"The average person only listens with about 25% efficiency."
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Don’t Tell. Don’t Lead. Engage: Part 1- Audience Engagement
Being an audience member holds just as active a role as being the speaker. The audience signifies a check and balance system: they remain there to listen, guide, question, and interpret the speaker's presentation. With these simple tips and tricks, you can vastly improve the value you get out of meetings.
Rule #1: Be on Time and Ready! Be on time; it sounds easy enough. However, it remains the most common mistake audience members make. Life can get crazy, and when it does, time has a tendency to fly by. Suddenly you become late to the meeting. You have now rushed into a room of focused people and have to pull out every pen, pencil, laptop, notepad, etc. This does not prepare you for engaging during the meeting. Instead, try to allow yourself ample time before meetings to get ready, walk-in 5-10 minutes beforehand, and settle yourself comfortably. Setting up your workspace and establishing your space allows you to be prepared to rock'n'roll when the meeting officially starts. Rule #2: Be a Good Listener Being a good listener remains more challenging than you might expect. There exists a distinct difference between hearing and listening. Hearing- what happens when your ears notice noise from the speaker that competes with your thoughts and distractions. Listening- when you actively participate and think about what the speaker says. Some days being an active listener seems impossible. But just like riding a bike, the more you practice, the more comfortable riding a bike will become. Rule #3: Turn off Distractions Halting or turning off outside distractions when heading into a meeting continues as a great idea. Engaging oneself while your laptop or phone continually fires notifications at you can be distracting. Disconnecting from technology, even for an hour, remains a beautiful technique when focusing on work. Rule #4: Be active Examples of active audience members could be: giving nonverbal cues, like nodding your head in agreement with what the speaker means to say, taking notes on the presentation, writing down points you would like to touch on later, etc. Conclusion Following these rules will help make you a well-respected audience member. You will be on time and prepared, allowing your brain to engage with the meeting topics and listen actively to the information. When engaged actively with the presentation without outside distractions, the takeaway will be a wealth of information that might be otherwise overlooked. |
Further reading
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Cobalt Community Research is a national 501c3 nonprofit, non-partisan coalition that helps local governments, schools and membership organizations measure, benchmark, and affordably engage communities through high-quality metrics, mobile geofencing data, surveys, and dynamic population segmentation. Cobalt combines big data with local insights to help organizations thrive as changes emerge in the economic, demographic and social landscape. Explore how we can help by calling 877.888.0209, or by emailing [email protected].
Cobalt Community Research is a national 501c3 nonprofit, non-partisan coalition that helps local governments, schools and membership organizations measure, benchmark, and affordably engage communities through high-quality metrics, mobile geofencing data, surveys, and dynamic population segmentation. Cobalt combines big data with local insights to help organizations thrive as changes emerge in the economic, demographic and social landscape. Explore how we can help by calling 877.888.0209, or by emailing [email protected].