Engage vs. Interact

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Posted on 13th April 2010 by Kristin Arnold in Auto Responders |Engaging Mindset |Questions


Was trolling through the TED talks (great place to view short, insightful and interesting presentations on a variety of topics), when I ran across Tony Robbins ‘ presentation about the invisible forces that drive our behavior.

Tony is known as a hugely engaging and interactive motivational speaker.  But TED limits the presentation to only 18 minutes (he went four minutes over BTW – you don’t see that happen very often!) when he normally consumes 50 hours (his own admission).  In this presentation, he was very engaging for the first five minutes, and then ventured into the interactive space by polling the audience with an intriguing question: “How may of you have failed to achieve something significant in your life?”  After the hands went up in the air, he said, “thanks for the interaction.”

By encouraging a small degree of participation, he tangibly shifted the mood in the room. If you continue to listen to the video – whether you agree with what he said or not – the mood in the room became lighter.  He continued to interact with the audience when they “filled in the blank” to a question.  Robbins came into the audience and hi-fived Al Gore.  He had a bit of spontaneous reparte with the audience – including a bit of laughter. He used an autoresponder asking them to say “Aye!” if they agree.  He used more interactive techniques – not only connecting but conversing with the audience.

Question:  Are you just engaging your audiences or are you engaging AND interacting with your audiences?

Absolutely as an Autoresponder

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Posted on 25th June 2009 by Kristin Arnold in Auto Responders

Just came back from the Halifax Chapter Meeting of the Canadian Association for Professional Speakers (CAPS).  Our guest speaker was Jeff Tobe talking about “Coloring Outside the Lines.”

Jeff used an autoresponder (when you have trained the audience to respond with a specific answer) beautifully and absolutely worth mentioning:

First, he asked for permission.  He asked the audience to respond with an energetic “ABSOLUTELY” whenever they were in agreement to a question he asked.

Second, he modeled the behavior by asking, “Can you do that?” while leaning forward with the expectation that the audience would respond with the correct answer.

Then, he reinforced the behavior.  When he got a strong response, he acknowledged it.  When it was rather wimpy (which it usually is the first or second time until the audience “gets it”), he would tease the audience into participating. 

It then became “natural” for the audience to listen for and respond to a question with an energetic “Absolutely!”