Imagine if everyone was ignoring you and just talking amongst themselves. My guess is that you don’t have to imagine it, you can probably remember it.
If you have pretty much any public speaking experience, you’ve experienced that moment of ignorability.
How do I feel when I’m ignored? Like an ignoramus.
Even if you’re the smartest person in the room, being ignored makes you feel like less than you really are. That’s the ignorability factor.
7 Principle Case Study
It’s bad enough at work when people are being paid to listen to you. Have you ever tried to keep the attention of people who DON’T even want to be in the room?
Not long ago, my wife took over teaching a middle school classroom. She arrived home one evening exhausted from herding cats:
They just talk to each other or start working without even listening to the rest of my instructions. What do I do?
The answer to nearly every presentation skills question lies in one of the 8 principles in my SpeechDeck communication system. Whenever I’m asked a “how do I” question, I immediately begin ticking off each of the principles to see how each one would be applied to the problem.
My approach in this post is not to detail specific techniques. Rather, let’s discuss how each of the 7 PRINCIPLES of color works to solve the problem. Let’s solve the ignorability factor!
A Inject Anticipation
When you’re being ignored, the principle of injecting anticipation into your public speaking is the most obvious starting point. The ignorability factor means that something or someone else in the room is more interesting than you.
In principle, that means something else creates more UNCERTAINTY than you do, because you have left no open questions.
For example, if your students had any UNCERTAINTY that you might explode a stink bomb in the front of the room, I promise they would be paying rapt attention. The reason they’re not listening is because they already think they know what happens next.
In principle, the first way to solve the ignorability factor is to tease them with UNCERTAINTY–inject a secret:
In each of these 3 boxes is a hidden object that explains each of the three steps of your instructions.
The students would be UNCERTAIN what you’re hiding in the boxes and practically forced to listen.
OR if you want a strictly verbal tease:
I’m going to give you instructions with a “special” keyword.
The students would be UNCERTAIN what is “special” and what the keyword is, and therefore more likely to listen.
In each example above, great presentation skills require you point out to the listener what the listener does not know.
R Develop Relationships
People chatting with each other during your presentation feel a tighter in-group relationship with each other than with you. This is especially common in a school or workplace where the audience members already have preexisting relationships.
No matter how great your presentation skills or how hard you try, you will not be able to thwart preexisting relationships–you must use them to your advantage. Solving the ignorability factor means you find COMMONALITY with the in-group.
Use opinion leaders: Every group has leaders. Identify the opinion leader. Use that leader in on stage or by name to help you deliver your explanation. Even if people don’t want to listen to YOU, they will pay attention to anything you say about or with their group leader.
OR conformity: While you talk, require EVERY member to follow a series of steps: verbal response, hand raises, page turning, physical action, etc. When everyone must do the same thing, it’s usually uncomfortable for one individual to rebel against the group.
M Reveal the Messenger
The principle of revealing the messenger requires that you share something UNIQUE about yourself that the listener wouldn’t otherwise know. If they’re ignoring you, they think they know you. Prove them wrong.
Privileges: Do something they CAN’T do. In a classroom, that means a teacher giving instructions can simultaneously touch props or classroom objects that are off limits to the class (UNIQUE to the teacher).
OR verbally, the teacher could describe events and access that are UNIQUE to the teacher:
Let me tell you what Mr. Summers (principal, boss, thought leader, etc) said …
Reveal access to something the listeners don’t have.
This is why people listen to celebrities who aren’t even good public speakers. Those celebrities have access to UNIQUE people/places that the rest of us don’t.
P Encourage Participation
The opposite of the ignorability factor is the REACTION factor. The audience can’t REACT and ignore at the same time. Seek REACTIONS.
Great public speaking is very interactive. You’ll notice I already included attempts at REACTION in my previous examples.
- Anticipation – students were told to identify an uncertain, “secret” keyword
- Relationships – a group leader was asked to participate with you
- Relationships – students conformed to a series of steps while listening to instructions
Any REACTION will suffice: tell a joke, surprise them, shock them, sadden them, ask them a question.
I Empower the Individual
In the context of ignorability, empowerment means PERSONALIZED ownership. The listener doesn’t care nearly as much about YOUR instructions as their OWN instructions.
How do you PERSONALIZE the instructions? Simple. Give each individual options. Let the listener choose part of YOUR presentation: order, requirements, rules, consequences, rewards, evaluation.
If the student has ownership in the instructions, the student will listen to the instructions.
For step two, would you rather …
The choice makes step 2 less about the teacher and more about the student. Public speaking skills are not just about “speaking.” Notice that the above example also seeks participation!
Another type of personalized ownership would be discussing emotions or motivations before the explanation:
Why do you want …? How do you feel about …? What do you think …? What do you want to learn …?
T Manage the Theater
It’s easy to ignore words. It’s hard to ignore SPACE. Fill the space.
When my wife asked me about the problem of students not listening, I immediately pictured her standing still in front of the room talking. You know that teacher that never moves out from behind the lectern at the front of the class? That teacher is the epitome of ignorability.
The solution–move: Move, point, move again, point again, pick something up, touch things, make big gestures, contort your body and face into appropriate expressions, point, move.
It’s virtually impossible to ignore a moving object. You are that object. Just don’t overdo it.
S Engage the Subconscious
Last but not least, you need DRAMA. Appropriate drama tickles the subconscious and forces the listener to pay attention on a subliminal level.
Drama requires the listener to use less focused mental energy and the listener follows along more easily. Add public drama to your public speaking.
Instead of giving merely step-by-step instructions, drama could be as simple as telling a story.
LESS EFFECTIVE:
Step one is … Then for step two you should …
MORE EFFECTIVE, dramatize it:
The first time I did this my teacher told me … When I did that first step … I wasn’t ready to move to step two because … and when I saw that …
Notice that story example above also incorporates the principles of “injecting anticipation” and “revealing the messenger” and often “managing the theater” with no additional effort.
Anything can be turned into a story, and by doing so you usually kill two or more ignorability birds with one stone.
The Ignorability Factor
Great teachers know dozens of similar techniques to keep the listener engaged. If you attend teacher training workshops or university education classes they will spend lots of time explaining some of the results of modern instructional design principles.
Those are great resources. Personally though, I’ve found that every technique I’ve ever been taught falls into one of the 7 colored SpeechDeck principles:
- Inject Anticipation (UNCERTAINTY)
- Develop Relationships (COMMONALITY)
- Reveal the Messenger (UNIQUENESS)
- Encourage Participation (REACTIONS)
- Empower the Individual (PERSONALIZE)
- Manage the Theater (SPACE)
- Engage the Subconscious (DRAMATIZE)
If you don’t understand the principles, don’t be surprised if you suffer from the ignominious ignobility of the ignorability factor. If you don’t want to feel like an ignoramus, don’t be ignorant of the principles.