Want to get the most out of your presentation?
Learn to read the room!
Everything you need to know about the effectiveness of your message, or the clarity of your ideas, is all right there for your reading pleasure.
Here are three tips to increase your room reading expertise:
- Face the Place. As you begin your talk, purposefully make eye-contact with a few folks seated at various points around the room. Return to those faces often and note what you see. All smiles and nods is a good thing (go baby go—more like that). Faces avoiding your glance or busy looking around the room are likely confused, sorting out some aspect of what you’ve said and want to make sure they are not the only person that doesn’t get it (proceed with caution).
- Less is More. Running long in your talk is a sign of disrespect and/or a lack of preparation. It’s always better to leave them wanting more.
- Speech CPR. After lunch, the end of a long day, a dark conference room, excessive heat… you name it and a great presentation can fall flat. If this happens to you, cut the talk short and ask your audience to help you solve the problem. Let’s say you have the next great dot com and the audience doesn’t get why it is so great. Ask them for help. “Given what I’ve shared with you, how do you think I should describe what my dot com does?” Allowing the audience to take ownership of the idea will not only breathe life into an otherwise DOA speech, but could provide you with valuable insight!
This week’s shout out goes to Jason Smith of the TrueNorth Companies, an insurance and financial strategies firm. Jason’s favorite bit of advice serves as a wonderful reminder this week, “TIME is your only diminishing resource. Use it wisely…” Whether it’s your next talk, sales call or meeting, Mr. Smith’s advice is on point!
Stay connected!
PS: If you didn’t have a chance to do our survey last week – please take a second to answer a few questions now – just click HERE!
