Audience-Centered Seating for Your Presentations

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Posted on 20th January 2012 by Kristin Arnold in presentation skills |Set The Tone |U R #1 Visual |Visuals/Props

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You walk into the room and see a traditional seating set-up for your presentation.  Theater-style with two columns of chairs, with a path down the middle.  The overhead screen is at the front in the middle of the room.  Looks pretty good, right?

While typical for many meeting venues, and perhaps most comfortable for you, the presenter, meeting planner, or hotelier, it is NOT the best seating arrangement for an audience-centered presentation.

So what’s wrong with straight rows?

1.  Focus.  The seats directly in front of the speaker are the only decent seats in the house.  Everyone else has to adjust the view to get a direct line of sight to the presenter.  And yet we give up this prime real estate to a multimedia projector table or vacant space for a center aisle.  Whenever possible, place the chairs in front of you, the speaker:

2.  Energy Drain.  Any feng-shui expert will tell you that the energy flows out of the room through a center aisle.  Wherever possible, keep the straight row center section right in front of you, with an aisle in between each outer seating section.

4.  Safety.  You may want to have some ability for people to get in and out of their seats, so you can modify the seating with some extra aisles starting a third of the way from the stage.  This way, the energy won’t flow out of the room!

5.  Blocked View.  Unless you are sitting in the front row, there will always be somebody taller or wider in the seat in front of you.  If you are lucky, you will have a semi-obstructed view of the presenter.  Worst case, you have to lean one way or the other just to get a clear view. Wherever possible, stagger the chairs so they aren’t lined up like soldiers behind each other.

6.  Pain.  Unless you are sitting right in front of the presenter, chances are you must turn your neck slightly to see the presenter.  If you are on the far reaches, then you are probably putting more weight on one butt cheek than the other and are constantly readjusting your seat!  Do this for an extended period of time, and it starts to hurt!  Wherever possible, angle the chairs toward the presenter.

7.  Disconnect. If you want to connect with the audience, the best way is to enable the audience to connect with each other.  They simply can’t connect with each other if they can’t see each other. Straight rows allow each person in the row to see only one person on either side (and the back of somebody’s head – but that doesn’t help connection!)  Wherever possible, curve the seating around the presenter, so the audience can see each other.

Finally, if you can, ask for the overhead screen to be placed on the left, looking at the front of the room (otherwise known as upstage right!).  Since we read from left to right, make it easier for the audience to “read” what you are saying by placing the screen to the left of the stage (downstage right in theater terms).  Place the screen at the same depth as you will be standing and close enough to your center position so that your audience’s eyes won’t have to travel a great distance from you to the screen.  Furthermore, should you have to point to something on the screen, you can use your right hand without turning your back to the participants!

Depending on the venue’s capability, you can transform a ho-hum, boring traditional theater-style room set into an audience-centered seating arrangement.  Being able to view the presentation in comfort, as well as to see each other enhances the dynamics of the presentation.  In the best of all possible worlds, orient the seats toward the front so they can comfortably connect with the presenter and with each other.

 

Understanding Your Audience as a Speaker

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Posted on 17th November 2011 by Kristin Arnold in Engaging Mindset |Group Interaction |presentation skills |Set The Tone |Uncategorized |Word Choice

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To be an effective, engaging presenter, you have to let go of your own internal conversations and focus on your audience. This means you have to care sincerely about and want to connect with each person in the audience. They need to know that you are putting their needs first. That means you need to know enough about them so they feel they can trust you and will want to listen to you.

Research. We all despise the speaker who delivers his presentation on autopilot, never changing a word. It is the same presentation for one audience as it is for a completely different audience. To engage an audience, a presenter needs to find out their hopes, fears, and interests. Take the time to understand the people, their backgrounds, and the collective culture—often called the “personality” of the group—so you can connect your comments with what they care about.

Content. The actual message you share should address the issues that your audience cares about, not the ones you think they should care about. This is a subtle distinction with dramatic implications. If you do not address something that helps them make their lives better or improves the life of someone they care about, you are dead on arrival.

Make It Personal. Few things can help you bond and establish a connection with a group better than knowing and using people’s names.

• Obtain a participant list ahead of time and read through the list out loud several times. If possible, learn the correct pronunciation of the difficult names.

• As you  meet a new participant, say her name quietly to yourself a few times and make any associations that will help you recall the name later.

More “We” than “Me.” If you are truly focused on the audience, you will use more inclusive language. Rather than saying “I did this” and “Look at me,” you will inherently talk more about them, using either the words “you” or “we.”

Listen. As you are speaking, shift your focus from how you are doing to how the audience is doing. When you “listen” to the audience, you are much more aware of their verbal and nonverbal reactions during your speech. Are they smiling and nodding their heads? Yes; you are in the zone.

Adjust. As you listen to your audience, you can either continue as planned or adapt your speech. Because you aren’t going to hit the mark all the time, always prepare a plan B to pull out of your back pocket. Audiences are quite forgiving as long as they know you care about them. They want you to succeed. So if one technique doesn’t work, try another until you do connect.

 

A Senior Moment on Stage

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Posted on 26th August 2011 by Kristin Arnold in Engaging Mindset |Group Interaction |Humor |presentation skills |Uncategorized

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I recently attended a national convention when one of the speakers had a “senior moment” – she forgot her lines.  It was only a five minute speech, and so she had carefully crafted her speech, practiced methodically and came out onto the stage with energy and enthusiasm.   She performed her speech, much like she practiced it in the car, in the mirror, or to her friends.  Unfortunately, when you are speaking to a thousand people, it just isn’t the same.

Somewhere in there, she got lost.  It could happen to all of us.  In fact, it probably has.  Maybe not to a room of a thousand, but surely, somewhere in your life, you forgot where you were.

So what are your options?

1)  You can pause, take a deep breath, collect your thoughts and you’ll get back on track.  It might not be where you left off….and you might have left out a word, sentence or even paragraph, but you’ll enter back into the speech where it makes sense to you.  And the audience will be none the wiser.  They don’t know what your speech draft looks like – so they have nothing to compare it to!

2)  You can take a deep breath, and subtly refer to your notes – if you have them close by on the lectern, taped to the floor, or have them in your hand.  This is okay too as most audiences are very forgiving.  They appreciate your effort to speak to them rather than to the paper your speech is written on.  And well, most people are thrilled that they don’t have to be up there giving the speech, so they are really quite supportive (most of the time).

This presenter chose option 2.  Repeatedly.  And got more flustered as she got more lost.  And those of us in the audience felt her pain. There was a collective will to have her succeed.

When option 1 or 2 doesn’t work, then just put your notes down and speak from the heart.  Find a friendly face in the audience and tell them what you meant to say.  You’ll find that a few of those words, sentences, and even paragraphs will find their way back into your speech. In fact, you might even give a more heartfelt presentation than the one you rehearsed!

What do you do when you have a senior moment and forget your lines during an important presentation?