Short coaching video by TJ Walker advising speakers what to do when they sense they're losing an audience. Walker diagnoses that audience disengagement is usually the speaker’s fault (boring data dumps, ignoring audience) and offers remedies: pause, ask questions, tell relatable stories, move around, and edit content on the fly; also notes not to over-focus on a single inattentive attendee.
Chapters
Huh? Has ever happened to you when you're in the audience? Or has that ever happened to you when you're looking at your audience and you're losing them? What do you do if you're losing your audience? Well, first of all, you got to realize most of the time, it's not their fault. It's your fault. If your audience is. Is zoning out, playing with their phone, talking to each other, there's a problem, and it's you. You're not being interesting. So the biggest reason most audiences zone out is you're up there giving some boring data dump. You're ignoring your audience, and you're going through your little PowerPoint, delivering data, boring. So if you're losing your audience, you've got to stop and you got to regroup. Maybe you ask a question of an audience, maybe you tell a story that relates to someone in the audience. Maybe you walk around to create variety. But you do need to pay attention to your audience. This presentation is about your audience. It's not about you. So if you just go through your presentation and ignore them as if nothing happened, what good is it? What have you really accomplished? So you've got to engage your audience. Sometimes you just got to stop and ask a question of the audience and figure out how can you retool what. You've got to be more interesting and relevant to them. Sometimes you're in a subject area and you realize, uh, oh, I'm going too long on this subject. They're not interested. I'm going to have to edit that out and go to the next part of my presentation. You're going to have to do an edit on your feet. But do keep one thing in mind. If you're speaking to more than 20 people, you can be the best speaker in the entire world, and there could be someone right on the front row who's falling asleep. It's happened to me. It's happened to Ronald Reagan. It's happened to Bill Clinton. And realize that people have other stuff going on in their life. They may have a newborn child at home, and they haven't slept in three days. It's not that your speech is bad. So don't ignore everyone in the room and just focus on that one person who seems to be out of it or dozing or having a bad day. Give them a little attention, but if they're gone, they're gone. Give attention to everyone else in the room. Really focus on your audience members one at a time, and you will solve the problem of losing your audience.
