So how do you feel about your audience? Do you like them? Maybe we can take this one step further – do you love them? Do you want them to love you? When you consider the fact that your audience probably has never met you before, this might seem like a bit of a stretch goal even if you understand the importance of public speaking. However, as a speaker you have some pretty incredible powers. You have the ability to make your audience fall in love with you if your speech can seduce them, engage their minds, and finally win their hearts.
It’s All About Seduction
As speakers what we want to do is to attract our audience to ourselves. In order to do this we are going to have to get in touch with their emotions. The good news is that that as speakers we have the ability to craft a speech that will attract an audience to us. If we want to seduce our audience, then we are going to have to take steps to do so at the beginning of our speech. The good news that that this is not hard to do: all we have to do is to keep our speech nice and simple.
It turns out that simplicity rules. It is simplicity that will start the spark of emotion within your audience as you start to speak. If you choose to give a speech that is complex, then you will simply be getting in the way of your audience’s emotions and will be preventing them from being attracted to you. If you have complex things to share with your audience, then hold off until the middle part of your speech before you share them with your audience. At the beginning take great pains to keep things simple. Remember that simplicity is how you are going to seduce your audience.
Engage Your Audience’s Minds
Seducing your audience is a great way to start a speech. However, it is really only going to get you so far. What you are going to have to do next is to engage your audience. If you are going to be able to engage your audience, then you are going to be able to keep your speech moving forward. One of the best ways to go about engaging your audience will be to tell them what you will be speaking about. You can do this by providing your audience with a context for your speech after you have seduced them with your speech’s opening.
You can provide your audience with context for your speech by giving them an outline of both your main and supporting points. Your purpose for doing this will be to tell your audience what your speech is going to mean for them. If you take the time to do this, then you’ll give your audience time to recover from your very good opening and they will have a chance to become engaged with what you are preparing to tell them. They are going to have an understanding of where your speech is going to be taking them and they’ll have a better understanding of why this is going to be important for them.
Wrap Things Up By Winning Their Hearts
As a speaker, if you want to win your audience over, you are going to have to take the next step. Your audience is going to be able to sense how your feel about the things that you are talking about. They have the built-in ability to feel it when you really care about your topic. During your speech, you need to be working to give your audience both your energy and your love for what you are talking about.
Yes, your audience should be important to you. However, what you are talking about has to be even more important to you. Deep down inside you need to believe that by giving this speech you have the ability to either change the world or at least change the lives of some of the people who are sitting in your audience. Keep in mind that you don’t want to make the mistake and over-dramatized the delivery of your material. Make sure that you are delivering it with passion. You’ll want to stay authentic and be passionate about the importance of your message for your audience.
What All Of This Means For You
Every audience that we present to is different. We may be meeting them for the first time, but we want them to like us. We want them to love us. We want them to love the message that we have to deliver to them so that we can share the benefits of public speaking with them. In order to make this happen, we need to use all of our speaker skills to find ways to seduce them, engage them, and finally to win their hearts.
In order to win an audience over, it starts with the beginning of your speech. We want to attract our audience to ourselves and so we need to seduce them. In order to make this happen, we need to keep our speech nice and simple. Simplicity will seduce an audience. In order to keep your audience’s attention you are then going to have to engage them. This can be done by providing them with an outline of your main and supporting points. By doing this they will know where you are going to be taking them and they can settle in for the journey. Finally, you have to win their hearts. You can do this by being passionate about what you are sharing with them. If they can feel how much you love your topic, then this love will flow to them and then back to you.
As long as we are going to the effort of creating and delivering a speech, we would like to be able to capture the hearts and minds of our audience. Our audience may not know us when we start and so we are going to have use our speaking skills to start out by seducing them, then engaging them, and finally capturing their hearts. If we can accomplish all of this in our next speech, then we will have truly been able to seduce our audience!
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™
Question For You: How much time should a speaker spend providing his or her audience with an outline of what they will be telling them.?
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Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!
What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
When it comes time to deliver a presentation, we don’t always do it alone. Sometimes we are called upon to participate in a group presentation. These can be tricky to do correctly. No matter who the presentation is going to be given to, we need to realize that the most important thing about the presentation is that it has to give the impression that it was all put together by a single person in order to deliver the importance of public speaking. This is the challenge that you face every time you get asked to participate in a group presentation.