In improv comedy, the first thing you say in a scene is called an “initiation.” A good initiation contains a gift—specific information that gives your partner something to work with. Vague openings like “Hi, how are you?” force your partner to do all the heavy lifting.
The same principle applies to podcasting. Opening an episode with “So, today I want to talk about…” forces your listener to wait while you figure out your point. Specificity is generous. When you start with a specific client question, a metric, or a concrete moment, you give the listener an immediate reason to care.
In this micro-episode:
- The concept of “The Gift” in improv and how it applies to business content
- Why vague introductions increase cognitive load for your audience
- How to test if your opening sentence is specific enough to hook a listener
Find more episodes and subscribe at stereoforest.com/minute.
Transcript
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::In improv, the first thing that you say in a scene is called an initiation, but it often contains a gift for
your scene partner to respond to. You're handing your scene partner specific information so they have
something to work with. And this could be a name for a character, a relationship, a location, an action that
you're doing. Sometimes the more specific or sort of rich and detailed it is, the better of
::a gift it is or at least it makes it easier for that scene partner to use in the scene. Vague openings however
are kind of the opposite of a gift. If you walk into a scene and you say to your scene partner so here we are or
the very the dreaded hi how are you doing? It doesn't give your partner anything. It gives them work to do.
You have to build up like why are you there? What are all the things that led to this scene?
::happening that we're going to be able to play with. Both of your brains have a lot more work to do. It's a lot
more effort. And the same thing can happen in our solo podcast episodes. So if you start that episode. So
today I want to talk about something I've been thinking about a lot lately or something like recently I
wrote a blog post. These kind of openings make your listener wait while you kind of figure out where you're
actually going with what you're saying.
::So your listener is trying to figure out what you're about to talk about or make some connection to your
title. They might be straining to kind of do that or the description in your thumbnail, whatever they
looked at to make them click. In podcasting, this might look like, well, last Tuesday, a client asked me an
interesting question about vocal prosody and, and you'd go on from there. So in that opening, you handed
the listener something. You handed them a day, a person, a feeling you had, a talk.
::and action. So the listener had something to hold on to. And so do you as the podcaster. You gave yourself a
clear starting point for a story. You gave yourself something to teach instead of a vague intention. And if
you're looking for how to use hooks for your episodes at the very beginning, this is a good way to start
implementing them in your work. Like those specifics is generous. Specificity is generous.
::It costs you nothing and gives everyone in the exchange something concrete to build on.
::So here's what you can do in podcasting. Before you start recording, know what gift you're handing over in
the first, say, 10 seconds.
::Can you name a metric of some sort or a specific moment or a claim or topic, maybe a person?
::What's the gist of what you want to cover across that episode? So if your opening sentence could be, say, the
opening sentence of any episode, that isn't specific enough. It needs to be the opening of the specific
episode that you're recording today. And if you have that gift, it's going to make your listener care. I'm
Jen DeHaan. This is the Credibility Minute. You can find more episodes and get in touch with me at StereoForest.com/minute