read the audience's body language

Most of the literature that deals with body language while speaking in front of an audience focuses on the speaker. In the following articles, I want to turn the spotlight in the opposite direction to the audience, and see how the audience's body language allows the speaker to improve his speech and adapt it to the audience and its changing mood.

Importance of the audience's body language

There is a great advantage for the speaker in knowing what the audience is thinking and feeling. Unfortunately it is not easy to read the crowd. In fact, body language is the only means of continuously sensing the audience. Although reading body language requires learning and skill, with a little practice it is certainly possible to turn it into a natural skill whose value is priceless. (For the full article)

Sources of audience body language

Body language communicates feelings and intentions to other people in a way that is not completely conscious and controlled. Body language works at all times and transmits our emotions at that moment.

From this it follows that an audience also feels emotions and transmits them as body language in a way that a skilled speaker can understand. People sitting in the crowd usually don't think about their body language, so it is more reliable and accurate. (For the full article)

Learn to read body language

Reading the body language of the audience is one of the only skills in the field of rhetoric that can be learned only by watching it. It is not necessary to make a speech but it is enough to look at the audience while someone else is speaking to understand the audience's body language. In this article we will understand that the wisdom is actually to avoid a careful reading that will cause us to be flooded with information, and that a more general view is actually better. (For the full article)

What does body language say? 

In order to use this tool and not become a slave to it, it is very important to examine the subject only occasionally and not every moment (because otherwise there is an overflow of information). In addition, it is useful to take a cursory look at the whole room and not examine the participants individually (unless there is one dominant decision-maker, then you can look at him more).

There are some prominent elements of the audience's body language, which can be easily learned (there are others that require prolonged learning, but experience teaches me that it is better to look for a few prominent signs and not get distracted) and they are:

• the sitting position - ranges from leaning back and even 'leaking' and standing up to leaning forward. 
• Preoccupations and distractions - Is the audience writing, worrying, texting or chattering?
• eye contact – What is the audience looking at and how focused is it?
• noise level - The volume in the classroom represents the people who are talking together with you

How to respond to what the audience is broadcasting

When we learned to read the audience's body language, we should start thinking about how to respond to what we learned. There are some simple and effective techniques

• What to do when the audience is bored
• What to do when the audience is angry
• What to do when the crowd is in a hurry
• What to do when the audience is interested
• What to do when the audience is indifferent (coming soon)