Find a location with good light for a portrait shot. Place your subject some distance in front of a simple background and select a wide aperture together with a moderately long focal length such as 100mm on a 35mm full-frame camera (about 65mm on a cropped-frame camera). Take a viewpoint about one and a half metres from your subject, allowing you to compose a headshot comfortably within the frame. Focus on the eyes and take the shot.

Result

The subject image is slightly compressed and nicely separated from the background which is blurred.  A used a very wide aperture to ensure that the background was fully blurred.  This effect helps to hold attention in the subject in two ways.  i) The naturally directs itself to the in focus part of the image.  ii) and detail of interest that might have been in the background is lost in the blur.

I was particularly interested to see that even though the background is actually brighter than the subject, in fact it includes some highlights, the attention of the eye is still drawn to the portrait itself.