How to Engage an Audience During a Public Speech
If you are a motivational speaker, and you happen to be a good one, then you know how it feels to be invited to numerous conferences around the country or even the world. You know this is tiring work, but you probably love what you do. It gives you a chance to connect with the audience, to give them away to understand your chosen topics. That being said, you don’t always find the right tone, sometimes you may suffer from what we call speaker fatigue, or maybe the topics are so talked about, that your audience is suffering from listener fatigue instead. To get back on your feet and keep people engaged, you may need to make some changes:
Why Should the Audience Listen?
If your audience doesn’t have a reason to feel engaged, then you need to take steps to keep them listening. This may be an awkward situation, as some audiences aren’t there in a voluntary manner, so the answer is to let them know why they should care about the topic at hand. If you are talking about marketing or sales, then you should tell the audience about the few salespeople who overcame overwhelming obstacles and managed to succeed where others failed.
Stick to the Subject
You should only talk about the things your audience expects to hear during your speech. Now that may be a no-brainer, but some speakers tend to go off on a tangent about unrelated things and that completely loses their audience. Stay focused. If you don’t you risk completely losing the interest of your audience and sabotaging your efforts to make a point with your speech. Don’t make that rookie mistake, instead keep your speech tight and on point.
Keep the Flow Going
If your presentation is compelling enough and the audience is rapt and listening to your every word, then you have entered a state of flow. Presentations challenge the audience members, but you should ride the edge between making things too boring and simplified and too complex and hard to follow. They need to think, but you also need to find the appropriate level of challenge for your audience. When a speaker is going through a series of bullet points, there is no challenge and the audience tends to get bored fairly quickly. On the other hand, if the speaker keeps going on and on about the details of a very complicated flow chart without explaining the overall idea, then the challenge will be too great for your audience to follow. You should always ask yourself whether your presentation is too easy or too hard to follow.
Introduce Changes to Attract Attention
Since people’s concentration tends to wander around, you should do whatever you can to keep their attention focused. The best way to approach that is to change what’s happening in your presentation. You should try some of the following:
- Change from slides to flipcharts and back again
- Change from sitting around tables to standing around a flipchart.
- Change from listening to your speech to discussing a topic with the audience.
- Show a short video
- Use a long silence before and after making an important statement
Telling Stories
Every presentation does well with a few anecdotes thrown in for good measure. People tend to be wired to listen to stories. If you start with a story, then people are far more likely to listen, compared to throwing statistics their way and hoping they stick. Stories must always reinforce your data, to keep your audience engaged.
Take Frequent Breaks
You should let the audience take breaks, something that may happen for just a few minutes at a time. It is a necessary way to allow them some breathing room and also a chance to engage with each other and talk about the topic you’re presenting.
