Props and Humor in Professional Speaking
People learn and retain information in different ways. As a professional speaker, you must also learn to incorporate as many different ways of engaging your audience in order to reach as many people as possible. In fact, you have an obligation to use anything and everything it takes so that more people can relate your message to their life. This means at one point in your career, you’ll have to use props as part of your message.
Props can often be used as the “impromptu” portion of your presentation. When used correctly, your props can have your audience sitting on the edge of their chair as they strive to see what you are doing at the front of the room. As you talk about your props, your audience won’t feel like you are reading a speech, which brings us to the next point. They can also be a substitute for notes since they automatically prompt you to describe the reason for introducing the prop in the first place. You can essentially go through an entire presentation just using props!
Using humor in your professional speaking gig
If using humor in your professional speaking presentation, understand this, People will pay more to be entertained than they will to be informed. Look around you and you will see that the top industry is the entertainment industry. Encompassing sports events, comic acts, movies, television and music, the entertainment industry steadily received trillions of dollars worldwide.
- Humor helps you connect with your audience. Make yourself more relatable with your audience as they begin to see that it’s not all about the information. Humor draws your audience to you because people are naturally drawn to positive things.
- Humor strengthens point and ideas you want to highlight in your presentation. Funny stories are memorable and can strengthen the point of your message. Television sitcoms are famous for taking real life situations and presenting them in a humorous fashion.
- Humor helps paint mental images in the minds of your audience. Self-effacing humor is often relatable to your audience because they can see themselves having those same situations.
- Humor will make people happy. People want to enjoy your seminar. They want to have a good time and they want to be happy. Humor helps you achieve that.
Your passion communicates more than you’ll ever say! Passion brings a professional speaker’s material to life for their audience. Your audience will know if you are passionate about what you’re speaking about or not. Moreover, they will need to draw on your passion to move them into taking action.
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