Why Won't My Audience Pay Attention?
- Victoria Hogg
- Nov 28, 2024
- 2 min read
Ever found yourself delivering a presentation, only to notice your audience's attention drifting away, their eyes glazing over like doughnuts in a bakery display?
Don’t worry: it’s not just you. Holding a crowd’s attention in today's distraction-laden world is tougher than ever. It’s not called ‘the attention economy’ for nothing. But what if the secret to magnetic presentations was already wired into different aspects of your personality?
Watching a sea of suppressed yawns from the stage can be demoralising and difficult. It’s tricky to keep everyone engaged without resorting to tactics bordering on manipulation, bullying or arse-kissing. Here’s three steps to a better experience.
Step 1: Identify Key Moments
Stay relevant and riveting by checking your speech through the lens of the audience themselves. There’s a way to ‘sell’ every section of it. Imagine sitting in the front row and ask yourself where the delivery might lag or listeners might get lost. You can divide the final version into segments that might have differing energies or messages.
“Don’t look at the floor: it doesn’t buy tickets” Didi Hopkins, global Commedia Dell’Arte expert
Step 2: What Does the Audience Want?
In these sections, what might the audience want to see? Useful knowledge and penny-drop moments, for sure. The sense of being a part of a bigger picture? Yes. A delivery that includes calls to action? Probably. What about being understood, as though the speaker knows what they’re going through. And to be entertained: definitely! With a heavy topic, especially: light relief is always welcome. Find those changes of pace and write them in.
Step 3: Deliver!
Enter our tried-and-trusted ‘SWaLK’ quadrant. Sage, Warrior, Lover, and Kidder are four presentation archetypes that allow you to take control, be charismatic and continually captivate your audience in a way that’s both effective and ethical.
Back in the day, writing S.W.a.L.K. - aka ‘Sealed With a Loving Kiss’ - on an envelope, would definitely get you noticed. So will this S.W.a.L.K. whenever you deploy it in a presentation. Try it out in a low-stakes situation (with your cat, perhaps), and let us know how it went!
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