Episode #187: Huge Auditorium Presentations Are Complex

Owning the room is doable with an audience of one hundred people but much more challenging when there are five thousand people in an auditorium. Today we look at how to own the huge room.

This is what caught my attention lately: Japan’s disease control center has been hit by cyberattacks amid virus

A key disease control center in Japan in the fight against the virus experienced a huge surge in cyberattacks in 2020 with the figure quadrupling to around five point three million from around one point two million. Many of the attacks originated from Russia and China. The monthly average in 2019 of one hundred thousand leapt to four hundred and forty thousand in 2020.

Most of the attacks were phising emails. Lately an increasing number have been EMOTET malware which steals the content of past emails and attempts to dupe email readers into thinking they have received replies from people and organisations they know.

The chances of this happening and happening regularly are remote for most of us. The happening regularly part is the key, because when you are dealing at this scale, you need to get practice to really master the big stage. Nevertheless, in case you find yourself in front of a very large audience, here are a few hints on how to adjust to the increased size of the event.

Get there early and go and sit in some of the most far flung locations. It might be the last row at the back or the rear seats on the elevated third tier of the venue. What you will notice, is that anyone on stage is quite small at that distance. You realize you will seem like a peanut to audience members seated at the far extremes and so you need to “big up” your presentation to suit the tyranny of distance.

The stage area is usually quite long and wide in big venues, but you need to be investigating the front of the stage. Often there is an orchestra pit or a defined space between the front row of seats and the stage itself. You will be standing very close to the apron of the stage, so that you can be more easily seen by your audience. The thing is to try not to fall off the stage when you are presenting. That is why you need to check it out beforehand, so that you know how far is far enough forward. You may laugh, but once you are into it and your eyes are searching for faces up on the third tier at the back, you are not looking down where you are walking anymore. Often those stages are curved and not in a straight line and so it is easy to forget that and down you go.

Definitely go for the pin microphone, so that you hands will be left free for gestures. These gestures will have to become much larger than anything you have been used to before. Remember you are a peanut waving your arms around to those in the cheap seats at the back. This means go for double handed gestures as much as possible, to fill up more of the stage with your presence.

Normally when we hold our hands out, palm up toward an audience in a sign that says “you can trust what I an saying”, the arms will be within the bounds of the sides of our body. On the big stage those hands will be almost drawing a straight line across your body so the hands are super widely spread. If you are raising your hand to indicate something high, like a number, usually it would be slightly above head height. Not this time. You need to raise your hand as high as possible above your head to have any impact.

Don’t overdo it, but get your audience involved by asking them to raise their hands if they have had this or that experience. Pick something which is fairly common, so as many hands will go up as possible. This is using crowd dynamics and crowd psychology. When a huge number of people do that same thing, at the same time, it infects the entire audience with that energy and agreement. You will also get a huge energy boost as their energy connects with you on stage. That is a serious high. Trust me, when any audience leans in toward you, it is electric and at scale. What an incredible feeling. It is like a drug and you want more of it. I don’t know how rock stars calm down after having hours of that amount of monster energy directed at them.

The other thing is having your ki or chi marshaled for the task. Ki or chi is the intrinsic energy we possess and it is most famously seen in martial arts like aikido and taichi. When you are on stage, you have to try and push your energy, your ki, to the very back wall of the hall. You have to mentally project your energy that distance. Your voice helps with this task. You have to be directing your voice all the way to the last rows of seats. I don’t mean yelling, because you are set up with a microphone and if you start yelling you will only distort the sound. What it means is push your voice strength to the back walls.

Your eyes also come into play here. You need to be breaking the audience up into a baseball diamond. Left, center, right field, inner field and outer field. These six sectors have to be worked hard by your eye contact to be picking out individuals and looking straight at their faces. Now if your eyesight isn’t up to the task, don’t worry. Only you will know that the person you are directing your gaze to is a blurry outline in the crowd. The act of looking straight into the eyes of audience members means that at a certain distance, the twenty people seated around that person, all believe it is them you are looking at. In this way, you can engage with many more people, no matter how far away they are seated.

Normally I am not keen on having speakers wandering around the stage when presenting. You have seen this I am sure. The speaker is nervous and they are going up and down, up and down, up and down, the whole time they are speaking, totally detracting and distracting from their key message.

I want you to use the left, center and right sides of the stage. However walk slowly to the extreme edges, stop, settle and talk to the audience on that side. Walk back to the center and talk to those located in the center seating, then walk to the right and do the same for that side of the venue. Keep repeating this walk and stop, settle process throughout your talk. For those in the front row, definitely don’t forget to look at them, because you are so close and can have the greatest impact with that group because they feel your presence most immediately. Don’t fall off the stage unless you want to make it a really spectacularly memorable speech.