Voltaire said, “The secret to being boring is to say everything.”

The temptation to fill in all the gaps for the reader (or listener) not only makes a book tedious, but especially a presentation.

Why is curiosity so important?

When we present, we forget the importance of stimulating curiosity. It has evolved us from ignorance to knowledge. The curiosity to explore the surrounding environments, to know what was in the valley next to ours, and to discover the laws that rule the physical and psychological world. Every human progress is linked to curiosity, the desire to fill a knowledge gap.

We often overlook the importance of this energy and fall into the trap of providing as much information as possible. This takes away from the audience the pleasure of discovery and the desire to fill in the gaps.

Knowledge is a process favored by curiosity. Ask any (good) teacher. The more you try to cram notions into students’ heads, the harder it will be to make them learn. But try to stimulate their curiosity, and they will go on their own to search for information, want to understand and learn the concepts better.

Curiosity makes us hypothesize and pushes us to verify them by researching information.

So, in presentations, saying everything is counterproductive. It is more valuable to create curiosity and let the audience start searching for information within your speech.

How to do it practically?

QUESTIONS

You can start with a question and give the answer during the speech. With a question, each audience member will provide their answer and want to see if it is correct, compare it with the speaker’s, and see if they agree or are different.

A CURIOUS FACT

You can cite a curious or unexpected fact and then explain why it is so in the following minutes. For example: Did you know that 2 out of 10 of you will live beyond 110 years? Now, I will tell you how and why…

STORIES

Or tell a story and then finish it at the end of the presentation:

“I was in one of the most challenging interviews of my life. I was giving a colleague a negative feedback for a series of behaviors that were not in line with our company’s values. The feedback was going badly. Very badly.

Everything I had said up to that point had been misinterpreted. The person was not only defensive but was also getting very angry, making the feedback useless and counterproductive. Then, after almost 40 unproductive minutes, the quote from one of the greatest leaders I have ever known came back to me.

When I quoted the phrase, the person in front of me changed their attitude, relaxed, and after a while, started crying. An opening, cathartic cry. They were ready to listen to the feedback for real, with a more open heart. The phrase I quoted was… I’ll tell you in a moment.”
In a context like this, everyone will be interested in knowing the phrase that changed the colleague’s attitude so suddenly.

Curiosity drives us further, turning us into explorers wanting to know more. As a public speaker, we must create a gap and let the audience want to fill it. That way, we’ll have their attention, we can maintain it until the end of the speech, and the audience will better remember what we said.