When you're the one talking, all eyes are on you. This means several things:

• Everyone showed up to accomplish something.
• We all dedicated this time to this thing.
• We chose to be here instead of anywhere else.

It doesn't matter if it's a three-person meeting to decide on today's work or a recorded TED Talk with tens of thousands of people in the audience. Your responsibility doesn't change:

• inform / assist
• keep their attention

Most of us took classes on the first part - putting together information, making charts, or preparing to troubleshoot. But if you forget the second half of the job, you're going to lose the audience and you're going to fail at the first part.

Think to the last meeting you were in that lacked an engaging leader/speaker. Monotone voice. Flat delivery. Reading straight from the slides. You know the one. Were you "all in"? Or were you checking email, Slacking coworkers, and generally wasting that time slot?

It's because the speaker forgot that they have a responsibility to entertain. Yes - "entertain". You don't have to wear a clown suit to the next meeting but if you're not entertaining, if you don't behave in a way that earns their attention, you're not going to get it.

No attention. No learning. No enabling. Complete waste of your time and theirs.

Quit reading from the slides - rehearse them, and do it in your own voice. When you use your own style and voice, you become so much more engaging because it sounds like you, not words from a textbook.

I learned this when a generous coworker was coaching me on delivery. He summed it up with this:

Light yourself on fire and people will run from the mountains to see the flame.

Leaves a little room for interpretation but you can certainly see the point. Be interesting. Be engaging. Once you have their attention, that's the best time to get your message across.