3 Ways to Keep Connecting with Your Audience

You work hard to get your presentation just right. Your goal is to connect with your audience. If you don’t, they won’t benefit from the valuable content you’re sharing with them. You practice, practice, practice so you can achieve the goal of delivering your presentation with confidence too.

What’s frustrating is that you can set yourself up to accomplish these two goals and yet you won’t know if you’ve achieved them until after the fact! If everything goes great, mission accomplished. You’ll receive the feedback and reactions you were hoping for (including making new connections).

On the other hand, you could be talking and suddenly start sensing that things aren’t going well. Your audience’s response to you is tepid at best. Or maybe you hit the halfway mark in your presentation and realize you’ve lost them. After something like that happens, your first instinct might be to tear your presentation to shreds so you can find and fix what’s wrong with it. Before you go to that extreme though, take a look at your presentation with these three simple fixes in mind.

Show and Tell: Don’t rely on wordy slides to explain your main points. Instead, keep your presentation interesting by using a variety of ways to engage with your audience while you’re sharing your main points. There are so many great photos, videos, props, etc. available to use that will make it easier to capture, and keep, your audience’s attention.

Reclaim Your Physical Space: Sometimes audiences tune out because the speaker doesn’t realize they’ve started talking AT their audience rather than speaking TO them. One reason this might happen is because of all the time we spent staring at a camera over the past few years. But the times are a-changin’! Come up with ways to move your body. If it’s an in-person gig, move to a different part of the stage/room etc. But whether you’re in-person or on camera, it’s relatively easy to get people’s attention. Change the way you deliver a particular point you’re trying to make. Change the tone and pace of your voice. Reframe your stance.

Implement Discrete Check-Ins with Your Audience: Doing this will spare you the embarrassment of being in the middle of your talk and suddenly realizing you’ve misjudged how much your audience does or doesn’t know. Maybe you’re speaking over their heads. Maybe they’re more knowledgeable than you thought. Either way, including strategies for making sure your audience is still on the same page as you is going to help. Yes, you can do this by straight up recapping what you just said, but you can also ask if anyone has questions, ask them a specific question, and/or take a quick survey or poll.

When you’re confident you’ve taken advantage of all three of these, you’re back to where we started because you won’t know if they worked until after. This is why you always want to provide your audience with a survey so they can give you feedback (as long as it’s okay with the person who invited you to speak). This way you’ll have definitive proof of how your audience gauged your talk, and if there are other adjustments you’ll need to make before you share this talk again.

One of my favorite things about the three fixes I shared here is what great reminders they are that just because something doesn’t go right, that doesn’t mean we have to panic! We don’t. Yes, we have to sit down and take a look at our presentation. But gratefully, simple fixes like these can save us from trying to “recreate the wheel” before we take our presentation back on the road.

‘Til we speak again….
~Bet