If all you do is reel someone in, they are going to feel pressured/pursued and their natural instinct is going to be to try to get away. With the reel-in and release takeaway, you alternate between pursuing someone, and having them pursue you, which continually freshens their interest and keeps your "fish" on the line.

This applies to sales as well- if all you do is chase a client with reasons to buy into the deal, he's most likely going to try to get away, so you gotta get him to chase the deal some also.

And it applies to any time you are telling a story or teaching a class and want to keep your listeners interested.

So how do we do that? Well, the object of this thread is to get to the bottom of the takeaway technique, because involves the most important aspect of story-telling, sales or seduction: making someone hunger for what you're offering.

Pick-up artist Mystery often teases girls by introducing an interesting subject, and then he speaks very slowly and pauses a few times to make them drool and jump over each other like puppies for the rest of each sentence and rest of the details, as he's slowly feeding the story to them. Then he teases them some more by interrupting the story with a false takeaway "I'm sure you don't want to know the boring details", and turns to walk away, whereby the girls grab him, saying "where do you think you're going??... Tell us the rest of the gddamn story!!" His technique is so effective it makes women actually get physically aggressive towards him. Can you imagine Mystery the car salesman? Customers grabbing him by the shirt- "Where do you think you're going, come back here and finish selling us this gddamn car!!"

I think the best way for us to learn how to do this is to put together a list of ideas for takeaways in order to form a backbone list/database to pull from, which will allow us to practice using takeaways and thinking that way (which is quite unnatural for most of us, I imagine), so then once it starts to become a natural part of our conversations, we will eventually be able to start putting together our own takeaways on the fly and using them on a daily basis, in any situation you want to keep someone's attention.

Mystery uses several types of teases and takeaways:
Interesting story interrupt (described above)

The "I'm curious about you, but check out this fake distraction" interrupt.

The false time constraint: (sorry girls/guys, gotta run...okay I'll give you one more minute).

The "Things are too good" takeaway, like "We have too much in common, so we can't date", or "You're too nice, so we'd never be a normal couple."

The Deal-Breaker takeaway: Mystery reels 'em in with "I love you", or "You're the perfect girl/guy for me", and then throws an easy-to-fix "deal-breaker" roadblock in their path to play upon their inclination to fix things, such as "but, you remind me of someone I had a crush on in high school, so I could never date you..."

So, got any more to add to the list?