Engage Your Audience With Storytelling

Being able to foster a relationship and a dynamic with your audience while telling a story is going to make you a much better storyteller and allow you to really impact your audience more than if you just talked at them.

One of the easiest things you can do is to passively include the audience. This doesn’t require direct interaction with them, but you can do a few different things to make the audience feel more included.

For example, you can change up some of your uses of “I” to “us” or “we.” Instead of saying, “I know a lot of people that have struggled financially,” you can say, “Many of us have struggled or know people who have struggled financially.”

What this does is it includes the audience in the story you’re telling without them even saying anything. When they feel included and you say something relatable, it’s going to hit home for them and make them really connect with what you’re saying.

There are more active ways of including your audience as well, though this needs to be done correctly. If an audience is responsive and you can interact with them directly, it can really complete your storytelling event.

If your audience seems to be low energy or generally awkward, you shouldn’t try to force any interaction out of them. This tends to fail and ruin the mood of the whole rest of the event, so you need to be careful with it.

One way you can interact with your audience is to take questions from them and answer in depth. This can help clear up small confusions, and can even give you information about topics you need to clarify in future stories.

If the audience is really responsive you can even get them to partake by having them speak up when calling on them to share their experiences. This might be dependent on the setup of the stage or auditorium you’re in, though.

Getting viewers to partake and share their own experiences can help you better connect with the audience and vice versa, as when they talk about their experiences you can share your own similar ones.

Involving yourself with your audience is what moves you from being another generic speaker to someone that they’ll remember. You can make a greater difference in their lives if you’re able to connect personally with them and make them feel included.