Ep 9 What To Do If You Are Losing Your Audience

What do you 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 question comes from Tex Ragsdale, writing from our YouTube page. He says, TJ, should you cut a speech short if you see that the audience looks bored? Well, Tex, this does happen from time. It happens to everyone. It's happened to me. I don't care how good a speaker you are, it will happen from time to time. Everything seems like it's going well. You're hitting your points, you're telling your stories, you're engaging, you're doing everything as you plan. And still you might see people with their arms crossed, looking down at their cell phones, or maybe they're being respectful, but their faces are just completely blank. What do you do? Now? I understand your impulse to cut it short, finish up, wrap up quickly. Occasionally that could be the best choice, but I don't think that is necessarily your first option. You want to choose for if the audience looks bored, that's telling you something's wrong with you. Quite often you're not giving them information that is as interesting or as relevant as it could be. So the first checklist you should go through when you're thinking in front of people is. Is, what can I say that's more interesting to these people? How can I make my ideas more interesting? It may be that you're going deeper and deeper into a particular area and that example just isn't interesting to people or that particular point doesn't resonate with them. Go to the next one. Part of being a great speaker is you have to be flexible. Yes, you do have to have a plan. You do need a structure. You do need an outline. I'm a big fan of using notes, but don't be wedded to it. If you can see everybody's eyes just glazy and not looking like they're totally into you. Try something else. So that's my first instinct. Not to wrap up quickly, but to switch topics or at least messages. You may have the same topic for the whole speech, but you need to find a different. A different message that resonates. Also, try to engage the audience. Stop and ask an audience member a question. Also challenge yourself. Are you being as interesting and compelling as possible, or are you doing what most speakers do, sort of standing behind a lectern, everything at the same pace, the same speed and the same volume. There's not enough variety there. Now. Now, you mentioned if the audience looks bored. Let's go into that in a little more detail.

Body language.

Today's body language segment is not about you, the speaker. It is about the body language of the audience. If you want to be a truly great speaker, you have to be keenly aware of the body language that your audience is sending. If they're constantly shifting as if they're uncomfortable, if they're sitting way back, as if they are really way too comfortable, those can be problem signs. If they're not looking at you, that's a problem sign. And of course, in most cases, the worst situation is if they are holding up a cell phone and typing. Now, it could be that they think you're saying something so brilliant, so insightful, they're quoting you and tweeting it. So I don't want to say it's automatically a bad sign if people have their cell phones out. And certainly these days with millennials, they might be capturing video of you and tweeting that, posting that on Snapchat. But let's not kid ourselves. In my experience, when audience members are on their cell phone, they're checking their email, they're checking the sports scores, they're chatting with friends on Snapchat, on Facebook, they're looking at posts on Pinterest, they're not looking at you, or maybe they're half listening to you, half focusing on that, that is a sign of true failure. So it's easy for me to talk about, look at the body language of your audience. But as a practical matter, it's very difficult for most speakers to do because most speakers are nervous, most speakers are uncomfortable. So they are fixated on their slide deck, which might be behind them, that they're projecting. They're focused on a full written script. Even though you've heard me say a thousand times, don't use a full written script, or they're focused on highly detailed notes, which are quite extensive, and it keeps their head, head pointed down for most of the time. All of those things are huge traps, and it prevents you from really looking carefully at audience members. The other big problem, frankly, is that if you don't speak a lot and you're nervous, you don't actually see individual audience members. You just kind of look out and you see this mass of people. You see this mass of people, and you're kind of nervous and you're thinking, okay, let me get through this, let me get to the next point. Me, me, me. What's next for me? And you don't actually notice what the audience is doing. So, so much of getting good at this is you have to be comfortable enough to really look at the audience, not think of anything and focus on them to see what they're doing. Only then can you make a judgment of do you need to switch messages? Do you need to go to a different example? Are you somehow too dated? Are you speaking too slowly? Or are there other issues involved? And let's go over some of these other issues.

Inside doe the craft of media and presentation training.

Sometimes it's just mundane stuff. It's the temperature of the room. If it's too hot, if it's too cold, people are covering themselves up, crossing their arms. It's not necessarily because they are trying to shut you off, they're just cold. So part of being a good speaker is you have to think about how is this room for the audience. Now, you can't always control the room. If you're speaking at a big hotel, a big conference in Las Vegas, and you're one of 50 speakers for the day and there's a thousand people in the room, and you're not necessarily going to know how the room feels everywhere, nor are you going to be able to control the master switch for the thermostat. But if it is a room in your own building, your own office, anything you control, you should be aware of that. Now, as a speaker, if you're a little bit nervous, chances are you're a little bit heated. Especially if you're walking around as you should be, you may be feeling some tension. So you may be hot and not notice that the audience is in fact cold. Well, you've got to focus on the audience, not yourself. If they're cold and you're already a little hot, you've got to try to get the temperature up. That's part of the issue. If you are speaking to them for a lengthy period of time, you need to get bathroom breaks. I know this sounds mundane, this doesn't sound like brilliant strategic insight or advice, but often people forget these little details. So you need to think about all of them. Now, sometimes you may be slated to speak at 10:30 and there's a break at 11, but everyone's running late. And now you don't get to start speaking until 11:05. You may have to make a judgment call and just say, hey, before we start, all run to the restroom and I'm going to start in three minutes. Even if the organizer hadn't planned it that way, believe me, your audience will thank you and they will show their appreciation by actually focusing on you more. A speaker's relationship with the audience is like any other relationship. It can go well, it can go poorly. If you reciprocate, it tends to go better. If you show concern for the other party, they will most likely show more of a concern for you. Now, in a moment, I want to focus on specific things of what not to do. If you feel like you're really losing the audience.

What not to say and do.

Worst thing you could possibly say is, uh, oh, I can see I'm losing you. Let me just wrap this up quickly because maybe half the audience, maybe the third of the audience thought everything was fine. They found you interesting. Maybe you just got distracted by one or two people who were bored or out of it or just hadn't slept that night. Other people thought you were doing things well. But by announcing to the world that you think you're bombing, you're planting seeds of negativity in the audience. And part of them think, they think, well, you're smart. If you think your speech is awful, hey, you must be right, it must be awful. So if you're going to shorten the speech, my advice is don't tell anyone you're doing it and don't do it and announce that you're doing it as a sign of defeat. Simply finish your presentation, act like you said everything you want to say, and act like you can't believe how well this presentation went. Do that. There's a crowd psychology. You will affect not everyone. If some people genuinely thought you were awful or boring, you're not going to change their opinion. But for other people, you may actually convince them and they may walk away with a sense that you were confident, you were authoritative, you were actually good. Interesting. Now, the other thing you can't do is just assume because someone is falling asleep or looks totally bored that it's a reflection that you're losing the audience. If you're talking to a larger group, a hundred people or so, there's always somebody who didn't sleep that night. There's already always someone who got stuck on a plane and coach and now hasn't slept in two days. You could be the most interesting, fascinating speaker in the history of the world. They would still be nodding off. So don't beat yourself up if you can't win everyone and don't give all your attention to those people. Instead, focus on the audience you do have. Engage. I mean, if it truly looks like everyone is zoning out, no matter what you do and you've walked around, you've engaged, you've asked questions, you've shifted gears then it might be time to throw in the towel. But do it gracefully, do it without, without causing or calling any more attention to your failures. Thanks so much for the question there. Do appreciate it. By the way, we do take your questions here.

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.

So by all means, please send me your questions. I have questions for you. This is an interactive show and my question for you is what have you done in the past when you felt like you were losing the audience? Now I remember once about a dozen years ago, I was doing a training and speaking in front of about 20 people. They all happened to be officials from Nigeria. This was the Attorney General, senators, governors from Nigeria. And there was a tremendous amount of talking back and forth and they're all in the front row and I'm right there, I'm thinking, oh, am I losing them? The organizer of the event came up to me, tj, you're losing them. You better wrap up early. So I did wrap up early and I thought I didn't apologize or call attention to it, but I did finish about a half an hour early that day thinking, wow, I didn't really do very well. This is a bit disappointing. But here's the surprising thing. The second I finished, all of the trainees sort of rushed up to me and they fought with each other over who could get, who could take their picture with me first. They actually liked me. They liked the training. It was I guess just a bit of a cultural thing where it was considered common and normal to talk the entire time throughout the presentation. So in that case, I think I misjudged slightly and the conference organizer did as well. So you never completely know. All you can do is do your very best, focus on it, try a few things and if you do, throw in the flag. If you do call it quits, do so with grace. On that note, I'm going to end, not because I think I'm losing you, but this is the weekend edition of the show. We make these a little bit shorter. Thanks again for joining me. May all of your speaking opportunities in life be a huge success.

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