Remaining audience-centered is key to an effective and influential speech.  If you do not consider your audience at every step of your preparation, you have failed to make it important to your audience and thus they have little reason to listen to you.

Consider this, too: speakers should adapt to their audience before they speak and during their speech.  Consider the feedback your audience gives you during your speech — are they falling asleep?  Are they excited?  On their phones?  Talking with neighbors?  Listening intently?  If your audience is asleep, you’ll certainly want to try a different approach!  If they are listening intently, keep going!

If you have ever seen the popular 90’s sitcom Friends, then you are familiar with the Courteney Cox character, Monica.  She is a Type A, OCD, neat freak, right?  Consider the following scene, when she and her husband Chandler, played by Matthew Perry, are trying to have a baby and he tries to get her “in the mood”:  Clip 11: The one with the fertility test – YouTube

Additionally, Seth Rogen and Barbara Streisand play a son and mother taking a road trip around the country, trying to sell his cleaning product to retailers in the movie Guilt Trip. He has failed repeatedly to do this and his well-meaning mother has repeatedly told him to adapt to his audience, making it important to them.  In this penultimate scene of the movie, he finally takes her advice and wins over the buyer: The Guilt Trip Best Sales Pitch – YouTube

If you’ve ever seen the 90’s comedy Tommy Boy, you will see the same try-and-fail selling.

Until you make it important to your audience and relate it to their lives, you will not influence them!