Standing on the podium, in front of the microphone, you deliver your speech. Audience starts jumping in joy, they start praising you, claps and hand shakes everywhere when you get off the stage. Job well done!! After all your audience loved it. Well.. might not be true every time.
It's been observed that 62% of the times, yes 62%!!! when you speak in front of a live audience, you don't know your audience!!! You might not believe this. Obviously, you are an awesome presenter, a killer machine when it comes to exploiting that microphone, you have that swag, that persona/aura to create an impact and people love it. Well, i don't doubt you, but the problem is that your audience most of the time does not know how to REACT.
You need to understand the psyche of the audience well before you enter that hall. You need to relate with them. Following are the major categories in which your audience generally falls, knowing these categories well can make a difference.
1. "Me too" audience - It's a chain reaction when it comes to audience feedback. In a gathering of hundred, even if five start praising you for nor reason, the others would soon join them and you would start to believe that it's going great. But think of it in a different way, if even two start with negative feedback, then a group of fifty taking you down would not be a good scene. Most importantly many of them are doing out of a chain reaction, they have not used their brain at all. Majority of the feedback you get when you speak is driven by this, do not fall in this honey trap.
Always, keep a self check mechanism in place when you are speaking. With every line that you speak, you should ask yourself if you are going in the right direction or not? If you genuinely ask yourself this question, you will get the right answer. Tweak your speech then and there, otherwise your speech would die an early death!!
2. "Need a change" audience - In many cases you will find the auditorium/hall fully loaded with people dying to listen to you. Beware, many of them have no idea what your show is all about, and many of them even don't know who you are. This group has come to listen to you for a change, and it's not that they genuinely thought of coming to your show, in fact they had no other choice and thought of killing their time by occupying a seat in your show. They do not connect with you at all, they would not respond to you, they would put a poker face throughout. You end up in a confusion, if your are going right or not. Not to mention,
With practice you will learn to identify such people, it's better to ignore them, as they do not add anything meaningful to the equation.
3. "Mystery shoppers"- So you think you know the best on a particular topic. Well, you might be, but then there are some "Mystery shoppers" in the group who are best in this game.They are here to judge your talent, to benchmark how much they know vis-a-vis the competitor i..e YOU. They will listen to you seriously, they will stare at you, their gaze might make you nervous, they would grin on every wrong statement put in front of them. They would try to take you down any time. This species is a bit intelligent than you think they are, and their feedback can make or break your reputation.
To tackle them, it's better to do your homework before the speech, ask the organizers about the invitation list, analyse it, research about them, know who your audience is. If you get it right, you can atleast ask for a truce, if not beat them.
Speaking well and a great response not necessarily paints the right picture when you deliver a speech We need to read what's not visible, audible. Believing what you see might not be true for you. Better watch out for cues that you ignore most of the times.
So what do you think? Do you have any other category in your mind? Do let me know, I 'll share the same to all my readers.
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