How to Engage Your Audience at Their Level
Successful communication/presentation skills are based in part on how well you perceive, incorporate and engage your audience. Whether your audiences are one-on-one or thousands you need to engage them in dialogue —no monologues, no oratory. Because your goal is to connect with your listeners, to get them to listen, and to get them to want more.
You will be far more successful as a speaker if you focus on what your particular audience wants to hear as opposed to what you want to tell them. This can be a difficult task if you’re a subject matter expert. By no means am I advocating that you dumb it down. What I am advocating is how you take your great content and deliver it well and present it plainly. Imagine you’re having an everyday conversation. Develop a smooth lead in that has an emotional hook — a hook to tap your audience’s goals, aspirations, or anxieties.
Here’s where storytelling becomes a major tool to grab your audience’s attention. Most of what we’ve learned in life has come through stories. Your story should be personal, reflective and a metaphor for the major topic of your presentation. In other words, your story should reflect the audience’s needs and trigger reactions from them. Those reactions can be as simple as a verbal ‘aha’, physical response or even applause. Your job as a speaker is to be attentive so you can perceive those reactions and build from them. The more interactive your audience is the more successful your presentations will be.
In addition, it’s important to remember your audiences are not there to hear your stories. Once you engage your audience, ease into the point of your presentation quickly. In addition, don’t try and overwhelm your audience with lots of data facts and figures.
A good test for your opening is to practice it on a child to learn how much they understand what you’re talking about.
Practice Practice Practice
As a coach, trainer and consultant, Larry Blumsack partners with people and organizations on the move and those already there to accelerate their communication, presentation and speaking skills to be on par with their ambition. Through one-on-one coaching and group training Larry helps leaders and aspiring leaders elevate their presence and communication skills to influence more people, sell more products-services-ideas and inspire others more successfully than they ever imagined.
Larry is the bestselling author of Face-to-Face is The Ultimate Social Media and founder of Zoka Institute and Zoka Training®. Zoka Training® — Mind/Voice/Body/Mindfulness in sync — is the result of Larry’s 45 years as a coach, acting teacher, actor, voice-over artist, theater and TV director/producer, radio & TV commentator and show host, speaker, trainer, serial entrepreneur, and syndicated columnist. Larry was a founding member of the theater department at Northeastern University.
Leave a Reply