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Speaking Success: Does Your Audience Care?

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Here is an unfortunate secret when it comes to giving great presentations – your audience doesn't care about you, they only care about what's in it for them!

Sound cynical? It really isn't. Why should the audience care about you? Unless they all happen to be related to you, they have no reason to care about you. Think about times when you have been in the audience. Do you really care about the speaker? Aren't you mostly interested in how what they are saying will impact your own life?

This is true whether you are a professional speaker addressing an audience of thousands or giving a presentation to 5 people at work. This is also unfortunately where most presentations fall short.

If you have ever been listening to a speaker who bores the tar out of you, chances are that they haven't set up the speech to make it clear why you should care. To ensure that you don't fall into the category of boring speakers, you must make sure that the audience cares.

Getting your audience to care is not that hard, but it may take a shift in perspective. Here are a few simple ways to connect, engage, and interest your audience.

1) Explicitly state the "what's in it for me" – Take a look at your presentation and ask yourself, "why should the people in my audience care about this?" The answer to that question must be explicitly stated in your speech. State it in the introduction and re-state it at the end. If appropriate, and especially for longer speeches, repeat the benefit throughout the speech.

If you have trouble answering the question, then chances are you have designed a weak speech. Re-work it until you can answer it.

If you still struggle, ask yourself, "why am I giving this speech?" You were most likely hired, forced, or asked to speak by someone. Why did they ask you, and what did they ask you to do?

In the working world, you may be asked to give an update or status report. These may be harder at first to connect to the audience, and you will be tempted to just regurgitate information. Resist that urge, do your best to tie it the audience's needs and wants, and your presentation will be much more effective.

2) Show them how they can apply it – When you are very comfortable and familiar with your material (as you should be) you may take for granted why it is important and exactly how your audience can use it. However, your audience members are not experts on your topic. For many of them, this will be the first time they have ever heard the information you are imparting. Make it easy for them by explicitly stating what they should do. Give examples and stories to make it easy for them to understand how they can immediately apply your information.

One easy way to do this is to think in terms of "call to action" statements. A call to action is simply a statement that tells your audience to do something. When you create an outline for your presentation, re-state each point so that it is phrased as a call to action instead of a summary.

For example, if you are giving a technology presentation trying to convince management to invest in a new software package, then make sure at some point you say, "you should agree to invest in the software package for the reasons I have outlined." Sounds too simple too even mention, but people leave this out all the time. Take a look at all of your points (the main point of your speech as well as each supporting point) and make sure each one is phrased as a call to action – you will automatically include the audience this way.

3) Tie everything to your point – All too often a speaker will start to ramble or go off on a tangent. As an audience member, I can recall many speeches I have seen where I have thought to myself, "why is he telling us this now?" As a speaker, you may feel what you are saying is obviously relevant, but quite often your audience will be completely lost.

As in the points above, one of the best ways to make sure this doesn't happen is to explicitly state what the point is of the story or tangent you are on. In longer speeches, you may throw in a relatively unrelated story (but be very very careful about doing this) that happens to be interesting or funny, but say to this audience, "this is kind of unrelated, but I want to share a funny story with you."

4) Try using the word "you" instead of "I" – This is a more advanced technique, but when you are telling stories or examples from your own life, you will tend to tell it from the first person and repeatedly use the word "I." Try to re-work sections of the presentation to replace the word "I" with "you." For example, if you are telling a story about how you botched your first job interview, you can switch to using "you" by saying, "just imagine this: you really need to find a job and you finally land a great interview, and then you mess it up by repeatedly calling the interviewer the wrong name!" By switching to "you," you get the audience to put themselves in your shoes. They become an almost active participant in your story. This is a simple way to engage and interest your audience and make it about them and not you.

To summarize, making the audience care often involves going against what you may think is obvious. "Of course the audience should care." "Obviously this example ties to my point." "It should be clear how they can apply this to their lives." Don't make those assumptions. Connect the dots for the audience, give them actions to take, make your points clear, and make it about them and not you and your audiences will truly start to care.


Avish Parashar is a dynamic professional speaker who shows organizations and individuals how to get what they want using the Art and Science of improv comedy. He weaves together humorous stories, witty observations, and interactive exercises from improvisational comedy to get people laughing, learning, and motivated! Avish is most commonly called upon to deliver programs on Motivation, Sales, and Communication

For more free articles, downloads, and resources, visit http://www.AvishParashar.com

To learn how to apply the powerful principles of improv comedy to your own business or life visit http://www.ImprovforEveryone.com

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