How to grab the attention of your audience

Let's face it, attention spans are short and to have a great speech you should be able to hold the audiences attention from start to finish.

The question is, how do we do this? Here are a few great tips for maintaining the attention of your audience.

• After you have created your talk, go through it and make sure that every 2 minutes you use some kind of attention gaining tactic. This could be clapping your hands or using some sort of body movement.

• Make use of inflection in your voice

• Show a visual or hold up a prop

• Move around the room

• Tell a story

• Pose a questions to the audience

• Make use of silence to break up the rhythm of your speech. Pauses are a great technique to grab attention

Becoming a great public speaker should have you incorporate many of these devices in your speech. Challenge yourself and attempt to use at least one device every minute of your speech. If you are doing a speech for 5 minutes try using 5 devices. The more you try them out, the easier they will come to you naturally. 

Give it a shot the next time you have to do a speech or even when you're participating in table topics!

And most importantly, HAVE FUN WITH IT!

If you would like to try out some of these techniques, we'd love to have you participate in one of our meetings! We're a Toastmasters Winnipeg club located at the University of Manitoba. Our meetings are held every Wednesday from 12:05 –12:50 PM in Room 111 at St. John’s College (which is part of the University of Manitoba).

If you're in Winnipeg and interested in sitting in on a club meeting to see if Toastmasters is right for you, please feel free to contact Beverley Doern at  beverley_doern@umanitoba.ca