If you prefer video content over text, I explain this material with fun, musical examples in my YouTube video.
As a public speaker, your responsibility is not just giving information. It’s gaining trust and connecting with your audience.
In this article, I break down how speakers can maximize audience engagement through interactivity.
What Not To Do
Consider this example: a speaker is giving an hour-long lecture on habits. Halfway through, they deliver their most important point:
“Temptations are hard to resist. They are not easy to change. At first we are conscious of those habits, but after a while we become the prisoner of them.”
Great information … but boring! Do you really want to hear someone talk nonstop for an hour or more? Here’s the fix…
What To Do
Check out how Carmen Simon, cognitive neuroscientist and keynote speaker, handles the same material. You only need to watch about 30 seconds from the video below to get a sense of Carmen’s technique.
Instead of straight lecturing, she asks her audience, “What temptations are hard to resist?”. They say “Sleeping in, Biting your fingernails”. She says:
“If we wanted to change these habits – sleeping in, biting your fingernails – these are not easy to change. At first we are conscious of those habits. But after a while we become the prisoner of them.”
The difference is small, but significant: Carmen inserts a moment of interactivity to connect.
Presenting, after all, can feel like quite a bizarre and contrived way to speak: you’re up there by yourself … talking to a silent room.
- There is the advantage of efficiency: as the expert, you are given space, without interruption, to curate the audience’s experience of unfamiliar information.
- But there’s the disadvantage of rigidity: as the only one talking, you have few opportunities to figure out how your audience feels about the information and what they’re actually interested in.
Interactivity provides touchpoints – opportunities to see if your material is resonating and, if not, how to adapt:
- As Carmen did, you can ask your audience to apply what you taught. That lets you see if they’ve actually listened and understood.
- You can use polls or raise-of-hand questions to evaluate your audience’s opinion (and let them learn about the opinion of their peers).
- You can insert intermittent moments of Q&A. This lets you see what the audience finds confusing, so you can change course and explain further (before the end of a presentation when it’s no longer top of mind).
Summary
As a speaker, remember: your responsibility is to inform your audience in an engaging way. Instead of pure monologuing, use moments of interactivity to identify how your audience feels and adapt to their needs.
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I’m writing a book on thinking quickly, speaking clearly, presenting convincingly, and supercharging your executive presence. Follow me on LinkedIn for more updates on the book and its release!
