Keeping your audience’s attention throughout your entire presentation is difficult, isn’t it? Not if you know this one secret.
One participant in my workshop once said, “To keep the audience’s attention, telling jokes?” Well, your business presentation is not consisted of a series of jokes.
In today’s world, attention is the most valuable asset. You’ve probably learned that it is vital to grab your audience’s attention in the beginning of your presentation. But that’s not enough. You have to keep it.
Do you know how your audience’s attention works?
It is changing all the time.
Studies on human brain show that the average capacity for adults to maintain full attention during the course of doing the same listening activity is ten minutes. You can’t assume they’ll follow you along for the rest of your presentation if you just drone on and on. You have to work it every 10 minutes.
How do you do that?
Think about the best one-to-one conversation you’ve ever had with someone.
How was it like?
You were talking with each other, exchanging thoughts and ideas, and constantly asking each other’s opinion, right?
That is the secret to keep your audience’s attention. You must make the audience feel you are talking with them all the time, not just in the beginning.
To make your audience feel that way, make what you say stay relevant to them all throughout your presentation, and involve them in various ways, asking questions, telling a story of your previous client, doing an activity.
It requires you to structure what you say, not just pile your information together and dump that info to your audience. So it does take some work. But which one do you want to experience in your presentation?
Drone on and on and lose your audience while feeling less and less confident? or
Work on your presentation before hand and see your audience’s showing great interest in what you say?
