David Julian Price shows seven more ways to open a speech: props, audience challenges, quotations, confessions, unexpected agreement, the time-bomb, and what-if scenarios. He emphasizes pauses and explains when to introduce yourself after the opening lands.
Here's another 7 ways that you can open your speech. But remember, they all work on the same principle that you've walked to the front of the room or stood up wherever you are, and you pause before you start speaking. You pause before the opening and you pause after the opening. It signals confidence. So here's opening number 8, and this is the prop. You take something with you so that it's perfectly clear to the audience that you are taking something. You're not trying to hide anything. And it might go like this. This is a letter I received from my son's teacher. It was sent to me after I queried why writing a poem out 15 times was productive or useful. Pause. And then you go on. Number 9, the tip is the audience challenge, but you use this with care. Ask them to do something physical. So it might go like this. Stand up if you've ever sat through a presentation that should have been an email. Now again, you do this in a rather large audience, but it can work. Next one is the quotation. You really pause after the quotation because it's got to sink in. Here's an example. Abraham Lincoln said, give me 6 hours to chop down a tree. And I'll spend the first 4 sharpening the axe. Pause. But you pause for longer with the quotation because you let it sink in. Another example is, the secret of getting ahead is getting started. Mark Twain. Pause. Number 11 is the confession. Be careful with this with some audiences and some people. I've done plenty of things in my life that I regret, but my biggest regret is something I did not do. Pause. Number 12, the unexpected agreement. The audience is thinking something and you say exactly what they're thinking. You enter the conversation going on in the audience's mind. It could go like this. You're probably thinking that this meeting will be a waste of time, and you'd normally be right, but today is going to be different. So what happens there is once you said, you're probably thinking that it'll be a waste of time, they're nodding inside their head and perhaps physically nodding. So it's, it's called getting micro yeses. Number 13 is the time bomb. What I'm about to share with you took me 30 years to figure out. I'm giving it to you in the next 20 minutes. Pause. And number 14, the what-if. This could go anywhere. What if you woke up tomorrow morning to the news that every war in the world had ended? Fantasy? I'm not convinced. Pause. So there's the second set of 7 ways to open a presentation. Play with them. Try them. The secret is the pause at the beginning and the pause at the end. You may wonder where to introduce yourself. You do it after the introduction. So it might go like this, for instance. What I'm about to share with you took me 30 years to figure out. I'm giving it to you in the next 20 minutes. My name is David Price. Thank you for coming tonight. And then you go on. Always introduce yourself in the second or third paragraph, never the first one.
