Getting a Group’s Attention without Losing Your Voice

 

This week’s Facilitator Tips episode shares seven simple and fun strategies for getting your group’s attention without losing your voice.

 

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Useful Links & Resources

 

  • Copy Claps – wonderful, short demonstration of a non-verbal opening exercise that will quickly get your group’s attention.
  • Episode 10 – watch this latest video tutorial which describes a really simple yet effective way to quickly gain your group’s attention.

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Video Transcript

 

Hi there and welcome to Episode 11 of the Facilitator Tips video series.

My name is Mark Collard. I’m an experiential trainer and author at www.playmeo.com, and today’s video is to talk about how to get your group’s attention. This is critical for any leader because if you don’t have their attention not much stuff is going to get done.

Now, first of all, I want to mention the bit about your voice. It’s critical that even when you’re getting the group’s attention and if yelling is your only strategy, you’re not going to have much of a voice left. So consider how important monitoring your tone and volume is. And I think of it in terms of a scale of 1 to 10.

I preserve everything from 3 to 5 out of 10 as my normal presentation, your 7s and 8s for when you really want to emphasise something, and stuff like 9s and 10s when you’re absolutely non-negotiable, must get that group’s attention, maybe it’s for their safety purposes. So consider how you modulate your voice.

But raising your hand… When the hand goes up, the mouth goes shut, works really well.

Clapping. If you can hear me, clap twice. If you can hear me, clap three times. And gradually the claps are shared throughout the room. You could just simply ask the group to repeat what you’re doing. The group then repeats. That will get the group’s attention.

Snapping your fingers. The group follows and eventually that spreads throughout your group.

‘One-two-three, look at me’ works great with young children. I learned that from my kindergarten teacher of my child.

Five, four, three, two… The countdown method. Again if you train them into that space they’ll understand that by the time you get to one you expect it to be quiet.

And then “softly”. I don’t like to use my voice very loudly that often as I was saying before, around those 3, 4s, and 5s out of 10. So if I speak softly I have to lean in to be able to engage with what I have to do.

And here’s my last-minute tip. If you look back to Episode #10, the Back-to-Back exercise, if nothing else is working ask people to stand back to back with one other person and there’s just something really powerful about that that invites people to quieten down.

And that’s it for this episode.

You can get more information and links at www.playmeo.com Episode 11.

And if you found value in this please leave a comment or consider sharing this with your colleagues and friends as well.

And that’s it for now. I look forward to seeing you at the next episode.

Have fun in the meantime. Bye.