How well do you really communicate with your audience? Communicating with an audience is more than delivering a coherent speech. To communicate effectively your need to understand how your audience absorbs information.
There are four different ways that audience members assimilate information. They are: visual, auditory, auditory digital, and kinaesthetic. While the members of your audience will process information utilizing all four of these approaches at different times, each audience member will tend to rely on one of these approaches more than the other three.
Visual: These people memorize and learn by seeing pictures and are less distracted by noise than others. They often have difficulty remembering and are bored by long, verbal presentations because their minds will wander. Visual learners are interested in how your presentation looks. They like it when you use words like see, look, envision, imagine, and picture in your presentation as these words encourage them to make pictures in their minds.
Auditory: These people are easily distracted by any noises occurring during your presentation. Typically these audience members learn by listening, Your vocal tone and vocal quality will be very important with these people. Words that work well with auditory learners include; hear, listen, sound, resonate, and harmonize.
Auditory Digital: These audience members spend a significant amount of time in their heads talking to themselves. They memorize and learn by steps, procedures, and sequences. They want to know that your presentation makes sense. Words that are effective with auditory digital people include sense, experience, understand, think, motivate, and decide.
Kinaesthetic: These audience members often speak very slowly. They are much more oriented towards their feelings than people in the other three categories. They learn by actively doing something and getting the actual feeling of it. They are interested in a presentation that feels “right” or gives them a “gut feeling”. Words that are effective with kinaesthetic audience members include feel, touch, grasp, concrete, get hold of, and solid.
Approximately 40% of the population are primarily visual, approximately 40% are primarily kinaesthetic, and the remaining 20% are primarily auditory and auditory digital in how they process information.
How can you use this? As you write your speeches and prepare your PowerPoint slides look at the words you are using, and identify if your slides are too text or picture heavy. In most cases you will find that your speech and PowerPoint slides will be dominated by your preferred style, whether it be Kinaesthetic, Visual, or Auditory. Revise the speech and edit the slides to achieve a balance. You will find your audiences become far more receptive to your presentations.
