Blue Planet Training

That’s a little zen for starting a blog, isn’t it? What does it mean?

When you put your focus on the audience instead of yourself, you become attuned to what they are thinking. You are reading them while you are speaking. Keep asking yourself, if I was them listening to me, what would I be thinking?

When you can answer the questions that are popping up in their mind, you look smart and it lowers their filters.

For example, you were supposed to break for lunch at 12:00 noon and it’s 10 minutes after and you are still presenting. What question would the audience not ask?

Exactly. “Geez, when are we going to finish?” Even when they like you and the topic, their filter is up high and not much of what you say will be heard or remembered. If you don’t anticipate and answer the question, you look out of sync.

You can turn more to your favor by saying “I know we are over, give me 5 more minutes and let’s wrap up this module and we can take the full hour for lunch, is that ok with everyone?” This will allow people to have their question answered, and drop their filters back down.

And when you think about the order, keep the audience ever in mind. If you want to cover A, B, C first… and the audience wants to know X, Y and Z, it works against you. Even if you are going to cover that later, you want to answer as many of the audience’s questions first because it keeps their filter down for the content you want to address.

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