Episode #122: How To Sustain Audience Interest

We know that first impressions really count and we have planned the start. We contacted the organisers well before the talk to get a sense of who has signed up for the talk and what their main interests are. We got to the venue early and checked on all the logistics. We have been speaking with some of the early arrivals to get a sense of why they are attending and to know their name. We reference their name as we start to connect with the audience and remove the barriers between speaker and the gathered masses.

We are also fully primed for the end, with both our first summation and our final close. We know we need two closes, one for the immediate end of the talk and another one for after the Q&A. We have prepared both. We know how to properly handle questions – repeating, if not hostile or paraphrasing if a veiled or direct attack upon us. In this way, we can make sure everyone heard the question and that any invective in a question has been properly neutered.

What about the middle bit of the speech? How we do we keep attention from start to finish when we have an entire audience fully tooled up with their escape vehicles, their mobile phones, firmly clasped in their hands.

The next time, you are at a presentation look around after the first 10 minutes and see what the audience are doing. Many will be surreptitiously scrolling through their Facebook or Line feed or whatever, multi-tasking, rather than giving the speaker their full attention. How to not become that speaker who has lost the opportunity to get their key message across to the audience?

Every five minutes we need to switch the pace. We need to be presenting something that grabs the attention of the masses. We need an example, a story, demonstration, audience involvement, etc.

We need to use pace – fast and slow, strength – loud and soft, vocal intonation – up and down. Japanese native speakers have a disadvantage on the up and down front, because Japanese is monotone delivery language. No problem, just work on the pace and strength variables and you will gain enough variety in the delivery to keep your audience’s attention.

Story telling is so powerful and so under used. So tell your disasters, your fails, your hard won lessons, your triumphs. Come up with pithy quotes that are referencing well known legends like JFK or Churchill etc.

The key here is the planning and then the practice. What is written down sounds a bit clumsy sometimes when we say it out loud. This is where rehearsal comes in. Go through the presentation and work on the cadence of the delivery. Make sure that every 5 minutes you are switching gears and giving your audience something to do, like raise their hand (don’t overdo this, it is annoying) or ponder, or laugh at, or nod to knowingly.

We cannot let our audience escape and lose the benefit of hearing our valuable message to the idiocies of whatever is trending on social media.