- When you're opening a presentation, one of your options
for an attention grabber, or sometimes called
an attention getter, is to share a statistic or fact.
These can go by a little quickly, but with a little help
you can pump them up for maximum effect.
So let's look at some details.
(light music)
Hello, friends, I am Alex Lyon, a communication coach
that's here to help you increase your impact
to lead your teams to higher levels of excellence.
Presentation skills are really important,
and your attention grabber in your presentation
is a great way to make people want to listen
to the rest of what you have to say.
Sharing a statistic is one effective way
to do that, so let's look at some tips.
First of all, you want to use a statistic
that is shocking, or startling, or interesting in some way.
And one of the ways that you can know this, by the way,
is when you're reading and doing your own research
for your presentation, you'll probably come across
a statistic or a fact that stands out to you.
And that's a really good clue that it may be
a good candidate for your attention grabber.
Just put it aside, and as you develop
the rest of your presentation, consider it as
a top candidate for grabbing your audience's attention.
The second thing you want to do,
is when you share this nice statistic or fact,
is you want to cite the information,
your source, up front, and then give the fact or statistic.
You don't want to do it at the end,
it sounds like you're reading a paper,
that you just tagged on your citation at the end.
And I've heard a lot of people do it
that way and it doesn't sound very smooth.
The same way you would share a quotation,
you would share the person's name upfront.
You would say, according to Bruce Lee,
And then you would give your quotation from Bruce Lee.
As Mother Teresa once said, and then you give
the quotation from Mother Teresa.
You want to do the same thing when
you give your fact or statistic.
So here's an example of what that would sound like.
The source I'm going to cite is Nielsen,
which is an organization, and the year is 2016.
And it sounds a little bit like this.
In 2016, Nielsen, the company that keeps track
of TV viewing patterns, found that the average American
watches television for four and a half hours a day.
Even more shocking, most Americans look at a screen
of some sort up to 10 and a half hours a day.
And so, what I did there is I gave a couple statistics
but I cited my source upfront with the year
and the name of the organization.
And if it's a person that came out with a study,
you obviously give that person's name.
The other tip I want to give you is that, like I just did,
it sounds best, I find, if you add about
two statistics or facts together.
So you combine them a little bit.
I have found if you just give one brief fact or statistic
as your attention grabber, it's only going to last
for about a sentence and it's not going to do the job
of guiding people in and really getting them to want
to listen to the rest of your presentation.
So that's one of the things you want to do,
is stack a couple together for a maximum impact.
Let's talk about a couple of other ways to pump this up.
One of the ways is to mix rhetorical questions
in with your statistics to make it a little more
interesting and to engage another part
of your listener's minds.
So let me give a statistic and I'll give
you a couple of questions where I package those
statistics within those rhetorical questions.
In 2016, an organization called Clear Labs did a study
on hot dogs and you may not want to hear the results.
Would it disturb you to hear that three percent of all
hot dog brands do not even list pork as an ingredient?
Would it unsettle you further to learn that
two percent of the hot dogs tested contained human DNA?
So by the way, that is a little unsettling, that's what
I'm talking about, a startling fact or statistic.
And also what I did there is I packaged
those statistics inside a rhetorical question
so I'm not just sharing it, I'm asking you.
Would it shock you?
Would it unsettle you to hear?
Would it disturb you further?
And you can build a lot of nice momentum that way.
And one of the things I caution against with statistics
is sometimes people will use them to exaggerate.
And I don't recommend you do this, you don't want
to be like a pharmaceutical company that's exaggerating
the results of their studies, or some weird manipulative
politician who, even though the study
really says 40 percent, they say about half.
I mean that's not half, 40 percent is not half.
And so you don't want to stretch things
and get weird with it.
Just be ethical and be upfront.
And if you have good research, share it.
So rhetorical questions can be mixed in,
and you want to stack a couple of these
statistics together for maximum impact.
Question of the day, what are your tips
for using statistics as an attention grabber?
Do you have any other good ideas about how to
make these even better so they're not quite as dry.
I would love to hear your comments in that section below.
So thanks, god bless, and I hope you get to use
a great statistic in your very next presentation.