127 How To Work The Room When Presenting

<p>Getting up in front of people is confronting for a lot of speakers.  Beady eyes are boring into you, a sea of serious faces is scary, the lights are painfully bright and the pressure feels intense.  You start to doubt your preparation was sufficient for the occasion.  You throw up the laptop lid and then try to mount the podium such that it provides a safety barrier between you and the great unwashed.  You studiously avoid confronting eye contact, by staring down at your laptop screen or your notes.  Or to leaven things up, you read the screen to the audience, presenting a nice view of the top of your head.  If you have a partly bald pate, like some medieval monk, then that makes it all the more gripping. It doesn’t have to be so pathetic.  In fact, you can “own the space and work the room”. </p> <p> </p> <p>By properly designing your presentation in the first place, you can release yourself from the laptop.  The main screen will be composed of little text and mainly images.  These are images designed with the object of conveying the key points in two seconds.  This means you are replacing text on a screen, with oral word pictures delivered by you.  This is so much more powerful.  The slide advancer technology is pretty good these days and this frees you from having to be physically chained to the laptop.</p> <p> </p> <p>Now you can move to the audience.  Depending on the size of the occasion, the approach will be different.  Let’s assume a 30 person plus venue.  You divide your audience space into six sectors, like a baseball diamond.  Left, Middle, Right Field.  You then cut it in half, so you have an Inner Field and an Outer Field.  If the audience is smaller than 30 people, then you probably have just left, right, front and back to work with.</p> <p> </p> <p>The point is to “work the room” by engaging with your entire audience.  Make around six to eight seconds of eye contact with each individual, in all of those sectors.  Do it randomly, unpredictably, to maintain interest.  If you do it a predetermined o