Using Humour in Your Professional Speaking Gig

by Jaimie Abbott

If using humour in your professional speaking presentation, understand this. People will pay more to be entertained than they will to be informed. Look around you and you will see that the top industry is the entertainment industry. Encompassing sports events, comic acts, movies, television and music, the entertainment industry steadily received trillions of dollars worldwide.

Humour accomplishes many things in your presentation. Here are some things that humour can do for you!

1. Humour helps you connect with your audience. Make yourself more relatable with your audience as they begin to see that it's not all about the information. Humour draws your audience to you because people are naturally drawn to positive things.

2. Humour makes you more approachable and likeable as a speaker. Your audience will see you as being more down to earth and again, relatable.

3. Humour creates interest in your topic as well as yourself. Humour just makes things interesting to follow. People like to laugh.

4. Humour helps to keep the attention of your audience. Your audience tunes out because they get lost in your presentation. By using humour, it'll be harder for your audience to tune out because they will want to hear your humorous story.

5. Humour strengthens point and ideas you want to highlight in your presentation. Funny stories are memorable and can strengthen the point of your message. Television sitcoms are famous for taking real life situations and presenting them in a humorous fashion.

6. Humour removes hostility in your presentation. If there were any ill feelings towards you or your message, humour lightens the mood of your audiences and disarms negative emotions.

7. Humour helps connects pieces of information in your topic. Work humour into the transition points of your presentation. In that way they will be the bridge that connects the points of your message together.

8. Humour helps paint mental images in the minds of your audience. Self-effacing humor is often relatable to your audience because they can see themselves having those same situations.

9. Humour makes your presentation more memorable. People remember when they laugh. They'll remember funny stories or funny instance during your presentation.

10. Humour lightens a heavy topic. People can only take so much of heavy topics. You don't want to make your audience feel depressed even if your topic discusses a very grave matter.

11. Humour can bring in better evaluations and more product sales. Humour warms your audience up to you. In doing so, your audience will be more open to purchasing your back of the room products as well as give you a better review.

12. Humour will make people happy. People want to enjoy your seminar. They want to have a good time and they want to be happy. Humour helps you achieve that.

Humour can add so much variety to an otherwise dull, information only presentation. Helping to connect you with your audience, humour is a great addition that can bring you better speaker reviews and increased revenue. Add some spice to your message by incorporating humour!