5 tips to grasp your audience attention!

“It is almost end of year, how is your KPI doing? You may finish them very well, the next step is properly present your work to co-workers, but is that really that simple?” Presentation needs skill!

What is the goal for presentation? It is not about how fun it is to speak in front of group of people, but more about if deliver your message to your audience properly. How to get your audience attention? Here are five tips that may help you. 5 minute reading may empower your ability of presentation to next level!

1. Good use of eye contact

Eye contact is one of the easiest and most powerful ways to make a person feel recognized, understood and validated. it conveys confidence and power, make whoever on the other side believe what you are saying. You are trying to sell your point to your listener, so use some of eye contact to empower your words. First decide your audience into several zones, make eye contact with zone1 audience, with firm and smell in your eyes for 3 to 5 seconds, and then smoothly transit to zone2. Too long will make people uncomfortable, too short will either make other feel neglected or hiding. So practice this skill.

2. Tell a story.

I have been participating speech contest since I was a little girl, there were so many that I cannot recall most. One of them mark a sign on me. I went to Beijing I was so nervous and even wanted to puke. I spoke so fast, I couldn’t even understand myself and just want to go overwith that 5 minuet. Later on I found that 5 minuet is so treasonable what a beautiful moment, even I fail I should have enjoyed it. So I am telling you a story about enjoy your time of talking and not nervous which is easy to say with a sentence but you won’t feel it, but telling a story preferably your own story can make audience involved and understand your statement better.

3. Ask question

Question is a good way to communicate with audience. It is a way to let audience step their foot in your shoe and proactively trying to understand your statement. It is always a moment of thinking would leave the strongest impression in audience mind. So instead of directly throw a knowledge or fact to your audience, try to come up with proper question and lead them to the answer.

4. Live poll

Interaction with audience is one of the best way to make the crowd fully engaged. If your presentation is rather long, then you will gradually loose audience attention. How to let them more involved here are some good way for it: live pool, let audience make a choice, can be either a small quiz of what you just said or better, it can be a live experiment confirming what most people think, if the consensus is different from your conclusion, you definitely gonna receive a wow! Live poll is supported by many app. Picpic Live is a tech solution to do live poll and live result reveal, no need to download things, only scan QR code.

5.Wisely pause in your speech

Like the story I listed in 2. The minute of attention is treasurable, enjoy it, don’t rush it. When you feel comfortable, your audience will also feel comfortable. More importantly human brain needs time to process words, appropriate pause is not awkward at all. The second of silence let audience think throughly about your statement and merge with their knowledge structure. Remember you knew what you gonna say next, you remember the script, but your audience don’t. So apply some pause in your speech, it will make things easier to understand.