Good Talk: Five Myths About Leading a Panel or Being a Facilitator
April 21, 2026
Your Audience Checked Their Phone. Now What?
By: Michael Chad Hoeppner
Published: May 27, 2026
“When you can tell you’ve lost someone’s attention, how can you get it back?” he asked.
“How did you know you had lost their attention?” I clarified.
“Because their eyes dropped to their phone,” he admitted.
This interaction was part of the first question I got in a Q&A at a keynote for my book, Don’t Say Um, that I did last week, and I thought it was such a universal and topical question that it merited its own Good Talk.
So I’ll tell you exactly what I told my questioner: Change.
We’ve all heard of the simple trick of using silence to require an audience to lean in and take note of whatever will follow the silence.
But the silence trick is gimmicky if you don’t understand the principle of why it works. It works because all that came before it was not silence.
We lean in because in the middle of a soundscape of continuous words, suddenly there is the absence of sound. It is the change that requires our attention.
If, instead, a conversationalist chronically paused languorously and excessively, our attention would be piqued when that speaker removed all pauses and raced instead.
Attention is not something you get; it is something you earn and must keep earning, by continuously upending your audience’s expectations.
I explain this in my book in the following way:
“Whether you’re aware of it or not, your brain is wired to look for surprises. It burns an outsized amount of your total calories given its fairly minor weight (approximately three pounds); therefore, your body is always looking for moments to power it down and conserve calories. When is it safe to power down? When all observable surroundings are predictable and orderly. The moment your brain recognizes a pattern, it can dedicate less and less attention to it, until eventually you may not even register it at all. Think of an electric fan whirring in the background—eventually, the sound becomes white noise, and our brains don’t even note it.
This adaptation is important from an evolutionary standpoint; it conserves energy for the sprint away from the inevitable, lurking saber-toothed tiger. A surprise can signal danger—in the case of the prehistoric predator—or delight. It is something unexpected and our brains have to focus on it very quickly to determine its implications.”
So if your audience is drifting, do different.
- If you “aren’t a storyteller” – give up that fixed mindset today and tell a story instead of remaining only in the data.
- If you speak in an authoritative, serious manner, embrace the 5P’s of vocal variety and bring musical dynamics to your speech.
- If you use words transactionally, as speed bumps that get in the way on the sprint to your goal, meander and see what power unlocks by savoring the enunciation and onomatopoeia of your sounds.
I share this concept with you as tactical know-how, but it can move well beyond tactics.
Consider this an invitation to revel in your brain’s neuroplasticity!
The best thing you can do to keep your audience’s attention may well be the same thing that would most grab your attention:
Try
Something
New.
(how about even today – on the next call you have)
~Michael Hoeppner and the GK Training team
P.S. I put an easter egg at the end of this Good Talk to reward you comprehensive readers out there – I finally finished Moby Dick! I don’t flatter myself that any of the loyal readers of this newsletter have been kept awake wondering if I was going to keep the promise I made last summer to complete that veritable tome (500+ pages). But in the spirit of accountability, I finished it! (I was only ~4 months later than I hoped). And I’m happy to say it was worth every minute!
P.P.S. If you want to see the old-school video where we use the opening of Moby Dick to illustrate how variety works, click here. (Warning: I am very, very young in said video.)
P.P.P.S. If you want to download the chapter in my book about change and surprise, you can find it here.
