Let’s sit down, we need to talk.

(Oh, you already are. Excellent.)

Making that connection with your audience isn’t always about being as loud as possible. A big performance can help (especially in front of a large audience), but it can be just as effective to tone things down at certain points. Switching style like this gives your presentation the peaks and troughs that engage your audience, much like the intensity variation of a good story. This is vital for longer presentations so that you don’t lose your audience. A bit like yin and yang:

‘Yin and yang are actually complementary, not opposing, forces, interacting to form a whole greater than either separate part; in effect, a dynamic system. Everything has both yin and yang aspects, (for instance shadow cannot exist without light).’

So when you’ve just delivered that important phrase, pause. Let it sit for a while, and then switch to a conversational mode. Try:

• walking around, not looking at the audience, speaking as if you’re just thinking out loud.
• sitting down.
• sitting in the audience, talking to one or two audience members.