5 Seconds To Standing Ovations:
How Your Opening Lines Can Electrify The Room.
I’m standing backstage at a Leadership Summit in Vienna, waiting for my introduction to deliver my closing keynote, “Speak To Lead.”
During the day, a cloud of defeat hung in the air.
Some unexpected incidents made the audience feel down, bored, and sometimes even beaten. What could I do to recapture their attention?
Every professional speaker knows that the opening seconds are crucial. They determine whether the audience will lean in or zone out.
Pro-Speakers meticulously plan their opening lines to keep their audience on the edge of their seat.
But, sometimes, things happen, and you must improvise a new strategy quickly.
As I took the grand stage into the spotlight, I tripped — and barely held myself from falling off the stage.
The audience gasped. The shock was audible.
Here I was, their keynote speaker, tripping before uttering a word.
They didn’t know I tripped on purpose — until I looked them in the eye while still on the floor and said:
“Never ever mistake falling for failing.”
Suddenly and absolutely unexpectedly, the audience rose to their feet and gave me a standing ovation!
What? What just happened?
How could one line and five seconds electrify the room?
In this article, I will try to investigate and explain this standing ovation and offer some strategies for opening a speech. By the end, you’ll learn practical tools to enhance your awareness, hook your audience from the start and dramatically connect with your audience.
1- Forget the Hellos; Open with thunder.
Falling on stage is an unconventional opening.
Was it a disaster? Far from it.
If you’re yearning to make a mark as a speaker, remember this: Vulnerability humanizes you.
By orchestrating a stumble, I resonated with my audience, recognized their feelings, and revealed a universally relatable truth: we all fall.
I forged an instant connection by mirroring this vulnerability on stage, telling them silently: “I see you. I understand.”
If you grasp and act on this connection principle, your audience will want to listen to you. You’ve given them a reason to trust you or at least to have positive expectations about what’s coming next.
Ask yourself: How can you open your presentation with thunder? Be creative and integrate your opening into your presentation theme. And, never start with conventional pleasantries, like “hello” and “thank you.”
2- Struck them with one line.
It’s crucial to distill your message into a single line that captures the essence of your idea. I call it: a ‘PowerLine.’
After the fall, the gasps echoed through the room, I paused and let the silence hang for a moment before delivering my PowerLine: “Never ever mistake falling for failing.”
It was their beacon of hope. Why?
Besides the uncomfortable incidents on that day, falling is universal. We all have our trips and tumbles.
How many times have you fallen while learning to ride a bike? Does this mean that you have failed? Absolutely not. It’s a momentary deviation. It’s a learning curve that teaches, adjusts, and molds us.
However, failing is different.
If you aim to win a bike race but come in second, you might consider this a failure because your specific goal of winning was not met. It’s a judgment, an evaluation. If you re-evaluate, you might win; you will learn and, in the process, build your growth mindset.
If you equate falling with failing, you transform learning opportunities into burdens and render yourself a failure.
I can keep on elaborating. How about a thesis? Or a topic for an upcoming presentation?
The point is: Always condense your ideas, lessons, or words of wisdom into a simple, memorable PowerLine. That’s how you transform a profound lesson into a simple, memorable, and repeatable line that touches hearts and minds.
3- Found a pain? Twist the knife.
Have you ever noticed something that makes your audience tick but didn’t dig deeper? You find their pain point, and you strike them but merely on the skin’s surface. Yet, until you dig deeper and twist the knife, your audience will not feel the pain and will rarely be motivated to act on your message.
You can’t sink a nail in one hit. You need repetition.
Immediately following my Powerline, I did something else unexpected to hammer my point. I asked my audience: “Do you know what real failure looks like?”
Then, I turned my back to them and faced the giant screen.
The room, now silent, watched in anticipation.
Then I said: “It’s when you focus too much on your content and too little on connecting with your audience. This is what I coin as Deep Failure.”
The nail sank deep. That’s how they felt all day!
Think about it. Communication isn’t about delivering a monologue of your content. It’s about establishing a dialogue, an exchange that thrives on mutual participation. Your role as a communicator is to convert information into transformation.
By defining turning one’s back as ‘Deep Failure,’ I made my point visual and emphasized the importance of connection, understanding, and respecting the role of my audience.
Never treat your audience like an information dump; give them a transformational goosebump.
4- Fresh beats canned presentations
Perhaps the most underrated yet pivotal skill in the toolkit of a masterful public speaker is awareness. You can rehearse for hours, perfecting every line, every pause, every gesture. But when you step on stage, it’s a new world — a living, breathing entity with its own pulse.
The room’s ambiance, collective mood, fellow speakers, and subtle reactions of your audience are cues that a canned presentation can’t anticipate.
So, no matter how prepared you are for your presentation, make it a practice to scan the room and gauge the atmosphere.
You will gain invaluable insights if you interact with attendees before the event, observe audience members’ body language, and study previous speakers’ performances. These moments become the ingredients for a freshly baked presentation unique to that specific time and place.
This is the crux of crafting an experience that feels just out of the oven, tailor-made for the here and now. So, while preparation is paramount, remember that awareness is your compass, guiding you to mold your message to the heartbeat of the room. In the world of public speaking, awareness is what separates a generic monologue from a dynamic, resonant conversation.
The Ovation: An Unforgettable Lesson
So, why did the audience, after just five seconds, erupt into a spontaneous standing ovation? Because they felt seen, heard, and, importantly, understood.
They weren’t applauding the speaker who fell but celebrating the lesson that fell on them. They were honoring their inner voice, which I merely made visible.
As speakers, we don’t yearn for ovations but for invitations. You want your words to find a permanent home in the hearts of your listeners. You need to earn their trust and respect so they invite you to their world and allow you to connect with their deepest emotions and dormant questions.
The real gauge of success is whether your message resonates and whether they long for another dose of your wisdom.
Also, you want the organizers, moved by the experience, to yearn for an encore — for a repeat performance.
Your measure of success is whether they invite you back to speak on stage.
Final Thought:
Public speaking, at its core, is about creating connections. It’s about understanding your audience’s world and inviting them into yours. My brief stumble on stage in Vienna wasn’t about the fall or the applause. It was about creating magnetic connections.
For all speakers, new or seasoned, this is the heart of the craft: Connect genuinely, speak with full awareness, and let your words touch your audiences’ inner voices.
Every time I take the stage, I am reminded of its boundless potential — and responsibility. The potential to change a perspective, ignite a passion, and heal a wound — the responsibility to honor your craft and your audience.
My love for public speaking is not just about sharing my stories but about enabling you to find your voice and design it above the noise.
This is why I coach: To empower individuals like you to recognize that your voice matters, that your stories hold power, and that your awareness is your uniqueness.
Your turn:
What will your opening line be in your next presentation?
And how can you make it flexible enough to change it if something happens? Because something will happen.
I hope that by sharing my experience in this article, you can discover what is possible for you and find the drive to act on it.
If you enjoyed this article, follow and connect with Leopold Ajami on Linkedin.
Leopold is a Creative & Strategic Consultant and a Public Speaking/Communication Coach. He’s the Founder of Novel Philosophy, a professional coaching academy for future leaders.
Additional Resources:
Read “The Anatomy of Air: 10 Public Speaking Tactics from Vaccaro’s Speech to Michael Jordan.” I also developed a workbook to help you apply the 10 tactics. Contact me on Linkedin, and I’ll send you a copy.
Dive deeper into: Decoding Clarity and Stage fright is Not about the stage.
Check out Leopold’s Podcast: Ideas On Trial.
Do you want to become a Though-Leader? Invest in your Public Speaking & Communication skills. As a thank you for reading this article, you’ve got free one-month access to Leopold’s SPEAKERS INNER CIRCLE. (claim your spot).
