Have you ever been put to sleep by a boring speaker? While you fight the urge to slip happily into your dreamland, your head is nodding though paying the least attention.
Though many of you will not admit it but sure this has happened to all of us at least once. But don’t ever let it happen when you are the speaker. The only way to keep your audience alive and active while you are making a speech is to interact with them and involve them into it. There are various ways to involve your audience:
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Ask questions to the audience. It will make them work their brains and think of an answer. If you feel that people are losing interest, simply put up a question and select someone from the audience to answer it. Whether you get the answer or not thank that person and proceed to someone else in the audience. This keeps the audience active both mentally and physically.
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Always finish the sentence. If you just begin a famous sentence such as “Lions and tigers and bears…” and leave it midway, only those people familiar to the movie “The Wizard of Oz” will be able to respond to you. Always choose something that is obvious for them to guess.
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Whenever you feel that the room is heavy with energy, change it using this simple technique. Ask a simple question and then question “Is this good stuff?” And as the audience replies with a “Yes”, you tell them to turn to people on their either side and give them a high-five and say this aloud ‘this is good stuff’. It really makes them get a kick out of it.
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According to a famous millionaire, T. Harv Ecker you should get your audience to do the work for you. In order to achieve this, break your audience into groups of two or three and then hand over some exercises to them that are an integral part of your presentation. In order to tempt your audience to remain active and participate reward them for the same. Ask questions to the audience and then whoever answers; just reward them with a candy. People compete for it and hence, it becomes a game. Use it only for a few minutes in the middle of your talk.
There are plenty of other ways to involve your audience. You as a speaker should come up with various new techniques that you feel are appropriate for your audience and for you.
