How To Attract Your Audience And Not Repel Them

“Attraction is not a choice.”

Have you heard that before? I can’t remember where I heard it but it definitely hit home for me.

If you want the audience to be sucked into your presentations, then you have to trigger their emotions not just their logic.

Note: Emotion is not a substitute for logic. For long-term success and influence, you need to utilize both.

Here are five ways to trigger emotions and create a gravitational pull around your message.

1 – Be dynamic: Move on stage, move your hands and arms, use gestures. Every time you move you reset the focus point of your audience and you force them to consciously pay attention. This is one of the secrets of video production; producers use fast camera cuts to keep the audience from dozing off. You can use the same principle when speaking by using your body language to keep resetting your audience’s focus.

Don’t go overboard with this. Start by adding a few more gestures to your body language and build from there. “Body Language” is a Language, and can be learned. Find a place to learn more about body language and experiment to get you out of your comfort zone (Toastmasters, our workshops, and many other places).

2- Tell a story: Nothing triggers audiences’ emotions more than a relevant story. The success of TV, Youtube, and Blogs is a testimony to our innate need for stories in our lives.

Increase your chances of standing out and succeeding in the business world by learning how to tell good business stories. Stories are easier than you think. I used to be an engineer with almost zero ability to tell stories, now I can’t stop telling stories in my presentations.

Adding stories to my presentations is what allowed me to succeed as a presenter. It allowed me to capture my audience’s hearts and minds every time I speak.

3- Smile more: You know that people are attracted to other friendly people. Having a smile broadcasts to your audience that you are friendly and approachable; therefore, they feel more compelled to listen to you.

Use the mirror and practice smiling more. Make sure you learn how to smile using your eyes.

4- Belief in your product/company/message: Believing in your product, message, or company is a huge component for you to access your passion for the subject. People get inspired by passion even if it’s about the most analytical and abstract subjects or ideas.

Build your belief in your product, message, or company. Yes, beliefs can be cultivated. If you chose not to invest your energy in cultivating your belief in what you are working on, consider finding something else that you believe in.

5- Be congruent: It’s always amazing to see people shift to a new identity when they present versus one-on-one conversations. That is not congruent. Train yourself to be the same person on-stage and off-stage. (Your topics might change, your audience might change, your message might change, but you remain the same)

Get a video of yourself when presenting and notice if you shift into a new persona. Usually, the person that shows up is more robotic, stiffer, and less fluid. You don’t want to be that person, be you.

Find a place to practice your speaking while being natural and conversational and copy that feeling anytime you “officially” speak.

Your real you will not be perfect. No one is. But at least if you want to improve you will be improving the real you, not the artificial robot that showed up.

People are attracted to authenticity-  the more of you that shows up when you speak, the more people will be attracted to you.

6- Be positive: People avoid pain and are attracted to pleasure. If you have a negative attitude and pessimistic outlook then people will start avoiding you like the plague. However, if for the most part have a positive outlook on life and have a great vision for the future, people will be attracted to you and to your message.

Being positive takes energy and effort. With the media scaring us with doom, disease, and disaster every day, it’s hard to be naturally positive. So, we have to invest time every day to train our minds to spot and share the good.

I am not saying that we have to be blindly optimistic. I am saying that we have to be more optimistic than pessimistic if we want to attract people to our ideas, methods, and life.

remember, attraction is not a choice. Stop trying to convince people logically of your points, and start attracting them by implementing some of the strategies listed above.

Would love to see your comments below, I read them and respond to them!