Hang on, I'll be with you in just a minute. Yeah. Pay attention. How do you deal with audience members who are texting during your presentation? How it's annoying, it's insulting. But you can't just go up to someone's Hey, cut that out and hit him on the head.
That would be not a good thing to do. That would be rude. And you can't yell at them. But it is frustrating and it can take away your confidence to here's my advice. Try to do something to bring them back. There's several strategies.
One, simply walk closer to them. If you're standing behind a lectern, and you're 30 feet away and that person's on the second row. They feel safe, they feel like you can't see them. Walk over there. If you're determined to stay in one spot. You're basically giving people a green light to be rude, ignore you and text and send email during your presentation, so one strategy is just to walk near them.
Another tactic is to throw out a question. Make it a rhetorical question. That's easy. That's happened to all of us from time to time, Jim to right now Jim's like, Oh, he's gonna put away your cell phone, shake his head. You're not embarrassing him. You're just asking simple question where he can nod his head.
Another tactic, you can go to the different part of the room. You're not really looking at this person. And let's say it's bill. You can say I was talking to bill in the hallway earlier today. And he mentioned to me that he had this exact same problem. So now I'm mentioning the person by name.
I'm not looking at him so it doesn't seem like I'm annoyed. are wrapping it on the head or wrapping mama knuckles or being a school teacher, but by now mentioning his name. It often shames someone Oh, I better pay attention. They're talking about me. So that's a tactic to I would try all of those things. And, of course, make sure you're being interesting.
If an audience member is texting while you're presenting, it may be a sign that you're boring. So make sure you're saying interesting things to your audience. So they don't want to text