Mesmerize Me – World’s #1 Audience Captivation Course

Clinton Swaine, Founder – Frontier Trainings

Key Concepts

Mesmerize Me is all about audience captivation, engagement and enrollment as well as creating suspense and contrast within your presentation. Naturally, one of the first things that comes to mind is the Magician archetype. If you want to look at someone who exemplifies all of these characteristics and more, take a look at any world class magician. They keep you on the edge of your seat; they move fast… then slow; they use tonality and pacing to draw you in; they use suspense, intrigue and mystery to keep you guessing. There is never a dull moment when you are watching a true master of magic at work.

You will have an opportunity to learn some of these skills and put them into practice by performing an illusion while weaving in tonality, mesmerizing motions, stage usage, contrast and more. Once you begin to embody and implement these techniques, you can use them in any platform to create a mesmerizing, and more importantly, a memorable experience for your audience.

EXPRESSION

As presenters, it is critical that we know exactly what we are communicating to our audience at all times, but sometimes the message that we think we are conveying is vastly different to what our audience is experiencing. An example of this is emotion. There are times on stage in which stepping into various emotional states can be very powerful. Either to connect with your audience, enhance a story or highlight a point; but your message can get easily misinterpreted if you don’t communicate it congruently. In the exercise Express Express, we explore many common emotions and dissect them looking at their unique facial expressions, body mechanics and energy. This allows you to leave with a more clear understanding of each and the ability to exhibit them congruently and effectively.

STORYTELLING

Storytelling is an incredibly powerful tool. It can be used to stimulate creativity, teach principles, relate to your audience and keep them engaged for long periods of time. Presenters who are great storytellers are often praised more highly than those who simply teach straight content. That is why in most every one of our Speaker Certification courses, we get students to train different aspects of their storytelling skills.

In Mesmerize Me, we focus on skills such as: creating impromptu stories to exercise your creativity; using your entire body as a communication tool; creating stage anchors that not only engage, but improve your student’s ability to recall your material; using accents, tonality and pacing to create contrast, and assuming an array of characters to create a rich and immersive experience.

REFRAMING

What would it be like if you were able to positively reframe any challenge, fear, objection or block that your students face? To be able to enroll them to move forward, past those blocks and towards their highest potential? That is exactly what you learn through the art of fortune telling.

In the exercise Fortunate Futures, you are taught a simple method of reading tarot cards, you then get to read the cards of another student – using stories, metaphors, hypnotic language and more – only, every card you draw must be framed in a positive light; whether destruction, fear or even death, each must be made to empower your partner. Putting the tools and methods that you will learn into practice will allow you to get creative, think outside the box and move your students forward no matter how daunting an obstacle may seem.

SPEECHES

Throughout history, speeches have been used to share common visions, inspire the masses, move people towards action and to create massive change. The ability to inspire people with your words and get them to take action is incredibly powerful and one that should be learned by all who truly want to impact people on a large scale through speaking.

In this exercise, you will create and give a speech as if you were running for President of the United World. You will get direct feedback on your word choice, tonality, presentation flow, authenticity and ability to inspire others through your speech. This experience tends to be a great leap forward in boosting confidence, creating a powerful presence, being able to inspire others to action and so much more.

STAGE ANCHORING – ADVANCED

The stage is a blank canvas on which we, as speakers, can paint anything we choose. Whether we are telling a story or ingraining a lesson into the minds of our audience; when one knows how to use the stage effectively, the outcome can be magical. There are 5 types of stage anchoring:

Timeline – Past, present and future

Ordinal – A list or order of points

Regional – Specific emotions or lessons tied to various regions

Interactive – Motions are used to create and interact with objects

Multi-stage – The stage is reset and re-anchored multiple times

Mesmerize Me focuses on Interactive and Multi-Stage anchoring. These are two advanced types of stage work that most speakers do not use and as a result 50% of their stage, or more, goes underutilized. Using these tools keeps your audience engaged, enrolled, mesmerized and captivated and makes you and your content even more memorable and impactful.

CONTRAST

A principle you've probably heard if you've been to any of our Speaker Certification Courses in the past, is Contrast Creates Captivation. This means that the more you are able  to create contrast – right then left, up then down, fast then slow, outrageous then precise – the more you are able to keep your audience captivated and engaged.

In Mesmerize Me, we train many methods of doing this. Each method you learn will strengthen your ability to engage each member of your audience by appealing to all learning styles – visual, auditory and kinesthetic. Since most presenters only appeal to the auditory senses, much of the message can get lost, but by tapping into all three – and creating contrast within each – your audience will stay engaged and be able to absorb and thus apply the information at a much higher rate.

TONALITY & PACING

Tonality plays a large role in keeping an audience's attention for long periods of time and is especially critical while telling a story. Studies have shown that tonality makes up approximately 38% of over-all communication. Here, we model Robin Williams in his movie ‘Good Morning Vietnam’ where he exemplifies a vast range of accents in excellence. The purpose of this is to begin exploring, and start expressing with, your full vocal range – volume, control, pacing, evocativeness, etc. When you can unlock the full capacity of your tonality and effectively weave it into your presentations, you are well on your way to unleashing 100% of your communication ability.

SHOWCASE

The final section, is where you get to showcase what you’ve learned throughout the course by weaving it all together into one final presentation of your content. It’s great to learn a lot of content, but without actually weaving it together and putting it into practice, chances are you won’t apply nearly as much as you could. It’s primary purpose is to allow you to begin testing new things and finding what works best for you, your content and your style. You will then get detailed feedback on your use of the tools and find out what you can do to maximize the tools and get results in the real world.