Truth 43 - Involve your audience

Mindful Presenter is far more than a training and development business helping people to speak with greater confidence and impact. We are in the business of helping people to connect with each other. Connecting themselves and their ideas with others in a way that is calm, creative and compelling. Mindful Presenting is the route to connecting emotionally as well as intellectually with your audience?What do you do?

We all need to have our physiological needs looked after, we need to feel safe, we need to feel a sense of belong and connect, we need a healthy self esteem and we all want to be the best that we can be.In public speaking and presenting it's worth remembering that whilst we are all unique and have a vast range of very personal and specific needs at the core we are all the same. That knowledge and understanding can be very helpful to us and our audience when we sit down to craft our presentation.

If you've been following the Mindful Presenter Truth Series you will have experienced our passionate belief that high impact public speaking and presenting involves far more than simply presenting data. At the heart of our presentation we need to send our audience a sincere feeling of love.

At Mindful Presenter we don't believe that you can having a boring topic, product, service or idea to present on. We do however, believe that any presentation can be made boring because the presenter is boring. The key reason for this is the lack of energy given in the crafting and delivery of the presentation. Your audience really do need your energy and if you are involved in public speaking or presenting in any way we owe it to them to give them as much as we can.

You could be the best presenter and public speaker in the world but that doesn't mean you know the answer to everything. Occasionally you will be asked a question during or after your presentation that you either don't know the answer to or have momentarily forgotten the answer. Public speaking and presenting isn't easy but it becomes much easier if we own the entire experience, including the fact that we can't know the answer to everything. It's ok to say 'I don't know'.

Public speaking and high impact presenting is about how we make people feel. It's not simply about sharing knowledge and data, that's easy. The five most important words in presenting and public speaking is Please Make Me Feel Something. Imagine your audience silently screaming those 5 words out to you from their own minds.

The challenge of public speaking and presenting is to craft and deliver content and a message which is so mindfully considered that it'e memorable.If your audience don't remember your presentation then you've wasted their time and yours.

Far to many presenter prepare and deliver presentations without knowing exactly who there audience are, how much they know and how they can help them.Public speaking is about making a difference to people and the only way presenters can do that is by understanding the expectations of their audience and then mindfully managing those expectations.

Every presentation has to be personal and relevant to your audience in a specific and meaningful way. Effective public speaking and presenting isn't about simply turning up to tell your audience what you want to see. Mindful presenting and high impact public speaking involves telling your audience what they need to know.

A high impact presentation is far more than a presenter simply speaking and presenting; it's a conversation. Public speaking success requires us to actively involve our audience in the presentation.