It’s hard to get anyone’s attention these days.  We receive, what, a billion marketing messages a day, something like that.  People you pass in the street have ads tattooed to their foreheads.  The piles of books on our nightstands threaten to scrape the ceiling.  Magazines and newspapers?  Forgetaboutit.  You’ll never catch up.  We’re oversaturated, so why pay attention?

In public speaking, how do you pull the attention of the audience away from their Blackberries and planning their kid’s next birthday party to listen to you? 

Don’t assume that your topic is interesting enough in itself to automatically grab the audience’s attention from the moment you start to the very end.  It’s probably interesting to you, but it’s a big world out there, and not everyone shares your predilections. 

There’s only one way to grab the attention of the audience, and that is to answer the question ‘why is this relevant to me’ (where ‘me’ is a member of the audience) early in your talk — preferably the first 3 minutes. 

More than that, your ‘why’ statement had better have reference to a problem the audience has — one that you’re going to solve.  That’s how you achieve relevance for an audience. 

But here’s the thing.  That problem had better be one that is affecting the safety level of your audience, or they still won’t be hooked.  If it’s a business audience, for example, they’re worried about profit and loss.  Don’t talk to them about redesigning the corporate logo.  That won’t do it — unless you can make a convincing case that it will affect the bottom line.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a useful way to think about this, if you invert it.  Maslow said that people think about their needs beginning with a base of physiology (food, shelter), going up to safety, to love, esteem, and finally self-actualization.  He argued that people move up the list as they satisfy needs below.  His goal was to get everyone working on self-actualization in a happy society.  The other way to look at this is that if you’re worried about a safety issue, say, you won’t be worried about anything higher on the list.  Hence, to grab someone’s attention, tell them their safety (in business terms, profit and loss) is at stake.  Then you got ’em. 

That’s the only way to grab and hold the audience’s attention throughout a speech.