Four Ways To Keep An Audience Interested

Sit through somebody else’s presentation this week and spend a few minutes watching the audience instead of the speaker. It is the best training available to anybody who presents; it is free, and almost nobody does it.

You will notice one of two rooms: either faces looking up and appearing interested, or the gentle, slow settling of chins towards the phones resting on their laps. The second is not very pleasant to observe, and it feels even more uncomfortable when you realise you are seeing yourself in the person standing at the front.

What separates those two rooms is almost never knowledge. The presenter losing the room is often the person in it who knows the most about the subject. Here are four ways to be the presenter in the first room.

Watch The Room While You Are Still In It

You cannot read minds, and there is no point in trying. What you can pick up on is simpler and more helpful: whether your audience is looking at you or at the screen, whether the room stays still or people shift in their seats, and whether the phones are out, which is often the clearest signal you will get and the one most presenters train themselves to overlook.

When it starts to go, the instinct is to speed up and get to the end, which is the move guaranteed to finish the job. Do the opposite and stop for two seconds. Silence pulls a room back further than any sentence you could have said; from the outside, it reads as emphasis rather than panic, and it buys you just enough time to abandon whatever was coming next and say instead the thing you most want them to remember.

Give Them The Gold

Panning for gold is mostly dirt. You lift out gravel, grit, and more gravel, and if you are patient enough, there is occasionally something in the pan worth keeping.

That filtering is your job. Hand your audience the riverbed and invite them to sift through it themselves, and you have not been generous with them; you have been lazy, though it rarely feels that way at the time.

Charts are where this goes wrong most often. Nine lines go up on the screen, the presenter says “as you can see”, and nobody can see anything at all, because what has gone up there is the unsifted riverbed and the sifting has quietly been handed to the audience, to be done in about forty seconds, while somebody keeps talking at them.

Work out what that chart is actually for, say that one thing plainly, and put the chart itself in a handout for anybody who wants to check your working afterwards. What belongs on the screen instead is a separate question, and I have written about it in how to avoid death by PowerPoint.

They Are Reading You Like A Magazine

Think about the last time you sat waiting for a haircut and picked up a magazine you would never have bought.

You didn’t read it. You turned pages until something stopped you: a photograph, a headline or a sentence that happened to be about you, and when nothing stopped you within a page or two, you put it down and picked up another. Nobody in the history of waiting rooms has read one of those magazines from the front.

Your audience is doing that to you, without the pages. They are scanning, waiting for something to catch, and they will give you less time than you think before they go looking somewhere else, which now means the phone in their lap. The question is not whether your material is good. It is whether anything in your first two minutes will stop somebody who is skimming.

So What?

I have sat through a lot of presentations with two words going round my head: so what?

You’ve done the same, waiting for the speaker to reach something that has anything to do with you, and somewhere along the way giving up on it arriving at all.

Four questions sit underneath those two words, and every audience asks all of them.

• What has this got to do with me?
• Why should I care?
• What difference will it make?
• Why are you telling me this?

Put them in every section and on every slide yourself, before your audience has to. Anything that cannot answer them is not information. It is filler, and filler is what people take their phones out during.

All Four Are The Same Instruction

Do the work beforehand so the people in front of you don’t have to do it in the room, because they won’t; instead, they will reach for their phones and decide this wasn’t really for them.

That is the whole difference between a presenter who is prepared and one who merely knows a great deal, and from the third row you can tell which of the two you are watching inside ninety seconds.

If any of this was useful, please pass it on. Somebody you know is presenting next week and is lying awake worrying about how they are going to come across, when the only thing the room will be wondering is what any of it has got to do with them.

If you would like some help with your presentation skills:

• Book yourself onto a powerful public speaking course.
• Invest in some really good one to one public speaking coaching.
• Get yourself some excellent presentation skills training.

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