Mantain your Audience Attention

Have you ever asked yourself:

What can I do to keep the audience’s attention on a speech or during a presentation? There are always people who seem not to be paying attention or listening. Keeping audience attention is more important and more difficult than gaining audience attention. 

From the author of Speaking about Presenting by Olivia Mitchell these are four ways to keep the audience’s attention during a presentation or meeting:

1.Tell them a reason why they should listen

If the audience does not have a reason to be interested in what you are about to say, tell them why they should bother in paying attention to you. This can be defiant. As the presenter you can give examples or handouts to the listeners about the topic you are about to talk, if they don’t have interest in the topic the solution is to tell them why they should care about your topic. It doesn’t matter the topic you can break the ice telling a short story about what you are going to talk. If you cannot find a reason why they should listen, do not give the presentation.

 2. Talk about a topic your audience is interested in

The presenter might think this is very obvious and that you would never make this mistake. However, there are many people who talks about their own interests rather than what the audience is interested in.

3. Do not make it too easy or too hard for the audience

The concept flow developed by Csikszentmihalyi a Hungarian psychology professor is a state of being completely engaged and pleased in what you are doing. The presenter loses track of time because you are entirely focused on what you are saying. As well as the audience and it is there when the audience probably is in state of flow.

There is only one rule to succeed in having a flow and that occurs in the act of don’t be too easy or too hard with the audience. When the audience is listening to a presentation, the key is to think. The thinking task that you set has to be exciting for your audience to make them keep interest in your topic.
When you listen to someone talking through a series of bullet points it is important to make exciting thinking, if you don’t do that your point gets boring very quickly.

4. Keep your ideas short
The best way to keep your audience’s attention is not to ramble on.