Read the Room While You Speak

Piranhas. That’s what the audience at Philadelphia’s Laff House Comedy Club must have felt like one Tuesday night in 2006.

Comic after comic walked onstage and got destroyed. Hecklers shouted insults. Dollar bills flew and drinks followed. From the back of the room, a young Kevin Hart, who would later achieve fame as an actor and comedian, watched an established local comic bomb and realized he would soon have to face the same crowd.

When Hart finally took the microphone, he saw what had been going wrong all night. The other comedians had been trying too hard to get the audience on their side, and the crowd could feel it. The harder the comics tried, the more the crowd attacked them.

So, Hart abandoned the battle.

“This has been weird all night, guys,” he told them. Instead of trying to power through his set as planned, Hart talked about what was happening right there in the room. He described watching the crowd tear into the other comics and admitted he was scared. When he did, a few reluctant laughs started to come through, and the mood in the room began to shift.

Hart later described the difference simply: He was speaking to the audience, not at them. It wasn’t his funniest set, but it worked and at the end of the night he was the only comedian who made it offstage without being humiliated.

Every speaker prepares speeches, but great speakers are also prepared to change them based on audience engagement. Reading an audience well requires noticing patterns, especially when those patterns change.

Here are five places to start.

1. Establish the room’s baseline.

   Before you start speaking, take in the room. How quickly do people settle down and take their seats? Are they focused on you, or still talking among themselves? A baseline vibe provides a reliable reference point for noticing changes later.

   Maybe the audience starts out making steady eye contact and looking relaxed. Then, five minutes into a more technical section, several people look down at their phones.

   Make sure you notice these changes and are prepared to respond if the room feels as if it’s contracting.

2. Read the crowd, not the individual.

   One audience member yawning can shake a nervous speaker’s confidence, but try not to read too much into it. Look for clusters of behavior from the whole group instead.

   If one person checks their phone, just keep going—it’s an isolated incident. If a group of people do it within a minute, it’s time to pay attention. If someone looks confused, it could just be that they missed something, but if an entire section of the audience starts furrowing brows or looking at the slide and then at one another, your explanation may need work.

3. When attention drops, change the pattern.

   Once you notice a shift in the audience’s behavior, such as people looking down, shifting in their seats, or whispering to one another, resist the temptation to simply talk faster. Change something more significant; move deliberately to another part of the stage. Research on presentations suggests that changing your physical position when attention is slipping can help bring audience members back, provided you move with purpose rather than pace nervously.

   You can also change the audience’s role.

   Ask for a show of hands. Give them a question to consider. Ask them to picture themselves in the situation you’re describing. Techniques like polling, reflection, and imagination exercises are excellent ways to break up a monologue and sustain attention.

   Changing the pattern is a crucial public speaking device that re-engages a flat room. We underestimate how useful it is to have engagement tactics ready to offer up.

Every speaker prepares a speech, but great speakers are also prepared to change it.

4. Use your voice and gestures to hold attention.

   Your audience responds to both what you say and how you say it.

   If the room starts to flatten, listen to your own delivery. Has your voice settled into the same pitch and volume? Have your gestures disappeared, or become repetitive?

   Skilled speakers vary their pitch and volume throughout a presentation rather than staying in one vocal register. Timing matters, too. Gestures are most useful when they arrive just before or at the same time as the words you want to emphasize. When gestures lag behind the words, audiences remember less.

   So, if you notice attention beginning to drift, don’t automatically try to add more content. Instead, change the delivery, put more emphasis into the sentence that matters, vary your volume, let a gesture underline the point.

5. Keep a story in your back pocket.

   Facts may support your message, but they don’t always hold the room.

   As many speaking experts have noted, stories are more memorable than statistics. Yet when attention starts to fade, speakers often respond with another number, another chart, or another explanation.

   Prepare for that moment before you step onstage. Keep one or two short stories in your back pocket that illustrate the point you want to make.

Then watch the room. Give the audience a human experience to attach to.

Kevin Hart survived the Laff House because he noticed that the performance all the comics had prepared for was failing, and he changed his.

That is the peculiar challenge of public speaking. Hundreds of eyes may be watching you, but you still have to watch back.

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