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Understanding your audience.
Ten years ago, in my past life as a business consultant, I read somewhere that the average person is hit with three thousand marketing messages a week. Can you imagine what this is figure is today?
Visualise that three thousand plus aliens are vying for your audience’s attention while you are executing your next keynote!
Now let me add in the following for your consideration; any keen observer of human behaviour in the developed world will have noticed that people have moved away from conversation to presentation and from dialogue to monologue. In summary we are in the main very poor listeners. Indeed I believe that a motivational keynote speaker is working in an attention deficit environment.
So what are the implications for your communication strategy?
A motivational keynote speaker needs to energise the audience:
At the highest possible level as mentioned in past articles, it is paramount that you are delivering a congruent message, one drawn from walking the path of your own philosophies. Energetic, enthusiastic keynote presentations tend to hit the spot.
Interactive workshop style – that is the way forward for the motivational keynote speaker:
Engage or induce sleep – that is the choice?
No matter how engaging you are; to deliver a challenging address to as many attendants as possible, your keynote needs to be interactive.
The average attention span - being generous - is fifteen minutes. After this people switch off and in order to re-engage, you need get them involved – exercises, discussions, role plays, whatever, just get them involved!
When a participant “does” as opposes to “hears” you have geometrically increased the possibility that they will retain and use the information, quite apart from keeping them awake. Also people will remember exercises that arouse the emotions at some level.
Emotion sells – no doubt about it. On the other hand, facts tend to induce sleep.
Other strategies:
Storytelling – stories are memorable. They tend to bypass a person’s conscious filtering system and deliver the message with impact.
Use all mediums – People tend to take in information three ways:
- Visually - they see it.
- Auditorally – they hear it
- Kinesthetically – they feel it.
Obviously when your keynote is a talkshop you are engaging only those who learn by listening. When you add in visuals or powerpoint to emphasise your points you are honouring the visual’s learning style. When you get them to participate, they have the opportunity, to engage the kinesthethics. This is a simplistic overview but the message is clear – honour all learning styles.
A simple test for you – at the end of your next presentation ask people to write down what they remember most from the seminar.
Number one, expect them to have been moved by your energy. Then expect a strong recall of the exercises and stories in that order. And finally, expect a poor recall of facts unless the facts are so amazing they have stirred the emotions!
Enjoy the gift of motivating audiences to pursue their dreams.
About Kevin Kelly
Described as the "coach behind Ireland's Celtic Tiger," Kevin Kelly is one of Europe's and Asia’s leading authorities on motivation, entrepreneurship, leadership, communication, and personal excellence.
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