Speakers Obligation to the Audience

Do you ever stop to realize your attitude when you are speaking publicly? As a speaker what is your obligation to your audience? If you’re like most, we concentrate on ourselves, on delivery and the messages we want to convey. So, we get up, rattle off the material and try to get off as quick as possible. Leaving it to the audience to decipher and understand the material – we’ve done our job, its up to them to do the rest. Not a winning practice. For one, the audiences of today have so much information hitting them at once that you become a faded memory quickly. As speakers, it is our obligation to understand if we have reached them and break through the clutter. The attitude needs to be of winning their minds. Did you reach them? Did you win them over? Did you connect? How would you know? A speaker’s obligation is to not just deliver material but to connect with them so they connect with you. If you don’t, you’ve lost.