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When crafting a transformational speech, one of the most important preliminary steps is to identify your audience. Knowing who your audience is makes it much easier to write and deliver a speech that will resonate profoundly with them.
If you get this step right, you’ll be able to enter their world, understand their unique problems, and present your core message, solution, mindset shift, or framework in a way that lands with them.
If you don’t start with this solid foundation, you might find that your speech doesn’t produce the results you hoped it would. You see, no matter how fantastic your ideas are, if you don’t connect them to your specific audience, they likely won’t change the way they feel, think, and act.
But truly knowing your audience is just the beginning. It’s equally important to know the role in which you’re casting your audience.
In the most recent article in this series on Playing Actions, you learned how to cast yourself in a particular role onstage to craft a powerful and unique experience for your audience. But there’s another side to role playing speakers often overlook.
The Playing Actions Shortcut
Your desired audience may be tech entrepreneurs, young mothers, mission-driven leaders, CFOs, or small business owners. Regardless of who your target audience is, casting your audience can help you deliver a more confident and emotionally rich performance.
Casting your audience simply means deciding who your imagined audience is and the relationship you have with them. Just as you can play roles like mentor, authority, spiritual guide, or sentinel, you can also decide what roles your audience will play.
Perhaps you’ll choose to see your audience as a group of your closest friends, or a classroom of students who are anxious to learn, or a football team heading into the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl. The role you assign your audience will evoke different behaviors in you, the speaker, and different emotional responses in your audience.
Casting your audience will bring out natural performances and powerful contrast that affect how the audience feels about the ideas being taught. In essence, it’s a shortcut to Playing Actions and making your audience feel certain emotions.
Just think about it: naturally, your behaviors—how you carry yourself, your tone, and the energy you give off—vary depending on whom you interact with. If you’re talking with your sibling, you’ll act much differently than if you were engaging with a stranger—or a celebrity, or your partner, or your boss, or your parents.
This Subconscious Mistake Can Sabotage Your Speech
This nuanced aspect of role-playing is something that few speakers consider, yet it often catches up with them when they least expect it. You see, if you don’t cast your audience ahead of time, you’ll probably subconsciously cast them as your judge and jury.
This unfortunate mistake amplifies stage fright, decreases your confidence, and can interfere with the message you’re trying to deliver.
Instead of walking onstage and focusing on helping your audience, you’ll likely try to prove yourself, impress, and be “good enough.” You’ll subconsciously see your audience as people who will decide if you ever get another speaking gig in your entire life—likely provoking actions that stem from anxiety, fear, or worry.
Instead, imagine how different your performance would be if you saw your audience as people who need your help and who have asked to be mentored by you. That casting of your audience will bring out an entirely different set of behaviors—probably much more beneficial to you and your audience.
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