Think about the last time you sat in an audience and found your mind quietly passing comment on the person at the front. Not unkindly, perhaps, and certainly not out loud, but steadily, the way a mind does when it has been asked to sit still for forty minutes. You might have wished they’d slow down, or wondered where on earth this was heading, or found yourself thinking that they’d made their point several minutes ago and were now busy unmaking it. When they finished, you probably clapped, smiled and said nothing of the sort.
That silence is one of the strangest things about presenting. The people who could tell us most about how we’re doing are the very people least likely to say so, and so many of us go through our working lives relying on polite applause and the occasional “that was great” in the corridor, neither of which tells us very much at all.
I can’t prove what any audience is thinking, and nobody sitting in one would admit to half of it, but I suspect that if you look back at the talks you’ve sat through yourself, you’ll recognise every one of the ten thoughts below. I’ve written them in the audience’s voice, because that’s where they live, and with each one I’ve shared what I believe it’s asking of you.
1. “You’ve already made your point.”
There’s a moment in many presentations when the point lands. You can often feel it in the room, a kind of stillness, a sense of something settling. What happens next says a great deal about the presenter. Some take the hint and move on. Others, worried that it didn’t quite land, explain it again, and then once more in slightly different words, with another example for good measure.
I understand the instinct completely, because it comes from wanting to be understood, but every repetition quietly tells the room that you didn’t trust them to get it the first time, and with each one the point doesn’t become stronger. It becomes smaller. When you sense it has landed, the most generous and confident thing you can do is let it rest.
2. “I don’t need to know everything you know.”
Most people who are asked to present have been asked because they know a great deal, and that’s exactly where the trap lies. When you know your subject well, everything in it feels important, and leaving any of it out can feel like a kind of dishonesty, or worse, like leaving yourself exposed if someone asks about the part you left out. So, the temptation is to empty your head onto the slides and into the room.
Your audience didn’t come for everything you know. They came for the part of it that’s useful to them, and your job is to do the difficult work of choosing that part before you arrive, so they don’t have to sift through the rest to find it. Leaving things out takes real courage, particularly when you’re the expert, but what you leave out is often what makes the rest possible to hear.
3. “Where are we going with this?”
In my experience, an audience will follow you almost anywhere if they have some sense of where you’re taking them. Without that, even the most interesting content starts to feel like wandering, and I think people quietly stop following and start waiting for the end, for the point, for anything that tells them the journey has a destination.
It needn’t take much to fix. A sentence at the start that tells them where you’re going, a word as you move from one part to the next, and the occasional reminder of where you are and how far you still have to go. It can feel unnecessary, because you know the route by heart. They don’t, and they’re relying on you to hold up the map now and then.
4. “Say it in plain English.”
Every organisation develops its own language, and after a while the people who speak it stop hearing it. The acronyms, the project names and the shorthand that saves time in a meeting of colleagues all become invisible to the person using them, while remaining stubbornly visible to everyone else.
The trouble is that every acronym someone has to decode is a moment when they aren’t listening to you, and while they’re working out what one sentence meant, the next two have already gone by. Very few people want to be the one to put their hand up and ask what it stands for, so they nod and fall a little further behind. If you wouldn’t use a word with a bright friend from outside your industry, think twice before using it with a room full of people you want to reach.
5. “I was listening until you started reading the slide.”
In my experience, this is one of the quickest ways to lose a room, and there’s a simple reason it grates. Your audience can read the words on your slide for themselves, and they can read them faster than you can say them. A review of 190 studies by the psychologist Marc Brysbaert estimated that adults read non-fiction silently at around 238 words per minute, against an average of about 183 when reading aloud, which means that by the time you reach the end of the bullet point, they’ve been waiting for you for a while. They’ve also stopped listening, because you’ve given them nothing they didn’t already have. If the words are on the screen, don’t recite them. Tell them what the slide can’t: why it matters, what it means and what you’d like them to do about it.
6. “Please slow down. I can’t keep up.”
By the time you stand up to present, you’ve usually lived with your material for days, if not weeks. You’ve written it, rewritten it, rehearsed it and heard yourself say it so many times that it feels obvious, even a little dull. Your audience is hearing it for the very first time.
That gap is where so much rushing comes from, along with the nerves that push us to get through it and out of the spotlight as quickly as we can. Slowing down can feel painfully exposing at first, as though every word is hanging in the air for everyone to inspect, and I’d never pretend otherwise. From the other side of the room, in my experience, it rarely sounds slow. It sounds like someone who is comfortable being there, and who genuinely wants you to understand.
7. “Are you here to impress me or help me?”
It’s a searching question, and I suspect an audience answers it far sooner than most of us would like to think. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be thought well of. It’s entirely human, especially when your boss is in the room, or your reputation feels at stake.
The presenter who is trying to impress tends to reach for the complex slide, the clever phrase and the long list of credentials, while the presenter who is trying to help reaches for whatever will make things clearer for the person listening. I believe people can feel the difference, even when they couldn’t put it into words, and only one of them makes them want to keep listening. The lovely irony is that helping usually turns out to be the more impressive of the two, because clarity is more impressive than complexity.
8. “I want to know why this matters to me.”
Information isn’t automatically interesting, however much it fascinates the person presenting it. What makes it interesting is relevance, the moment someone in the audience realises that this affects their work, their team, their decision or their day. Until then, even very good content can feel like something happening to someone else.
Before you present anything, it’s worth asking yourself, for every part of it, the question your audience is silently asking: what does this mean for me? If you can’t answer it, they won’t be able to either, and if you can, say the answer out loud rather than hoping they’ll work it out for themselves.
9. “You can stop now.”
Endings are hard. Plenty of presentations reach their natural conclusion and then keep going, with one more thought, one more example, a summary of the summary and a close that seems reluctant to close. I think it often happens because stopping feels abrupt, and the silence after the final word can feel like a judgement waiting to happen.
Once your message has landed, continuing doesn’t add to its impact. It dilutes it, and the people who were ready to leave with something clear walk away with something blurred instead. Know what your final sentence is before you begin, say it with conviction when the moment comes, and then have the courage to stop.
10. “I want you to sound like you.”
I’ve kept this one until last because I think it sits underneath all the others. So many people, the moment they stand up to present, become someone slightly different. Their voice changes, their language grows more formal, and they begin performing what they imagine a presenter ought to sound like. It’s understandable, because the role can feel as though it comes with a costume, but the moment you start performing, your audience loses the very person they came to hear, the one with the knowledge, the experience and the point of view that got you asked in the first place. You don’t need to become a presenter to present well. You need to be yourself, with a little more care and attention than usual, and to trust that it’s enough.
They’re telling you all the time
Your audience will probably never say any of these things out loud. They’ll smile, they’ll clap politely at the end, and they’ll tell you it was great. But they are telling you all the time, though rarely in words, and the more you move your attention away from yourself and towards them, the more of it you’ll begin to notice.
If there’s one thing I’d want you to take from all ten, it’s this. Not one of these thoughts is hostile. Each one comes from someone who has given you their attention and would like it rewarded. That’s not a room to be afraid of; it’s a room that’s on your side.
How we can help
If you’d like help hearing what your audience isn’t saying, there are three ways we can work together:
- Public speaking courses in London
- One-to-one public speaking coaching
- Presentation skills training for teams
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