Leadership Speaking Radio 🇨🇭

Episode 10 - Audience Connection and Participation in Online Meetings

March 29, 2020 Dr. Laura Penn Season 1 Episode 10
Leadership Speaking Radio 🇨🇭
Episode 10 - Audience Connection and Participation in Online Meetings
Show Notes Transcript

We are living in a time of massive disruption and change and the right time is now to rapidly upskill to show up as the best version of yourself in online meetings.

This episode of Leadership Speaking Radio shares more valuable tools from the leadership speaking toolbox to help you to thrive when speaking online.  It unpacks what you need to do in order to earn and maintain your audience's attention in online meetings.

We train global leaders and change-makers how to speak in public

www.theleadershipspeakingschool.com 

www.theleadershipspeakingschool.com

Speaker 1:

[inaudible]

Speaker 2:

Welcome to leadership speaking radio. This is episode number 10, audience connection and participation

Speaker 1:

Online meetings.

Speaker 2:

I'm your host, dr. Laura Penn professional speaker, coach, industry disruptor and founder of the leadership speaking school. We're based in Switzerland and we train global leaders how to speak in public to find out more about the transformational work that we're doing. Feel free to have a look at our website at www dot the leadership speaking school. That's all one word.com. Let's get straight into our top. We've got lots to unpack today related to audience connection and participation in online meetings. By the way, this is episode three in the series. That's about how to rapidly up-skill to show up as the best version of yourself in online meetings. If you're interested in hearing those other two episodes, the first one, which is episode number eight is about your setup. What you need to think about related to setting up the optimal environment for you and for the people who are going to be looking at you in your online meetings. Episode number nine, which is the second in the series was about the you in the online meetings. What you need to be thinking about how you need to be showing up in your energy, in your presence and how to take care of yourself in that online meeting. So this one is about how you need to be thinking about audience connection and participation in your online meeting. And I want to get into the details here for you unpacking the golden nuggets of leadership. Speaking from the leadership speaking toolbox. The first thing I want you to think about related to this audience participation element is that it is not the me show when you are speaking online, it is the week show. In other words, it is not a monologue. It should be a dialogue. You need to be interacting in a way with your online audience so that they feel like they are a part of the package so that they are involved. They've got skin in the game, they're inside it with you. This is essential. If you want to keep their attention and maintain the group energy of your online meeting, episode two in leadership speaking radio was all about understanding that it's not about you. It's about the audience. Well, this is where this idea really gets a life of its own. In this episode, I talked about how, if you have this point of view as a speaker, that it's not about you, it's not about me. It's about we, then you are changing the game. It is a complete elevation and mindset shift for you to think about the audience. More than you are thinking about yourself. What does this look like? Well, I can tell you what it looks like in the negative sense. This typically pans out when somebody doesn't have this point of view. So they don't know that it's not about me. It's about the audience. They don't have this mindset. So they start talking about themselves, their resume, their problem, their point of view. And there is so much time spent in their little bubble world and not enough time extended into their audience. In other words, they're not sharing insights and ideas that the audience can hold on to because it's so me related, this is something that needs to be thought about intensely in an online meeting, because there are so many distractions. There are so many things in an online environment. When you're sitting in watching someone on your screen that you could be thinking about or doing, it's hard enough when you're in your office, right? But it's even harder. If you're distracted by the things going on at home, the laundry that needs to be done, the food that you need to make for the family that night or whatever else is on your to do list at home. So this is where this is really important in the online meeting space that you, as the person speaking online, perhaps even running the meeting, you are taking your audience into account. You are talking to them about them. And with them, you are making this a dialogue, not a monologue, a really powerful tool from the leadership speaking toolbox that can help you in this realm of audience. Connection and participation is what I call bridging. This is a technique that I share with the leadership speaking core group. This is the group of people that come together in an intensive one week training session at the leadership speaking school campus in Switzerland. And these folks are leaders from a wide range of different sectors, and they want to elevate now Pronto ASAP. They want to learn the tools and the leadership speaking toolbox that will bring them to their highest levels of speaking. And this toolbox, by the way, it's applicable across different media, whether it is talking online, whether it is talking in a Ted like environment where you're giving a talk to a lot of people on stage, or whether you are doing a podcast interview, these tools and techniques are shared with you here at leadership radio, but they really come into a life of their own in leadership, speaking core. Anyway, in this bridging understanding, the, the knowledge is about figuring out the stories and the anecdotes and the talking points that you're going to use as a speaker with your audience before you go and speak to them. So this is all in your content preparation, and here you are harvesting the ideas and the facts and the anecdotes that your audience cares about where they have buy-in, or it touches their lives, where it's about them. And it's not about you. And I gave an example in episode two of a client that had this fantastic aha moment in leadership speaking Corps, where he came onto the scene and he was going to speak his industry is the car manufacturing industry. And he was going to talk to a group of about a hundred people about the topic of the day. And he started this out by talking about himself and his own experience in the car manufacturing industry and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I stopped him right there in the exercise, because this is an exercise that I call it trial by fire. You get out in front of the audience and you just keep doing it over and over again until you build a bridge and make a connection with your audience until that's flowing. So he had to repeat this over and over again, to get it right with my feedback. He understood that it's not going to work for him to talk about his resume. It's not going to work for it to be the me show. And this is what I accomplished. And this is what I love about cars. And this is who I am, blah, blah, blah. No, the audience will tune that out and they'll start to fantasize about what else they could be doing or whatever else is on their to do list. Do you see what I'm saying? So you need to hold your audience's participation and attention by talking about things that are related to their world. Building bridges, building bridges in to their time and space and with quite a few attempts. Finally, the gentleman that I'm talking about, he got it. He stopped talking about himself and he started talking about cars. The way that people who love to talk about cars, talk about cars and just like that. He had built the bridge with the audience, but here's the trick. You can't just build one bridge. In fact, to hold your audience's attention, you need to be building bridges all the time. Some are bigger, some are smaller. It's all in the design of how you're going to hold on to your audience's attention. This is everything. And let me just reiterate that word that I just said, design, this is something that you figured out beforehand. This is something that you've put pen to paper and thought about. Maybe even making a list of what are the subjects and topics that my audience cares about. That means something to them that are important to their hearts and minds. Write down that list and then match those elements on that list with what you're talking about, your bridges. In other words, and the beautiful thing about a bridge is you create the bridge and then you talk about your thing for a while. Not a resume, not the me show, but whatever topic you're there to download. And then you create another bridge holding on getting that audience participation on board. And then you talk about your subject and then another bridge you get this it's a little bit like, you know what? It reminds me of fly fishing. It reminds me of the physical motion of throwing that fishing line out into the water. And then it bobs up and down for a while and then it sinks down and then it moves closer to you if the stream is moving right. And then you've got to do it again, casting that fishing line back out, over and over and over again, constantly grabbing for the audience's attention, which by the way, isn't free. The audience's attention is not free. It's something you have to work for. It's something you earn. It's something that comes with them. Believing in you. You have incredibility, you holding onto them with the things that they care about. Does this make sense? You earn their attention and building bridges is a way to get this reward, to get the reward of their attention. There's one more thing I want to talk to you about today related to this idea of how to hold onto your audience, to connect with them in online meetings. And this is a technique that is really, really powerful when you are in a live space, because it's about your physical environment, but you can adapt it to the online space. It's a theatrical technique called breaking the fourth wall. Imagine a performer standing on a stage. And that performer, that speaker performer is surrounded by four walls. There's one in the back one on the side, on the left, one on the side, on the right. And where is that fourth wall? You guessed it. That fourth wall is the invisible line that separates the speaker performer from the audience. And everybody knows it's there because everybody knows when it breaks. When you either walk through physically shattering that illusionary wall, you walk through the wall and maybe you go into the audience. That's breaking the fourth wall physically. You can also break the fourth wall with your words, shattering the illusion that you're alone up there on stage. And it's only about you talking. When you break the fourth wall with words, you are creating a completely different level of connection because now the is expected to be involved somehow. So adapting this to online is straightforward. You are breaking the fourth wall by asking for audience participation. This is extraordinary in the leadership speaking toolbox. And I love when this comes into its own, because this is where it really is not the me show. But the we show when you break the fourth wall with a question or with something where you're asking the audience to interact with you verbally, you are telling them, Hey, wake up. You're in this too. And I know you've all been there when somebody does break the fourth wall and asks a question and you're like, Ooh, I better be paying more attention here. Right? You switch yourself on because now there's a stake there's skin in the game. So this is super have a list of questions that you've created in your content creation phase, where you are involving the audience. You breaking the fourth wall consciously, you are saying, Hey, how about this? What do you think about this? What's the answer to this? What does this? And this mean, get them engaged, make it the we show so that it avoids being the me show. And if you want extra bonus points, do something called recall. Recall is public speaking, rock and roll. Whether it is live or online, it is always the star of the show recall is about having broken the fourth wall. Let's say through a question and then somebody out there, let's say, you know, that person, that person's name is Jen, that person, Jen answers the question. And a little bit later, you know, you're talking and you're still adding to the content. And then you refer to Jen's answer you say. Yeah. And remember what Jen said. She thought that that was also the way it was going to go. Next year, that's recall. You have called out a member of the audience, literally remembering what they've said. And you've said their name pitching. This makes everybody's skin rise into goosebumps. It is so powerful. It is such a rock and roll move from your point of view, because it makes it look like you care about your audience and that you are paying laser focused attention to what they are saying. That's why this is rock and roll. And that's why the sets you up into the realm of leadership speaking, because this is what leaders do. They pay attention to the details. They honor people they recall. Okay? Now you've got quite a few more tools in your online speaking toolbox. I hope that this information is valuable for you guys. And I hope that you found this episode useful. Now it's up to you to go out and use these skills, put them into action, make them work for you and adapt them to your individual situations. What I've given you in this series is the baseline. Now go and make it work so that it serves what you're doing. It's your foundation. It supports you. Okay. I look forward to bringing you another episode next time, where I will unpack more leadership speaking golden nuggets in the meantime, thank you so much for tuning in. I love that you guys are listening and if you like what you're hearing, share, share, share, share, and care. If you can help other people to rise and shine and their leadership speaking, whether it's live or online, help them to do that by forwarding this episode or others. All right, folks, I look forward to speaking to you the next time. Take care and be well

Speaker 1:

[inaudible].