19 Surefire Ways to Connect with Your Audience
By: Doug Stevenson
1. Remove all physical barriers between you and your audience. Get out from behind the lectern and move. The lectern is the portable reading desk with a little light on it. It’s designed for you to place your notes on it and stand behind it. It is sometimes called a podium. However, it is a barrier. It makes it easy for you to hide and prevents the majority of your body language from being seen. Step away from the lectern, and walk and talk like you do naturally. Your entire body is an instrument of communication. Use it. As a matter of fact, your audience will be disappointed if you stand behind the lectern because it shows that you are a lecturer and not a speaker. They don’t want another boring lecture, like back in high school. They want you to entertain them while you teach. So take a deep breath and reveal yourself. Get out from behind the lectern and move.
2. Know your audience. Don’t talk at them with a canned speech that you prepared for another audience. Customize your content to their issues. Do your homework and find out who they are. Prepare a pre-program questionnaire and ask three or four people to fill it out. Keep it simple enough for them to want to complete it, but include probing questions such as, “What is the most recent change affecting your organization?” The more points of view you get, the better. Decide what stories and content elements you want to use based on your research. Connect the point of your stories to their current problem or challenge. Use the names of a few people in the audience. To do this, you’ll need to interview a few people on the phone or ask around. Be kind. Know who you can have fun with in the audience and who to steer clear of.
3. Make it personal. Speak about what you know from personal experience. Bridge the gap between your research and your opinions. If you don’t bring your point of view to the speech, why bother? Tell personal stories that show people that you’ve been there. Your credibility lies in your life experience, not in what you’ve read from books and articles. Talk about challenges that you’ve faced and obstacles you’ve overcome. Go deep. Reveal your struggles and hardships and what you’ve learned along the way. Then, reveal the lessons in your stories as points. Remember, they didn’t hire a reporter or a book reviewer, they hired a content expert. That’s you. Be the expert. Take a stand.
4. Create a 40/60 balance of facts and interpretation. Report on the facts, and then interpret them. If you report too many facts, you run the risk of having a very dense program that loses people. There is nothing wrong with facts and data. A good percentage of your audience wants to know where you get your information and if you can back it up with statistics. Too many facts and statistics, without your interpretation of the data, however, is boring. Weave back and forth between facts and interpretation. Use metaphors as a way to interpret information. What is your information or data like? Is it like a Chihuahua trying to pull a milk wagon, when a draft horse is what’s needed?
5. When you make eye contact with someone, hold it for a few sentences. Really talk to that person and connect. See if you can get them to nod their head or smile. Then move on and connect with someone else. Don’t make the mistake of focusing above people’s heads or at a spot on the back wall. It’s phony and will get in your way. Looking into people’s eyes will ground you and help you to slow down.
6. Be aware of your tendency to focus on one side of the room, while neglecting the other. Most of us do it unconsciously. My tendency is to go left. I didn’t know I was doing it until I saw myself on video. Practice working right, center and left or left, center and right. Once again, make eye contact and then move on. If it’s a large audience, pick a face that is ten or twenty rows back and focus on it for a few seconds. Talk to all sections of the room. Even though you may not be able to see someone twenty rows back, they feel included.
7. Slow down. Give your audience a moment to feel and interpret what you’re saying. Most speakers seem to think that they have to talk nonstop, not realizing that they’re not giving their audience time to breathe. Feel free to walk from one side of the room to the other in silence at the end of a section or after making a point. Silence acts as punctuation in a speech. During the silence your audience is working. They’re processing what you just said and deciding whether it applies to their life. If it does, they’re probably deciding what they need to do next. Your speaking prevents them from having their moment of reflection. It’s okay to slow down. As a matter of fact, your audience will appreciate it.
8. Use your audience as a test group if you have a point to make about human behavior. Take a simple poll of the people in the room and use the immediate results to illustrate your point. Make it fun. I poll my audience about how they deal with change. Based on how many times they’ve moved, changed jobs and fallen in and out of love, they fall into one of three categories - the walkers, joggers or sprinters. Polls can be used in many ways. They create audience involvement and lift the energy in the room. Make them short and sweet, and simple to understand.
9. Give clear instructions. I’ve witnessed some embarrassing moments when a speaker had not planned or written out their instructions for a group exercise. The result was chaos. Write out your instructions and try them out loud, with a few friends, before you use them on an audience.
10. Use PowerPoint as your assistant – not your replacement. They came to see and hear you, not read off of a bunch of slides in the dark. Did you know that dimming the lights tells your audience members’ brains that it’s nap time. Darkness signals the brain that it’s time to sleep, so it starts to produce Melatonin - that’s right - the same Melatonin that you buy to help you sleep at night. So keep the lights in your meeting room up and have the fewest slides you can get away with. Keep the focus on you. (See the eBook: “Powerful PowerPoint That Doesn’t Steal the Spotlight”)
11. Share the spotlight. Ask carefully worded questions that allow others to share their views and participate in the discussion. If you’re looking for someone to give you their opinion or share a short vignette, and they give you a one word answer, say “Tell me more about that.” If they are unresponsive, move on to someone else. Be careful with the one person in the room who thinks he or she is the expert and wants to steal the spotlight or make you wrong. Hold the microphone in front of their mouth, but don’t hand it to them. Control the flow of the interaction and hold on to the microphone.
12. Speak your own language, just talk the way you do all day. Don’t use words you wouldn’t use at dinner with friends. Too many speakers fall into the trap of trying to sound like a scholar. They write out a speech that would work well for an English exam and then read it, word for word. The problem with that is - we don’t speak the way we write. If you’re going to write out your speech, make sure you write conversational English, not proper English. If you want to disconnect with your audience, be verbose and pleonastic. See what I mean?
13. Speak to their hearts as well as their heads. Remember that we are all emotional beings. People act on emotion and use facts to justify their decisions. In order to speak to their hearts, you must speak from your heart. How do you feel about what you have to say? How is your audience feeling? In addition to the facts and philosophies you bring to the table, don’t forget love and compassion. Before I begin every presentation, I stand in the back of the room and send out love to everyone in the audience. It helps me to shift from being totally in my head to a balance of head and heart. Appeal to emotion and motivation, as well as to logic.
14. Have a conversation rather than give a speech. Be intimate. Talk to them like they’re your best buddies. Think of them as people that you know rather than a room full of strangers. Know that if you sat down with any one of them, you would find more in common than not. Ultimately, you and they are very much alike. Don’t be afraid to speak softly, to confide in them. If you hide, there is little chance for true connection. Be real. Just talk to them.
15. Tell personal stories. Nothing connects like a good story. People may not remember facts and data or the seven points that you made, but they will remember the pictures they saw in their mind’s eye while engaged in your story. Get into the details and paint pictures with words. The more visual you can make the story by acting it out, the better. Have fun and get into the telling of the story. The more energy and commitment you bring to the sharing of the story, the more fun it will be for both you and your audience.
16. Be honest. People can tell when you’re not telling the truth. Don’t steal other people’s stories or say something about yourself that is false. You are credible just as you are. You have lived an amazing life full of ups and downs, twists and turns and hairy escapes. Tell the truth with compassion and tact. Don’t be brutal. If you happen to be the bearer of bad news, craft your words carefully. Think about what you’re going to say beforehand and run it by a few people. If you have good news, share your true feelings.
17. Provide hope. Don’t just paint a picture of doom and gloom - be optimistic. Find quotes and stories that uplift people’s spirits. Give them something to hold onto, as well as beliefs and philosophies that will support them in moving forward with their lives. Build your speech to a climax that envisions a better outcome. Paint a picture of a bright future and help them get there. Wayne Dyer says, “You’ll see it when you believe it.” That’s the spirit.
18. Care. People can sense your compassion. It’s as tangible as anything you will say or do while speaking. Remember, your audience is not made up of strangers, they are fellow travelers on the same roads you traverse every day. They may not travel the same pavement, but the roads are the same. They struggle for balance, for security, for love. They long for success, for excitement, for freedom. Zig Ziglar is famous for this simple but profound statement, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
19. Get out of your own way and have fun. If there is one ingredient that will make you a successful speaker, it’s your sense of humor and playfulness. Smile. Enjoy yourself. This isn’t dental surgery! Love yourself and let them watch!
You may have the most brilliant content ever spoken, but if you don’t connect with your audience, it is all for naught. You’re human. They’re human. Connect!
Article Source: http://public-speaking-source.com
For more information on how to connect with your audience, purchase Doug Stevenson’s book, Never Be Boring Again – Make Your Business Presentations Capture Attention, Inspire Action, and Produce Results. Also available is the Story Theater Audio Six-Pack. It’s like having a coach in a box. Six hours of detailed audio content to help you become a better presenter. Learn how to use vocal inflection, tempo, volume changes, comedy timing and delivery. Free newsletter. www.storytheater.net
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