Want to give a presentation but not sure about the audience psychology?

I know what you are thinking:

“Rama, my own psychology gets messed up when I have to give a presentation. How will I think about the audiences’ psychology”

I totally understand.

But isn’t it a good idea to equip yourself with the concepts when you are stress free…such as NOW.

I don’t know about you but I got excited when I heard about knowing the psychological aspect to give a presentation.

Sometime ago, I was interviewing Jo, a professional corporate trainer and also a member of PublicSpeakKing email community.

I was asking him about his thoughts on entertaining an audience.

He was sharing his thoughts and then he goes, “In transaction analysis, people think that Adult ego to Adult ego works best. But, Child ego to Child ego works best during a presentation”.

I’m like, “Oh wow… that’s nice… But what is transaction analysis?”

Duh…I did not have a clue about transactional analysis.

What is transactional analysis?

Transactional analysis (TA) is a psychoanalytic theory coined by Eric Berne and a method of therapy wherein social transactions are analyzed to determine the ego state of the patient (whether parent-like, child-like, or adult-like) as a basis for understanding behavior.

P is the Parent ego state, A is the Adult ego state and C is the Child ego state.

To help you understand in super simple terms, let me break it down for you…

We have the following ego states as we grew up.
• Parent ego state (these were taught concepts)
• Adult ego state (these were learned concepts)
• Child ego state (these were felt concepts)

And, we might get into one of the these states even now.

So, what Jo was telling is: When we entertain the audience, we activate the Child ego state in our audience. And when we educate them in that state, we directly feed the new information in their sub-conscious.

And it is a great benefit when you give a presentation because the audience will be able to retrieve and apply the information even under stress, as the information is stored in the sub-conscious.

I am exploring more on this and trying to apply this concept to real time situations and it just opens up a bag full of goodies that explains why certain presentations click and why some bomb….

You can even apply this to your life.

You’ll understand why certain weird things happen such as the follows:

You say to your wife, “I am not finding the keys”.
She goes, “Why always blame me if you did not get the keys”.
You are thinking, “What the heck is she talking about”?

Transaction analysis can explain this:

You said it from a typical Adult ego state…you are thinking it will reach her Adult ego state.

But unfortunately, her Child ego state is activated. On a tongue in cheek mode, I believe that Child ego is default state for wives when they are with their husbands. Ladies, please don’t kill me!

To continue with the example – When she says something weird like “Why are you blaming,” your Parent ego gets activated and you try to correct her. And the “high volume” discussion starts.

Jo is doing a Ph D in this area. He said, P-P A-A C-C are complementary transactions. They are good and as presenters we need to strive for these transactions.

A-C is crossed transaction and interaction may stop after some time. Typical husband and wife scenario.

Any cross transaction for that matter is bad for communication in life and also during the presentation.

The following are reasons to use C to C transactions to give a presentation:

• no ego on both sides.
• Good rapport between the two
• conducive learning atmosphere
• both sides are motivated

As a speaker, you need to aim to strive for C-C mode. And you can do it when you entertain and create humor.

And thus you can give a presentation that truly connects. All the best!