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

1 Aug 2017 · 2 min

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Transcript of a TJ Walker live-stream segment (August 2017 upload) in which Walker addresses how speakers should handle difficult or disruptive audience members. He advises acknowledging the issue without blaming the individual, offering private follow-up for off-topic questioners, and balancing attention to maximize benefit for the majority. The clip closes with a brief promotion of his public-speaking courses and workshops.

Chapters

How do you deal with a difficult audience member? If you speak long enough, often enough, there's going to be someone in your audience who either looks annoyed with you, as if they think you're stupid, or they're interrupting or they're trying to take over. This can happen. It's happened to everyone. My advice is you do have to deal with it. You can't simply ignore it. But you can't go to the other extreme of ignoring everyone else in the room and just trying to placate that one person. You don't really know what's going on in that person's mind. They may have just had a spouse leave them. They may have had the death of a loved one. It may have nothing to do with you. I do recommend that you try to figure out if it's a relatively small group. Find out if they have any questions. If they just look really annoyed, something I've done before is just say, bill, I feel like I'm not being clear, then I'm losing the audience. Can you tell me where I may have taken a wrong turn? So I'm not blaming him. I'm blaming myself. It gives that person an easy out to say what's unclear. Now, if someone wants to keep asking more and more questions and they're not relevant to the audience, another technique I have is to say to the person, jim, your questions are so important. I want to give them the attention they really deserve in more detail. If you could meet me at the back of the room as soon as we're done, I'll answer all your questions in detail. Then I move on. So there's a fine balance you don't want to ignore, but you don't want to give the person so much focus that everyone else feels ignored. You want to reach the highest percentage of people in your audience and communicate the most messages. That's the real focus. I'm TJ Walker. I help people speak more effectively. If you'd like to improve your own presentation skills, reach out to me. We have online public speaking courses, public Live workshops every month in New York City, and private workshops conducted all over the world.