09/23/2019

Daily Buzz: How to Re-engage Audiences During Your Presentation

Consider these strategies to engage and ignite

You’ve been rehearsing your presentation for weeks—making tweaks, talking to yourself in the mirror, the whole nine yards. Come the day of, you’re gearing to go. But your audience? Well, not so much.

“As a speaker, it’s dispiriting when you feel you’re trying to convey important information and your audience has obviously lost interest,” says professional speaker Dorie Clark on Harvard Business Review. “But your only chance at being heard is finding a way—somehow—to reengage them.”

Clark offers these strategies to reignite an unfocused audience:

Move to a different part of the stage. “You don’t want to overdo this maneuver, but used judiciously it keeps audience members guessing where you’ll go next, which means their eyes are trained on you,” she says.

Change your pace. Speaking too fast or too slow can cause audience members to check out fast. As with moving around, changing the rate of delivery from remark to remark will keep listeners on their toes.

Lower your voice or pause. “When I want an audience to focus on a key point, I’ll deliberately lower my voice to a near-whisper, so they need to focus intently in order to understand what’s going on,” Clark says. “I may even pause in silence for several beats, to the point where they’re itching to hear the conclusion.”

Please select this link to read the original article from Associations Now.