TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

18 Jul 2018 · 2 min

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2:25

A short live-stream segment where TJ Walker offers practical strategies for dealing with audience members who text during presentations. He frames texting as annoying and confidence-sapping for presenters and recommends behavioral tactics: walk closer to the texter, move to a different part of the room, ask rhetorical questions to invite nodding, mention an attendee by name indirectly to prompt attention (shaming gently), and, fundamentally, ensure the presentation is interesting to reduce texting.

Chapters

Hang on. I'll be with you in just a minute. Yeah, yeah, I'm paying attention. How do you deal with audience members who are texting during your presentation? Now, it's annoying, it's insulting, but you can't just go up to someone, say, hey, cut that out, and hit them on the head. That would be not a good thing to do. That would be rude, and you can't yell at them. But it is frustrating, and it can take away your confidence, too. Here's my advice. Try to do something to bring them back. There's several strategies. One, simply walk closer to them. If you're standing behind a lectern and you're 30ft away and that person's on the second row, they feel safe. They feel like you can't see them. Walk over there. If you're determined to stay in one spot, you're basically giving people a green light to be rude, ignore you, and to text to send email during your presentation. So one strategy is just to walk near them. Another tactic is to throw out a question, make it a rhetorical question. That's easy. That's happened to all of us from time to time. Jim too, right? No, Jim's like, oh, he's going to put away his cell phone, shake his head. You're not embarrassing him. You're just asking a simple question where he can nod his head. Another tactic, you can go to the different part of the room. You're not really looking at this person, and let's say it's Bill. You can say, I was talking to Bill in the hallway earlier today, and he mentioned to me that he had this exact same problem. So now I'm mentioning the person by name. I'm not looking at him, so it doesn't seem like I'm annoyed or rapping him on the head or rapping him on the knuckles or being a schoolteacher. But by mentioning his name, it often shames someone. Oh, I better pay attention. They're talking about me. So that's a tactic, too. I would try all of those things. And, of course, make sure you're being interesting. If an audience member is texting while you're presenting, it may be a sign that you're boring. So make sure you're saying interesting, interesting things to your audience so they don't want to text.