Keep Your Audience Iterested

Unless you keep your audience, whether it is one person or a hundred, engaged in what you're saying you might as well shut up.


Some persons are natural story tellers and as long as they have intriguing content have little trouble holding on to the audience's attention. Others might have more difficulty, but David Lavin , president of the Lavin Agency -- a very successful North American speaker's agency, outlines two ways anybody can do this more easily in the November 2009 edition of The Report on Business published monthly by The Globe and Mail  newspaper in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.


In this short feature he urges speakers to get straight to the meat or core of their presentation, eliminating as much of the preamble as possible.


He also warns that asking questions during your presentation can cut into the flow of your presentation, disruption your audience's attention.  This is a bit of a controversial point because asking questions can be also be a very good way, depending on your audience of course, to create an excellent dialog between you and them.


You could get around this by asking rhetorical questions to focus attention on the most critical or important parts of your presentation  and then having a question and answer session  after you have concluded to correct any  misconceptions some persons might have   as well to test how your ideas have been received by the audience.


If you do this, however, make it clear at the beginning of the question and answer period just how much time will be devoted to this.


This tactic could also create the opportunity for you to make future presentations on this topic.