Dr. Antonia Johnson
How Does an Audience Impact a Speaker?
How Does an Audience Impact a Speaker?
1. You walk to the front of the room and turn to face the audience. Your instincts say to scan the audience. Your eyes almost wander by themselves. But that makes a feeling of nervousness. You get an extra jolt of adrenaline. Your thoughts get jumbled; your mind can go blank.
2. Our instincts tell us to do all the wrong things:
• Look away from audience while searching for a word.
• Look up, hoping for the universe to help.
• Close eyes, as if that will focus us.
• Sweep the whole room with our eyes.
Those are habits. You do them because you don’t know what else to do.
3. Where should you focus? Focus on one person, one pair of eyes. Remain focused on one person until you complete a thought. That is a sentence or phrase. Usually it is more than five seconds but not as much as fifteen seconds. Then you move to another pair of eyes and complete another thought.
When you focus on one person, you reduce the audience to one individual. That is the same as you face every day. You are used to speaking to one person at a time. You are good at it.
This is a rerun from 2013.
Don’ts for Effective Preparation and Speaking
Don’ts for Effective Preparation and Speaking
1. Never read a speech to an audience. They deserve better and so do you. Recall your own experience. Have you ever been impressed when a speaker read a talk or sermon to you? If you answer is, “No,” then don’t inflict the same injury on others.
2. What about reading notes? Audiences feel offended or shortchanged. The drama of a presentation from your personal angle of view is lost.
3. When a speaker begins a talk with head held high, looking at the audience as he speaks, we know we are getting the news of the moment—created fresh in the moment before us –like fresh bread or a unique soup. We are impressed with a live and in the present performance.
This is a rerun from 2013.
