s not always easy. Part of the problem, though, is we have a tendency to overestimate the rider’s control. The rider is our conscious verbal thinking and because it talks to us, we tend to think it’s in control, but the elephant is bigger and stronger than the rider. Now, sometimes the elephant is willing and goes along with the rider pretty easily. But, if you’ve ever laid in bed thinking, “I really, really need to get up now” while your hand reaches over—almost as if it’s acting on its own accord—and presses the snooze button anyway, then you know what it’s like for your rider to lose out to the elephant. Your rider is no match for a fully charging elephant running in the opposite direction shouting “SNOOZE BUTTON! SNOOZE BUTTON!!” Dragging the Elephant The rider can force the elephant to pay attention. We do it all the time. There’s a cost to this, though. It’s the cognitive equivalent of biking straight uphill. We have to expend a lot of willpower to make it happen, and willpower gets used up pretty quickly. In a study by Professors Baba Shiv and Alexander Fedorikhin, participants were asked to remember either a two-digit number or a seven-digit number. They were subsequently offered a snack choice of either fruit salad or a piece of cake (see Figure 3). NOTE Shiv, B. and A. Fedorikhin. 1999. Heart and Mind in Conflict: Interplay of Affect and Cognition in Consumer Decision Making. Journal of Consumer Research 26 (December): 278–282. Figure 3 Which would you choose? It may depend on hard you’ve been thinking. Approximately twice as many people chose cake in the seven-digit group as in the two-digit group. This, and several similar studies, suggests that the cognitive resources of memory, focus, and control are finite. You can control the elephant, but just not for very long. This goes back to the idea that we can’t expect our audience to pay attention throughout if we are relying on their willpower alone. That’s like asking the rider to drag an unwilling elephant up a hill (it’s unlikely, and no fun for either of them). Getting the Elephant’s Attention So, how do you attract and engage the elephant? There are a number of ways to attract and retain the elephant’s attention, as shown in the following sections. #1: Use Urgency The elephant is creature of immediacy. It’s pretty content to let the rider worry about the future. Things that are going to happen in the future, regardless of how dire they are, are less compelling to the elephant than things that are happening right now. If you are talking to teens about smoking, the immediate social consequences are far more compelling than the hypothetical health issues that could occur years down the line. #2: Show, Don’t Tell The elephant is pretty smart. It’s not just going to take your word for it that something is important. It wants to see and feel the importance. This is one of the golden rules of fiction writing and movie making: Avoid heavy-handed exposition, and use visuals, action, and dialogue instead. You can tell the rider that “this is really important,” but the elephant wants to see proof—it’s not just going to take your word for it. #3: Tell a Compelling Story Use classic storytelling elements to create a compelling scenario. Have a protagonist who is trying to accomplish a goal. Have an antagonist who is preventing the protagonist from accomplishing that goal. Have obstacles along the way that the protagonist must overcome. Have an inciting incident that sets up the drama of the story. #4: Create Interesting Dilemmas Give your audience interesting choices to make. Dilemmas will capture interest if they are done well. Instead of telling people all the things they can do to conserve electricity, give them five options and have them figure which three will give them the most energy savings; let them debate the benefit of energy-saving light bulbs versus insulating the water heater. #5: Surprise It When researchers test people using expected and unexpected rewards, there is greater activation of anticipation and rewards structures in the brain when the reward is unexpected. For example, when I was growing up, I got a birthday card from my grandmother every year with a check for five dollars. While it was really sweet of her to do that, the five dollars itself stopped being particularly exciting after about the age of 12. There was always pleasure at the gesture, but very little buzz at the money itself. I compare that to the feeling I get when I’m are walking down the street and find five dollars lying on the ground, with no obvious owner in sight (“Woo hoo!”). The amount of money is five dollars in both examples, but the reaction is very different, due to the unexpectedness. We seem to react more strongly to unexpected rewards, which probably has a functional aspect. Basically, if something is good, we want to remember that because we want more. If something is bad, we want to remember that too, so we can avoid it in the future. But if something is exactly the way we thought it would be, there’s really no reason allocate mental resources to reinforcing that. #6: Leave Information Out As my mother’s first line of technical support, I spend a lot of time on the AOL home page whenever she has a technology issue. The AOL home page has a freakish ability to get me to follow article links, frequently for things that I don’t care about at all: • Which 80s child star now has three wives? • Eight reasons to avoid lip balm • The surprising truth about minivans I really don’t care about any of these things, yet find myself strangely compelled to click on them (I actually made up that list, but you get the idea). Whoever writes headlines for the AOL home page is a genius at tweaking my curiosity. It’s shallow curiosity, but it still gets me to click on their link. George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology, describes curiosity as “arising when attention becomes focused on a gap in one’s knowledge. Such information gaps produce the feeling of deprivation labeled curiosity. The curious individual is motivated to obtain the missing information to reduce or eliminate the feeling of deprivation.” NOTE Loewenstein, G. 1994. The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin 116 (1): 75–98. Curiosity is a very compelling way to attract the elephant, and telling less rather than more can really draw the elephant in. #7: Create Dissonance Another form of surprise happens when we bump into something that doesn’t match to our view of the world. Let’s say you are walking down the street one day, and you see a purple dog. You probably have a pretty detailed mental model for dogs, but unless you have a traumatic dog-painting incident in your childhood, you probably don’t have “purple” as part of your dog mental model. So when you see the dog, you are comparing what you see with your existing formula for dogs (right size, right shape, right texture, right movement, right sounds = yep, it’s a dog), but it’s not the right color. There’s enough there that does match your definition of dog, so you really don’t question that, but you do stop at the color. Now you have two opposing ideas in your head: “That’s a purple dog” and “Dogs are not purple.” The term for this is cognitive dissonance. Stuff just doesn’t add up based on what you know about the world. You need to reconcile those two opposing viewpoints. How do you go about doing that? Explanations could include: • “Somebody spray-painted that poor dog.” • “I’m seeing things.” • “Maybe there really are purple dogs…” In the last example, you are considering whether to reconcile and expand your mental model for dogs to include purple. When you create these moments of cognitive dissonance, you can really capture the elephant’s attention. #8: Make It Visceral We live in a world full of abstractions: Credit cards stand in for actual money, virtual selves stand in for our actual selves, statistics stand in for actual people. This is necessary for our modern society to operate efficiently, but abstractions speak to the rider, not the elephant. One way to engage the elephant is to make the experience visceral and real using emotional context or physical interaction with real tangible objects and people. In the fruit salad versus cake experiment, people were more likely to take the cake if they could see it, rather than being presented with an abstract choice. #9: Tell It All the Other Elephants Are Doing It We all have tremendous demands on our attention, and one of the shortcuts we use to determine how to allocate that attention is to see what other people are doing. From Amazon reviews to street crowds to topics on Twitter, we are more willing to investigate if other people (particularly other people we know or respect) are already engaged. If you are trying to engage the elephant, think about how to make other people’s interest or experiences visible to the elephant (see Figure 4). Can they see other people using a new product, or trying a new process? Can you make sure that people’s success stories are visible and accessible? Figure 4 One of things that causes the elephant to pay attention is if others are already interested. Summary If you want to get and maintain your audience’s attention, you need to talk to the emotional visceral brain, as well as the conscious verbal brain. If you can succeed in doing so, paying attention will feel relatively effortless for your audience. If you don’t succeed, then you probably will want to keep it under that “10-minute attention span” mark. More Resources Cialdini, Robert. 2005. What’s the best secret device for engaging student interest? The answer is in the title. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 24 (1): 22–29. Gailliot, M.T., R.F. Baumeister, C.N. DeWall, J.K. Maner, E.A. Plant, D.M. Tice, L.E. Brewer, and B.J. Schmeichel. 2007. Self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source: Willpower is more than a metaphor. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92: 325–336. Okita, S.Y., J. Bailenson, and D.L. Schwartz. 2008. Mere Belief of Social Action Improves Complex Learning. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference for the Learning Sciences. Pink, Daniel. 2009. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Riverside (Penguin). Vohs, Kathleen D. and R. J. Faber. 2007. Spent Resources: Self-Regulatory Resource Availability Affects Impulse Buying. Journal of Consumer Research (March 2007). © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. 800 East 96th Street Indianapolis, Indiana 46240

Take a look at this for your visuals: http://www.flickr.com/groups/16135094@N00/pool/with/6637637919/

9 Ways to Get and Keep Audience Attention

This is a very good summary via PeachPress but I would suggest buying the book if you are interested in this. Nine Ways to Get and Keep Your Audience's Attention By Julie Dirksen Date: Dec 20, 2011 Getting your audience’s attention is increasingly difficult in our distraction-filled world. Part of the reason we fail may be because we are crafting our appeal to the wrong parts of our users’ brains. Instructional designer Julie Dirksen describes how attention works, and shows you several ways to attract and maintain the attention of your audience. One of the things I see every once in a while is some statement about people’s average attention spans. Maybe you’ve seen proclamations that the “average adult attention span is no more than 10 minutes” or 15 minutes, or 45 minutes, or… If you think about it, this is just silly. There’s a movie theater near my house that shows a back-to-back marathon of all the “Lord of the Rings” movies every holiday season, and it’s really well attended. And it’s the extended editions of each movie. That’s more than 11 hours of movies. That’s the attention span of that audience—more than 11 hours. Aside from the constraints of hunger, fatigue, and bathroom breaks, there’s really no limit on someone’s potential attention span. What may be much more limited is the length of time someone can force themselves to pay attention. If your audience is happily romping with the hobbits, then attention is easy, but if you are asking your users to pay attention to the procedures for their health savings account, then the clock is probably ticking. You might be lucky to get 10 minutes. I design learning experiences for people, and learning designers are very concerned with getting and maintaining our audiences’ attention. The number one rule I have is that you have to talk to the elephant. Talking to the Elephant Jonathan Haidt, in his book The Happiness Hypothesis, talks about the brain being like a rider and an elephant: The rider is … conscious, controlled thought. The elephant, in contrast, is everything else. The elephant includes the gut feelings, visceral reactions, emotions, and intuitions that comprise much of the automatic system. (p. 17) NOTE Haidt, Jonathan. 2006. The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. New York: Basic Books So basically, he is talking about the idea that there are two parts of your brain that are in control: the conscious verbal thinking brain (the rider) and the automatic, emotional visceral brain (the elephant), as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1 Who’s in charge? The elephant or the rider? The rider part of your brain is the rational, Mr. Spock, control-your-impulses, plan-for-the-future brain. Your rider tells you all sorts of useful things that you know will provide long-term benefit (“I should order a salad,” or “I really should get this homework out the way,” or “If I exercise now, I’ll have more energy later”). The elephant, on the other hand, is your attracted-to-shiny-objects, what-the-hell, go-with-what-feels-right part of the brain. It’s drawn to things that are novel, pleasurable, comfortable, or familiar (“Mmm…French fries!” or “I should work, but HEY, look, the ‘Jersey Shore’ marathon is on!” or “I’m just going to lie down on the couch for one minute…”). The elephant wants, but the rider restrains that wanting. This is a really useful evolutionary advantage; the rider lets people plan ahead, and allows people to sacrifice short-term wants for long-term gain (see Figure 2). Figure 2 We all learn to sacrifice current indulgences for future gain, but it’s not always easy. Part of the problem, though, is we have a tendency to overestimate the rider’s control. The rider is our conscious verbal thinking and because it talks to us, we tend to think it’s in control, but the elephant is bigger and stronger than the rider. Now, sometimes the elephant is willing and goes along with the rider pretty easily. But, if you’ve ever laid in bed thinking, “I really, really need to get up now” while your hand reaches over—almost as if it’s acting on its own accord—and presses the snooze button anyway, then you know what it’s like for your rider to lose out to the elephant. Your rider is no match for a fully charging elephant running in the opposite direction shouting “SNOOZE BUTTON! SNOOZE BUTTON!!” Dragging the Elephant The rider can force the elephant to pay attention. We do it all the time. There’s a cost to this, though. It’s the cognitive equivalent of biking straight uphill. We have to expend a lot of willpower to make it happen, and willpower gets used up pretty quickly. In a study by Professors Baba Shiv and Alexander Fedorikhin, participants were asked to remember either a two-digit number or a seven-digit number. They were subsequently offered a snack choice of either fruit salad or a piece of cake (see Figure 3). NOTE Shiv, B. and A. Fedorikhin. 1999. Heart and Mind in Conflict: Interplay of Affect and Cognition in Consumer Decision Making. Journal of Consumer Research 26 (December): 278–282. Figure 3 Which would you choose? It may depend on hard you’ve been thinking. Approximately twice as many people chose cake in the seven-digit group as in the two-digit group. This, and several similar studies, suggests that the cognitive resources of memory, focus, and control are finite. You can control the elephant, but just not for very long. This goes back to the idea that we can’t expect our audience to pay attention throughout if we are relying on their willpower alone. That’s like asking the rider to drag an unwilling elephant up a hill (it’s unlikely, and no fun for either of them). Getting the Elephant’s Attention So, how do you attract and engage the elephant? There are a number of ways to attract and retain the elephant’s attention, as shown in the following sections. #1: Use Urgency The elephant is creature of immediacy. It’s pretty content to let the rider worry about the future. Things that are going to happen in the future, regardless of how dire they are, are less compelling to the elephant than things that are happening right now. If you are talking to teens about smoking, the immediate social consequences are far more compelling than the hypothetical health issues that could occur years down the line. #2: Show, Don’t Tell The elephant is pretty smart. It’s not just going to take your word for it that something is important. It wants to see and feel the importance. This is one of the golden rules of fiction writing and movie making: Avoid heavy-handed exposition, and use visuals, action, and dialogue instead. You can tell the rider that “this is really important,” but the elephant wants to see proof—it’s not just going to take your word for it. #3: Tell a Compelling Story Use classic storytelling elements to create a compelling scenario. Have a protagonist who is trying to accomplish a goal. Have an antagonist who is preventing the protagonist from accomplishing that goal. Have obstacles along the way that the protagonist must overcome. Have an inciting incident that sets up the drama of the story. #4: Create Interesting Dilemmas Give your audience interesting choices to make. Dilemmas will capture interest if they are done well. Instead of telling people all the things they can do to conserve electricity, give them five options and have them figure which three will give them the most energy savings; let them debate the benefit of energy-saving light bulbs versus insulating the water heater. #5: Surprise It When researchers test people using expected and unexpected rewards, there is greater activation of anticipation and rewards structures in the brain when the reward is unexpected. For example, when I was growing up, I got a birthday card from my grandmother every year with a check for five dollars. While it was really sweet of her to do that, the five dollars itself stopped being particularly exciting after about the age of 12. There was always pleasure at the gesture, but very little buzz at the money itself. I compare that to the feeling I get when I’m are walking down the street and find five dollars lying on the ground, with no obvious owner in sight (“Woo hoo!”). The amount of money is five dollars in both examples, but the reaction is very different, due to the unexpectedness. We seem to react more strongly to unexpected rewards, which probably has a functional aspect. Basically, if something is good, we want to remember that because we want more. If something is bad, we want to remember that too, so we can avoid it in the future. But if something is exactly the way we thought it would be, there’s really no reason allocate mental resources to reinforcing that. #6: Leave Information Out As my mother’s first line of technical support, I spend a lot of time on the AOL home page whenever she has a technology issue. The AOL home page has a freakish ability to get me to follow article links, frequently for things that I don’t care about at all: Which 80s child star now has three wives? Eight reasons to avoid lip balm The surprising truth about minivans I really don’t care about any of these things, yet find myself strangely compelled to click on them (I actually made up that list, but you get the idea). Whoever writes headlines for the AOL home page is a genius at tweaking my curiosity. It’s shallow curiosity, but it still gets me to click on their link. George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology, describes curiosity as “arising when attention becomes focused on a gap in one’s knowledge. Such information gaps produce the feeling of deprivation labeled curiosity. The curious individual is motivated to obtain the missing information to reduce or eliminate the feeling of deprivation.” NOTE Loewenstein, G. 1994. The Psychology of Curiosity: A Review and Reinterpretation. Psychological Bulletin 116 (1): 75–98. Curiosity is a very compelling way to attract the elephant, and telling less rather than more can really draw the elephant in. #7: Create Dissonance Another form of surprise happens when we bump into something that doesn’t match to our view of the world. Let’s say you are walking down the street one day, and you see a purple dog. You probably have a pretty detailed mental model for dogs, but unless you have a traumatic dog-painting incident in your childhood, you probably don’t have “purple” as part of your dog mental model. So when you see the dog, you are comparing what you see with your existing formula for dogs (right size, right shape, right texture, right movement, right sounds = yep, it’s a dog), but it’s not the right color. There’s enough there that does match your definition of dog, so you really don’t question that, but you do stop at the color. Now you have two opposing ideas in your head: “That’s a purple dog” and “Dogs are not purple.” The term for this is cognitive dissonance. Stuff just doesn’t add up based on what you know about the world. You need to reconcile those two opposing viewpoints. How do you go about doing that? Explanations could include: “Somebody spray-painted that poor dog.” “I’m seeing things.” “Maybe there really are purple dogs…” In the last example, you are considering whether to reconcile and expand your mental model for dogs to include purple. When you create these moments of cognitive dissonance, you can really capture the elephant’s attention. #8: Make It Visceral We live in a world full of abstractions: Credit cards stand in for actual money, virtual selves stand in for our actual selves, statistics stand in for actual people. This is necessary for our modern society to operate efficiently, but abstractions speak to the rider, not the elephant. One way to engage the elephant is to make the experience visceral and real using emotional context or physical interaction with real tangible objects and people. In the fruit salad versus cake experiment, people were more likely to take the cake if they could see it, rather than being presented with an abstract choice. #9: Tell It All the Other Elephants Are Doing It We all have tremendous demands on our attention, and one of the shortcuts we use to determine how to allocate that attention is to see what other people are doing. From Amazon reviews to street crowds to topics on Twitter, we are more willing to investigate if other people (particularly other people we know or respect) are already engaged. If you are trying to engage the elephant, think about how to make other people’s interest or experiences visible to the elephant (see Figure 4). Can they see other people using a new product, or trying a new process? Can you make sure that people’s success stories are visible and accessible? Figure 4 One of things that causes the elephant to pay attention is if others are already interested. Summary If you want to get and maintain your audience’s attention, you need to talk to the emotional visceral brain, as well as the conscious verbal brain. If you can succeed in doing so, paying attention will feel relatively effortless for your audience. If you don’t succeed, then you probably will want to keep it under that “10-minute attention span” mark. More Resources Cialdini, Robert. 2005. What’s the best secret device for engaging student interest? The answer is in the title. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 24 (1): 22–29. Gailliot, M.T., R.F. Baumeister, C.N. DeWall, J.K. Maner, E.A. Plant, D.M. Tice, L.E. Brewer, and B.J. Schmeichel. 2007. Self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source: Willpower is more than a metaphor. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92: 325–336. Okita, S.Y., J. Bailenson, and D.L. Schwartz. 2008. Mere Belief of Social Action Improves Complex Learning. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference for the Learning Sciences. Pink, Daniel. 2009. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. New York: Riverside (Penguin). Vohs, Kathleen D. and R. J. Faber. 2007. Spent Resources: Self-Regulatory Resource Availability Affects Impulse Buying. Journal of Consumer Research (March 2007). © 2012 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. 800 East 96th Street Indianapolis, Indiana 46240