Learn It 7.3.1 Interacting with the Audience

  • Understand techniques to capture and maintain your audience’s attention
  • Understand how to incorporate audience participation
  • Explore strategies to manage common fears and anxiety associated with public speaking
  • Understand the public speaking techniques used by successful speakers

Audience Attention and Rapport

The key to capturing and maintaining an audience’s attention is having an idea worth sharing and sharing it with emotion. The following techniques will help you grab and hold an audience’s attention:

  1. Surprise: Saying, showing, or doing something unexpected reengages the audience’s brains.
  2. Suspense: Use drama, slowly building your idea like a verbal puzzle.
  3. Storytelling: Share a unique and compelling story to illustrate your point.
  4. Senses: Engage the senses—hearing, sight, taste, touch, and smell. The greater the sensory engagement, the stronger the interest.
  5. Involve: Invite participation, a point we will address in the next section.
You are pitching a new app to potential investors. You start your presentation by sharing an unexpected statistic about the current state of the industry. You then connect this to a compelling story about how the idea for your app originated, perhaps inspired by a personal experience or an identified gap. By combining surprise with storytelling, you grab the investors’ attention from the start and keep them engaged throughout the presentation. 
You are part of a training on improving customer service. You could incorporate suspense by presenting a challenging customer scenario. Instead of quickly sharing the solution, you gradually work through it, allowing participants to think critically and engage with your example. To enhance sensory engagement, you might use multimedia elements such as a video showing an example of customer interaction, allowing employees to see and hear it. Additionally, you could do a role-play where employees practice responding to the customer.

See how Susan Cain uses storytelling in her opening to capture the audience’s attention.

You can view the transcript for “The power of introverts | Susan Cain | TED” here (opens in new window).