Draw people to your message by grabbing their attention and engaging their minds.
Have you ever listened to a presenter and in your mind you’re begging for mercy, for the end to come quickly. This occurs for many reasons, but way up at the top of the list is the presenter is not interesting. He is purely moving through the content and is not really doing anything to deliver the message in a way the audience can relate to. “But I’m not very interesting” is a concern I have heard during mentoring sessions. You can be. You don’t have to be the boring talking head at the front of the room. Tell yourself, “I choose to be interesting!” But how? A few tried-and-true practices can help.
Do not write out your “speech” and read it to the audience. This can glue you to your script and relegates you to repeating whatever you happened to have written prior to the meeting with little flexibility to change based on audience reaction. It is far better to write out the key points on a piece of paper, perhaps a piece folded in half as noted here. Raise your point and have a conversation. Alter your approach based on what you see from your audience. In doing so, you become personable and relatable, not mechanical and uninteresting. With this approach you are simply talking through a message, which is undoubtedly more natural and interesting than a speech.
Intonate. It’s not possible to be interesting if you do not change the inflection in your voice at different points when speaking. Asking questions helps, as the pitch in our voices naturally rises when asking a question. But that is not enough. Find a reason to “yell” out a word like “NO.” For example, you can ask your team, “Are we going the best in the industry or just another player? Is there anyone who can beat us if we have the right culture? The kind of culture where we openly discuss problems and work together as one team to resolve them? NO!” You do not have to yell it out obnoxiously but raise your voice to emphasize the point. You will hold the audience’s interest far longer by intonating and varying the pitch in your voice.
Pace. “Bueller… Bueller… Bueller …” Ben Stein’s classic monotone, zero pace hilarious roll call in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Clearly a no-no. Far better to change your rate of speech regularly along with your intonation. Begin by speaking at a natural pace. Then choose areas within your presentation where you will speed up and slow down. For example, increasing your speed can work when you are being emphatic about a topic like, “We can win in this market. We will win in this market. Our competitors do not have the product nor the positioning to win like we do. Our insights, our sales team, the relationships, the technology we have in place, and the strategy we are executing give us a sustainable, structural advantage no one can replicate.” Read that quote beginning at a normal pace and then speed up as you get to the last sentence. Think about how doing so engages your mind. Slowing speech does, too. How about, “We … WILL … win … in this market. We … ARE … the … best team; and NO ONE can beat us.” As you read your audience during your presentation, be flexible and speed up and slow down your speech pattern to maintain interest.
Repeat words for emphasis. “Tell me how we can be better. Tell me how we not only deliver on our commitments today but advance our strategy for tomorrow. Tell me how we break through the historical cultural barriers that slow us. Being the best or not is our choice. It is our decision. It … is … our charge. We will be the envy of the industry. Let ‘em all wish they were us. Let their cultures be what holds them back. Not us. Let’s continue to improve and to focus on the future like no one else can, and we will be looking back at everyone else.” In addition to the repetition to make a point, notice how the early statements are intended to engage people’s minds and the statements at the end are intended to engage their hearts. Repeating key words and sentiments with heavy intonation and pacing delivers your messages in a powerful way the audience will remember.
Use self-deprecating humor. It’s an extremely engaging way of advancing your message. It is mentally jarring for the audience which keeps them interested in a very different way. For example, say you are speaking on a topic, and you can tell the audience is not quite following you. Maybe you adjust through humor, saying, “Okay, hold on. I don’t even understand what I just said there. Let’s try again.” Or say you stumbled across a set of words; call yourself out like, “Holy smokes. For all the years I’ve been speaking this language you’d think it would be a little easier.” People are not accustomed to hearing this in the middle of a presentation and it brings them into the conversation in a different way. Don’t overdo it with this humor; a little bit goes a long way. But it is a terrific way of maintaining interest and you get the additional benefit of being seen as authentic.
Call on someone but don’t ask her to answer. “Right Lisa?” Or, “That’s the way Karen talks about it, don’t you Karen?” Or, “Where’s Anita. Anita would agree with me, wouldn’t you Anita?” Anything that uses audience member names keeps them listening, even if out of fear of being called on. Look to do it in the moment based on who you see in the audience. Don’t force it; this is part of a natural conversation, after all. This works in large meetings and small. The difference is that in a smaller meeting you are looking for an actual response whereas in a larger one you are looking for an opportunity to engage in a personal way in a highly impersonal setting.
Ultimately, being interesting is different for each of us. Some people are funny, some are not. Some are good story tellers, some are not. Some command a room, some do not. Be yourself. Be genuine and practice a few of the pointers here and you will become an even better speaker who delivers messages the audience can truly hear and act on.
Share your thoughts below.
What techniques do you use to capture an audience’s attention to ensure they hear your message?
Leave a Reply