During a monthly teleseminar for a friend’s continuity program yesterday, our host told us about the negative self-talk she used to experience every time someone in her audience raised their hands during one of her presentations. The voice in her head would say something like, “They’re going to heckle me. I won’t be able to answer the question. Why are they picking on me?”
I appreciated her being so open, and it reminded me of how long it took me to get over that same sort of negative self-talk, fear, and overall defensive response when challenged by my audience. In my case, I was dealing daily with groups obligated to attend my classes, and I had to learn to handle multiple daily challenges effectively, or quit my job. I think it took me two to three years to fully get over my apprehensions and learn how to turn challenging audience situations in my favor.
Now, there are a wide variety of specific techniques one can apply to different audience types and circumstances, but during those first few years I realized three important truths when managing difficult audiences:
1) Adjust your mindset toward seemingly uncooperative audience members. It’s never personal, unless you the speaker insult or humiliate them in some way.
2) Never insult or humiliate an audience member, ever! You’ll look like a jerk, and you’ll turn your audience against you.
3) Whenever you must act to neutralize a disruptive person, choose a course of action from the attitude of protecting the best interests of your entire audience. For example, is it in the audience’s best interest to allow your presentation to become a tangential discussion between you and a single audience member while the rest of them sit idly by? No, and it’s the speaker’s responsiblity to recognize and stop any such developments immediately.
In the spirit of sharing, would you like to hear some of my most challenging audience experiences? Here you go: Once two young men broke out into a fistfight (over a young woman) during a presentation. Once that happened, my presentation was pretty much over. We got them out of the room and cleaned up the blood, but I just couldn’t get the audience back!
And another: a young woman fell asleep during one of my classes (early in my career), and in my indignance, I decided not to interrupt my talk to wake her. At the end of the class I found that I couldn’t wake her up, because she was unconscious. We had to call the EMT to transport her to the hospital. Fortunately, she was later revived, treated and released, and I wasn’t responsible for anyone’s death.
The truth is, it’s pretty unlikely you’ll experience anything that extreme from your audience, but it’s confidence-inspiring to be armed with specific techniques to apply when a problem emerges in your audience. Fearless Delivery’s Presentation Power Pack, a comprehensive 5-part group coaching series on public speaking will devote one of its five trainings to those very techniques. Please click on the highlighted link to sign up for the preview teleclass tomorrow, April 7th at 2p.m. EST.
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