A short talk by Lisa Nichols offering practical techniques to keep an audience engaged amid technological and social-media distractions. Nichols emphasizes abandoning formal constraints, creating a 3D conversational experience (dialogue/call-and-response), speaking to individuals in the crowd, using transparency and humor, and avoiding overreliance on PowerPoint.
Chapters
How do I keep an audience engaged? Especially in this day of technology and mass social media distraction, how do I keep the attention? Well, let me give you some immediate techniques that you can use. Number one, be willing to play outside of the box. That doesn't exist. So recognize there is no box, there is no formal way that you should be engaging with people. Remember that today you're operating inside of a high touch, highly organic, highly reality based reality TV, reality radio, reality podcast, reality, YouTube, a reality based society. So people want to feel a 3D experience. So if you want to keep your audience engaged, you have to give them a 3D experience. Imagine this if you just stand on stage and you just talk. It's literally what I call a chalkboard experience. Experience. It's like a teacher writing on a chalkboard for like 45 minutes and not saying anything. It's oh my God, give me a pillow. However, when you give your audience a 3D experience, meaning you create a dialogue versus a monologue, you have a conversation with them, you do a call and response. Have you ever, if you've ever, you do a raise your hand, you ask a question. You speak to one person versus everyone. You make everyone feel like you're in their living room talking just to them. You add humor to the conversation. You keep the conversation moving while you pull in points of transparency, points of riveting moments, points where you give them a butt naked truth, shock them, rivet, make them say, did, did she just say that? Did he literally just do that? You want to create an environment where they really don't know what's next. If you're engaged in a PowerPoint, if you're the type of speaker where you of PowerPoint, please do not be chained to your PowerPoint, because that's the number one way that I'm gonna get chained to my cell phone and I'm gonna start checking email and I'm gonna get on Facebook. You do PowerPoint, I'll do Facebook. But if you do me, then I'll do you. So remember that you're in a relationship for 10 minutes or 45 minutes or for two hours, however long you're in front of one or 1,000 or 10,000, whatever the number is that you're serving, however long you're in front of them, a relationship. If you want to keep your audience more engaged, then I invite you to adopt these techniques. One, find the box and erase it. Two, introduce yourself to a higher level of transparency and authenticity. Three, speak to one person, even in a room of 100, speak to one person and 100 seats. Four. Add some humor or some spice. Disrupt your audience. Five. If you're using your using a PowerPoint, make sure that you're not anchored to that PowerPoint, that the PowerPoint is your sidekick. You're not the sidekick to the PowerPoint. And sixth and final, you want to engage your audience. Make sure that you're meeting the audience where they are having a dynamic dialogue with them versus a monologue where you're just talking to them. Have a conversation with them. Sam.
