One of the goals of all of our presentations is to stay with our audiences and keep them engaged with our message every minute of our delivery. The reality is that they sometimes drift off and come back once if not several times throughout the presentation, especially if you’re speaking longer than thirty minutes. As a matter of fact, during my early training days, we were instructed not to speak continuously for any longer than 12 minutes for maximum impact, at which point our audiences’ minds would inevitably begin to drift off elsewhere.
Can we read body language to know if we’re losing our audience’s attention? The answer is… sometimes. Relying on body language can be deceptive. For all we know, it may be our saboteurs or inner self-critics convincing us that we’re losing our audience, when indeed we’re not. For example, an audience member with a bowed head may be listening in rapt concentration, whereas from the stage, they appear to be taking a nap. While some body language signs are obvious, it’s regularly hard to for the speaker to be sure and easy to assume the worst.
Not knowing your audience– they’re needs and interests– is often the primary reason for losing your connection with them. Early in my career as an instructor, I often became frustrated at silent, unresponsive students. I felt like I was continually hitting a brick wall with them. Finally, someone in the audience explained that they didn’t understand the complicated vocabulary I was using. I realized that I was completely oblivious to the fact that I was using terms in my explanations that they didn’t understand. My students weren’t bored; they were afraid of looking dumb. When I finally learned how to communicate in terms they understood, things went far, far better.
I would have saved myself a fair amount of time if I had engaged in a technique I later learned, christened by Madeline Hunter as dipsticking. Dipsticking is a way of monitoring the whole audience’s understanding frequently and broadly on the same topic or concept during instruction. This technique is especially important to process-oriented workshops or presentations, where a clear understanding of each progressive step in a particular process is key for overall understanding. Not only that, but dipsticking actually takes very little time.
There are two types of dipsticking: audience self-evaluation, and direct content checks. Some examples of quick self-evaluations are asking your audience to nod their heads if they’re with you, or to ask for a thumbs-up or thumbs-down signal to indicate how well they understand a concept you’ve just presented. However, the one significant problem with self-evaluation is that the audience may think they understand your content material when they actually don’t.
Hence, direct content checks that quickly evaluate recall and comprehension of the material presented may be provide the clearest answers for the presenter. For example, create a brief oral true/false quiz and have the whole audience respond with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down gesture. Remember, the entire room must be answering the question for you to be able to make a correct visual assessment of their understanding. Too many speakers rely on a correct answer from a single audience member and assume that the rest of the room gets it.
Whenever you reach a benchmark in your presentation, or a certain point where the entire audience should understand some content information or risk being lost for the rest of their time with you, be sure to dipstick!! You’ll give yourself the opportunity to correct misunderstandings and keep your audience with you consistently throughout your presentation.
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