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

How can you deal with audience members being rude while giving a speech? This is something that all speakers have to face from time to time. For starters, I would ask myself, are they being rude or am I being boring? Rudeness works both ways. If you stand up and give a speech and you get behind a lectern and you pull out a big script and you say, good morning, my name is today. I'm going to talk about here a bunch of whole boring slides, and all of a sudden you notice people are talking or they are texting. Guess what? They aren't being rude. They are reacting to you being rude because you didn't prepare an interesting speech or presentation. You're being rude to them. You're wasting their time. Therefore, they're doing what's rational. They're trying to use their time in a more effective way. Now it could be you're giving a great speech and people are just talking and being legitimately rude. A couple of techniques I use. For starters, don't stand in one place. Don't stand behind a lectern. Move around the room. Oftentimes, just getting close to people is enough to make them be quiet. Put away their cell phone. Another great technique, Ask them questions. Toss out a rhetorical question. Jim, that's happened to you. And maybe Jim is the guy who's talking to his colleague or on his cell phone. You're not chastising the person, you're not criticizing them, but you're essentially tossing the conversation over to them for a second and gives them a chance to say, oh, yeah, right. So I like to use a subtle approach. Walking around, getting physically closer, asking questions, being more engaging. And that brings back, not all, but most rude audiences focusing on you and stopping their rude behavior.