Page 55 - Effective communication Skills by Dale King

There are several things that you will have to do in order to achieve this, but

one prerequisite is the task can’t be too hard or too easy. If you are listening
to a presentation, your only task is to think. This is the task that you have to
set. This needs to have just the correct level of challenge for your audience.
The level of challenge needed will change with your audience, how confident
they are in the topic and their knowledge are all crucial factors.

Listening to someone talk you through a bunch of bullet points doesn’t
require you to think. So, it can get boring extremely fast.

If you put up a complicated chart and just dive into the details without telling

your audience what it is all about, the thinking is going to be too challenging.

You have to audit each minute of your presentation in terms of what the
thinking task is that you have set for your audience. Is it going to be too hard
or too easy for them?

Let Them Know Why They Need to Listen

If your audience doesn’t have any reason to be interested, give them one.

This can be hard. Most people in the audience have to be there, but they don’t
have any interest in the topic. The solution is telling them why they need to
care. If your presentation is about safety and health, tell them stories about
people who have been injured in the workplace and what happened to them.
If you can’t figure out a reason why they need to listen to you, then you
shouldn’t give the presentation.

Talk About Things Your Audience Likes

You might think this is too obvious and you’ve never made this mistake. I
have seen many intelligent people talk about what they think is interesting
instead of what the audience is interested in.

If you are giving a presentation at a large conference, people will come to
your presentation because of what is on the synopsis. This is why interests
them. Don’t change it up because it suits you. I had to sit through a seminar

that was advertised to be email marketing, which was what I was interested in
at the time. I get to the seminar and the speaker I had come to listen to gets up
and begins rambling on about SEO for websites. She had been entranced by
this subject and decided her target audience would listen to anything she had
to say. She asked the audience how many people had their own website and