So how do you keep your audience's attention when you're giving a presentation? Now, the problem many speakers have is they're not even focused on their audience. They're focused on their little text, their PowerPoint, they're doing a data dump, they completely ignore their audience. So the audience starts to ignore you. You're really relationship with your audiences in many ways similar to your relationship with any other human being. If you're rude to them, they're going to be rude back, you ignore your audience, they are going to ignore you back.

So for starters, you have to actually look at individual members of your audience in the eye. And you've got to be interesting and engaging. You can't just do a boring data dump. Periodically, you need to ask rhetorical questions. Sometimes you need to ask real questions, especially if it's not a huge, huge audience. You need variety the variety in your tone of voice, your volume, your speed, pausing, Everything has to be a little bit different constant variety, because that's what people do when they're having real conversations.

If you are in a bar or restaurant with three good friends from high school and you're talking about some game you just saw, people don't say, Well, let me tell you what happened in the first two minutes of the game, and then the second two minutes, and that's not how people talk. There's variety. It pops in and out different levels of abstraction. aside, that's what you need when you're giving a speech as well. Now, it may Of course, be more structured than just a conversation with friends. But it can't be the structure of here's a fact.

Here's a fact. Here's a fact, on my next page, here's a fact. That's what happens to so many business presentations because they are just straight forward data dumps. If you do that, it's virtually impossible to keep your audience engaged. Now you need to be mindful of a lot of things with your audience. If The room is really way too cold, you need to stop and have someone adjust the thermometer.

If it's way too hot, you got to open a window. If the last speaker went on for three hours and people have not been allowed to get up to go to the bathroom, you need to be aware of that. And if people are all of a sudden a bunch of they're on their phone, I wouldn't be rude to them and snatch it out of their hands. But you do need to be aware of it. Sometimes walking closer to them will get them to put it away. Sometimes referencing something that you had in a conversation with one of them will get them to put it away.

But if you allow audience members to drift, even one or two, the next thing you know the whole audience could drift away. So great speakers are keenly aware of what their audience is focusing on at all times.