Audience-centric speaking

- When presenting, it's easy to allow our focus to be on ourselves as speakers. We spend a lot of time thinking about what we want to accomplish, what makes us feel most comfortable, and what's most important to us. This is our default setting, and I refer to it as speaker-centric speaking. So what are some examples of speaker-centric behaviors? Well, we often put lots of words on our slides to remind us what to say, or perhaps we speak in our own native technical language using jargon and acronyms that are most familiar to us. Perhaps we choose to focus on the elements of the project that we spent the most time on or that we personally found to be the most interesting. Do any of these sound familiar? That list describes most technical presentations, but here's what we're getting wrong when we focus on ourselves as speakers. As speakers, we don't get to determine the success of the presentation. You don't get to give a presentation and say to yourself, "Wow, I was awesome." I mean, you can, all right? But nobody cares. Our ability to be successful depends entirely upon our ability to make our audience successful. A presentation is by nature always for an audience. So if you want to be successful as a speaker, then you need to make your audience successful; this is what I call audience-centric speaking. As audience-centric speakers, we are going to ask ourselves at every step of the way when developing and giving the presentation one important question: What makes sense for my audience? This question is the secret to great scientific communication. When making choices on content, slides, or delivery, continue to ask yourself: What makes sense for my audience here? While this might require you to occasionally make choices that are harder for you as a speaker, our goal here is to be successful and that's not always the same as being comfortable. For example, a text-heavy bulleted slide might work great for you as a speaker because it reminds you what to say, but it will overwhelm and bore most audience members who would find a visual slide to be much more compelling. We want to prioritize the needs of our audience over our own. Here are some questions that you can ask yourself about your audience in order to be more successful at understanding them. First: Who are they? And then what do they already know? Why are they here? And finally: What do they care about? Answering these questions provides a good foundation for understanding your audience and sets your focus where it should be: squarely on your audience. Remember, your ability to be successful depends upon making your audience successful. Strive to be an audience-centric speaker and your success will follow.