Watch this! [Hides Ball] We're going to talk about openings and closings for your
presentations. This is the first thing that you do and the last thing that
people remember. So it's really important to get them right. And if you
do it right, they're directly connected. And at the end of this video as a little
bonus, I'll show you how I did that little trick. Coming up.
Hello there friends. I'm Alex Lyon and Communication Coach is here to help you increase your
impact and lead your teams with higher levels of excellence. Presentation skills
are a key way to distinguish your leadership. And the intro and conclusion
are obviously key parts of this. A lot of times we don't get to the intro in the
conclusion in terms of fine tuning until after everything's done. And so it's
really important that you work just a little extra on your opening and your
closing to make sure you start and finish the way you want to. So I'm going
to give you a little bit of philosophy and then some really concrete tips on
the intro and then we'll go to the conclusion. So first of all in terms of
philosophy your introduction needs to do a few things. It needs to gain your
audience's attention, pique their curiosity, and essentially make them want
to listen to the rest of it. And if you do it right, you can do this very
effectively. So I'm going to take what I describe as the "funnel approach" where we
go from general to specific and by the end of the introduction it's going to go
right into the body points of your presentation really well. So it's gonna
have five parts where you grab the audience's attention, you give the
relevance that the topic has to the audience, you establish your personal
credibility, your a thesis statement, and then a brief preview. So let's unpack
each of these in a little more detail.
The first step is to grab your
audience's attention. In fact, I'm working on a whole separate
series that's connected to this video and I'll put the links below in time as
I develop them on attention grabbers and the different nuances of of sharing
those. So I'm gonna give a few samples here to get you started. But feel free to
dig in deeper into each of those. So the first
way to grab the audience's attention is to do it with rhetorical questions. these
are questions that might involve the audience a little bit but essentially
don't need to be answered on the spot. But it'll pique everybody's curiosity. So
you might say for example by a show of hands how many of you have ever had a
great boss? What is it that makes leaders great? And those are two questions put
together that will pique our interest. Rhetorical questions are a great way and
a very easy way really if you work at it you can make them good and effective but
they're not a complicated way to get people interested in your topic. Another
relatively easy way is to get a good quotation to start off your presentation
that draws people in. Now a good quotation to me goes to the heart of
what your message is going to be in the body of your presentation. But it
essentially you're picking someone who said it just a little better than you
knew how to say it. For example, I'll give you a couple of examples.
Muhammad Ali once said those who are not courageous enough to take risks will
never accomplish anything in life. You get a great quote from Muhammad Ali and
that quote can go toward, for example, playing sports, naturally, or taking risks
or trying new things or trying to achieve success. A good quote will really nail it.
Another example of a quote is from a famous comedian, stand-up comic named
George Burns. He did comedy until almost he was a hundred years old. He
was booked into his deep 90s doing stand-up comedy, if you can imagine. And
he had a lot of jokes about aging and getting old and about retirement, not
wanting to retire. Anyway as George Burns once said, retiring at age 65 is
ridiculous. When I was 65, I still had pimples. So he's saying it so well. Maybe
your talk is about not necessarily wanting to retire but continuing to be
productive later in life and that's a great way to start it. So quotations are
an excellent way if you find the right one and you set it up right. A great way
to start a presentation another way is through some kind of visual illustration
anything visual to communicate your message and grab people's attention and
draw them in. I saw a recent Speaker effect as a
student speaker, I teach college, in addition doing consulting, but this
was a student speaker and she started off with something very visual. She had
like a huge gift bag and in the bag for her attention grabber she brought out
one item at a time and described it a little bit put it down and one item at a
time described a little bit. It was very visual. Each item said a little bit,
something about her just in that first 30 seconds of her presentation and it
made us really lean in and want to hear what she was going to say next. You could
also use as an easy way to do this a visual slide of some sort like on
PowerPoint. Maybe an image of funny or cute image, whatever it is it helps get to the
heart of what you're trying to express. Another way to do this the grab people's
attention is through a startling fact or statistic. Again, this is all in the
opening just in the first twenty or thirty seconds of your presentation. In
fact I was looking into retirement planning recently and here's a nice
statistic I came across that might work well for a presentation on retirement
planning. By age 65, most people only have $100,000 saved for retirement. Now if
that sounds like a lot, that will last you less than three years of expenses
into your retirement. So there's a statistic that's relatively shocking.
Most people only have $100,000 again that does sound like a lot but you tease
out the statistic is a little bit and it makes people want to hear where you're
going to say. If you're gonna do something on retirement planning, for
example, well now I am very interested in hearing what comes next. Another way to
do this is through a brief story. A lot of times stories can get too long-winded
but if you can tell a thirty-second story that really captures the essence
of what you're going to share later then it can be a wonderful way to start.
Everybody loves stories. I was watching a speaker once to talk about donating to
food pantries and then he started off with about a 30-second story describing
a family's journey to America they immigrated here and they got by in part
on the help from food pantries in their local area for the first couple of years
while they got on their feet. And it really personalized the message he was
sharing and made me want to listen. Another student that I, another student
speaker I saw was talking about cleanliness around the house and how you
don't need big expensive products to do effective
cleaning. And she started with a story about a guy named Thomas Crapper. If the
name sounds familiar he made some key improvements to the
flushable toilet back in the day. And that was a really engaging story you had
a little humor to it so these are some ways that you can have that first step
in the overall funnel from general to specific is that attention grabber and
that can be somewhat general even though it's going to the heart of the message.
the next step to get a little more specific is talk about the specific
benefits that this particular audience is going to get by listening to your
message. And you this is not easy actually you have to work this out get
to put your self in the minds of your listeners think why would they want to
care. And in two to three sentences you want to spell out exactly what they get
out of this at the end. How they personally benefit. Maybe they walk away
with a concrete retirement plan that they can use and put into practice.
that's a good benefit. Maybe they walk away with really specific
strategies for cleaning around the house on a budget. That's great. so the next
step is to establish your personal credibility. In some situations when
you're introduced by other people they'll do this for you and you won't
have to. However, if you haven't been introduced or have them introduced
adequately, you want to in about two to three sentences, really concise, talk
about your personal experience in connection with the topic as well as any
research above and beyond that that you have done. And I've seen this done very
effectively in just two to three sentences. You share why you are the one
speaking on it why not someone else why is it you and you answer that question
for people. the fourth step is your thesis statement some people call this
the central idea other people call it the main idea of your presentation. And
you want to handle this as concisely as possible. this is the one sentence you
really want to pop out of your introduction. You should pause right
before it and right after it make sure it sinks in. It should be about one
concise sentence and it should be your claim, your argument, the main point. If
they remember nothing else, how would you boil it down into one sentence. And
that'll be that theme that runs through your presentation all the way can be
very powerful and memorable sentence if you craft it right.
And the last part of this funnel of introduction is even more specific and
that's the preview of the main points that you're gonna share. So usually you
have three or so main points I recommend keeping this preview very brief if you
can pair your main points down to single words or very brief phrases you're going
to be better off. Don't get into any detail. So let's say you're talking about
retirement planning. You would say I'm going to talk about individual
retirement accounts, 401ks, and Social Security. Little pause, a little beat
between each one. And it really clearly forecasts what you're going to talk
about in your main points of the body of the presentation. So those are the main
parts of an opening of a presentation with a lot of emphasis on the attention
grabbers because that's usually the part that is key but it you have to connect
it to the rest of this introduction for it to make the most sense for your
audience. And now we're going to transition to talk about your conclusion
and show how this can be directly connected, if you do it right, to your
introduction. You're at the point in your presentation where you've done your
introduction. You've done your body the main points. And now you're ready to
conclude. So let's unpack this conclusion and especially that last closing part of
the presentation. So the first thing you need to do in your conclusion is signal
the end. You have to say in conclusion or something along those lines, in closing
in summary, to wrap things up. Now a lot of people
push back on this, say I don't want to say that. It sounds so typical. Isn't there
some other way to say this? Well, you're welcome to try, but I can tell you it's
okay. Even high-level speakers, even the President of the United States sometimes
at the end of a presentation will say in conclusion. Because it's a really clear
signal that you're ending. Even though it might feel a little bit wooden or robotic
when it comes out of your mouth, it's really good for your listeners. They want
to know that you're shutting it down, you're coming to a close and that's the
clearest signal you can get. There are a couple of ways to express this but you
have to say it really cleanly. this only takes a few words though. so that's the
first part, is signaling the end of the presentation. The next thing you want to
do is reinforce the main point. If they missed it in the intro, if they missed it
throughout the body of the presentation, this is your last chance to emphasize
the main takeaway point of your presentation, your thesis. You can also as
an add-on to this summarize your main points again. Maybe it's the kind of
presentation where people would benefit from hearing you delineate your three
main points again. Sometimes it's not necessary depending upon your message.
Sometimes it really helps. The next step is to give your call to action. A
lot of times in a presentation where there's a persuasive element to it. You
want people to take some concrete action and this is where to spell it out. You
have to tell them exactly what you recommend they do next and this is gonna
be different depending upon the topic, depending upon the audience depending
upon you there's the situation. Everything. So there's no real way to
give you a boilerplate solution but I will say to avoid this common thing that
people do I've heard this a million times and it always is lame people will
say, So the next time you find yourself [blank] and then they tell you to remember
what you said. Well this--so the next time-- has got to go. Iif you're doing a
presentation and your in front of me and you say so the next time, I can tell you
right now I'm not doing whatever it, you've already lost me. And a lot of speakers do
this because they didn't work hard enough at this closing, this call to
action. So you have to figure out an appropriate and in doable
call to action that you can spell out exactly there in concrete fashion. And
the very last thing you should do, most people call the closing of the
presentation is the final clincher where you end on a high note. I call it a
clincher. Other people call it other things like a closing and this is where,
this is where you can really do some some magic. You're going to connect the
opening attention-grabber to your clincher, to your closing. so if
you start it off with a story in your opening, you want to echo that story,
maybe even tell a little bit more of it in your closing. If you start off with a
quotation, bring that quotation back around. You
started off with some kind of illustration, you bring that illustration
back around. Boy, do audiences love it! It's very
psychologically satisfying for people to call back what they did in the beginning.
It's like a comedian will have a good punch line
toward the beginning and then later on in the same routine they'll call back
that punch line and they get a big laugh again. There's a sense of closure, sense
of satisfaction that you have really buttoned up this whole idea and it's
come full circle. So the person presenting about the food pantries that
I mentioned in the attention-grabber, the story they told, they finished a little
bit more of the story and revealed that it was in fact their family. He was
talking about himself in this opening story and how his family helped get by
on the first couple of years in the United States because of the help of
food pantries. This the person who had the bag of objects as an illustration
pulling out objects talking about her identity
later on held up the open bag and talked about the kinds of things that she
wanted in the future to put into the bag to help define who she was and move
forward in her life in that next chapter. The person who told the story about
Thomas Crapper, the person who helped innovate improvements on the toilet, she
brought that story back around and used a little humor to talk about you never
know maybe we our family name could be known again and we could be the next
Thomas Crapper. I mean that was a really great way to end it on a high note and
everybody loved it. It takes a little art it takes a little skill but working hard
at that attention-grabber in the beginning will help set up your clincher
at the end. And that's what you should be doing when you're looking at a great
opening and a great closing. Now a couple of other little quick tips
once you're done, zip that mouth. You want to be silent smile nod and say thank you.
That's all. And then pause for two seconds and walk off. You're done. Do not
say, That's it. So that's all I have to say. Uh, okay. You want to be practicing your
ending the whole time, every time you practice your presentation practice that
ending where you zip your mouth, smile, nod, say thank you.
And that's all you say. Two seconds and you walk off. Don't multiply words at the
end. It's gonna really ruin a great presentation. So there's the tips
for the opening and the closing and how they can be directly connected. Make sure
you watch for a few more moments to see how I did that magic trick with the red
ball. that's my opening and my closing. And I would love to hear your comments below.
Question of the day. What are your tips for strong openings and closings? Put
those in the comment section below so everybody else can benefit from your
experience. So thanks. God bless. and I hope the next opening and closing for
your next presentation is out of this world.
Watch this.
Whoa, whoa. Hey guys. It's the wand! That is nuts!