Ep 196 What to Do If You're Losing Your Audience July 14, 2016

What to do if you're losing your audience.

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public, to the media, at work and in Life. Speaking with T.J. walker.

This is a nightmare for a lot of speakers. Everything is going as planned and yet you're clearly losing your audience. They're not paying attention, they're on their cell phones, they're talking to each other, or their facial expression is just one of complete utter boredom. You may toss out questions, there's no response. Well, for starters, I want to congratulate you for even noticing that you're losing your audience. One of the big problems is so many speakers have is they're clueless about the state of their audience because the speaker is so focused on his or her speech, presentation, text. They're reading either a piece of paper or they're reading slides. They're treating the speech as if it's just a treadmill. They're trying to or a conveyor belt. They're trying to get enough facts off as quickly as possible into the factory or into the warehouse. And they wouldn't even notice you if you are falling asleep or if you standing on your chair and lit your hair on fire. That's unfortunately the attitude a lot of speakers have. So give yourself some credit if you even notice that you're losing your audience. But after you've done that, it's time to roll up your sleeves and we've got to get to work. We have to solve problems. The problem Sometimes there are factors beyond your control. Let's say the room is excessively hot. You may want to stop your presentation and say, hey, Sally, or Jim, can you open the window or open the door? It's awfully hot in here. Address people's concerns. Sometimes the other speaker before you has gone on way too long and it's now been three hours since your audience has been able to stand up. You may want to just stop and let people stand up, say, I don't know about you, but I haven't stood in three hours and it's unfair for me to get to do it without you. So let's take 60 seconds, all stand up and turn around and stretch for a moment and then go right back to it. I've done that before. Sometimes it's been too long since a bathroom break. You've got to give people an opportunity to go to the toilet, go to the restroom if they need to. But those things are relatively easy to solve. Sometimes it's because what you are saying is uninteresting, or the way you're saying it is uninteresting. The biggest problem many people have is they have a speech. It's a lot of data points, a lot of numbers, message points. And they believe erroneously that they can sort of stand there and go through the facts, go through the numbers, stand in one place, read or semi read bunch of messages from a page or a PowerPoint slide and that will somehow suffice. That will not work. I'll show you how to correct that in a moment.

Do you have a speaking related question for number one USA Today best selling author TJ Walker? For more than 30 years, Walker has been a public speaking coach and media trainer to presidents of countries, prime ministers, CEOs, Nobel Peace Prize winners, professional athletes and Ms. Universes. Send your questions to infoediatrainingworldwide.com or on Twitter J. Walker.

One Technique if you feel you're losing your audience, ask questions and see if you can get them engaged. Sometimes that works, sometimes that doesn't. Now one thing I've done from time to time is I'll just go up to someone in the audience, say, Jose, I feel like I'm not being very clear here. Is what I'm saying making sense? And this way I'm asking someone in the audience a very specific question, but I'm not criticizing them, I'm criticizing myself. I'm not saying Jim, are you getting this? Because the implication there is that Jim is stupid and I'm the smart one. Well, if I'm a speaker, that is a horrible thing to be putting out. It's just going to make people hate me. But if I couch it in terms of Jim or Jose, I'm afraid I'm not making this very clear. Does this make any sense? I'm giving the audience member an opportunity to admit that things are a little bit fuzzy, but it's a mild criticism of me, not of them. Sometimes that can reveal things or help figure out what the problem is. Sometimes you're just going so quickly and you've been too abstract. Really, really look at people's eyes and their face to make sure they're getting a point. If you feel like they aren't getting it, before you go to the next point on your outline or your PowerPoint slide, stop and get another example, a story, a more compelling analogy so that you can see the look in people's eyes of oh, okay, now I get it. That's one avenue. Another avenue is to just toss out a more open ended question to your audience and say, how do you think this might be useful to you? What I'm saying, and then call on people, see what they say, because perhaps you're being unclear and someone will bring that to your attention. Perhaps you brought up something so fascinating five minutes ago that everyone is now thinking about the practical applications of what you said five minutes ago. So. So of course their eyes are glazed over with what you're saying now. They're lost in their thought. Well, let's go back to what you said 5 minutes ago and go much, much deeper. That can be one approach. Part of it can just be the style of how you're moving physically. Walk around the room. You may have a situation where the people in the front row look fascinated and everybody in the back half of the room looks like they're falling asleep, or worse, they're totally immersed on their cell phones. Walk back there, don't say, I'm coming back here to wrap you on the knuckles because you've been bad boys and girls and I'm going to get you off your cell phone. No, I wouldn't say it that way. But just walk back there while you're talking, while you're saying interesting things, while you're tossing out questions and look people in the eye back there. Give them some of the front row treatment. If you've been to any really high level rock and roll or musical concerts in the last 10 years, you may have seen this trend where instead of the stage just being completely flat, 30ft across, they'll build these gigantic horseshoes, these stages that go way out into the audience. And the reason for that is it just gives 10 times as many people a front row seat. And now you've got in some cases thousands of people who are going to be at least or no more than 20ft away from the star performers, whether it's bona, whether it's Mick Jagger, you can use the same technique, not that you have to build a gigantic horseshoe stage, but simply walk out to your audience, walk to the back of the room, walk to the side of the room, look people directly in the eye and don't be afraid to say, is this making any sense? Again, you don't want to sound insecure, but start a real conversation with people because at some level every great presentation is a conversation. Now, I understand if you're speaking to 5,000 people and you've been given an exact 12 minute time limit and things are highly structured, you can't have as many real questions and answers from the audience. But if it's your own event, if you don't have a severe, strict, regimented time restriction and you can call the shots as to when you enter. Maybe it doesn't matter whether you go 20 minutes or 26 minutes. Then loosen it up a little, Mix it up with your audience, ask them questions and be in the moment. Ask a question that you hadn't necessarily prepared in advance or plan, and truly listen to what the person says. The mistake a lot of speakers make is they only ask planned, prepared questions and they're hoping for a very specific response that they can then use as the starting point for their next point. You can't do it like that. You have to genuinely ask a question you don't know the answer to. Truly listen, listen for insights that you've actually learned and then build on that. When you do that, it's much harder to lose the audience. Sometimes what you have to do is make quick edits on the fly, and you can't do that if you feel wedded to and you've got your whole speech and presentation bullet pointed out almost word for word. If you're going deep in a particular subject area and you now sense that everyone in the room is bored with it, go to a different subject. And if you have to just very, very quickly advance four slides to get that, that's okay. Don't apologize. Don't say, oh, I realize this is boring, I'm not going to talk. Just go to the points where you think it will now be interesting to the audience. A good speaker is like a good surgeon. At some level you do what you need to do, but you're constantly monitoring and want to make sure things are alive. It doesn't matter how good your surgery is. If there's no longer a heart rate and the patient is dead, your surgery is a failure. Doesn't matter how pretty your words are on text, if your audience is asleep, your presentation has failed. So I'm not suggesting you have to get up and do a song and dance or a striptease. But if you can't keep your audience interested, it's never the audience's fault. It's always your fault. You've got to adjust accordingly. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. May all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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