I got a great email from a new Greenblast subscriber this week.

I asked if there was anything she was looking forward to learning about, and she said:

“I’ll be speaking at global events soon, so I’m keen to improve my skills before stepping out into the wild. Anything that helps with confidence, storytelling, and audience engagement would be super valuable for me right now.”

I love this type of info, because it allows me to write something I KNOW at least one of you gives a shit about!

So today, let’s discuss audience engagement.

Before we get into the HOW, I like looking up dictionary definitions of the words we’re discussing.

I might be a nerd, but sometimes you THINK you know how a word’s defined, but then looking it up gives you some cool perspective on what these words actually mean.

Look at definition “3b” below:

Engagement = “Emotional involvement or commitment.”

This is a great way to re-define “audience engagement” for our purposes as public speakers, because:

• words like “engagement” get overused

• they start to sound like jargon, or corporate bullshit

• and we forget what the hell they mean in the first place

This gives us a CLEAR DIRECTIVE:

Get some emotional involvement or commitment from your audience.

In other words:

Make them care.

Great, but HOW do we do that?

I’ll tell ya:

On my LinkedIn today I shared a list of 17 things I do to make my audience engaged. Worth reading if you haven’t yet.

It has tips like:

• start with your story

• vary your vocal delivery

• and ask the questions throughout

These onstage tips are very important, because you can get emotional involvement from an audience simply by speaking louder or softer, telling them your story, or including them in the talk with a Q&A.

BUT:

The thing that makes an audience care more than anything is CONTENT, and how that content is presented.

Ask yourself, when working on your slides or your script:

What do they REALLY care about?

This takes time, experience, and a great deal of empathy to answer. The good news is, most people care about the same five things:

1. Time

2. Money

3. Health

4. Relationships

5. Emotional wellbeing

(I call these the 5 Big Pain Points, I wrote more about them in my book.)

If you can make it clear that your content will help them with at least 2-3 of these, and if they believe you, YOU WILL HAVE THEIR EMOTIONAL INVOLVEMENT.

We all care about having more time, and our loved ones, and staying healthy and happy, and living a life that we’re proud of.

We forget this when we’re deep in the corporate terminology of productivity, and retention, and customer churn.

What we’re really talking about is life, love, and happiness.

Tap into that (and utilize the 17 techniques in my LinkedIn post) and you will engage your audience.

That’s IT for this week!

Pleas REPLY to this email with any questions or feedback, and tell me what topics you want covered next!

I’ll see ya in the next one, Greenblast OUT 🚀

P.S. When you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

1. Get unstuck & get onstage with a Speaking Strategy call

2. Join my community Speaking Heroes to for 2 hrs/week of live coaching & speech practice calls

3. Or book an availability call for speaking at your company