Use this simple tool to keep your audience engaged:

What is the movement of your talk as a whole? In other words, where is it going? What is the pace of your talk? How does it feel? Does it land? We hear that phrase sometimes, like, did you land that moment? I'm going to share with you a tool that I have used with my speakers in the past to help us get to a little more self-awareness of what's happening with the movement of our talks. When I think about the movement of the talk as a whole, this is where a lot of what we've been talking about over the last several weeks comes together, because when we use the between moments super well, right, the silence, the spacing, it can help shape our talk. It creates movement in our talk. Our stories give our talks shape and movement and feel. So we're not always talking at people. The before moment is a beat that gives your talk shape and engagement and curiosity. All of those things really create movement. So that we are moving towards something and it is not just a slog all the way along. We want moments where we're moving through faster and where we are setting up those key important moments for our audience. And then there's going to be times where you are flying through because it's not as important. So we want to use all of these tools so that our our audience can more easily remember the important things. We've talked about this whole way along. They're not going to remember everything. It's not possible. No brain can do that. Everything creates a feel and there are moments we want them to remember. And so we're going to use, put all of these things together so that they can remember. And the movement of the talk is really the, I was going to say, It's like a French phrase that I'm trying to access right now that I'm not even sure I know what it means. Le résistance something. You guys know what I mean, right? It's like the thing. It brings it all together. Someone in the comments, you can help me. You know what I mean? Ah, so what we are trying to avoid, of course, is stagnation. Those moments when our audience gets bored or they're less engaged or they're all of a sudden like those moments where they're pulled out of the experience and they're analyzing it. That's what we're trying to avoid when we think about the movement of the talk is really keeping people with us and, and, and serving up those most important moments to our audience and saying, here you go, here's a really important thing. Don't forget this. I am underlining it for you. So when you get to a moment where you're like, this isn't landing, This is not— the movement of this isn't working right now. There's something in it where even as a speaker, you're like, ah, this, this feels so opaque and like there's nothing for people to hang on to and it's not clear. Here's a few things I want you to think about. Maybe you just need to cut it. Maybe it's an easy cut. You just get rid of it because ultimately it's not that necessary. It's not serving you and moving your audience to the next part of your talk. So if you don't need it, get rid of it. Maybe you need to look at how long you have been in one particular mode, right? So maybe you've been at the, what I call the commentary part, where you're talking at people, you're offering your commentary, you're saying, uh, here's what I've noticed, here you're analyzing it, you're offering your expertise. If you stay in that mode too long, people start to go somewhere else in their brain, and it's time to switch up the modes and tell a story. And maybe that's what's going on. How you figure this out— then here's the tool that I want to share with you— how you figure this out is by mapping your talk. And you can take all kinds of different elements of a talk, like the pace, or even like positive, negative. You can look at your pitch and figure out, am I at this, this one pitch for too long? What does this really look like? What is the movement of my talk actually look like? What is the shape of my talk? Well, you can map it out. It's a really, really powerful way to take something that can feel super esoteric and give it a visual shape so you can understand yourself and your tendencies and ultimately what shape you want to create, how you want your movement of your talk to look and feel for your audience. So you could look at, let's say, pacing, for example. I'm going to take a piece of paper. So let's say I wanted to look at pace. You just pull out a blank piece of paper and you're going to watch and listen for yourself. And all you're listening for is pacing. Okay, so there's kind of a— you're gonna have like, oh, that marker's not working. You're kind of gonna have a middle basic line of like, okay, that, that's sort of mid-pace. Can you guys see that? Super helpful tool, Sally. Can't see what you're doing. Let's try that again. Okay, we've got— can you see that? Really? Another bad marker. We'll use one of these big ones. Can you see that? There we go. Okay, so you have kind of a midline, and as you are mapping your talk, you're just taking your pen and putting it on the paper and listening and watching without judgment the best that you can. You're listening for changes in pace. So as you get faster, it goes up, and as you get slower, you bring your pen down. Now again, it's not exact, it's not scientific. You don't have to be like, well, it doesn't really— it's not to scale, blah blah blah. You're just trying to give a sense of of the shape of it. And what we want to see, you know, it doesn't have to be like this, doesn't have to do that, but you want to see some variety. And importantly, when you slow down, you want it to match up with important moments. Or when it's super fast like that, is that the feel that you want? Is it like a really exciting thing maybe, and you want, you want the movement to match that? Or maybe it's just really unimportant. Like sometimes I have my speakers move really quickly through some things because we want to give the impression, we want to give the feel of like, oh my gosh, there's so much and there's this and there's this and there's this. It doesn't really matter what they're saying. I want the impression to be clear. I want the movement of it to be clear because it makes us feel something. Ultimately, we are with all of this. What makes a memorable speaker on stage is the feeling that we create, and we are serving it up to our audience intentionally. And we're trying to find that really difficult balance of being intentional without being robotic, about being thoughtful about how we use our body and how we use the movement of our talk without being choreographed, without being so polished that it no longer feels of the moment, in the moment, connected to the audience. It is the thing that we are as speakers. It's that elusive place that we are always trying to get to. Now, when you master it, when you have those moments where you're like, I felt really free, but I knew where I was going, I knew where I was moving towards. And I think thinking about the movement of your talk helps us get there because then it's not We're not focused on every little moment, but there are key moments that we're really gonna focus on. What are those key moments you wanna nail? What are those moments where you're like, I'm gonna be sure that I slow this down so people don't miss it. And then there's gonna be times when we're like, we're just flying through cuz this is fun and we're just giving the feeling, the impression of an experience. So it helps us. Find that elusive place in the middle between this is really, really important and I'm gonna let go of this. It's kind of, you guys know the Lazy Genius? We're kind of lazy genius-ing our thoughts. I just had that aha moment all by myself here.