When you first show up on stage, you have around 30 seconds to engage your audience and capture their attention. If you miss your moment to win them over, you can get it back, but it’s hard work!
One of the ways I teach to capture the attention of your audience is to use “Icebreaker Activities”. If you use one early on in your presentation, you can build audience rapport up front… even if their first impression wasn’t great.
5 reasons I love breaking the ice with an activity:
- For better or for worse, people are judging you the second you’re on stage. So you can either be absolutely fabulous, or you can use the vastly untapped resource of your audience to shift focus.
- By using an Icebreaker Activity this gets attention off you. The crowd are now focused on one another, and are judging each other rather than you!
- An activity like this not only breaks the ice but also increases energy and fun in the room. I love it when people come back from Icebreaker Activities because they are smiling, happy and laughing. They will usually be more polite with their fellow audience members than they will be with you!
- All this means you don’t have to work so hard to capture attention and engage your crowd. Phew!
- It allows audience members to build rapport with one another. And of course if they have fun, that rapport will then be crossed over to you!
My invitation to you this week is to look at including Icebreaker Activities in your next presentation and observe the shift in energy as a result of the increase in rapport.
Have your audience engaging with each other early on in your session, and intersperse a few more throughout your effective presentation, to be in command of your audience and keep them engaged with you from beginning to end.
Which Icebreaker Activities have you found to work well for building rapport in your audiences? Do you have any particular favourites from events you’ve attended? Please leave a comment in the box below and share your experience of Icebreaker Activities with us.
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