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

2 Aug 2018 · 2 min

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1:47

A short segment from a TJ Walker live stream offering practical tactics for presenters who notice their audience losing interest. Walker lists concrete interventions—pause and ask if the audience is following, skip to a more interesting section, invite audience participation, use humor, move physically—and stresses that successful presentations prioritize communication (attention, understanding, recall) over merely finishing slides.

Chapters

What do you do if you're giving a presentation and you just see it, you're losing the audience. They're perhaps yawning, maybe someone's falling asleep. People are doing this. Not a good sign. What do you do? Well, for starters, congratulations for even noticing. So many boring speakers are so fixated on reading their script or turning their back and reading a bunch of bullet points, they don't even know when they're losing their audience. So congratulations. If you're noticing that, you do have to do something differently. Sometimes it's a matter of stopping and saying, wow, I feel like I'm losing you, Jim. Tell me where I went wrong. You can do that. You're not saying, hey, wake up, buddy. Hey, pay attention. You're not being rude to your audience, but sometimes you just have to ask, are you with me? Now? This doesn't work in every scenario, but it does in some cases. Sometimes you've got to get rid of the section you're in and go to something you know is going to be more interesting, more relevant. Sometimes you've got to engage your audience, ask them questions where you know they have something interesting to say. Sometimes you may want to interject a little humor. Sometimes it's as simple as just moving around the room. If you're staying in one spot too long, it's boring. Go to the middle of the room, go to the back of the room, but do something. It's not about just getting through the presentation. You get no points for finishing your presentation. You get points for communicating. That means people are paying attention, understanding and remembering your message. So if you can tell right, then it's not happening. Don't keep on doing what you're doing. Do something different.