It’s the second day of a team off-site: reviewing numbers, setting strategies, admitting challenges, and learning together. We’re past the excited hellos, beyond the inspiring message from the leader, and done with the energizing team-building activities. Meals eaten, toasts raised.
Now we’re in the slog of the second day. It’s after lunch. We’re tired and our attention wanders. We’re trying to be “good” and keep phones away and laptops closed, but most of us seriously need a nap and a cookie.
During a break, I chat with the next presenter. His demeanor is different from his peers. He radiates anxiety. His eyes shift, his hands dance at his sides, his feet shift from side to side as if he’s thinking about bolting from the room. I check in with him.
“Hey, Roger, I see you’re presenting next. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!”
“Ummmm… thanks? I’ve done this a thousand times, but knowing you’ve coached TED speakers, now I’m nervous!”
I try to diffuse his anxiety by saying I’m not too mean, I only critique my individual clients, or that I don’t bite. I’ve seen him speak up in meetings, and I’m sure he’ll be great.
But his mind creates another story. I sense his fear of criticism about his slides… or posture, or delivery style, or vocal expression, or word choices, or… or… or. This is the familiar response I see from new acquaintances before they present. Eyes widen, half smiles freeze, bodies tighten. I wish I could show them the inside of my head as I watch. What I experience does not include a checklist of dos and don’ts. No rating card, judging score, clipboard, or red pen.
The loudest voice inside my head when I’m watching speakers is a four-year-old who would rather be playing outside.
When I’m working with leaders preparing for their high-stakes communication moments, I’m not thinking about a checklis. I’m thinking about the audience’s brains. We want all minds involved to shift into creating mode, stay engaged, and retain what was said. That means admitting that all of our brains have basic needs.
Let’s get real: we all have inner four-year-olds who want to have a bit of a tantrum at the low spots of presentations, talks, conferences, and workshops. We just want to curl up with a blanket and whine a little. Or shout just because it feels good, and go run outside. Or eat some goldfish crackers and stare out the window.
Dear readers, we are not weak, we are not broken, we are not immature. We have brains that function best in specific parameters of timing, variety, information mode, etc. Do you recognize this need in your own attention? Recall times when the current acceptable presentation practices left you feeling squeezed, wrung out, exhausted, and unable to remember what was said?
So, let’s talk about what we can do as the speaker/leader/guide/teacher/presenter in the front of the room to work well with our audience’s inner four-year-old.
Let’s talk about seven things brains crave.
1. Brains Crave Context
Imagine that inside your brain, you have construction scaffolding—existing structures on which to build new ideas. When a piece of information comes our way, if it relates to existing scaffolding, we understand it. If we don’t have the scaffolding (or schema), we won’t remember or learn the concepts coming at us.
For example, if I’m a skilled mountain biker, I have many existing schemas in my brain on this topic: mountain topography, bike mechanics, body coordination, principles of physics learned the hard way after that one failed jump.
Learning things unrelated to these structures (like baking a great chocolate chip cookie) will take more time, but I latch on fast to any skills overlapping with my mountain bike schemas (like learning to ride a motorcycle).
For an audience’s brain to grasp and remember new information, we’re faster if we get a heads-up about the incoming schema. Many pre-event tools fit this need to prime the brain: talk titles, agendas, notes from past meetings.
The fun part starts when we think about what context listeners need during a speaking moment. What existing schemas do they already have? Are we teaching these mountain bikers about motorcycle skills or about baking cookies?
When experts speak to beginners, they have the challenge (or opportunity) to break ideas down into smaller parts, or use metaphor, or simplify the one idea they want their audience to hear, and find an easy onramp to getting their audience’s inner four-year-old ready for what’s coming next.
Takeaway
Don’t show up and just start talking about the core message.
Do let us warm up: pre-meeting agenda, review what we covered last time, and repeat the essential ideas we all need to remember to move forward to the next new ideas.
2. Brains Crave Information
Even if on the third day of a conference it feels like we never want to hear another presentation or see another slide again, our brains do love information. Our brains keep us alive by understanding the world around us and making decisions based on that information.
If you are the speaker/leader/presenter/MC/guide, know that your audiences’ brains want the information you have, but we absorb it best within certain parameters. Our inner four-year-old likes specific patterns of time, pace, variety, relevance, and medium.
The art and science of hitting this sweet spot between distraction and focus, between forgettable and memorable, is called Cognitive Load Theory.
Takeaway
Don’t info dump complex topics in a noisy environment.
Do seek a simple environment and layer ideas like stepping stones.
3. Brains Crave Simplicity
The first thing our brains pick up—whether we are aware of it or not—is our sensory environment. Yes, the world around us seems to disappear when we’re watching a great movie or hearing a great talk, but it takes work for our brain to erase those sensory cues.
The most interesting slides can’t hold our attention if there are too many sensory inputs. Imagine trying to listen to anyone in the middle of flashing lights, loud fans, or someone chewing with their mouth open next to us. Not going to happen.
For optimal focusing, learning, and remembering, we need a simple sensory environment. (I groan when asked to do a lunch-and-learn. In the battle for your brain’s attention between me and your potato chips, I will always lose.)
Takeaway
Don’t try to compete with sudden sensory interruptions: pause when the firetruck roars past, the cell phone goes off, or the electricity flickers.
Do learn about the setting where a speaking moment will take place and try to manage it to create a simple, predictable, learning environment.
4. Brains crave one verbal channel at a time
We’ve all been there: we have no idea what the speaker just said because we were focused on the 20 bullet points on the slide, but we can’t discern what the slide means since we keep focusing on what the speaker is saying.
Our brains process language from one source at a time: through our ears or through our eyes. Full stop. If I’m reading, I can’t listen to what you’re saying, and if I’m listening to what you are saying, I can’t read. And when you read to me extensive text on a slide, the redundancy principle kicks in and all bets are off.
But if your slides are visual images, just pictures, and they work with the words you are saying… bingo! Our inner four-year-old is drawn in, and we understand even more with the two sources of information that we would if you were just speaking to us.
Takeaway
Don’t read extensive wording on your slides or expect the audience to read detailed slides while you are talking.
If you DO have to create a deck thick with information to leave behind, guide your audience’s attention while you present live. Share with them how you will leave it behind, so right now, focus on your words. Show them with a pointer to the data or charts, or pictures that you are talking about in each moment.
5. Brains Crave Story
It’s 1984, and I’m standing on a stage wearing all black. I can’t see the audience because of the lights in my eyes, but I know a full house sits in the silence, waiting for me to play the concerto I’ve been practicing for months. But… I have never played it in public without falling apart.
Do you feel yourself drawn in by the story? The need to hear what happens next? Mine did too. Our brains just lit up in similar ways: the occipital lobe imagining the stage and darkness, the cerebellum when I talked about standing on the stage, the limbic system when I mentioned the audience waiting, and my own stress.*
Even a 30-second story—”Last Tuesday, a client called me in a panic because…”—can hook attention in a way that “Our customer satisfaction scores decreased 15%” never will.
Takeaway
Don’t rely only on graphs, numbers, and facts.
Do connect your data to people, places, conflicts, and desired outcomes.
Bonus: My favorite TED talk on storytelling and the brain in a business setting.
6. Brains Crave Relevance
Our brains are the most expensive organ in the body to run and the most important one for keeping us alive. Attention is expensive.
Your audience’s brain is running a constant cost-benefit analysis. “Is this worth my limited attention calories?” And the first question every brain asks is: “What’s in this for me?”
We’ve all felt the annoyance and boredom when a speaker takes ten minutes to share with us their worthy credentials, heroic company history, and their epic journey to this moment. We tune out. Not because we’re rude, but because we haven’t yet been given a reason to care. We constantly ask, “What’s in this for me?”
But when a speaker opens with a problem we recognize, a question we’ve been asking, or a glimpse of something we want, we lean in.
Takeaway
Don’t start with your full bio, company’s founding story, or a lengthy preamble.
Do start with your audience’s world, and keep coming back to it: their problem, their question, their need. Stand-up comedians have got this… “Hello Chicago!”
7. Brains Crave Rest
For about 90 minutes, our brains can sustain high-frequency activity—the alert, focused learning state. But after that window, our brains naturally shift into lower-frequency activity. We feel dreamy, scattered, tired.
When we (inevitably) push through that natural rest phase, our nervous systems interpret it as a threat. Granted, it is a low-level threat—no tigers or angry bosses here—but any threat dims the capacity of the learning-centered prefrontal cortex.
Our inner four-year-old isn’t begging for a nap after 90 minutes because we’re weak-willed, but because that is its natural rhythm.
The irony is that conference organizers worry that breaks will cause people to lose focus. This is understandable. The pressure is on for them to fit as many speakers as possible into those four-hour blocks between meals, and they want a focused audience the whole time. But it just isn’t natural for brains to do this. (Or for bladders, but that’s a different topic).
Within those extended focused times, our brains can stay fresh if we change patterns about every 10-15 minutes: get quiet, shift energy, ask a question, invite movement, tell a story, or even sort into breakout groups for discussion.
Takeaway
Don’t schedule breaks more than 2 hours apart if your priority is understanding, engagement, learning, and memorability.
Do support efficient breaks with food and drink close by, countdown clocks, an auditory time reminder, and a teaser about what to come back for.
Our complex brains are constantly working to decode our environment, scan for danger, learn about the world, connect with others, and make new stuff. When we aim to meet its needs during our presentations, meetings, and conferences, our brains will feel as good as if they just had a nap and a cookie.
*To hear what happened next, you can watch my TEDx talk. Please forgive the outdated 2016 references.
