Mastering Audience Engagement: Insider Strategies for Dynamic Public Speaking

Do you struggle with fear, doubt and worry in your public speaking? Do you find it difficult to connect with your audience and deliver presentations that leave a lasting, positive, unforgettable impact? If yes, then let's dive in the world of public speaking and presentation skills with your host, Eric Edmeads. Welcome to the Unforgettable podcast.

Welcome back to the Q and A portion of the Speaker Nate podcast. I'm Eric Edmeads, your host and as usual, I'm answering your questions to help you find and develop your voice and get it out into the world in the most compelling way. And today's three questions are categorized in this topic. Audience engagement strategies. These are great questions. The first one is what techniques do you recommend for keeping an audience engaged throughout the speech? This is a really excellent question. Now I can tell it to you this way. My very good friend Janet Atwood is a multi New York Times best selling author and a very, very successful and prolific speaker. She speaks all over the world. And one day we were giving speeches together in Copenhagen. There we were in Denmark. I went on stage and did my thing. And then Janet, she comes up to me and she goes, eric, Eric, how do you do that? I do what? That thing. What thing? That thing you do. Yeah, Janet, what thing? That thing you do where they sit on the edge of their chair and they don't pick up their phones and they don't look at Facebook and they're just eng. And they just, they won't even go and pee. Oh, how do I keep their attention? And so that entered into a fascinating conversation about, frankly, how she was already very, very good at that and some ways she could refine it. And the most important thing we spoke about that day was the power of storytelling. The power of storytelling. You see, when I am delivering a speech or a training, my feeling is that I'm creating a bubble, a big bubble around the audience. And my job is to maintain that bubble. A big holodeck so that they are in the experience with me, that they forget time. And by the way, what often happens at the end of my workshops is people go, I feel like I've gotten to know everybody here like I've known them for years. But at the same time, I feel like we only just started a few minutes ago. Time distortion because of the bubble. So your job is to create an experience for the audience and really good storytelling does that. Think about it. You could tell a story that might span six months of your life and you might tell that story in five minutes. Well, the joke of it Is is that the audience later won't remember how long it took to hear the story. They'll remember the story in terms of the experience it created for them. So storytelling is one of the very best ways that you can keep your audience really, really engaged. One way silly little metaphor is, did you ever play the game with the balloon where you have to pop the balloon up and if. With your friends, and if the balloon came down and touched the floor, it was like a bomb and it would explode. We used to play this game all the time when we were kids. Well, I want to suggest to you that when you are delivering for an audience, a very similar thing is going on. Your job is to keep popping their attention up, keeping them engaged, keeping them engaged. And if you let their engagement fall too far and hit the floor, well, game over, right? And so what you want to do is make sure that when you're telling your stories, you're keeping an eye on the audience, and you're popping them up, and you're using your voice and you're using your stories to keep their intention engaged. Then it might come time to lecture. It might come time to wrap up the story and explain the moral of the story. That's great. You can do that. But when you're doing that, notice that the balloon is coming down, and then you want to quickly pop it back up. I hope that that helps with that question. Our next question, related, of course, is how can the speaker gauge audience reaction and adjust accordingly? Great question. And I mean it. Like, listen, cameras are tough, right? You can't gauge the audience reaction to the camera. But when you have an audience in front of you, you create a connection with them. You create an empathetic connection with them, and you have your visual observation of them. And so what happens as you're giving your presentation is you see them. And I don't recommend that you focus on any one person because, you know, people have different facial expressions. You don't know what they're thinking. What you're really looking to do is create something called expanded awareness, where you're gazing at the audience and feeling the energy of the audience. And as you feel the energy of the audience, what you'll begin to pick up is that you might be losing them a little, that you might need to change your voice modulation, that maybe you've been droning on in the auditory level for a little bit too long. Years and years ago, I was giving a presentation and I was sharing some ideas about cancer and about food and nutrition, and I shared this one Idea. And I was speaking at a very like, good conference with high quality people there. And I noticed that the event organizer was sitting just over there. And I noticed that I lost him. I noticed he wasn't fully engaged. I could feel the energy and I could feel that it was true about the people around him as well. And so I adjusted. I saw what was happening and I realized that maybe I hadn't explained it clearly enough and maybe I wasn't using my voice enough. I walked to that part of the stage, I took a deep breath and I paused for a moment because whenever you pause, people stop and look, why isn't he speaking? Recalibrated their attention and then re explained it with more energy and with a better example. And pretty soon he was nodding and he was engaged again. So what you want to do is create this sense of expanded awareness. How is the audience responding to what's going on? Sometimes maybe they're looking a little tired, maybe the air conditioning isn't on enough and they're getting a bit warm. Then that might be a time for you to jump in with a little more energy. Or it might be time for you to get them to stand up and talk to each other or do a little bit of an exercise. And that will lead us very nicely into our third question. What are some interactive elements that can be added to a speech to increase engagement? That also is a fabulous question, as they all are. And here's the thing. Sometimes in some context, you're only there to speak. You're giving a keynote and you're not really doing exercises with them. So this becomes a little bit more difficult. But even in that case, even in that case, there's never harm in looking for a show of hands. If you're asking for a show of hands, you do something like this. How many of you, and you raise your hand already a little bit to let them know that hand raising is coming. How many of you have ever had this experience? And if you use that cadence with good command authority, you'll get response from them again. Let me show you how many of you you see, you raise the hand part of the way to communicate that hand raising is going to be happening. How many of you have had that experience? And you push it up the rest of the way and tall. And then as they raise their hands and people start raising their hands, you say, thank you. Oh, thank you, and give them positive feedback. Now you've involved them with physical engagement in your presentation and you've thanked them for their physical engagement, which is a Re. Which means they're more likely to do it again. Another great mechanism is turn to your partner and share what you've learned. Turn to your partner and share what you've discovered. This is a very powerful mechanism, and you can use it for a variety of reasons. One is if you felt like you've lost the audience a little bit, or again, the room is a little too warm or something like that, you could say, hey, turn to your partner and discuss what we've been talking about. And they will. They'll get together, the energy of the room will raise, and you've bought yourself a couple of minutes to recalibrate where you are, maybe review your notes and to get your energy back online. And another time that this is fabulous is when there's a technical problem. Look, when there's a technical problem, the last thing you want to do is throw the AV guys under the bus. Don't ever blame them. The projector didn't work, the mic cut out. Don't blame them. Just put everybody into an exercise. I have seen this done, and I've done this myself many, many times where something happened with the projector that the audience, they barely even notice these things unless you tell them. And so instead of them noticing that something was wrong with the projector, I said, and so now what I'd like you to do is I'd like you to turn to your partner and I'd like one of you to share your realizations about what we've been talking about. And then I'd like you to switch. That's gonna buy me four or five minutes to get the projector fixed. And it creates an incredible amount of engagement. So it's very important that you wrap all of these things together to maintain that audience engagement. Again, think of it like that balloon. Whenever you feel like you're losing them, pop them up with a little joke, a little story, a little anecdote, a little exercise. And every time you pop them up like that, you buy yourself a little bit of lecture time to share really important information. If you ride that roller coaster well, you're going to deliver highly engaging and highly memorable presentations along the lines of getting practice is doing public talks and making sure you get them on video. So even if you volunteer to go and speak somewhere in an unpaid gig or you organize your own preview event with your friends, get it on video. Because you're going to be able to use that video on social media or on your website to lend some credibility. The main issue here is to get started. Too many people Think that they have to get everything perfect before they get started. You know, if you want to do a fun little exercise, look for some old Tony Robbins vintage videos on YouTube and you will see a guy who was far from perfect but willing to get started and look what he was able to create. Another common question we get is how important is it to niche as a speaker? This is a really great question and it's a tough one sometimes to answer, particularly for me, because the truth is, is that if you do niche, if you find a topic that you're really willing to speak about and you know you'll be willing to talk about for 10 years, then you should do it. If you are a leadership expert, then you should create that niche and you should go into that niche. Because you know what? It's going to make it really easy for event producers and agents and corporate accounts to know who you are and what you stand for. I can tell you I haven't done this so well because I had so eclectic interest that I started teaching business and I became known as a business speaker. And then I started teaching health and you might know me from Wildfit. And then of course we created Speaker Nation. And so at times that's caused market confusion for me where people are like, wow, we've heard Eric's a really great speaker, but what is it exactly that he does? So I'm saying you don't have to do it, but the more niched you are, the more solid and clear your brand identity is and the easier it is for people to book you. Here's a really common one. Can you please share some tips on how to get your first speech and what to do with it? Now, this is a very interesting question because most people find that their first speech is something that happens to them rather than something that they really meant to do. So what I mean by that is one of the very first speeches I had to do was when a friend of mine came and asked me to present an award for them. I mean, not what I really wanted to do, considering I was terrified of public speaking. But there was a part of me that knew it needed to happen and so I agreed to do it. Some months later, I got another request. Would I be willing to come and share my ideas about health? Would I be willing to come and share my ideas about food and diet? Well, as it was a major hobby for me, I agreed to go and do that talk. So sometimes your initial talks will simply come up because somebody knows that you have an interest and they want you to Come and speak. So sometimes the first step is just to say yes. Now, if you haven't had that invitation and you haven't had somebody ask, then there are other ways to do it. And I think one of the very best ones you can do is to simply put a note out. Put a note out to your friends and say, guys, I'm starting my career as a speaker and I'm organizing a talk. I've booked a little room at this hotel, and it's at 7 o', clock, and I really hope you'll be there to help me out with this. And I think that giving your first talk like that can be fantastic because you have a really nice, warm audience. You can get some photographs of you on stage with an audience, and you can already begin to build some level of experience. But there's an even easier way. Something that wasn't available to me and totally is available to you. It's called going live. And that's simple. You can open up your Instagram or your Facebook app, and you can click the Go Live button and just start speaking. And you know what's really great about that? It's totally different than recording a video. When you're recording a video and you get something wrong, you're tempted to go back and fix it because, you know, perfection and all right, but when you go live, you can't do that. And so it really does give you the feeling that people are watching. And by the way, maybe you don't have tons of followers yet, maybe you do. But even if one or two people tune in or remember that people can watch on the replay. So when you press live, it will create for you the feeling of a live presentation, and it's a fabulous way to test out your stories. And of course, I've got one more way for you, and it's really simplepeakernation.com you can find our membership there, where we have practice clubs. And if you've never given a speech before, if you're terrified, or if you're excited, you can show up and give your very first speech in front of the warmest crowd you'll ever get. SpeakerNation.com.

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