How to Be Brilliant at Public Speaking

empathy

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

finding out the ‘popular opinion’ about your subject from

blog articles, newspapers, etc.



asking the audience during your talk (risky if you do this

alone);

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trial and error.

Look at the diagram below and ask yourself where your audi-

ence sit on each scale:

Once you’ve judged your audience’s place on each scale, you

will have a map of their expectations on the topic. The more

you prepare, the better equipped you’ll be to handle every situa-

tion you may face, even if there are some tricky characters in the

audience (more on this later in Chapter 5).

Here’s how you use the information from your audience expec-

tation map to ...