How To Start A Speech People Actually Want To Hear

Close your eyes and think about the last Mission Impossible film you watched.

It didn’t start with Tom Cruise sitting in a comfy chair reading a book and listening to classical music.

It started with him doing something pretty fucking dangerous.

Hanging from some rust-coloured Californian mountains.

Dangling from the side of a plane.

Or wearing the face of someone else and then high kicking his way out of a prison.

You get dropped straight in the action.

Your heart rate is up, your adrenaline is pumping. You know this is high stakes.

And you are paying attention.

That is a hook.

And many speeches don’t have one.

Instead, they have some form of apologetic introduction and preamble.

“Thank you for having me”.
“It’s lovely to be here”

“Can you hear me at the back?”

None of that is useful to your audience.

It’s all for the speaker.

I hate to say it, but when I hear people say those things, my brain often goes, “I don’t care.”

I feel really bad saying that as well.

But even if I don’t outwardly think it, unconsciously I’m feeling it.

It’s really sad, but in the first few moments of your speech, your audience are making a decision.

They are deciding where they’re going to put their attention.

Are they going to listen to you, or are they going to do something else?

Because we all have a lot of emails to answer, and in the next 40 minutes of your keynote, it could be a good time to get all of those done.

A great hook not only gets people to pay attention at the beginning. It makes them think that if they stop paying attention, they’re going to miss something really good.

And there is nowt wrong with a bit of FOMO.

Now, you’re probably reading this thinking, “Dave, are you just telling me that I need to write a hook for every speech that I do?”.

Perhaps I am.

In fact, there is no, perhaps.

But there are a couple of things to consider here.

The first is that hooks come in different flavours.

Stories.

Questions.

Engagement.

Silence.

The beautiful thing is you get to play with this and find out what fits your style and your audience.

The second is that a hook will often appear later in the process of writing a speech.

When you start to look at what your content is and you start to bring it all together, suddenly you’ll see the way in which it captures people’s attention.

In my experience, that rarely happens early on, which means that there is a rather uncomfortable period where you’re wondering how the hell you’re going to start this thing.

And then it just happens.

There are times, though, when you don’t want a hook.

Or they are less useful.

And that is when you are hosting events.

That’s when all of the scene setting, housekeeping, and introductions become really important.

The key as a professional is to know when to use each approach.

Because, like many things, it’s all about context.

As audiences, we become a little bit too complacent when it comes to the quality of our speakers.

I’ve been to conferences where every speaker doesn’t even have a hook, and they open with that fairly useless preamble.

I believe that needs to change.

Because we owe our audiences more than that.

So the next time you’re writing a speech, try this: ask: What is the opening hook that would make your audience pay attention for the rest of your speech?

And of course, if you want to have a conversation with me about how that might look, give me a shout.