Leadership Skill Development - 5 Tips On How To Make Audiences Listen In Rapt Attention

For the rank amateur to the ignorant professional, audiences create the same effect no matter how small they are to a speaker. Fear and anxiety.

From a single person to a crowd as big as the fans in the Super Bowl, speaking in front of a serious listening audience is the true test and baptism of fire.

Despite this, audiences are predictable. Audiences listen to you because they want to learn something from the speaker.

Following this logic, the speaker would do well to follow the strategy of making it informative as well as interesting to listeners to see your speech through till the end.

Here are 5 tips on how you can have the audience listen in rapt attention.

1. Speak according to the listeners’ interests.
It is always a good idea to find out what the crowd you are speaking to is interested in. For example, if you have more teenagers in the crowd, you don’t really want to talk about your subject in a way that bores them, like good education. Other aspects to consider would be the local culture, age, sports, religious inclinations, etc. Talk about what’s important to them, something they can easily relate to without a stretch of imagination.

2. Praise the audience.
Audiences are human too, and each and every one of them has a need to be acknowledged as much as you want to be acknowledged for speaking well in front of them. There is only one requirement for this maxim, that your praise be one hundred percent sincere. Anything less and you’ll have resentment in your hands.

3. Connect with the audience.
Find a common thread that makes the audience relate to you, and you’ll find that the speech will come through really well. Finding a common thread humanizes you and the speech. It makes them want to listen to you because it may in some way be of great benefit to them.

4. Have the audience participate.
Get somebody to come onstage and participate in a demonstration. Ask questions of the audience. Get feedback. Encourage them to walk up to the microphone and give you a piece of their mind. The point is to involve the audience, once more, making it more real to them. Taking them along with you in your experience.

5. Less you, more them.
Play yourself down. Nobody, especially an audience, likes to be lectured to. This will cause resentment that will last a long time. Never feel that you are above them. The better way to think about your audience would be that you care about their welfare. Think of yourself as their best friend, and more often than not, this will hold you in good stead.


Leadership Skill Development Blog

An Effective Style To Use In Public Speaking: Audience Participation - Leadership Skill

An effective public speaker should be able to utilize devices that will be able to capture the attention of the audience. One effective means for them to give you that much needed interest is this: get them to go on stage. Make them participate. When someone is on stage and he or she happens to be a member of the audience, the rest will almost always stay attentive. Why? Because they would like to see what you will be doing to one of them. Also, because they are thinking they could be up there themselves and so to save their precious egos from embarrassment they at least need to know what is going on.

No matter how good or excellent you are as a presenter or as a public speaker, nothing beats the excitement of getting someone to be on stage who really should not be there in the first place. What is going through their minds at that moment when you pull an unsuspecting someone from their complacency is that, “Oh my god, what if the speaker selects me to go up there next?

What am I going to do?” Then later, “I need to pay attention to this.” A little bit later as you go through your presentation, the audience will then most probably think, “What point is he/she making?” And then as you take your point across, the audience will then get to think, “Now I get it.” Because you made them pay attention, you have forced them to listen and respond to your statement in the privacy of their minds.

However, there are those extremely shy and very sensitive members of the audience who might withdraw from going through the rest of your presentation if they hear you will be calling on them up on the stage. The objective is to gain an audience and not to lose any of them.

Make it clear prior to your asking someone to come up on stage with you that you are asking for a volunteer and that no one will be forced if they do not want to. Notice that if the majority of your audience are shy, once you finally get someone to be on stage, all of them will almost always heave a sigh of relief that you would actually feel a breeze pass you by, really.

Another way to get the audience to participate as well as pay attention is by giving them due recognition. Try to acknowledge a single member of the audience for a specific achievement or a moment of a good performance, or also acknowledge a group of the audience.