Monitoring Your Audience

If you want to be a great communicator, you must constantly monitor your audience. That's why I always advise clients. Don't just stand behind a lectern. Don't stand up on the podium in one spot. Because you can't really see what your audience is up to. Now, there are a lot of different ways you can do this. To stack the deck in your favor. For example, when I'm doing a typical day of public speaking training, PowerPoint training, media training, and I have, say, a dozen people I'm training. I very explicitly put into my contract that the room must be set up in a horseshoe setting a semicircle with no tables between me and the trainees. So it's a semicircle. Each trainee has his or her own seat. There's no table in front of them. Nobody is in a second row. There aren't rows. This way, I have an unobstructed view of everyone in the room. They can see me. I can see them. They can't hide a cell phone under a table and check email while I'm talking, because there is no table. Now, you can't always stack the deck in your favor. But you can always be on the lookout for ways of doing that. There are times when I speak to much larger audiences and there are rows. I simply walk around the room, all four corners. I may even start at the very back of an auditorium. Because I want to be able to look people in the eye. I want to be able to see if I've lost them. I want to be able to see if they're on their cell phones. Now, I'm not going to be rude, but I may ask a rhetorical question and look right at the person. I may come up to them and stand next to them for 10 seconds. Most people will feel uncomfortable reading their cell phone in front of a speaker. If the person's right there. Most audience members are used to the speaker ignoring them. Standing in one spot behind a lectern, staring at notes, or looking at the whole audience the whole time. Big, big problem. You need to monitor your audience. Because here's what I have noticed in the past. One person's on the cell phone. The person next to them sees that, well, Jane's on her cell phone. Why can't I? Jim gets on his cell phone. Now Sandra is looking. So what do those two people know that I don't know? And it will spread. It's like a virus, a contagion throughout the room. You've got to monitor your audience, and you've got to be consistently interesting, Jim. Makes sense to you. You got to do things like that. Take the pulse. Now, I'm not going to say, hey, Bill, you're being rude and obnoxious. Put your phone. I'm not going to do that because then I'm going to look obnoxious. I'm going to embarrass him. He'll hate me. So I'm not ever going to intentionally embarrass. This is not puritanical times. I can't come around and put a feather or knock someone on the head if they are dozing off or talking to someone or using their cell phone. But I can do everything possible to monitor the audience, try to engage them, walk closer to them, ask them questions, reference them in what I'm saying so that they stay focused.