How to get your audience involved without it being weird (most of the time)

You’ll find many talks are delivered to an audience.

A one-way delivery where the speaker does the speaking and the audience does the listening.

And if there is even a slight suggestion of engagement, the chances are it will all fall apart.

Now mate, there are actually some occasions where that makes sense.

Like a TEDx, where it’s often about you sharing your idea on a stage without engagement.

Or a technical delivery where it’s all about precision information without any kind of disturbance.

But I reckon you are the kind of speaker who wants the audience to feel like they’re actually part of something.

Or at least I hope you are.

And if that’s the case, you are going to need to do something different.

Speak with them, not at them.

There was a moment in my speaking evolution - and that sounds really fancy - where I started to get more confident with having a conversation with the audience.

When I did, I found that they were the deliveries that I enjoyed more and people seemed to get more out of.

It was a conscious decision to involve the audience more.

The author Seth Barrish talks about some really cool stuff in one of his books. He talks about the idea of the audience being a scene partner.

Instead of being passive observers outside of what’s going on, you’re bringing them into the whole conversation.

In fact, it has been described as “conversational connection.”

I fucking love that.

I might even go as far as to say it’s presence or rapport.

But neither of those are alliterative and you know how your boy likes an alliteration.

When I looked at this more, I’m sure I started to experiment.

I take the microphone out into the audience and look at my slides from their perspective.

Get physically closer to people and then engage them one-on-one.

Sometimes it works really well, and sometimes people look really scared because they don’t expect the speaker to be out there.

I’ll often ask questions.

Not just the “give me a show of hands” kind of stuff, but genuine questions to find out how they’re doing.

When I first do this, they often don’t respond.

And so I normally explain to them that when I ask them a question, I’m usually looking for a response, and that quite often gets a laugh.

(When people are laughing, they’re generally connected).

Sometimes I will use somebody from the audience to come and help me.
Perhaps it’s to write down things on a whiteboard because my handwriting is so bad.

Or perhaps it’s just to hold my pens.

All of this might sound absolutely terrifying when you’re first starting out, and perhaps it is.

But when you start to play with this stuff, it creates a real buzz.

Try something and if it doesn’t work, try something else.

But always keep your audience safe.

And really, it’s not about doing big stuff to engage an audience, or even small stuff.

It’s about doing stuff which is deliberate and intentional.

The talks that people remember are often not the ones where somebody stood up and delivered technical information perfectly.

They are the ones where people felt they were part of something.

If you’re already doing speeches and you think that there’s something missing from your delivery, come and have a chat with me.

Because if your talk could be delivered as a PDF, then we probably need to have a conversation.