How many times have you experienced this? A speaker takes the stage, head bowed, eyes firmly glued to a sheet of paper. Before even making eye contact with you, they utter the dull-as-ditchwater opening: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight I’m going to talk about…
In this brief moment the room switches off. The eyes are down. The voice is flat. And somewhere in the back row, a phone screen begins to glow.
This is how most presentations begin; not because the speaker lacks substance, but because they have surrendered the one thing an audience actually responds to before a single word is spoken: their presence. The eyes stay glued to the page. The greeting is generic and boring. The topic is announced like a weather report. Within seconds, the room has quietly decided this person does not deserve much attention.
Contrast that with a leader who commands a room without raising their voice. They don’t open with a topic, they open with a person, in that room, right now. Their gaze finds someone before their mouth opens. Executive presence at the podium isn’t loudness. It’s control of the first few seconds, deployed on purpose.
Here’s how to get an audience on your side.
Meet the room before you speak. Silence, held with steady eye contact, is not dead air, it’s authority. Before your first sentence, look up. Find two or three faces. Let a beat pass. That pause tells the audience: I see you, and what I’m about to say is worth your full attention. Only then do you speak.
Open with a moment, not a topic. “Tonight I’m going to talk about…” tells an audience what’s coming. It doesn’t make them feel anything. Instead, drop them into a specific scene: a decision made under pressure, a number that changed a boardroom’s mood, a single sentence someone once said to you that reframed everything. Specificity does the work generalities can’t, it makes listeners lean forward to find out what happens next.
Look at how Teena Lopes opened her address at the 2023 Ms Mature pageant in Sint Eustatius. She stepped up and simply said, “Tonight, like Rihanna, I shine bright like a diamond,” then stayed inside that image, describing herself as a stone formed under pressure, cut from the rough, unbendable, unbreakable, unbeatable. Only once the audience was fully hers did she reveal what the metaphor was actually carrying: a health scare that had put her in intensive care weeks earlier, and the wake-up call that followed. No topic sentence, no agenda. Just an image, held long enough to earn the story underneath it.
Ask a question you actually want answered. Not a rhetorical throwaway, a real one aimed at the people in front of you. “How many of you have sat through a decision you knew was wrong, but said nothing?” A genuine question turns passive listeners into participants within the first breath, because now they’re searching their own experience for an answer.
Name the stakes before the subject. Audiences don’t lean in for topics; they lean in for consequences. Rather than announcing what you’ll cover, say what’s at risk — or what’s possible — if they get this right. “In the next twelve minutes, you’ll have a better answer to the question that’s costing this organisation its best people.” Then, and only then, do you tell them what you’re going to talk about.
None of this requires charisma you don’t already have. It requires deciding, before you take the stage, exactly how those first fifteen seconds will unfold and refusing to let your notes make that decision for you.
The speakers who are remembered aren’t the ones with the most polished slides. They’re the ones who made a room feel seen in the opening line, and never let go of that connection.
If you or your team want to build that kind of presence — not just for one keynote, but as a lasting habit — Mazterpiece Communications designs bespoke public speaking workshops for senior leaders and organisations across the Caribbean and beyond. Get in touch to talk about what a session tailored to your team could look like.