The beginning of a presentation is a touchy time. On the one hand, you are feeling nervous and might not be quite sure of yourself yet. On the other hand, the audience is nervous for a different reason: they are worried that you might be about to bore them to death and perhaps they should have brought more reading material, called in sick, or located some cyanide tablets. Everyone—including you—is on edge!

So that’s why people like to start off a presentation with a joke. The only problem is that it’s hard to by funny. My advice? Don’t bother. After all, you aren’t trying to get booked at the local Comedy Cellar on Saturday night; so don’t give yourself all the pressure of trying to be funny on demand. You aren’t a trained seal!

To be a pretty good presenter, you only have to make one decision about the following two options when it comes to starting your speech: (1) Are you going to talk about yourself? Or (2) are you going to talk about something that is remotely interesting to your audience?

If you’re George Clooney, you can talk about yourself and people will find that interesting. However, if you are not a famous movie star, my recommendation is to discuss something of interest to your audience within the first five seconds of opening your mouth.

Most awful presenters spend the first five minutes saying the following boring stuff: “I’m happy to be here; thank you for that wonderful introduction. Here’s what I studied in college, here’s the boring history of my company, here are all the cities my company is in that you don’t care about because you are in this city, here are the 14 points I’m going to cover in my presentation today (and since I will cover them later you don’t have to pay attention now), and the bathrooms are down the hall and on the right. Have you fallen asleep yet?

To be a pretty good presenter, all you have to do is focus your attention on your audience instead of yourself at the beginning of a presentation. Imagine if you started a presentation with, “I was just in the hallway talking to Jim and he said ‘TJ, I’ve just lost my best customer because he says my prices are too high. What can I do?’” That might not be a brilliant opening to a speech, but it’s pretty good, and here’s why:

1. Jim is listening because I’ve mentioned him by name.
2. Everyone else can relate to a problem that one of their colleagues has; and so now they are listening.
3. Everyone is surprised that this is the first thing out of my mouth because they expected me to stare down at notes and go through the usual clichés of being happy to be there and so on.
4. I appear to be supremely confident because I seem to be speaking off-script and ad-libbing (even though the opening was planned).

Let’s say you don’t get to the room in time to ask anyone a question in advance. That’s okay. When you start your presentation, begin by asking everyone a question and see what responses you generate. Again, you won’t seem like you are starting with boring, canned clichés, so you’ll seem pretty good in comparison to most speakers. Just make sure that the questions you ask your audience are real questions and not just cheap gimmicks to get people to raise their hands. I can’t stand it if a speaker starts off a presentation by asking, “How many of you would like to make more money and work fewer hours each week?” Well, who wouldn’t? Duh! Questions like this are insulting because they come across as manipulative and don’t seem designed to generate thoughtful answers.

As long as you can think of one interesting question for your audience or have one interesting fact or message for them, you will always have a pretty good beginning to your presentation.

This article was taken from my new book “How to Give a Pretty Good Presentation” You can order a copy from Amazon.com or from your local bookstore.