How many of you have ever been in a situation where you are standing in a group of people and want to share your ideas and opinions, but you quickly realize that nobody is actually listening?
Me too. Depressing isn't it?
But not all is lost. Pick & Choose from the following 10 technqiues to light up your presence and engage the people around you.
The best way to increase the engagement of people begins before you even interact with them. Make sure that you know your audience, whether that's your friends and family, the interviewer who stands in the way of getting your dream job, your work colleagues in front of whom you'll be presenting your project proposal or the crowd to which will be seeing your YouTube video.
Knowing what their common interests, beliefs, or thoughts are, the issues they face, or even the current situation they are in will give you great power. It allows you to tailor the messages that you want to communicate to them in a way that resonates much more with these characteristics and thereby increases their interest in you and what you have to say.
As an example, if you are giving a talk about negotiation techniques and find out beforehand that most people in the audience are parents, fill your talk with examples of how the techniques you are teaching can help them to convince their children to eat their vegetables, tidy up their rooms, and do their homework. That way you turn your informational talk into a practical guide that will directly help your audience solve some of the personal issues that resonate with them, making it much more appealing and engaging.
Knowing your audience has also another advantage. It allows you to form a connection between you and them. Having a connection with your audience creates a great first impression of yourself, which ****will set the scene for the rest of the interaction and guarantee you to increase their level of engagement.
The best way to form that connection is by finding any commonalities that you and your audience have, such as shared beliefs or life experiences. Maybe you are a parent yourself and have three kids at home with whom you used to battle over tidying their rooms and doing their homework.
Highlighting these commonalities at the beginning of your interaction with someone else is crucial. It shows that you can relate and empathize with them, which breaks down barriers. It makes your audience feel like you understand them and their struggles, that you are on the same page, thereby increasing your likability and trustworthiness.
Another great way to draw in the attention of others and engage them more in any interaction with you is to tell them loud and clearly why they should care about what you have to say. How is the issue you are talking about relevant to the people you are talking to, how is it present here and why is it urgent now?
For instance, in his book Five Stars: The Communication Secrets to Get from Good to Great Carmine Gallo spends the first part of the book explaining how the advent of the next industrial revolution and the therewith connected technologies like artificial intelligence, robots, or quantum computing, is already revolutionizing the world of work and threatens the extinction of most jobs. Using real-world examples, he demonstrates how this scary "future" is already present, and why it is therefore so urgent for people to take action and adapt in line with this development to salvage their future employability.
However, that's not all. Simultaneously to creating this urgency, he also manages to do something else.
He creates uncertainty about what the future of work will look like and makes the reader curious about how to best deal with the pervasive technological changes that we are facing. By the end of the first part of Gallo's book, the reader is on the edge of their reading chair itching to find out what to do.
Only after having created relevance, urgency, and a bit of uncertainty Gallo then goes on to present his solution.
However, you can also take the opposite path to engaging people more: Create certainty.
In that context, you are strengthening the other party in their opinion about something by telling them that what they are saying is exactly what the majority of other people you spoke to about the same topic have said as well.
For instance, imagine you are talking to someone about the current state of the economy and the other person tells you that they think that market prices are way too high at the moment and that the stock market is probably going to crash soon. If you tell them that what they are saying is what 98% of the other people you know have said as well, you confirm them in their opinion, thereby creating certainty about their ideas.
We love being right, or a least seemingly right. In that moment of confirmation, the other person's body will release a short burst of dopamine, making them feel great. And that's great for you too. Why? Because you were the cause, or stimulus, for this outburst of the feel-good hormones, meaning that subconsciously the other person will automatically associate you with a good feeling and hence be more engaged in the interaction with you.
There is a particular group of communicators who we can learn a lot from when it comes to truly engaging people, who are true masters at drawing in and keeping our attention: Journalist. Just think of the abundance of different news channels which successfully manage to capture our engagement with their news stories on a daily basis. But what's their secret?
An important lesson we can learn from journalists is to always mention your most important points first. Adopt the assumption that the reader of your article, the listener of your podcast, or the viewer of your YouTube video won't listen or read till the end. If you adopt this mindset, it makes no sense to provide loads of long explanations which only tie into a conclusion containing your main takeaways at the very end of your content.
Instead, give your audience value straight away. They should feel that it was already worth engaging with you even when you are still just getting started. Turn the standard essay structure around. Explain your most important point first and then explain how you got there.
Now, grabbing someone's attention right from the start and ensuring they are engaged using the above techniques is great, but how do you make sure that it stays that way right until the end of your talk, presentation, or workshop?
A simple but effective trick is to announce in the beginning that you are going to ask your audience for their opinion at the end of your interaction.
Doing so has multiple advantages. Firstly, you show the other party that you respect and value them and that you care about their view on the topic of discussion, which is going to skyrocket the chances of the other person listening closely to your ideas and being engaged throughout.
However, as a helpful little side benefit, your initial announcement is also going to trigger the other party's self-preservation mechanisms, because chances are that the other party wants to avoid being embarrassed if they are asked to share their opinion and it became obvious that they didn't listen. Hence, they are likely to pay more attention and stay engaged throughout your interaction with them.
One of the most important things to bear in mind regardless of how many of the above techniques you want to include into your communication toolbox is to speak and write in straightforward sentences. After all, people will only ever be able to engage with you if they understand what you are saying in the first place!
Therefore, make it easy for them. Avoid long-winded, complicated sentence structures and fancy words that only serve the purpose of bolstering your ego.
Imagine you had to go into your local primary school and convince the third graders of your ideas.
I imagine you would try to avoid using sentences like "I was completely ambivalent about which option to select given the multitude of alternatives." and rather say something like "I didn't know what to pick because there was so much to choose from".
Adopting simple language will exponentially increase your chances of everyone being able to understand you and follow your thoughts without much mental effort, which will strongly enhance the chances of them engaging with you.
Now that you are talking to your audiences in simple language, how can you make it even easier to understand your ideas?
Enter one of the most powerful rhetorical tools of all times: Analogies.
Analogies - or metaphors - hold enormous power by making the unfamiliar familiar.
Consider for example the following analogy by the master of speech writing Winston Churchill:
“A good speech should be like a woman's skirt; long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.” ― Winston S. Churchill
In just one sentence Churchill creates an image in our mind that everyone understands and can relate to.
This is the power of analogies. They visualize and compromise complex ideas into familiar, easily understandable concepts that we know and feel comfortable with, and that ultimately engage us like almost no other rhetorical tool. Almost.
Let's finish off with the arguably most powerful tool of them all for creating unrivaled engagement of your audience: Stories.
Stories achieve something that most of the other tools can't achieve: It speaks to people's emotions. It makes people feel, which is far more powerful in attracting and keeping people's attention than appealing to their rational interests.
The art of storytelling is the secret power of Hollywood and Netflix, of the big brands of our time like Nike and Airbnb, and has been advocated by the greatest greats the world has seen ranging all the way back to Aristotle.
Great communicators know how to bring across their ideas in beautifully crafted stories, that connect and relate with the audience. They follow the 3-act storytelling technique, which gets their audience on the edge of their seat and keeps them engaged from the start to finish.
Learning this skill will trump all of the other techniques in this blog posts and is truly the most powerful match for lighting up the room and engaging your audience.
My Story
My name is Stefan, and just like you, I had (and still have) this little voice in my head telling me that I'm not good enough.... continue reading
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