attention

Surprise gets attention, but its effects are fleeting. Is there something that can provoke an attention more enduring? There is. It’s what Samuel Johnson believed the “first passion and the [...]

Surprise is one of the presenter’s best friends. Why? Because it’s all about that most valuable commodity: audience attention. Professor Bryan Boyd suggests that our minds exist to do one thing: [...]

We misunderstand how people make decisions. That’s the message in Kotter and Cohen’s The Heart of Change. The standard view, they say, is that we analyse, then think, and then we change. They [...]

If you have slides with multiple elements, I think you should build them up, piece by piece, from blank.  This gives you a number of benefits.  The first is control.  If there’s not much to look [...]

Curiosity, surprise and fear. We don’t pay attention to boring things. We pay attention to things that create an emotional response. This is because the brain releases the attention hormone [...]

The easiest, most powerful way to get the audience’s attention is to look at them. Eye contact is fundamental. Even very young babies are hard-wired to pay more attention to people looking [...]

Films get straight to the action. The audience is immediately engaged in the story. Films don’t begin with a long list of thank-yous and background details. The beginning is the single most [...]

Writing is not speaking. What looks good on paper nearly always sounds turgid and long-winded when spoken aloud. You don’t know if what you’ve written is any good until you actually say it. The [...]