A few tips for keeping your audience engaged

If you’re going to be a successful public speaker the first thing you need to accomplish is to have your audience pay attention and remember what you say during your talk, speed, presentation, or seminar. To do this you’re going to have to be quick on your toes, and adapt. Here are a couple of common issues that you might find your audiences facing while you speak and some tips about how you can adapt to compensate for them.

Boredom

You can address boredom by picking up the pace and skipping over some of the details. This can be hard to do—after all, you put those words in the presentation because you wanted them covered, right? But think of it the other way around and you’ll see that if you don’t start trimming some of the details they are not going to get any of your message. Some is usually better than none.

Distraction

Inattentiveness can be a little tougher to address. Side conversations can be a sign that you’ve sparked interest or debate in part of your message, and you may want to let those conversations proceed for a short period of time in order to let your audience members follow their own paths of learning throughout your presentation.

Longer side conversations, loud conversations, or conversations that are growing to involve a substantial part of your audience need to be either recognized and addressed through you with the whole audience, or they need to be shut down. Either way, you cannot allow a subset of your audience to hijack the presentation away from everyone else by making it difficult to hear and focus on you. I find that a politely phrased question—something like “I’m sorry, was there a question about something I said?”—is a pretty good way to regain control and attention when you need to do so.

Confusion

When the audience is confused you need to dig a little and Wnd out where the problem is. “I see a lot of puzzled looks out there… Where was I not clear?”

You’ll have to rely on them to tell you that they aren’t following, and if you don’t get any feedback, you’ll have to guess. I suggest you dig in and try to explain the topic of confusion with more or less detail (as appropriate) or from another point of view, and see whether you can alleviate the confused looks. Often this departure off the track will provide the incentive your audience needs to start asking questions, and then you can more eVectively pinpoint and address the source of their confusion.

When you’re way off base

You may occasionally find that you have greatly misunderstood your audience, either in terms of what they already know or what their goals are in attending your talk. Hopefully you will prepare well enough most of the time that this will happen only very infrequently. But it will happen sometimes, so what do you do?

When you realize that this has happened to you, then it is best to diverge from your planned material as far as you can while still remaining comfortable and convincing as a speaker. Some people are comfortable winging it, and some people aren’t; but when you find that you’ve come wearing a tuxedo to a barbeque lunch, you’re going to need to adapt.

Even if you cannot give your audience exactly what they were expecting, you can at least meet them in the middle. If your first fifteen slides cover the history of genetic testing, but you arrive at your talk to discover that most of the audience has done PhD research in this area, you’d be better served to skip those first slides altogether than to torment yourself and everyone else by slogging through them just because they are there. Remember, you are there to communicate something to them. If they already know part of what you had planned to communicate, then move on.