Does Your Audience Drift Away?

Does you audience seem to drift away to another world when you are talking? Are they coming away from your presentation with wrong ideas.  Are they still unconvinced  -- even after all of the work and effort you have put into writing and presenting your ideas? 


If so -- you may lack fluency -- hindering the smooth flow of words and thoughts.


A number of things can create this problem such as:

• Unfamiliarity with all the words in your material
• Pauses -- for no reason or in too many places
• Poor material organization resulting in your ideas becoming jumbled
• Poor vocabulary, causing you to grope for words to express your ideas, with word whispers such as: "uh - uh -uh" peppering your talk     
• Poor sense stress
• Poor grammar and composition skills making your ideas hard or impossible to follow

The elimination of all of these is  critical to a good presentation -- but all of these obstacles can be overcome with study and practice on a regular basis. It is good, for instance, to practice your speaking or reading  skills for a few minutes each day.

It is just like swimming. With swimming you learn the proper strokes and breathing patterns and then put them into practice regularly.  To gain fluency in your presentations you do much the same thing -- learn  where you need to improve, learn how to do this and then put this information into practice. It takes effort and discipline.

If the hopeful Olympian swimmer just jumps into the water and splashes around instead of practicing proper strokes and breathing    she would fail to achieve her goals  and the  public speaker who does not constantly test where he is weak and make efforts to improve will soon flounder.