Rownhams Ladies' Night, Hampshire

My last booking in March was a talk on My Life as a Freelance Comedy Writer for a ladies' group at Rownhams, just outside Southampton.

I speak in all sorts of venues: town halls, hotels, restaurants, golf clubs, churches, business premises, colleges, schools, libraries, private homes, social clubs, village halls, community centres...

The community centre at Rownhams is a really attractive setting for a speaker to work in. It was, at one time, the village school and the largest room used for events must have been the main classroom. It's big enough to accommodate a fair-sized audience but still small enough to be intimate.

A speaker should try to make regular eye contact with all visible sections of the audience, whatever the seating arrangements. Usually, when you speak in a rectangular room, you are placed at the head of it and you address an audience who are seated in a number of short rows but there may also be occasions when the audience are seated across such a room (I once gave a talk at a village hall in Surrey where an audience of 45 WI members were seated in just two rows). Making eye contact in this situation might seem a little more tricky at first (you might feel a little like someone watching a game of tennis!) but, with practice, you get used to it.

In a recent article in the Times, the rock singer Bruce Dickinson gave a fascinating insight into how he makes eye contact, even when he's performing for thousands at a stadium gig:

He...began performing in small clubs, and learnt from one of his childhood heroes, Ian Gillan, the Deep Purple singer, how to bring your audience in. “I said to him one night, ‘What's your secret?' And he said, ‘Always look 'em in the eyes.' I thought, OK, I'll try it - but how far can I actually see? And I discovered it was entirely possible to look right the way to the back of a show and see somebody. I thought, well, if you grab that person, then everybody around them suddenly goes ‘Wow' and you energise that whole area suddenly. I started working that - in the end you can do it in stadiums.”

(Now, what other public speaking blog brings you insights from the lead singer of Iron Maiden?) Seriously, Bruce's story shows that a certain level of eye contact is usually possible, whatever the seating arrangements!

Public Speaking Tip #303: Making at least some eye contact with as many of your visible audience as possible when you speak helps to draw them in; it makes everyone feel more  involved and demonstrates confidence on your part.

And don't forget about #8 in my Thomas's Twelve Tips for Terrified Speakers...

My Life as a Freelance Comedy Writer is a talk that I have been delivering and constantly honing since January 1996 so I am used to it going wll. Even so, the 50-or-so ladies at Rownhams were an exceptionally receptive audience, picking up on every nuance and humorous aside.

A great evening. My thanks to Sandra Burnage for the lifts from and back to Southampton Central and her sister June for the refreshments.