Public Speaking Tip: Connect With Your Audience

It's probably easy for most of us to connect with someone else through a one on one or small group conversation.  Not so easy to do it with a room full of people, though.

So how do you get up on stage and deliver a winning speech that will wow your audience, making them feel like they have received tremendous value from you?

Most people will say it's charisma, that special kind of charm successful public speakers possess that captures the audience's attention the minute they get on stage.  While it's true that some people have that kind of "presence" about them, remember that charisma wears off very quickly.  Without substance, charisma is a flimsy facade that will fall apart easily.

Follow our tips below to make your audience hang onto your every word from start to finish and win in the art of public speaking.

1) Know Your Audience

This goes without saying.  You have to know to whom you are speaking to before you even start to craft your speech.  Even if you intend to use the same speech you gave somewhere else, you still need to tailor the delivery of the speech to suit the audience.

For example, you can probably use the same speech content for both university students and corporate executives.  However the delivery method and overall tone of your speech needs to be different.  You cannot hope to engage university students with a formal, starched up speech.  They will be bored to death.  Similarly, you cannot deliver a speech that is full of college humor and using abbreviations like "LOL", "FML", "BRB", etc to corporate executives either.  They wouldn't be able to take you seriously.

The same principle applies to all aspects of your speech, down to your presentation slides.  Generally speaking, a presentation with vibrant colors and cartoon images may be fine for university students, but certainly not for a corporate audience.

2) Get Audience Participation

A successful speech is not a one way traffic.  It's a two way traffic consisting of you delivering your content and the audience giving you feedback on how you're doing.  You will know how engaged the audience are by their level of participation.

The easiest way to do this is to get them to do group activities amongst themselves.  This is effective for several reasons:

a) The audience won't feel put on the spot as they normally tend to do the group activities together with their friends.

b) The audience have a chance to find out for themselves how the content that you share is relevant to them.

Some speakers like to call on members of the audience to ask them questions.  However, bear in mind that this could backfire as audiences tend to be shy and reluctant to participate.  This is usually the case when you are a relative unknown.  People will tend to be more willing to volunteer for famous speakers, just for the 5 seconds of fame that they get being in the limelight.  For this purpose, smart speakers will have their friends in the audience that they can call on as volunteers just to get the ball rolling.

Audience participation will ensure that your speech does not become a long drawn out monologue but something that encourages your audience to think, get involved and is fun for them.

3) Keep the Jokes to a Minimum

While it is always great to start your speech with a joke just to relax the audience and for the most part, yourself, keep it to a minimum, unless you're doing a stand up comic routine.

Remember, you are there to deliver valuable content to the audience.

Use of humor can be a double edged sword.  It is an intricate art that needs to be used very carefully.  While weaving humor into your speech can make it memorable, over use of jokes can make you, well, a joke (pun intended).

Also, be very careful about the jokes you tell.  Keep politically or sexually charged jokes for more informal settings.  You'll never know who in the audience you'll offend.

4) High Energy!

Having high energy means being passionate and active in your body language.  This does not mean you need to be shouting and jumping all over the stage.  That will wear you out before you even get to the half way point.

If you look at famous speakers such as Anthony Robbins, Oprah Winfrey and T Harv Ecker, you notice that they come onto the stage with such a glorious burst of energy and they maintain that momentum throughout.

This comes from the passion that they have for their own individual fields.  You too can be like that by being passionate about your own field.

But of course, not everyone is like that.  You may just find that this kind of demeanor is incongruent with your innate personality, in which case, it's totally fine to find your own style.  After all, being comfortable on the stage will be more beneficial for you than trying to imitate someone else's style, however famous they may be.

5) Be Flexible

We cannot stress this enough.  The hallmark of a great speaker is someone who is able to adapt to suit any environment at the drop of a hat.

He may have his speech all drawn up, his presentation prepared and all ready to go, but once he detects that his audience is not as engaged as he wants them to be, he is able to switch his act for greater impact.

A speaker may stop half way to get his audience to stand up and stretch for a while or crack a joke (bear in mind #3 above when doing this).

A great speaker will have a few trick up his sleeves to break the monotony and engage the interest of his audience.

You need to be able to read your audience for this.  The most telling is their body language.  Are they sitting at the edge of their seats with rapt attention or do they look bored, looking at their phones or worst of all, fast asleep?  Being on stage should give you an eagle eye overview of the audience.

At the end of the day remember, it doesn't matter how much you love your speech or how awesome you think it is.  It's the audience's reception to it that is the acid test.

If you would like the opportunity to hone your public speaking skills as well as learn leadership skills, join us for our bi-monthly meetings on every 1st and 3rd Wednesdays of the month.  Our meetings start at 8pm.  For further information please contact us at gurneyhydrotoastmastersclub@gmail.com or refer to our Next Meeting page for information on our next meeting.