This subject line is, of course, a reference to the scene in the movie The Matrix where Neo visits the Oracle’s house and the weird bald kid tells him how to bend the spoon.

(As you can tell, I am a huge fan of The Matrix, and in fact have, for over three years, been co-hosting a podcast named directly after an early scene of that movie. Most would say the podcast’s name is a reference to the Lewis Carroll book (which is the source of most of these references anyway), others the Jefferson Airplane song, but the reality is the podcast is named after that scene in The Matrix.)

What does this have to do with your presentations?

I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating:

The single best way to hold an audience’s attention is to break a pattern and let the audience watch as you put it back together. In other words, do something unexpected. Let them watch as you bend a spoon. They will, of course, wonder, “How the h*ll did he do that?”

It’s hard to know what to do when someone tells you to just bend a spoon. You may be asking, “Do I have to be some weird kid in a movie to make use of this advice?” And the answer is “No.” So let’s make it a little more tangible:

Put some of yourself into your story. It doesn’t have to be a lot. It can be something as small as a sentence like “When my team and I were looking at the data, we noticed that X, so we Y.”

Why does this break the pattern? Because the default in the business world is to eliminate all of yourself from the communication. That default is why so little of this goes so far.

For example, doing a QBR (quarterly business report)? That sentence might look something like this: “When my team and I were looking at the data, we noticed that most of the growth came from the Southern Region, so we called up Julie and asked her what she was doing, how the other regions could learn from her experience.”

See? That wasn’t so hard. You don’t have to be some bald kid bending spoons to benefit from the breaking of patterns. One sentence is all it took, and no one is even going to really know why your QBR just got more interesting, all they are going to know is that it did.