How to Present to a Hostile Audience

Link on How to Overcome Your Fear of Public Speaking:

youtube.com/watch?v=1hYvcQF7LAc

Add me on Instagram: @masteryourtalk

Not all audiences are created equal. When you present in front of your parents, no matter what you do, they’ll always have your back (atleast, I hope), but in some cases, the audience can be somewhat tuned out of what you have to say, and in this week’s episode of MasterTalk, I’m going to help you prepare a strategy to reduce hostility as much as possible from your audience.

Where does hostility arise from? (1:22)

Generally, from 3 key things: they disagree with you or find an inconsistency in your presentation and want to question you on it, initial presumptions about your content or your character before you even entered the room or envy that arises from the way you present yourself in crowds.

1. Remedy to Disagreement - Welcome Criticism Openly (2:20):

Look everyone, you’re the expert of your own subject (or you should be), so if you exhibit defensiveness when questions are being thrown at you, your audience won’t trust you or think you’re someone worth learning from. If you are defensive in Q&A, it means you don’t know your subject well enough. ALMOST every single public speaking workshop I do, someone questions one of my tips and I ALWAYS hear them out and then provide my opinion in a clear, calm manner. I even thank them for asking me the question (no matter how they asked it), they’re participating hoorah. Imagine how powerful you come out if you answer a hostile question in a calm, happy fashion – you turn a tough situation in an opportunity to make yourself even that much more credible as the expert of your subject. So, KNOW YOUR SUBJECT – I shouldn’t have to be telling you this. But, more specifically, welcome criticism by acknowledging it at the beginning, don’t be shy to ask any questions or touch base with your audience if you feel something's off.

2. Remedy to Assumptions About You - Break Them Upfront (4:11).

In a past keynote, I delivered a MasterTalk workshop to a group of kids between the ages of 10-18 who were building apps for a technology competition. My secret to winning them over was putting myself in the shoes of the worst person in the room and what that person would think of me.

This allowed me to change the way I presented from talking about my usual accolades and accomplishments to simply speaking about the fears I had as a speaker and made a lot of funny jokes that were relatable to them as an audience of 15 year olds.

All in all, I didn’t sell them on the idea that I was this “expert”, I sold myself as a buddy that just happened to be good at public speaking and wanted to share some cool tips in a fun, quirky way, but because I framed it like a conversation, whenever someone had an objection or a question, I acknowledged it as if Bill Gates was asking me the question, with the respect and consideration it deserved.

All’s to say is it’s YOUR job to make sure you break your audience’s presumptions about you, not theirs and I can give so many more examples of how great speakers broke these assumptions, but I’ll rest my case here.

3. Remedy to an Envious Audience - Check Yourself (7:52).

When audience members are envious of you, in my opinion, when it’s educational content, it’s not because they’re bad people, but rather because you sound like you’re smarter than everyone else just because you know more about this specific topic than everyone else. I’ve never seen a situation in my life where a speaker was hated for being too smart, but I’ve definitely seen situations where the speaker gave the impression that he or she was superior than the person giving the presentation. A lot of people do this unknowingly, like my accountability partner when I practised public speaking, the trick is simply to have someone tell you, someone honest who cares about you enough to tell you that you sound like you don’t care about your audience by saying things like “this is so obvious”, “too easy”, “how can you not get this?”

If you enjoyed this video, be sure to SMASH that like button and subscribe to the Youtube channel to see more videos like this! If I can leave you with one word, send this to a friend that keeps saying how terrible their audiences are so that they can be one step closer to mastering their talk.

All the best everyone, have a great week!