How to stop boring people to sleep

I heard the familiar click of my wife closing her laptop and leaving her office.

Nosy as ever, I poked my head out of my studio.

“How was the webinar?”

“Ugh,” she groaned. “It was awful.”

Lindsey had just completed a 3-hour continuing education training.

“What happened?” I asked.

“It was just boring.” Then, after a beat, she continued, “When presentations are really boring, I pay just enough attention to pass the quiz and get my credit. The rest I tune out.”

Not exactly the outcome you want when designing a critical course for mental health professionals.

Wake-Up Call

Boring presentations are too common, and it’s got to stop.

Every August I sit through dozens of them as the guest speaker for incoming freshmen on college campuses across America: “How to use the student portal,” “What the health center covers,” “How the student help desk works,” or “Library procedures.”

Same in corporate. I once sat through a CFO’s 30-minute droning, monotone presentation on the quarterly fiscal report that quite literally put two people to sleep before my closing keynote.

And these presenters know they’re boring. They even apologize at the beginning of the presentation:

“Sorry, I know this is a boring topic. But we just need to get through it.”

Wait, what?!

The topic isn’t boring. You’re boring.

You owe it to them

It’s simply not enough to shrug your shoulders. If the topic is important enough that the audience needs to hear it, it’s important enough to be delivered in an engaging way.

I know, I know – easier said than done. That’s no excuse for not putting in the effort.

My wife is a brilliant mental health clinician and supervisor with a Master’s degree and a license. She cares deeply about her clients and takes time out of her schedule for continuing education classes that she believes will help her do even better work.

Instructors owe it to her to be engaging, to deliver the content in a way that makes her want to lean in and tune out everything else.

You owe it to your students to capture their hearts and minds, to get them excited about the whole of college life, not just late-night dorm room nachos.

You owe it to your employees to gain their enrollment in the success (or failure) of the organization, so that they feel like part of a cause greater than themselves.

How to Engage with Any Topic

We don’t have space in a weekly blog article to learn all the ways to engage an audience. Here are 3 strategies.

Be Excited

When you’re passionate about the material, it rubs off on the audience. That CFO is presumably really interested in fiscal reports, otherwise she wouldn’t be a CFO. She should tap into what drew her to the field in the first place.

What makes these numbers so important? What can we learn from them? Why should we, the audience of non-CFOs, care?

Tell a Story

As I tell my TEDx speakers, if you want to bore people to tears, give them facts. If you want to move them to action, tell them a story. It doesn’t have to be “once upon a time…” It can be an anecdote, a parable, a lesser known historical account, a reference to popular culture.

For an in-depth discussion on storytelling strategies, here I am with the story master Francisco Mahfuz on his podcast Storypowers: Brian Miller on Storypowers Podcast.

Move the Chairs

If you want the audience to care about your content, you need them to “sign up” to learn about it. That can be tricky when it’s a mandatory presentation. My friend, high school history teacher, and TEDx organizer Parag Joshi told me an amazing story on my podcast.

He said that Dan Bierderman, an urban developer, discovered that by unbolting the chairs in urban parks, people were more likely to come to the park, and spend more time there.

But why did unbolting the chairs matter?

People would move the chair before sitting down, often just an inch, and that slight adjustment made the chair “theirs” for that moment. It made the environment comfortable to be in, not just physically but mentally.

This was Parag’s lightbulb moment.

“I’m obsessed with how my students interact with the environment of my park, the classroom. I want to put items in the environment that can be manipulated, whether they’re conceptual or whether they’re physical. If they can ‘move the chair’ it’s no longer my curriculum, it’s their curriculum.”

One of the ways Parag lets his students ‘move the chair’ intellectually is by starting units with a challenging or thought-provoking question. He once opened with, “Is poverty a choice?” Everybody has an opinion on that. And when students start to form that opinion, even in their own head, they become enrolled.

Find ways to let your audience ‘move the chair’ in your presentations. Give them space to make the presentation theirs, and they’ll discover how rich your content really is.

Listen to my entire conversation with Parag on the Beyond Networking Podcast.

Taking Responsibility

You have the mic. You have the floor. It’s your job to convey the information in a way that the audience is most likely to retain.

When you take that responsibility seriously you discover that there truly are no boring topics, only boring presenters.

Aren’t you tired of boring presenters?

Time to be part of the solution.

Learn how to speak like yourself, but better: Conquer The Red Dot