HOW CAN YOU AFFIRM TO HAVE COMMUNICATED A MESSAGE TO AN AUDIENCE?
I think instead of worrying about the affirmation of your audience on whether or not they got or clearly understood your message, there are certain things we must not do during communication or a presentation. For example:
We Must Avoid long windedness: A lot of speakers get lost and become overly long-winded when giving presentation and now makes them too chatty or overly talkative. Forgetting that talking too much doesn’t mean you are a good communicator, it could simply mean that you are talkative and boring presenter although it can make you think you are smart or intelligent whereas your audience see you as the total opposite.
The audience will in their beautiful minds be like:
Will he ever stop talking?
Some even show verbal cues, some doze off in the process and that’s a bad sign towards your communication. Your audience may not tell you directly, but those signs automatically did,
People get longwinded for various reasons:
1. Insecurity: You are not quite sure about yourself, what you are capable of delivering or your choice words
2. Self-centeredness: You are mostly concern about yourself, you don’t respect timing, you don’t have respect for your audience to even know if they are exhausted or not and what a view.
3. You want to show all that you know at a time.
4. Too much talking instead of adding values or giving proper communication.
NB: you must always gauge yourself make sure you scale yourself so as not to be too concise or talk overly (Be a little of both) reason is because people:
• Will pay attention
• Will always remember what you say
• Will have more impact
Be it a presentation, Team meeting or Elevator pitch.
Now what you must do to avoid a bad communication
1. Always make your point and wrap it.
2. Skip preambles and back stories.
3. State the heart of the message
4. Always be UNDER TIME and not OVERTIME
What I mean by always being under time is that
If for instance your presentation is for one hour wrap it in 55minutes.
If its 30mins presentation wrap it up in 28minutes.
And when you ask for 5minutes only use 4 minutes and not being OVERTIME so you don’t bore everyone to death.
HOW DO YOU RELATE TO YOUR AUDIENCE BY CARRYING EVERYONE ALONG?
Below are key things to note:
1. Basically we have different types of audience, having different thinking capacity therefore you must be considerate in your speech, avoid sophisticated use of language.
2. Use plain English as much as possible, you may think speaking grammars makes you special but unfortunately it doesn’t, what is the essence of communication without proper understanding of the audience? It could simply mean you wasted your time all along.
For example: check the images below
If you check the picture you would u understand that speech B was actually clearer and more concise. I’d go for speech B wholeheartedly.
The above English simply means “I changed my mind” so why not save yourself the trouble and shave the words to the understanding of your audience.