How To Capture and Hold Anyone’s Attention
Daniel Goleman
Director of Daniel Goleman Emotional Intelligence Online Courses and Senior Consultant at Goleman Consulting Group
In today’s over-crowded media environment, attention is at a premium. Whether you are offering ideas, information or goods, you’re up against the same challenge: how to capture interest.
The key lies in an ancient strip of brain circuitry that triggers the orienting response to anything new, novel or surprising. This circuitry was crucial in evolution for both recognizing threats from predators and learning how to adapt to anything not encountered before: a new place, new food, new animal.
Today those powerful circuits reflexively make us pay attention to whatever differs from what we are familiar with. The ways to capture this kind of attention are endless. For instance, one of the many new web apps centers on the orienting response is Vine, which shows us six-second clips. You’ve got to be original to stand out on Vine.
Witness Meagan Cignoli, a Vine super-star, who works with ad agency BBDO for Home Depot. In one of her Vine posts, Cignoli first appears as an eye staring through a sea of cotton balls, then slowly emerges, spitting cotton balls, as a dark background finally frames her face. You’ve got to see it to understand why these scant seconds are visually gripping – and irresistible to the orienting response. The best-known Viners, like Cignoli, have followers in the millions.
A TIME magazine article about Vine, however, gets it wrong, suggesting that the key to Vine is appealing to short attention spans. One myth today is that people’s attention spans – especially younger people’s – are shorter, and so we’ve got to grab them and get the message across.
To bust that myth, watch any youngster rapt in a video game for endless minutes or hours. Those games continually trigger the orienting response, keeping users’ attention glued.
Once you’ve got someone’s attention – thanks to the orienting response – how do you keep it? One powerful way that appeals to the brain’s emotional centers is to tell a gripping story. For the cutting edge of story-telling, check out The Future of Story-Telling. Their October 3 conference was sold out, but you can catch up on their website.
So you need attention grabbers plus a powerful story line. And how do you come up with those? Well, that requires other varieties of focus, ones that stimulate creative insights and innovations.
How do you capture and keep people’s attention? Share your insights in the comments sections, or tweet them to @DanielGolemanEI (include #focus).
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Daniel Goleman’s new book FOCUS: The Hidden Driver of Excellence and CD Cultivating Focus: Techniques for Excellence are now available.
His more recent books are The Brain and Emotional Intelligence: New Insights and Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence – Selected Writings (More Than Sound).
Leadership: A Master Class is Goleman’s comprehensive video series that examines the best practices of top-performing executives.
Related articles:
Effective leaders are effective story tellers
The role of attention for creativity
Focus: The hidden ingredient in excellence
How to avoid creative dead ends
Meditation Teacher, учитель медитации
10yThe best way to keep other people's attention is to be deeply focused oneself on what one is doing, saying, feeling, thinking at the moment. Since most people's attention is quite dispersed the attentive one becomes a point of chrystallization in this chaos.
Financial Systems Analyst at Shining Systems
10yWell, first i must give you credit for capturing my attention with your headline. Second i must give myself credit for patiently holding my attention and reading through the article! (jokes). But most importantly, this is a topic worth discussing and i have read many useful contributions in the comments section. My take on attention is that man's focal point is at any given time receiving information of different kinds both in the present, past and future. And anything can momentarily capture a man's attention from the great to the mundane.What makes the difference though is the alignment of what is observed with an existing felt need. This is what distinguishes those who will just observe from those will take action. For those of us in marketing, this means everything. We can only succeed at selling if we can connect our product with a customer's need which must be felt in the present time. Sometimes we have to help the client to realize that they in fact have the need. This is where a calculated and well phrased story can deliver.
Thanks for your insights Mr. Goldman. Whether we look left or right, to the front or to the back, media is all over the place inundating us with all sorts of information; it's overflowing that many times it just saturates people's minds. Content, story-telling, attention grabbers, visuals; whatever it takes to get people's attention needs to be original, creative, meaningful and directly speak to the right audience. It's not a matter of one-size fits all or a cookie-cutter strategy. By the way, the short video of the girl spitting cotton balls is dull. There is no need to go to extremes such using profanity or invasive imagery to get people's attention. People will probably react and most likely impulsively, not out of genuine interest. Sadly, this is how the world is evolving with technology changing at giant steps and providing more and more avenues of communication; we have not learned well enough about something when we have been presented with a new version of it. People will be come weary emotionally and intellectually at some point; for now, everything seems cool and fun, though, let's pause, think about where all of this is taking us as humans and how our brain stimulation is being altered by technology - good in some ways and not so good in other ways.
Restorative Practitioner at Jesuit Social Services and Leadership Coach at Arrow Leadership Australia
11yInteresting idea - demything shorter attention spans...yes my boys can play video games for hours!
CEO, Founder, Mentor
11yEveryone loves a good story